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Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/langhughrevi.26.1.000v

2154-9648

Ayesha K. Hardison, Randal Maurice Jelks,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was at once current, forward-thinking, and timeless when it was published on September 18, 1937. Emergent writer Richard Wright harshly criticized what would become Hurston's seminal work for its supposed minstrel characterizations—for being stuck in old, stereotypical portrayals of blackness—just two weeks after its debut as part of his impassioned yet myopic effort to usher in a new era of protest literature. However, Hurston's attention to the dynamic trends of the vernacular through Their Eyes Were Watching God's celebration of folklore and dialect (i.e., the “Ah'm,” “betcha,” “no more'n,” and “humph” proclamations of rural southern black subjectivity) was timely (Their Eyes 2–3). Her unabashed embrace of a black woman's self-discovery, spirituality, and voice was progressive. Moreover, her rendering of a sensual romance at the height of Jim Crow oppression and the lows of the Great Depression not only was visionary in its literary moment but also has proven to be enduring. Hurston has come in and out of vogue amid the shifts of what has defined African American literature throughout the twentieth century, but there is no doubt that Their Eyes Were Watching God is canonized now as a fixture of American arts and letters. What has remained constant within evolving scholarly and broad public understandings of Hurston's persona and extensive body of creative and ethnographic work is love: the intense eroticism of her classic novel as well as the deep appreciation, profound ardor, and communicable joy she had for black culture and black people.Hurston shared an unapologetic commitment to baring and cultivating esteem for African American literature and culture with this journal's namesake; thus, it is fitting that this issue of The Langston Hughes Review recognizes over eighty years of Their Eyes Were Watching God with an exploration of black love. Of course, Hughes and Hurston also had a lot of love for each other while navigating New York's black enclaves and white publishing circles, which led them to produce a single issue of the magazine Fire!! (1926) with their fellow Harlem Renaissance artists Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, and Wallace Thurman before falling out over the play Mule Bone (1930). Hughes and Hurston collaboratively wrote the comedy based on a folktale that Hurston collected as part of her anthropological research, but the two disagreed about acknowledging Louise Thompson, who typed the play without compensation, as a third collaborator (Gilyard 72). Whereas Hurston's reworking of the script and rightly copyrighting the new play De Turkey and de Law in her name only amplified the conflict, Hughes's split from his white patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, who also supported Hurston, further complicated their working partnership and friendship (Taylor 192–98).Nonetheless, Alice Walker maintains that Hughes and Hurston are permanently bonded as family. Walker is well known for recovering Hurston as a literary foremother by placing a headstone on her unmarked grave and compiling the reader I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … And Then Again When I Am Being Mean and Impressive (1979). Yet, Walker also had a valuable relationship with Hughes, whom she met with in Harlem after her college instructor introduced her work to him for inclusion in his edited collection The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers (1967). Whereas Hughes effectively weighed in on the Hurston/Wright debate and concluded “both/and” by featuring the two as contributors in his anthology, Walker mediates the contention between Hurston and Hughes by facilitating their reconciliation in her 2003 Barnard talk “Finding a World that I Thought Was Lost: Zora Neale Hurston and the People She Looked at Very Hard and Loved Very Much.” Walker claims her precursors as a dearly loved “aunt” and “uncle”; she refuses to believe they stoked their argument, even if warranted, in perpetuity; and, as their “descendent,” she takes up the responsibility to bring them together again.To this end, Walker surmises that Hurston would have loved Hughes for his poem “God to Hungry Child” (1925), which satirizes the rich and empathizes with the poor: Hungry child,I didn't make this world for you.You didn't buy any stock in my railroad.You didn't invest in my corporation.Where are your shares in standard oil?I made the world for the richAnd the will-be-richAnd the have-always-been-rich.Not for you,Hungry child. (Hughes 48) Walker intimates Hurston would have cared