Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

Bibliographic Data

ID5797904
AuthorsDarryl Pinckney (corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume17
Issue3
Pages93-100
Publication date2020-08-24
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLabor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1547-6715 • E-ISSN: 1558-1454
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/15476715-8349392
OpenAlexW3080818805
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited8

The New Negro (1925), Alain Locke's anthology of writings about black America's enlightenment and transformation, includes "T'appin (Terrapin)," a folktale Arthur Huff Fauset collected from "Cugo Lewis, Plateau, Alabama. Brought to America from West Coast Africa, 1859." "T'appin say, 'King, we in te'bul condition on de earth. We can't git nothin' to eat."1 Fauset makes the point that, in order to counter the distortions of even well-meant adaptations of Negro folklore, specifically Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, there was "a strong need of a scientific collecting of Negro folklore before the original sources of this material altogether lapse."2 He believed in taking down stories as faithfully as possible.Fauset was one of the few black anthropologists in the field when Zora Neale Hurston began to study under Franz Boas, also the teacher of Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Margaret Mead. As a child of the black American culture she wanted to study, Hurston greatly appealed to Boas. His anthropological relativism stressed trying to understand a given culture from the inside rather than by viewing it from outside. Boas cautioned that it was a mistake to judge different peoples by values that may not be universally applicable. He argued that cultures must be evaluated according to how well people adapted to their environments. The temperament of the observer, the degree of sympathy, and the absence of condescension were important to a method of cultural analysis that depended on descriptive information.Boas instructed Hurston to pay attention to the behavior of people, as well as to the stories being told. Hurston recognized this approach to anthropology as a way of studying and preserving her origins, of asserting folklore's worth, even while Boas and his students were criticized within the discipline for not being rigorous enough. Though she was trained in the American tradition whereby anthropologists regarded societies they were trying to understand as fast disappearing, Hurston realized that she was not standing in the same relation to her subject as most anthropologists, and not just because she was not an outsider to the culture she was studying. Where professional anthropologists-and black sociologists, such as Charles Johnson-for the most part saw folklore as specific to sequestered communities and as collective memory from which the shape of the past could be inferred, Hurston regarded black folk culture as movable and constantly renewable.Robert Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography tells us that Hurston considered her first trip to the South to collect folk material in 1927 a failure. Boas had enlisted the help of Carter G. Woodson and his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Hurston found the archive trawling and census checking expected by the exacting Woodson to be a burden. Her impatience and ambition maybe figure in her having resorted to plagiarism in her first professional publication in Woodson's Journal of Negro History. She published two articles in one issue in 1927: a transcription of records concerning the black community of St. Augustine, Florida, and an account of an interview with Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States, who was then living in the all-black town of Plateau, Alabama."Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver," Hemenway contends, is mostly taken from Historic Sketches of the Old South (1914) by one Emma Langdon Roche, a white woman whose book Hurston found in the Mobile Historical Society.3 Hemenway notes that Cudjo Lewis was well known among anthropologists, but he spoke a heavily accented English that was hard to understand, and what Hurston later said about their initial conversations suggests she could not get him to talk much. She wrote to Langston Hughes that she had found another original African, a woman who was "a better talker than Cudjoe."4 She told Hughes whenever she came across material that she would share only with him. Hemenway says that from the beginning she was collecting for different purposes.5Hurston went back to see Cudjo Lewis in 1931, by which time she'd figured out how to collect from, interview, and befriend her subjects, from lumber camps to turpentine stills, from Florida to Louisiana. Hemenway muses that the instance of plagiarism showed how ambivalent Hurston was about her work.6 Subsequent biographers and critics have also speculated as to her motives: she unconsciously wanted out of professional anthropology, for example, or she had been so moved by Cudjo's story she could not get her own thoughts together. She never did it again and went on to do work as an anthropologist utterly original in every way.It took Hurston a while to prepare in some publishable form the vast amount of material she had gathered. She had editorial advice, a patron, but no luck. She set aside the draft of what became Mules and Men (1935) and quickly wrote the Cudjo Lewis story. However, Hemenway is clear that the problems of Barracoon remain. In her book-length version of Lewis's story, Hurston still does not acknowledge Roche as a source. Woodson and Boas never knew of her plagiarism, but Hemenway says that Boas would have repudiated Barracoon, Hurston's "imaginative recreation" of Lewis's experience.7Thus, there is the story that Barracoon tells and then there is the story that the history of its publication tells. It is, first, a story of what happened to the Harlem Renaissance, which was coming to an end as Hurston was writing the Cudjo Lewis story and trying