That carried him back in his mind to the earliest rocking of his cradle that he could remember, up until the present moment. Things thought and felt. Things done and undone. Joy, sorrow, defeat and triumph. What was and what might have been. Everything ended in riddles. He, Moses, who had never wanted to rule anyone had been thrust into the position of absolute rule-and law-giver. No man on earth had ever wielded so much power. He visited over Egypt and his various travels and studies and work, and the sun moved on and big pregnant-looking clouds wallowed past and eyed the solitary figure on the peak and moved on. Moses was fighting again all his wars, agonizing in wilderness and deserts, facing revolts of Princes of Israel who had been slaves or the sons of slaves before he lifted his rod in Egypt. Ambitious men and women, stiff-necked with new pride. Wars, plagues of snakes and fevers and famine, misunderstanding and hatred. Only the short secret visits across mountains and plains to Jethro’s house to light up his life. Something had made him endure it all, but he did not know what it was. Once or twice he had felt that Jethro could have told him, but he never did. He did hover over him occasionally as if he felt for him, but he always stopped short of speech.
But here Israel was at the Jordan. If he had failed in his highest dreams he had succeeded in others. Perhaps he had not failed so miserably as he sometimes felt. Israel was at the Jordan inside as well as out. Perhaps he had done as much as it was possible for one man to do for another. He had put the future in their hands to do with it according to their hearts and their talents. Over the river they would till fields that they had not cleared and dwell in cities that they had not built.
He had given Israel back the notes to songs. The words would be according to their own dreams, but they would sing. They had songs and singers.
They might not be absolutely free inside, but anyway he had taken from them the sorrow of serving without will, and had given them the strife of freedom. He had called to their memories the forgotten words of love and family. They had the blessing of being responsible for their own.
Moses lifted his eyes over Canaan. It was a good country and just as he had remembered it from his travels in his youth. He had known what the twelve spies would find before they got there. He merely wanted their interpretations for the people. If their representatives saw the benefits and not the difficulties, then Israel was ready for Canaan. If they saw the difficulties bigger than the benefits, they were unfit for citizenship and he would have to draw back and try again in another generation. The report of the twelve spies showed him somehow he had failed to stir the people to the full courage of responsibility in their first approach to the Jordan forty years before. They were still a horde of slaves, then. To his dying day he would always feel bad about this first great failure of his. But, well, anyway, this time Israel had her songs and her singers. Israel had a fine army of fighters. Israel had laws on tables of stone and Israel had a God. He had lifted their eyes to the mountain. Out of a rotting mass of creeds he had made a religion that had height and depth. Of course, he had made his mistakes and had his regrets. But every heart has its graveyard. But some things had been well done. Now God had a voice and glory.
So Israel was at the Jordan in every way. He had learned from his first failure and so looking on the nation beneath him, the gall of the numerous and senseless revolts grew less. You do not mock a man for being blind. You lead him.
The dimming sunlight gave him inside vision. He looked through time far and near. He saw the twelve priests, with Eleazar leading, descend into the shallow ford of the Jordan, bearing the sacred Ark of the Convenant on its staves. They must pick up twelve stones from the bed of the river as a sign forever. A strong front guard of fighting men would come down to the water’s edge eight abreast and divide in midstream and pour four deep on either side of the Ark and mount up on the other bank. They would go before to beat back any challenge to the crossing. Then the people and the herds would come down into the water the same way. Night and day, day and night, they would come down into the river and flow past the Ark and up into Canaan. Last would come the strong rear guard and last of all the priests would bear the Ark up the bank and the feet of Israel would be in Canaan. The high-lifted rod could be lowered.
And what would he, Moses, do over there? What could he do for Israel that he had not already done? Nothing but live in a palace and wear a crown. A deep frown settled on the face of Moses. He had known palaces and the shadows of crowns had fallen athwart his head. He recoiled inwardly and felt cold.
No, he didn’t want to rule that way. He wanted freedom. He wanted to ask God and Nature questions. He wanted to revel in mountains. He wanted to sit on the slopes of Sinai and remember God’s glory that he had glimpsed from the cleft in the rock. An altar high on Sinai where he had heard the Voice and seen the burning bush and had the rod thrust into his hands. Surely the Voice wouldn’t trouble him again. He had answered and served his fifty years. Israel was at the Jordan and free. The Voice should welcome him and speak of other things like mysteries of sea and sky and air. There was his youngest son ruling the tribe in Jethro’s place. He had seen next to nothing of his children and grandchildren. It would be nice to be among them. They wouldn’t understand him any more than the Hebrews had, but at least he wouldn’t have to lead them. Zipporah was old and reconciled. They could talk about simple things together like asking about who was still living and who was dead and things like that.
