Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors: The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston
[Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors are professors of English and African and African American studies at Harvard University.]
Last spring began with no hint of any but the usual excitement of a new class. We were team-teaching a course on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, writers who represent opposing literary and political tendencies, intellectuals who disliked each other's work and said so in print. Wright found Hurston's prose in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) cloaked in "facile sensuality" and complained that she "voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks' laugh.'" Hurston mocked Wright's collection Uncle Tom's Children (1938) as "a book about hatreds. Mr. Wright serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live. Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work." She was especially troubled by his language. "Since the author himself is a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf."...
Wright (1908-1960) is best known for his novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), although he produced 10 novels (A Father's Law was published posthumously in 2008), a collection of haiku, several books of essays, and other nonfiction works (on subjects including the black urban migration of the early 20th century, African decolonization, his travels in Spain, and transnational communism). As an expatriate in Paris, he wrote (among other works) his novel The Outsider (1953), and Black Power (1954), an account of his travels to the Gold Coast of Africa before it became independent Ghana. Like Hurston, Wright lived a rich and varied life and produced an equally rich and varied body of work. Yet critical attention has focused almost exclusively on the sociological and psychological insights that his fiction offers on racial strife in America, at the expense of exploring his sophisticated modernist aesthetics and his prescient views of political modernity....
That work tends to be glossed over, however, although the scholarly tide might be beginning to change. In 2004, Hugh Davis wrote an essay on the previously undocumented urban story "She Rock" in the Zora Neale Hurston Forum, and in 2005, Margaret Genevieve West discussed "She Rock" and another urban story, "The Country in the Woman," in her book, Zora Neale Hurston & American Literary Culture. Indeed, we later discovered that West found the same three stories we had in a microfiche collection called Black Literature, 1827-1940, and listed them in her bibliography. Like us, she knows of no place the stories have been reprinted. She wrote us that she shares our belief that "they deserve wider attention."
The three stories are important because they provide fuller insight into Hurston's engagement with urban black life. They show us that Harlem was of more than just passing interest to the author, and ask us to dig deeper into the phase of her life before she became so identified with Eatonville. The first story we found is a different, somewhat funnier version of "Book of Harlem," with the subtitle "Chapter I.," suggesting that Hurston may have envisioned it as the beginning of a longer migration tale. The second story, "Monkey Junk: A Satire on Modern Divorce," adheres to mock-biblical storytelling to satirize urban divorce, with the duped husband going back to Alabama at the end. It closes with the exclamation "Selah," an equivalent of "Amen" or "so sayeth the Lord" from the Book of Psalms and an ending that Hurston also used as a tongue-in-cheek valediction in a 1927 letter in which she expressed hope for a large automobile....
To our knowledge, no Hurston scholar has analyzed "Monkey Junk" and the other stories we found. Perhaps Hurston's self-consciously crafted image as a writer of Southern folk culture has predisposed critics to explore her oeuvre accordingly. But the tendency to overlook Hurston's Harlem period may also be due to the fact that she was a terrible bookkeeper, making the task of collecting her work and even learning her full biography hard for scholars. As we've already noted, she was evasive in her autobiography, keeping people in the dark about even her age, among other facts, for a long time. The tombstone that Alice Walker put on the unmarked grave that she found for Hurston has a birth date that is off by 10 years....
Read entire article at CHE
Last spring began with no hint of any but the usual excitement of a new class. We were team-teaching a course on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, writers who represent opposing literary and political tendencies, intellectuals who disliked each other's work and said so in print. Wright found Hurston's prose in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) cloaked in "facile sensuality" and complained that she "voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks' laugh.'" Hurston mocked Wright's collection Uncle Tom's Children (1938) as "a book about hatreds. Mr. Wright serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live. Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work." She was especially troubled by his language. "Since the author himself is a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf."...
Wright (1908-1960) is best known for his novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), although he produced 10 novels (A Father's Law was published posthumously in 2008), a collection of haiku, several books of essays, and other nonfiction works (on subjects including the black urban migration of the early 20th century, African decolonization, his travels in Spain, and transnational communism). As an expatriate in Paris, he wrote (among other works) his novel The Outsider (1953), and Black Power (1954), an account of his travels to the Gold Coast of Africa before it became independent Ghana. Like Hurston, Wright lived a rich and varied life and produced an equally rich and varied body of work. Yet critical attention has focused almost exclusively on the sociological and psychological insights that his fiction offers on racial strife in America, at the expense of exploring his sophisticated modernist aesthetics and his prescient views of political modernity....
That work tends to be glossed over, however, although the scholarly tide might be beginning to change. In 2004, Hugh Davis wrote an essay on the previously undocumented urban story "She Rock" in the Zora Neale Hurston Forum, and in 2005, Margaret Genevieve West discussed "She Rock" and another urban story, "The Country in the Woman," in her book, Zora Neale Hurston & American Literary Culture. Indeed, we later discovered that West found the same three stories we had in a microfiche collection called Black Literature, 1827-1940, and listed them in her bibliography. Like us, she knows of no place the stories have been reprinted. She wrote us that she shares our belief that "they deserve wider attention."
The three stories are important because they provide fuller insight into Hurston's engagement with urban black life. They show us that Harlem was of more than just passing interest to the author, and ask us to dig deeper into the phase of her life before she became so identified with Eatonville. The first story we found is a different, somewhat funnier version of "Book of Harlem," with the subtitle "Chapter I.," suggesting that Hurston may have envisioned it as the beginning of a longer migration tale. The second story, "Monkey Junk: A Satire on Modern Divorce," adheres to mock-biblical storytelling to satirize urban divorce, with the duped husband going back to Alabama at the end. It closes with the exclamation "Selah," an equivalent of "Amen" or "so sayeth the Lord" from the Book of Psalms and an ending that Hurston also used as a tongue-in-cheek valediction in a 1927 letter in which she expressed hope for a large automobile....
To our knowledge, no Hurston scholar has analyzed "Monkey Junk" and the other stories we found. Perhaps Hurston's self-consciously crafted image as a writer of Southern folk culture has predisposed critics to explore her oeuvre accordingly. But the tendency to overlook Hurston's Harlem period may also be due to the fact that she was a terrible bookkeeper, making the task of collecting her work and even learning her full biography hard for scholars. As we've already noted, she was evasive in her autobiography, keeping people in the dark about even her age, among other facts, for a long time. The tombstone that Alice Walker put on the unmarked grave that she found for Hurston has a birth date that is off by 10 years....