to find a publisher for her books on folklore and conjure. By 1931, she had had more success publishing fiction close to the folklore that was central to her understanding of black vernacular culture. Hemenway points out that some of Hurston's early stories contain the seeds of her later novels, while still others reappear in Mules and Men. Though she was rediscovered as a light of the Negro awakening, she published most of her books during the Depression, when the vogue for black culture and the cult of primitivism had passed.Hurston did not subscribe to Locke's view of the Harlem Renaissance as an argument for race advancement. She went south as the Depression deepened, while Hughes went into the communist party. In his review of Mules and Men, Sterling Brown, a match for Hurston as a folklorist, said that to be true her collection ought to have been more bitter. But Brown praised Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), whereas Richard Wright castigated the novel.8 The sense that Hurston's work was not political enough, that it dealt in images of black life uncomfortably close to stereotype, was part of what Wright had in mind when he attacked the Harlem Renaissance for being on its knees to white audiences.9Hurston and Hughes had a falling out over authorship of a folk play they collaborated on, and Hughes paid her back in his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), with a coolly mischievous portrait of her as an entertaining hustler.10 Maybe Hughes's autobiography influenced her decision to write her own. In Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston gives the outline of Cudjo Lewis's story: "The only Negro alive that came over on a slave ship," "a cheerful, poetical old gentleman."11 Again, she presents a picture of the warrior kingdom of Dahomey as information that Lewis told her, not that she'd looked up. What she learned, she said, was that white people may have held her in bondage, but her people sold her in the first place. "That did away with the folklore I had grown up on," that white people kidnapped black people.12Hurston's biographers have analyzed the effects on her early career of her relationship with her patron, a Park Avenue enthusiast of the primitive. By contract, Hurston did not own the material she had collected when she was writing the Cudjo Lewis story. Perhaps being obliged to one white woman made her disinclined to be in debt to Roche, another white woman, dead and obscure, especially when it came to possession of black history. Alice Walker judged Dust Tracks on a Road to be unfortunate because to her it rang false.13 Hurston had to express too much gratitude to patrons. Most of her work in anthropology would be published posthumously.The return of Hurston coincided with and was part of the assertion of black women's voices both within the feminist movement and independent of it. By 1974, most of Hurston's published titles had been reprinted, with introductions by the poet Larry Neal, for instance, or the literary historian Darwin Turner, who in his study In a Minor Chord acknowledges Hurston's talent but calls her shallow.14 Barbara Smith declared that no other segment of the literary world had endured the invisibility of black women writers.15 Walker made a sensation when she published "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms. in 1975. After she contributed the foreword to Robert Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston, Walker edited I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979).An essay by the activist poet June Jordan, published in Black World in 1974, sought to reconcile Wright's and Hurston's views of black life.16 For a long time black history held that slavery had been traumatic, violent, wiping out most cultural memory of Africa. The damage showed itself in everyday ghetto life as a host of pathologies. Yet Herbert G. Gutman's Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976) challenged the premise that family life in slavery had been disrupted and that this dis-organization was at the root of the social ills suffered in black communities, arguing that the family was essential to passing on black heritage.Though the first vagrancy laws in the South were meant to control black men, thousands of whom were on the road in the aftermath of the Civil War in search of their families, black nationalism in the 1960s profoundly changed the understanding of black history in mass consciousness: it was not pathology, it was glory. In her essay, Jordan argued that there did not have to be a choice between Wright and Hurston. Protest mattered, given the long struggle to present to the larger society what black life was really like. But the black community also needed affirmation in its art, one of the techniques of survival. "Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, throwing light on language. Open the way for today's freedom-wigged freaks," wrote Sarah Webster Fabio.17Gilbert Osofsky's Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1971), a study of a socially troubled, segregated urban slum, was supplanted by David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was in Vogue (1989), a history of its glamorous past, when Harlem was the intellectual capital of the Negro world. As an entrance into African American literature, the Harlem Renaissance was a junction where past and future met. The debate about whether black literature was protest or self-expression, addressed to a white audience or to a black one, took shape in this era and became generational. But it was a debate that was never free of an underlying view of art as primarily utilitarian. John Edgar Wideman eloquently defined the history of black literature as an effort to escape its frame.18Hurston embodied the folk sensibility, and she knew it. She had mixed feelings about the page compared to oral performance. Moreover, she would say that folktales were already a conscious aesthetic, a well-developed art form, not raw material. Yet with her superb ear, maybe something happened between her hearing what someone said and