“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.”
I find this passage incredibly powerful. Other than a reference to slave ships, there is nothing in this quote to suggest the author to be, “African American woman writing in the 1920’s,” as a first choice. On the other hand, the 1920’s was a world where political thinking about poverty as a problem to be solved collectively was front and center. The political culture of the United States (then as now) often spoke a different language than our European counter-parts when speaking of socialism and communism, Catholicism and Judaism. A contributing reason for this was our different foundations “at the beginning” and our history and preoccupation with race as a social issue (vs an economic one) NOT to be addressed constructively. What was a political question in Europe could be dismissed as a racial problem in the United States.
The author is Zora Neal Hurston. I have been familiar with her name and her place in the “Harlem Renaissance” for several decades. I only read some of her works this year. My first exposure was through my daughter Amber who’s mother guided her to this author as contrasted with the popular Toni Morrison ( author of Beloved which in 1997 was considered for an advanced English Senior Essay/project). Books about race and rape were controversial in my High School, but available as they were for Amber. When considering a choice of authors, Kernie guided her to Nora Zeal Hurston and away from Toni Morrison. No school board action needed—a mother and her daughter discussed options and came to a shared agreement in their choice.
My edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God had an afterward where Neal’s life story was shared. It is predictably heart-breaking. She was a graduate of Barnard. She was an anthropologist who studied black cultures of the Caribbean and the Deep South where she grew up. She was the dominant black woman writer in the United States for the decades before the end of the Korean War. She died in 1960, in obscurity and without funds. It was an essay by Alice Walker (Color of Purple) that brought Hurston back to the attention of the literary public. Walker recounted finding the unmarked grave in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Two Guggenheims, four novels, dozens short stories, two musicals, two books on black mythology, essays, and a prizewinning autobiography become meaningless and forgotten for three decades. What a metaphor!
Reflections:
It is 2022. The use of vernacular in the speech of her characters living in Central Florida one hundred years ago is a bit unsettling. I read this book aloud and the phonetic sounding out of the words of her characters as they gossiped and chatted on a store porch. The dialogues were both amusing and troubling. Some reminded me of the barbershop scenes in Coming to America—except Eddie Murphie’s work is a form of slapstick humor and in this book, they are so much more. An added issue I can’t ignore is that in my world today, using the accents and voice of other cultures—Southern Black culture in this case— makes an aging white man suspect as he reads them aloud. I felt self-conscious even as I was alone with Kernie. Faithfully reading the words as written by this black woman made me feel vulnerable? Chauvinistic? Superior? White? Reading about, thinking about, and speaking about race in this world of 2022 is nuanced and complicated to say the least. I can with the best of intentions and purpose speak in this manner, quoting the book and there are a host of people who not knowing me or my intent could and would assume the worse about what I convey.
One analysis suggests that the narrator’s voice and that of the characters makes apparent the class or cultural differences in our country. These have in some ways hardened and in other ways become less dramatic. An example of my using two voices finds me reading to my children when they were little in an effort to convey a rich literary tradition into something they could relate to and enjoy. I called it “teen speak” and used it when reading the Odyssey. For example, “Athena told Odysseus, ‘Dude, hang in there! Be careful of the Sirens because they are tricky bitches and will get you if you aren’t careful!. If you have to hear them, make sure all the sailors can’t—stick wax in their ears—and make sure they tie your butt down next to the mast so you can’t jump overboard.”
Examples from Their Eyes Were Watching God:
SERIOUS:
“Dry made him uh delegate huh de Sunday school Convention and head uh paper on Booker T. Washington and tore him tuh pieces!
Booker T? He wiz a great big man wins’t he?
‘Sposed tuh be. All he ever done was cut de monkey for white folks. So Day popped him up. But know what de old folks say ‘de higher de monkey climbs de mo’ he show his behind’ so dat’s de way it wuz did Booker T……”
“….He didn’t do nothin’ but hold us back—talking’ bout work when de race ain’t neve done nothin’ else. E wiz uh enemy tuh us dat’s what. He wiz uh white folks’ nigger.”
HUMOROUS: On the porch, a Socratic argument ensues:
“Well all right then. Since you own up you ain’t smart enough tuh find out what Ah’m talking’ ‘bout, Ah’ll tell you. Whut is it dat keeps uh man from gettin’ burnt on uh red-hot stove—caution or nature?
Shucks, I thought you had somthin’ hard tuh ast me……
Ah’m uh educated man, Ah keeps mah arrangements in mah hands, and if it kept me up all night long studyin’ bout it, Walter ain’t liable tuh be no help to me. Ah needs uh man lack you.
And then agin, Like, Ah’m goin’ tuh tell yuh. Ah’m goin’ tuh run dis conversation from uh gnat heel to uh lice. It’s nature dat keeps uh man off of uh red-hot stove.
Uuh huuh! Ah knowed you would going tuh crawl up in dat holler! But Ah aims tuh smoke yuh right out. Tain’t no nature at all, it’s caution, Sam…”…
Other than my history books, I don’t hear the name Booker T. Washington too often. He is critiqued by many black authors as having, “caved” to the needs of white society. Zora Neal captures some of the tension simply and clearly.
What is apparent reading this novel is that the historical weight on black culture and what it has endured is not a central focus of her writing. This is a feminist novel about an individual’s emancipation. This would not be the case for the majority of her competitors, black men, from Richard Wright, to Martin Luther King to Malcolm X. In fact her focus on “coming of age” with a singular female character and a lack of this broader social focus is what lost her that battle—and led to her disappearance from the public.
Zora Neal recognized my orientation in that I make excuses for those less fortunate than me. She felt that many, black and white, reduced black people to, “mere ciphers,” beings who are a product of omnipresent racial oppression and whose culture, as a result is a pathological one. In her time, socialists, social scientists, and civil rights advocates believed this. Many believe it today. She declared in her first novel that this orientation to black culture is both degrading and its propagation a jail sentence. “Man must make his own emancipation and declared her first novel a manifesto against the arrogance of whites assuming the black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.”
I am guilty as charged. The medical model I use is PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) or the research around ACE’s (Adverse Childhood Experiences). The notion is supported by psychological research —that having emotional and physically trying events has repercussions in behavior as well as outcomes (such as risk of incarceration, risk of suicide, risk of drug or alcohol abuse, salaries to be attained, and so on). Her point simply reminds us all that no group should be “ciphers” for a specific stereotype and problems stemming from a difficult environment require individual judgements to lead to emancipation. Martin Luther King thought this could be achieved through publicity, legislation, and an evolving change in attitudes on the part of the majority. Malcolm X thought that approach hopeless and believed in organizing Black Muslims to be self-actualizing in their mutual support and independence from the mainstream. I think history gives a nod to Malcolm’s assessment—that is, laws did not and do not solve our racial problems— but his approach did not sustain social or economic emancipation.
In my office, the norm was, “one person at a time.” Long lasting change requires people to improve themselves—no one can do it for them. While being guilty of the judgement she thought a jail sentence, I also agree with her as to how liberation comes about. A huge problem in our modern world is so many people “getting liberated” to crossed purposes. We do not hold to any unifying vision of even basic principles in government, education, health care, business regulation, and on and on. The culture wars we are in will hopefully distill out some sustainable vision we can agree to live with.
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