Jonah's Gourd Vine (21 page)

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 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:

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 dish-pan full of broke-up crockery!”

Immediately following the passage about her mother's death, she writes:

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.”

H
ENRY
L
OUIS
G
ATES
, J
R
.

WORKS BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Jonah's Gourd Vine.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934.

Mules and Men.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935.

Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937.

Tell My Horse.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938.

Moses, Man of the Mountain.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1939.

Dust Tracks on a Road.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942.

Seraph on the Suwanee.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948.

I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…& Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader.
Edited by Alice Walker. Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1979.

The Sanctified Church.
Edited by Toni Cade Bambara. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981.

Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston.
Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1985.

Baker, Houston A., Jr.
Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory,
pp. 15–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Bloom, Harold, ed.
Zora Neale Hurston.
New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

———, ed.
Zora Neale Hurston's “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Byrd, James W. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Novel Folklorist.”
Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin
21 (1955): 37–41.

Cooke, Michael G. “Solitude: The Beginnings of Self-Realization in Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.” In Michael G. Cooke,
Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century,
pp. 71–110. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Dance, Daryl C. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In
American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays,
edited by Maurice Duke, et al. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Speakerly Text.” In Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
The Signifying Monkey,
pp. 170–217. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Giles, James R. “The Significance of Time in Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Negro American Literature Forum
6 (Summer 1972): 52–53, 60.

Hemenway, Robert E.
Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Holloway, Karla.
The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Holt, Elvin. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In
Fifty Southern Writers After 1900,
edited by Joseph M. Flura and Robert Bain, pp. 259–69. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Howard, Lillie Pearl.
Zora Neale Hurston.
Boston: Twayne, 1980.

———. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In
Dictionary of Literary Biography,
vol. 51, edited by Trudier Harris, pp. 133–45. Detroit: Gale, 1987.

Jackson, Blyden. “Some Negroes in the Land of Goshen.”
Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin
19 (4) (December 1953): 103–7.

Johnson, Barbara. “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in
Their Eyes.
” In
Black Literature and Literary Theory,
edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., pp. 205–21. New York: Methuen, 1984.

———. “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston.” In
“Race,” Writing and Difference,
edited by Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Jordan, June. “On Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.”
Black World
23 (10) (August 1974): 4–8.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. “‘Tuh de Horizon and Back': The Female Quest in
Their Eyes.” Black American Literature Forum
17(3) (Fall 1983): 109–15.

Lionnet, Françoise. “Autoethnography: The Anarchic Style of
Dust Tracks on a Road.
” In Françoise Lionnet,
Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture,
pp. 97–130. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Lupton, Mary Jane. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Survival of the Female.”
Southern Literary Journal
15 (Fall 1982): 45–54.

Meese, Elizabeth. “Orality and Textuality in Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes.
” In Elizabeth Meese,
Crossing the Double Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism,
pp. 39–55. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Newson, Adele S.
Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

Rayson, Ann. “
Dust Tracks on a Road:
Zora Neale Hurston and the Form of Black Autobiography.”
Negro American Literature Forum
7 (Summer 1973): 42–44.

Sheffey, Ruthe T., ed.
A Rainbow Round Her Shoulder: The Zora Neale Hurston Symposium Papers.
Baltimore: Morgan State University Press, 1982.

Smith, Barbara. “Sexual Politics and the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.”
Radical Teacher
8 (May 1978): 26–30.

Stepto, Robert B.
From Behind the Veil.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Walker, Alice. “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.”
Ms.,
March 1975, pp. 74–79, 85–89.

Wall, Cheryl A. “Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words.” In
American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism,
edited by Fritz Fleischmann, pp. 370–93. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Washington, Mary Helen. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow.” Introduction to
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing,
edited by Alice Walker. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1979.

———. “‘I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands': Zora Neale Hurston's Emergent Female Hero.” In Mary Helen Washington,
Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960.
New York: Anchor Press, 1987.

Willis, Miriam. “Folklore and the Creative Artist: Lydia Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston.”
CLA Journal
27 (September 1983): 81–90.

Wolff, Maria Tai. “Listening and Living: Reading and Experience in
Their Eyes.
” BALF 16 (1) (Spring 1982): 29–33.