her saying what the person said: "Was the real voice of my people never to be heard?"19 Folktales became literary in her hands. She recycled like crazy, reworking material from story to folktale to theater and back to fiction. Hemenway notes that early on in her career she wasn't entirely clear in her own mind about where folklore ended and fiction began.20The slave trade was illegal in 1859, but four Alabama businessmen sent their fastest boat in secrecy to the Bight of Benin, where the king of Dahomey was known to do a brisk trade in captives from his raids against weaker nations. Born Oluale Kossola in a Yoruba town in West Africa in 1841, Cudjo Lewis remembers in Hurston's version of his life the murderous raid, the barracoon where they were held, the conditions of the crossing for him and 110 other black people, and his five and a half years of constant labor and no rest as a slave-a relatively well-treated one at that. As much as he welcomes emancipation, freedom is dirt farming, getting cheated, and losing his children, one after the other, and finally his wife. Barracoon is a sad story.M. Genieve West's Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture (2005), an exhaustive survey of Hurston's critical fortunes, quotes from reviews during her lifetime that viewed what she was doing as a kind of local color. The research in folklore supported by the WPA had not yet begun when Hurston completed Barracoon. But most important, American historical studies were then under the sway of Alfred Dunning and his school. They discounted slave narratives as sources of information about slavery, because they were not objective, Dunning claimed. It is strange to think that Cudjo Lewis's story as Hurston had him tell it went unrecognized among her friends and advisers at the time. His was not an unknown story, and then he became one more person in black American history forgotten. Was there a single review of Alex Haley's Roots (1976) anywhere that mentioned that an actual, documented Kunta Kinte had lived on into the Jazz Age?In The Mis-education of the Negro (1933), Carter G. Woodson denounced the racial assumptions of education in the United States that taught white people and black people that black people were inferior to white people. Black students were not expected to ask what societies or cultures existed where their ancestors came from. Nothing of value had ever happened in Africa, schools and books said. Some African Americans were ashamed of folklore and folk songs, because to them this oral literature was the naive expression of a backward people. Negro dialect was despised rather than investigated as linguistic history, a broken-down African tongue, Woodson said.In Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," Hurston's voice provides the narrative frame: "Again his head was bowed for a time."21 She speaks in standard English, but the dialect of Cudjo Lewis's English isn't hard: "Somebody stand guard before de door so nobody could make noise and wakee him. Sometime de son of a slave in de compound makee too much noise."22 There is as much dialect in Mules and Men as there is in Barracoon. Roger D. Abraham published African Folktales (1983), giving one hundred tales, some of them Hurston had also published, but in Abraham they are in standard English, not dialect, because he thought maybe the racist associations of dialect, the Uncle Remus type of dialect, would never go away. However, the problem in American literature that dealt with racial themes wasn't dialect per se but, rather, the thoughts being expressed in dialect. Mark Twain had more than an ear, or the imaginative sympathy, to listen to black speakers, and he gave his black characters the capacity to think, to reflect. Traditionally, dialect was the expression of the ignorant, the uneducated, comic or brutish black people. The stereotype was as old as minstrelsy and lasted just as long.The dialect in Charles Dickens's stories is hard for us because of changes in usage. The literary historian Christopher Benfey has noted that the chief reason George Washington Cable's monumental novel The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) can't win the admirers it perhaps deserves is that it is brimming with dialect.23 Some readers dislike or disbelieve the dialect in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929). In her essay "Breaking Out of the Conventions of Dialect," Gayl Jones cites Hurston in her use of dialect as one of the first black writers to break out from the frame of linguistic hierarchy that Wideman talked about.24Dialect, in Hurston's work, is a central question of composition. She, like Wright, had found a way to render it on the page yet keep it as fast as contemporary dialogue. It is a literary matter, as much as the harrowing detail of the smell of the beheaded heads of his townspeople that Lewis/Kossola remembers were worn as trophies by their conquerors on the forced march to the slave fort at the sea. Cudjo Lewis is a lost man, even in old age, but he and Hurston's Moses in Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) are both solitary visionaries. What Cudjo Lewis can see is an African past. The works are similar in tone as well.Deborah G. Plant, in the afterword to her moving and scrupulous edition of Barracoon, this long-entombed work, reviews the scholarship that quarrels with Hemenway's findings. Hurston sort of did this, she sort of tried that, and none of it is very convincing. In these days of imaginative prose that mixes genres, Barracoon has its place. It is somehow more than the sum of its parts, even the appropriated parts. What an outcry there would be had a white writer lifted material from a black writer. Hurston was angrily territorial, for intellectual and commercial reasons, for reasons of racial history and her character and her destiny as a writer

Art · Art history · Enlightenment · Folklore · Literature · Scholarship · Sociology · Sympathy · Theology · Anthropology · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

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