What about Israel? What would people think of him for leaving them like that? Well, if he were dead they would make out some way without him. He was still hale and strong. None of his natural powers had failed him yet. He had ten good active years ahead of him, barring accidents. Maybe twenty years. He could go over the Jordan and spend them straining against things that he had strained against for fifty years. He could wear crowns and robes. But one day he must die as other men died. And they looked upon him as different from other men and followed him only through fear and awe. When he was sickened and crumbled like ordinary men, what would become of his laws and statutes? No, Moses must not die among the Hebrews. They must not see him die.
So Moses set to work to build a tomb on Nebo for himself. The leader of Israel would be buried there. He would end in mystery as he had come. Then his laws would stand and he could spend those last years away from conniving politicians, stupid, but stubborn pushers and suspicions and avarice. He could dwell forever in the mountains without having to descend and struggle with the sordid. He worked furiously for hours piling stones over his relinquished power.
Under one stone he found an ancient lizard and asked him, “What are you doing under there, old lizard?”
“Oh, just resting from living and thinking about the time when my ancestors ruled the world. That was a glorious time.”
“How do you know your ancestors ruled the world? Your life span isn’t very long, you know,” Moses said, sitting down on a rock to listen and rest.
“Oh, we lizards don’t try to keep our memories in our bodies. We have a keeper of memories and when we want to know what used to be, we go to him to find out.”
“Do all lizards go to ask?”
“No, Moses, you don’t have to know much to enjoy a fresh batch of flies and worms or to have children. No, some lizards never ask.”
“Did you ever inquire?” Moses asked as he produced a small swarm of flies by lifting his right hand slightly. The lizard looked at him in surprise and pleasure and ate down a few flies before he answered.
“Oh, yes, I have been to ask. There was some dispute on this mountain about the month of the flood. So I traveled out to ask.”
“Where did you have to go?”
“No need to wear myself out talking so much. I am an old lizard as you see and it’s hard to be talking so much on a full stomach, though I’m much obliged to you for the favor of the flies. But if I told you where to go, it wouldn’t do you any good. The keeper of our memories is hard to reach and hard to talk to. I’m getting sleepy now.”
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sp; “Maybe I could reach him and could talk with him. You never can tell.”
But the lizard was fast asleep. Moses got up and moved more rock upon the mound. Just then the lizard woke up and said, “You could try anyway. One who can produce fly-swarms might find a way. Listen: you must go east to a great mountain called Sinai and climb to the very top. There is a great flat stone on the very top and on that stone is another stone that is the very peak. And under that peak stone, and resting on the flat stone, is a bearded lizard who knows all the things that used to be.”
“Would he know how the world was made, and the heavens?”
“Oh, yes, that is one of our important memories.”
“I must go and talk with him. My work is finished but it is dark. I think I’ll sleep on the mountain and start out soon in the morning. It is a long, long walk to Sinai. I have seen that mountain before.”
But Moses did not sleep on the mountain. He sat on the mountain top for a while gazing at the dim shapes of things over Jordan in the night. He looked down at Israel’s smoking, flaming stretch and turned away from his memories of fire-spitting mountains and night-vigils with God. “Lord, Your people are here.” He took his rod in his right hand and lifted it and Nebo trembled. The moon in its reddest mood became to him a standing place for his feet and the sky ran down so close to gaze on Moses that the seven great suns of the Universe went wheeling around his head. He stood in the bosom of thunder and the zig-zag lightning above him joined the muttering thunder. Fire and flame played all over the peak where the people could see. The voice of the thunder leaped from peak to plain and Moses stood in the midst of it and said “Farewell.” Then he turned with a firm tread and descended the other side of the mountain and headed back over the years.
AFTERWORD
ZORA NEALE HURSTON: “A NEGRO WAY OF SAYING”
I.
The Reverend Harry Middleton Hyatt, an Episcopal priest whose five-volume classic collection, Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork, more than amply returned an investment of forty years’ research, once asked me during an interview in 1977 what had become of another eccentric collector whom he admired. “I met her in the field in the thirties. I think,” he reflected for a few seconds, “that her first name was Zora.” It was an innocent question, made reasonable by the body of confused and often contradictory rumors that make Zora Neale Hurston’s own legend as richly curious and as dense as are the black myths she did so much to preserve in her classic anthropological works, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and in her fiction.
