The resurgence of popular and academic readerships of Hurston’s works signifies her multiple canonization in the black, the American, and the feminist traditions. Within the critical establishment, scholars of every stripe have found in Hurston texts for all seasons. More people have read Hurston’s works since 1975 than did between that date and the publication of her first novel, in 1934.
III.
Rereading Hurston, I am always struck by the density of intimate experiences she cloaked in richly elaborated imagery. It is this concern for the figurative capacity of black language, for what a character in Mules and Men calls “a hidden meaning, jus’ like de Bible…de inside meanin’ of words,” that unites Hurston’s anthropological studies with her fiction. For the folklore Hurston collected so meticulously as Franz Boas’s student at Barnard became metaphors, allegories, and performances in her novels, the traditional recurring canonical metaphors of black culture. Always more of a novelist than a social scientist, even Hurston’s academic collections center on the quality of imagination that makes these lives whole and splendid. But it is in the novel that Hurston’s use of the black idiom realizes its fullest effect. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, her first novel, for instance, the errant preacher, John, as described by Robert Hemenwoh “is a poet who graces his world with language but cannot find the words to secure his own personal grace.” This concern for language and for the “natural” poets who “bring barbaric splendor of word and song into the very camp of the mockers” not only connects her two disciplines but also makes of “the suspended linguistic moment” a thing to behold indeed. Invariably, Hurston’s writing depends for its strength on the text, not the context, as does John’s climactic sermon, a tour de force of black image and metaphor. Image and metaphor define John’s world; his failure to interpret himself leads finally to his self-destruction. As Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s biographer, concludes, “Such passages eventually add up to a theory of language and behavior.”
Using “the spy-glass of Anthropology,” her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that “both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.” As author, she functions as “a midwife participating in the birth of a body of folklore,…the first wondering contacts with natural law.” The myths she describes so accurately are in fact “alternative modes for perceiving reality,” and never just condescending depictions of the quaint. Hurston sees “the Dozens,” for example, that age-old black ritual of graceful insult, as, among other things, a verbal defense of the sanctity of the family, conjured through ingenious plays on words. Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston’s ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.
IV.
We can understand Hurston’s complex and contradictory legacy more fully if we examine Dust Tracks on a Road, her own controversial account of her life. Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions. In this way, Hurston wrote herself, and sought in her works to rewrite the “self” of “the race,” in its several private and public guises, largely for ideological reasons. That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment. That which she silences or deletes, similarly, is all that her readership would draw upon to delimit or pigeonhole her life as a synecdoche of “the race problem,” an exceptional part standing for the debased whole.
Hurston’s achievement in Dust Tracks is twofold. First, she gives us a writer’s life, rather than an account, as she says, of “the Negro problem.” So many events in this text are figured in terms of Hurston’s growing awareness and mastery of books and language, language and linguistic rituals as spoken and written both by masters of the Western tradition and by ordinary members of the black community. These two “speech communities,” as it were, are Hurston’s great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.
The representation of her sources of language seems to be her principal concern, as she constantly shifts back and forth between her “literate” narrator’s voice and a highly idiomatic black voice found in wonderful passages of free indirect discourse. Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly, just as she does in Their Eyes to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.
Her language, variegated by the twin voices that intertwine throughout the text, retains the power to unsettle:
There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Elsewhere she analyzes black “idioms” used by a culture “raised on simile and invective. They know how to call names,” she concludes, then lists some, such as ‘gator-mouthed, box-ankled, puzzle-gutted, shovel-footed: “Eyes looking like skint-ginny nuts, and mouth looking like a dishpan full of broke-up crockery!”
Immediately following the passage about her mother’s death, she writes:
The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death. Made him with big, soft feet and square toes. Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere. Made the body of death out of infinite hunger. Made a weapon of his hand to satisfy his needs. This was the morning of the day of the beginning of things.