for Hughes's denied child of the poem, and she would have abided his expansive affection for humanity because that was not in question between them. Carla Kaplan appears to substantiate Walker's notion in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (1996) with two correspondences Hurston wrote to Hughes in 1931. One expresses her empathy for his health issues on Valentine's Day, during the month they supposedly finalized their break, and the other letter, dated the following month, thanks him for sending a newspaper clipping detailing circumstances comparable to the tensions they themselves were managing (Kaplan 210, 213).As guest editors of this issue of the Review, we, too, imagine Hurston and Hughes sustained an ongoing, mutual respect beyond the Harlem Renaissance because of how much they had in common, including the folk and the vernacular. We know they both loved music and humor, too. We also imagine they quietly tended a requited love for the other because of what their commonalities recognized and helped bring about. Both lived, traversed, and engendered a diasporic blackness extending from Kansas (by way of Missouri) and Florida (by way of Alabama) to New York, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and the soulful rivers of the Congo. This is black love given, received, multiplied, and returned, and that is what this special issue honors.From what scholars know about Hurston's love life, her romantic relationships were also uneven. She had married and divorced twice over the course of the late 1920s and early 1940s. In between these legal unions, she also had “at least one serious love affair” with Percival McGuire Punter, a man twenty years her junior, while in her forties (Kaplan 163). It is this stormy on-again, off-again relationship's fervor that she inscribed in Their Eyes Were Watching God, written in just seven weeks while she conducted research in Haiti funded by a Guggenheim fellowship. Yet, Kaplan points out that Hurston was “particularly secretive” and “guarded” about her intimate intrigues (163, 189). Consequently, in her letter to William Stanley Hoole, then a professor and librarian at Birmingham-Southern College, she explains her new book is about a forty-year-old woman, who has been “hungry for life” since childhood, taking a “chance at mud” with a man named Tea Cake. “He took her down into the Everglades where people worked and sweated and loved and died violently, where no such thing as flag-poles for women existed,” she summarizes. “Since I narrate mostly in dialogue, I can give you no feeling in these few lines of the life of this brown woman with her plentiful hair. But this is the barest statement of the story” (“To William Stanley Hoole” 366). Hurston does not impart the proximity of her unnamed protagonist to her own personal life in any of her correspondence, including letters to people who would have known firsthand (Kaplan 183). Instead, it is in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) where she discloses her affair with Punter, who she refers to as P.M.P. and as the muse for Janie and Tea Cake's exciting but tumultuous coupling. Within her autobiography she reflects, “The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God” (Dust Tracks 210–11).Hurston contemplates the novel's impetus as well as exhibits her wit and insight about her desirous liaisons more broadly in the Dust Tracks chapter “Love.” For her, love is as pleasurable and transgressive as myth-making due to its indulgence, audacity, contingency, and ambiguity. In the chapter's opening, she questions, “What do I really know about love? I have had some experiences and feel fluent enough for my own satisfaction. Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much” (Dust Tracks 203). She goes on to describe childhood crushes, her college sweetheart and first husband Herbert Sheen, and her bittersweet “agony” with Punter, which is constitutive of his God-given intellect, honesty, and attractiveness as well as his manliness, her jealousy, and their physical altercations (205–9). Five years after the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God, however, Hurston declines to provide definitive closure to her romance with Punter as she tragically does with Janie's marriage with her suitor's alter ego, as she had recently reconnected with Punter before delving into writing her autobiography. “What will be the end?” she tantalizes. “That is not for me to know. … And even if I did know all, I am supposed to have some private business to myself. What I do know, I have no intention of putting but so much in the public ears” (211). Memoirs are perceived to be tell-alls, but even when sharing the behind-the-scenes story of Their Eyes Were Watching God and her real-life Tea Cake, Hurston elides