A graduate of Barnard, where she studied under Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books—four novels, two books of folklore, and an autobiography—and more than fifty shorter works between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean War, when she was the dominant black woman writer in the United States. The dark obscurity into which her career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent political stances rather than any deficiency of craft or vision. Virtually ignored after the early fifties, even by the Black Arts movement in the sixties, an otherwise noisy and intense spell of black image-and mythmaking that rescued so many black writers from remaindered oblivion, Hurston embodied a more or less harmonious but nevertheless problematic unity of opposites. It is this complexity that refuses to lend itself to the glib categories of “radical” or “conservative,” “black” or “Negro,” “revolutionary” or “Uncle Tom”—categories of little use in literary criticism. It is this same complexity, embodied in her fiction, that, until Alice Walker published her important essay (“In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”) in Ms. magazine in 1975, had made Hurston’s place in black literary history an ambiguous one at best.
The rediscovery of Afro-American writers has usually turned on larger political criteria, of which the writer’s work is supposedly a mere reflection. The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry. Alice Walker’s moving essay recounts her attempts to find Hurston’s unmarked grave in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida. Hurston became a metaphor for the black woman writer’s search for tradition. The craft of Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara bears, in markedly different ways, strong affinities with Hurston’s. Their attention to Hurston signifies a novel sophistication in black literature: they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other black fiction. This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.
The charting of Janie Crawford’s fulfillment as an autonomous imagination, Their Eyes is a lyrical novel that correlates the need of her first two husbands for ownership of progressively larger physical space (and the gaudy accoutrements of upward mobility) with the suppression of self-awareness in their wife. Only with her third and last lover, a roustabout called Tea Cake whose unstructured frolics center around and about the Florida swamps, does Janie at last bloom, as does the large pear tree that stands beside her grandmother’s tiny log cabin.
She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!
To plot Janie’s journey from object to subject, the narrative of the novel shifts from third to a blend of first and third person (known as “free indirect discourse”), signifying this awareness of self in Janie. Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition. Yet in its concern with the project of finding a voice, with language as an instrument of injury and salvation, of selfhood and empowerment, it suggests many of the themes that inspirit Hurston’s oeuvre as a whole.
II.
One of the most moving passages in American literature is Zora Neale Hurston’s account of her last encounter with her dying mother, found in a chapter entitled “Wandering” in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942):
As I crowded in, they lifted up the bed and turned it around so that Mama’s eyes would face east. I thought that she looked to me as the head of the bed reversed. Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice.
We can begin to understand the rhetorical distance that separated Hurston from her contemporaries if we compare this passage with a similar scene published just three years later in Black Boy by Richard Wright, Hurston’s dominant black male contemporary and rival: “Once, in the night, my mother called me to her bed and told me that she could not endure the pain, and she wanted to die. I held her hand and begged her to be quiet. That night I ceased to react to my mother; my feelings were frozen.” If Hurston represents her final moments with her mother in terms of the search for voice, then Wright attributes to a similar experience a certain “somberness of spirit that I was never to lose,” which “grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself…the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness….” Few authors in the black tradition have less in common than Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. And whereas Wright would reign through the forties as our predominant author, Hurston’s fame reached its zenith in 1943 with a Saturday Review cover story honoring the success of Dust Tracks. Seven years later, she would be serving as a maid in Rivo Alto, Florida; ten years after that she would die in the County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida.
How could
the recipient of two Guggenheims and the author of four novels, a dozen short stories, two musicals, two books on black mythology, dozens of essays, and a prizewinning autobiography virtually “disappear” from her readership for three full decades? There are no easy answers to this quandary, despite the concerted attempts of scholars to resolve it. It is clear, however, that the loving, diverse, and enthusiastic responses that Hurston’s work engenders today were not shared by several of her influential black male contemporaries. The reasons for this are complex and stem largely from what we might think of as their “racial ideologies.”
Part of Hurston’s received heritage—and perhaps the paramount received notion that links the novel of manners in the Harlem Renaissance, the social realism of the thirties, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement—was the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers, to beings who only react to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose culture is “deprived” where different, and whose psyches are in the main “pathological.” Albert Murray, the writer and social critic, calls this “the Social Science Fiction Monster.” Socialists, separatists, and civil rights advocates alike have been devoured by this beast.
Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by “the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal.” Unlike Hughes and Wright, Hurston chose deliberately to ignore this “false picture that distorted….” Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain, “was something internal…. The man himself must make his own emancipation.” And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the “arrogance” of whites assuming that “black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.” Her strategy was not calculated to please.