Language, in these passages, is not merely “adornment,” as Hurston described a key black linguistic practice; rather, manner and meaning are perfectly in tune: she says the thing in the most meaningful manner. Nor is she being “cute,” or pandering to a condescending white readership. She is “naming” emotions, as she says, in a language both deeply personal and culturally specific.
The second reason that Dust Tracks succeeds as literature arises from the first: Hurston’s unresolved tension between her double voices signifies her full understanding of modernism. Hurston uses the two voices in her text to celebrate the psychological fragmentation both of modernity and of the black American. As Barbara Johnson has written, hers is a rhetoric of division, rather than a fiction of psychological or cultural unity. Zora Neale Hurston, the “real” Zora Neale Hurston that we long to locate in this text, dwells in the silence that separates these two voices: she is both, and neither; bilingual, and mute. This strategy helps to explain her attraction to so many contemporary critics and writers, who can turn to her works again and again only to be startled at her remarkable artistry.
But the life that Hurston could write was not the life she could live. In fact, Hurston’s life, so much more readily than does the standard sociological rendering, reveals how economic limits determine our choices even more than does violence or love. Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not. Financial problems—book sales, grants and fellowships too few and too paltry, ignorant editors and a smothering patron—produced the sort of dependence that affects, if not determines, her style, a relation she explored somewhat ironically in “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” We cannot oversimplify the relation between Hurston’s art and her life; nor can we reduce the complexity of her postwar politics, which, rooted in her distaste for the pathological image of blacks, were markedly conservative and Republican.
Nor can we sentimentalize her disastrous final decade, when she found herself working as a maid on the very day the Saturday Evening Post published her short story “Conscience of the Court
” and often found herself without money, surviving after 1957 on unemployment benefits, substitute teaching, and welfare checks. “In her last days,” Hemenway concludes dispassionately, “Zora lived a difficult life—alone, proud, ill, obsessed with a book she could not finish.”
The excavation of her buried life helped a new generation read Hurston again. But ultimately we must find Hurston’s legacy in her art, where she “ploughed up some literacy and laid by some alphabets.” Her importance rests with the legacy of fiction and lore she constructed so cannily. As Hurston herself noted, “Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.” If, as a friend eulogized, “She didn’t come to you empty,” then she does not leave black literature empty. If her earlier obscurity and neglect today seem inconceivable, perhaps now, as she wrote of Moses, she has “crossed over.”
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
CHRONOLOGY
January 7, 1891
Born in Eatonville, Florida, the fifth of eight children, to John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a former schoolteacher.
September 1917-June 1918
Attends Morgan Academy in Baltimore, completing the high school requirements.
Summer 1918
Works as a waitress in a nightclub and a manicurist in a black-owned barbershop that serves only whites.
1918-19
Attends Howard Prep School, Washington, D.C.
1919-24
Attends Howard University; receives an associate degree in 1920.
1921
Publishes her first story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” in the Stylus, the campus literary society’s magazine.
December 1924
Publishes “Drenched in Light,” a short story, in Opportunity.
1925
Submits a story, “Spunk,” and a play, Color Struck, to Opportunity’s literary contest. Both win second-place awards; publishes “Spunk” in the June number.
1925-27
Attends Barnard College, studying anthropology with Franz Boas.
1926
Begins field work for Boas in Harlem.
January 1926
Publishes “John Redding Goes to Sea” in Opportunity.
Summer 1926
Organizes Fire! with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman; they publish only one issue, in November 1926. The issue includes Hurston’s “Sweat.”
August 1926
Publishes “Muttsy” in Opportunity.
September 1926
Publishes “Possum or Pig” in the Forum.
September-November 1926
Publishes “The Eatonville Anthology” in the Messenger.
1927
Publishes The First One, a play, in Charles S. Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz.
February 1927
Goes to Florida to collect folklore.
May 19, 1927
Marries Herbert Sheen.
September 1927
First visits Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, seeking patronage.
October 1927
Publishes an account of the black settlement at St. Augustine, Florida, in the Journal of Negro History; also in this issue: “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver.”