providing a clear chronology of events that would inform readers she had already married and filed for divorce from her second husband Albert Price, who countered her allegations of cruelty with claims she threatened him with black magic, before reigniting with her old flame Punter (Boyd 377–78). It is important, then, to heed biographer Valerie Boyd's distinction: “Tea Cake is not Punter and Janie is not Zora Neale Hurston. … Janie is more conventional than Hurston ever was; … Hurston, on the other hand, sought her identity in her own self, in her work, in writing and speaking her mind” (303).Hurston's speculative provocation in Dust Tracks is reminiscent of her negotiation of her insider and outsider status as a native black southerner and extraneous anthropologist in her folklore collection Mules and Men (1935). In the book's introduction, she imparts a theory of dissemblance to explain African Americans' polite evasiveness with people trying to study them: The white man is always trying to know into somebody else's business. All right, I'll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho' can't read my mind. I'll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I'll say my say and sing my song. (3) In this passage about culture, performance, and spectatorship, Hurston acknowledges the artistic subjectivity that can be retained with play and masking within hierarchal racial and gendered public spaces (Hardison 217). Further, she signals that she knows what it is like to be behind the door preserving black folk culture and in front of it seeking knowledge. A creative and a connoisseur, Hurston transposes these divided positionalities onto Dust Tracks when she concludes her delineation on love with the caution: “And then again, anybody whose mouth is cut cross-ways is given to lying, unconsciously as well as knowingly. So pay my few scattering remarks no mind as to love in general. I only know my part” (Dust Tracks 214). With these words, she doubles down on her unwillingness to divulge all aspects of her love life by suggesting that lying is an innate and self-conscious construction and black love, which is implied but not qualified here, is folkloric. Black love is autobiographical storytelling simultaneously projecting and safeguarding the subjectivity she constructs throughout Dust Tracks.In Their Eyes Were Watching God, black love is similarly enigmatic. Janie explains to her friend Pheoby, “Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets” (191). Janie's love for her man Tea Cake is forged with the fierce passion they have for each other whereas her love for her girlfriend Pheoby is molded through intimate self-revelation. Both relationships realize the love Janie seeks, and that love persists in spite of distance and death.The same is true of the novel itself. When Harlem Renaissance writers, especially its women novelists, were all but forgotten in the mid-twentieth century—with the exception of Hughes—Their Eyes Were Watching God still got love. In 1956, when Hurston's books were out of print, Mrs. E. Madeline Wiltz writes to thank her for the “deep emotional experience” produced by her “moving” and “compassionate” novel. “It seems especially important at this moment in our country's development when racial intolerance is at a peak,” Wiltz opines, “I wish this beautiful story could be known by everyone” (“To Zora Neale Hurston”). The 1950s censure of the Harlem Renaissance aided and abetted Hurston's poverty and, after her 1960 death, prolonged her obscurity well into the 1970s. But her novel weathered the times because, to quote June Jordan, “it is the most successful, convincing, and exemplary novel of Blacklove that we have. Period” (6). Jordan praises the novel for displaying the kind of “believable, contagious, full Blacklove that makes you want to go and seek and find, likewise, soon as you finish the book” (6). This desire to seek and find is part of the mythology surrounding the text and its repossession. Contemporary African American lore endows us with “the stories of a generation of young black women intellectuals sharing photocopies of [the] novel … passing it around as if it were contraband” before Walker reinstated Hurston within black and feminist cultural genealogies (Griffin 487). Hurston's Harlem Renaissance fame, post–World War II obscurity, and prodigious post–civil rights resurgence has the triumphant arc of epic mythology, in which the black female writer survived the Jane Crow politics of literary history and thrived with the emergence of black feminist criticism.And yet Hurston is repeatedly rediscovered. In 1977, her significance was recalled with the publication of Robert E. Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. A concentration of resuscitations appeared in the late 1980s and 1990s, including the critical work of Karla F. C. Holloway, Deborah G. Plant, Cheryl A. Wall, John Lowe, and Susan E. Meisenhelder as well as the annual Zora! Festival held in Hurston's beloved Eatonville. This recovery work culminated with Boyd's Wrapped in Rainbows (2003), the first biography published after Hemenway's inaugural profile. Now, with the posthumous publication of Hurston's short stories, plays, and ethnography Barracoon (2018), it is not the “lost” writer that must be recovered, but an understanding of her legacy. Reflecting on the eightieth anniversary of Their Eyes Were Watching God in 2017, Eve Dunbar remembers her “early lack of reverence” when she first encountered the novel in an undergraduate women's studies course. However, once she discerned the book's “salient” theme, she realized, “Hurston is offering us a number of revolutionary possibilities” about love for the impoverished, the weary, and those on the periphery. “The reclamation of that space and possibility may not seem revolutionary,” Dunbar posits, “but history continues to show us that black love and freedom are unceasingly difficult to arrange” (“What I Learned”). Given that our current historical moment is flagged by the fatalities of “hungry” children named Aiyana Jones, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice, casualties of the state that ostensibly negate all the “capacity” black families and communities “injected” into their “vessel[s] of flesh and bone,” rehearsing black love indeed feels revolutionary (Coates 82).Inspired by “Black Love: A Symposium” (https://bls.ku.edu/), a week-long conference organized by the guest editors to celebrate the oak anniversary of Hurston's novel at The University of Kansas, this issue of the Langston Hughes Review consummates our efforts to critically inquire into the mythologies and historical facts of black love. Symposium keynotes Tera W. Hunter and Pamela Newkirk examined the antebellum cultural ways informing Their Eyes Were Watching God while keynotes Mark Anthony Neal and Anthony Sparks spotlighted its twenty-first-century heir Queen Sugar. The convening, which also comprised presentations by nineteen writers and interdisciplinary scholars, closed with a quilt exhibit, curated by Marla A. Jackson, and a nine-hour marathon reading of the novel aloud in numerous public venues in downtown Lawrence, Hughes's childhood home. In the end, the symposium evinced the need for an extended conversation on Hurston, black love, and their present enunciations.The following contributions to this colloquy consider black love in its various sacred, spatial, penetrating, injurious, compromising, affirming, and just iterations. McKinley E. Melton opens the issue tracing the ways Their Eyes Were Watching God speaks to the writing tradition, theological interventions, and eros of black gay men in his essay “What God Hath Put Together: Hurston, Black Queer Love, and the Act of Creation.” In “Eros and Self-Realization: Zora Neale Hurston's Janie and Flora Nwapa's Efuru,” F. Fiona Moolla geographically broadens the issue's discussion of black love to a Nigerian novel and compares the race, gender, class, and cultural dynamics constructing domestic spheres across the diaspora.In “Love as Justice,” legal scholar Lua Kamál Yuille, Rúḥíyyih Nikole Yuille, and Justin A. Yuille discuss the collective damage the law initiates and incites as well as the emotional due process people pursue and attain. The requisite, curative possibilities of black love manifest in their collaborative writing endeavor. Tiffany Ruby Patterson further parses the nuances of love and its aims in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dust Tracks on a Road in her essay “Love in Hurston's Art and Life.” A review essay by Dana A. Williams and Jimisha Relerford reassess the lasting importance of Hurston's ethnography Barracoon. Poetry and artwork complement these critical essays and extend the dimensions of this issue's homage to black love. Poets Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Curtis L. Crisler, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, Kwoya Fagin Maples, Glenn North, DaMaris B. Hill, Yolanda J. Franklin, Zora Howard, and Avery R. Young capture the temporal and emotive range of black love: its absence and presence; articulations and silences; divine elevations and sensuous gravities; as well as visuality and scripts. Photographers Diallo French and Tonika Johnson reciprocally arrest the haptic and quotidian of black love. Together the work of these critics and artists remind us of the structures and strictures shaping black loves' trajectories toward freedom and reparations of all kinds. We believe this exposition will stir lovers of Hurston to continue to go and seek and find.