December 1927
Signs a contract with Mason, enabling her to return to the South to collect folklore.
1928
Satirized as “Sweetie Mae Carr” in Wallace Thurman’s novel about the Harlem Renaissance Infants of the Spring; receives a bachelor of arts degree from Barnard.
January 1928
Relations with Sheen break off.
May 1928
Publishes “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in the World Tomorrow.
1930-32
Organizes the field notes that become Mules and Men.
May-June 1930
Works on the play Mule Bone with Langston Hughes.
1931
Publishes “Hoodoo in America” in the Journal of American Folklore.
February 1931
Breaks with Langston Hughes over the authorship of Mule Bone.
July 7, 1931
Divorces Sheen.
September 1931
Writes for a theatrical revue called Fast and Furious.
January 1932
Writes and stages a theatrical revue called The Great Day, first performed on January 10 on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre; works with the creative literature department of Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, to produce a concert program of Negro music.
1933
Writes “The Fiery Chariot.”
January 1933
Stages From Sun to Sun (a version of Great Day) at Rollins College.
August 1933
Publishes “The Gilded Six-Bits” in Story.
1934
Publishes six essays in Nancy Cunard’s anthology, Negro.
January 1934
Goes to Bethune-Cookman College to establish a school of dramatic arts “based on pure Negro expression.”
May 1934
Publishes Jonah’s Gourd Vine, originally titled Big Nigger; it is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
September 1934
Publishes “The Fire and the Cloud” in the Challenge.
November 1934
Singing Steel (a version of Great Day) performed in Chicago.
January 1935
Makes an abortive attempt to study for a Ph.D in anthropology at Columbia University on a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation. In fact, she seldom attends classes.
August 1935
Joins the WPA Federal Theatre Project as a “dramatic coach.”
October 1935
Mules and Men published.
March 1936
Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study West Indian Obeah practices.
April-September 1936
In Jamaica.
September-March 1937
In Haiti; writes Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks.
May 1937
Returns to Haiti on a renewed Guggenheim.
September 1937
Returns to the United States; Their Eyes Were Watching God published, September 18.
February-March 1938
Writes Tell My Horse; it is published the same year.
April 1938
Joins the Federal Writers Project in Florida to work on The Florida Negro.
1939
Publishes “Now Take Noses” in Cordially Yours.
June 1939
Receives an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Morgan State College.
June 27, 1939
Marries Albert Price III in Florida.
Summer 1939
Hired as a drama instructor by North Carolina College for Negroes at Durham; meets Paul Green, professor of drama, at the University of North Carolina.
November 1939
Moses, Man of the Mountain published.
February 1940
Files for divorce from Price, though the two are reconciled briefly.
Summer 1940
Makes a folklore-collecting trip to South Carolina.
Spring-July 1941
Writes Dust Tracks on a Road.
July 1941
Publishes “Cock Robin, Beale Street” in the Southern Literary Messenger.
October 1941-January 1942
Works as a story consultant at Paramount Pictures.
July 1942
Publishes “Story in Harlem Slang” in the American Mercury.
September 5, 1942
Publishes a profile of Lawrence Silas in the Saturday Evening Post.
November 1942
Dust Tracks on a Road published.
February 1943
Awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Dust Tracks; on the cover of the Saturday Review.
March 1943
&
nbsp; Receives Howard University’s Distinguished Alumni Award.
May 1943
Publishes “The ‘Pet Negro’ Syndrome” in the American Mercury.
November 1943
Divorce from Price granted.
June 1944
Publishes “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” in the Negro Digest.
1945
Writes Mrs. Doctor; it is rejected by Lippincott.
March 1945
Publishes “The Rise of the Begging Joints” in the American Mercury.
December 1945
Publishes “Crazy for This Democracy” in the Negro Digest.
1947
Publishes a review of Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans in the Journal of American Folklore.
May 1947
Goes to British Honduras to research black communities in Central America; writes Seraph on the Suwanee; stays in Honduras until March 1948.