![]() ![]() Black dialect was at the heart of her work, and that was a dangerous business. The “minstrel” charge was finally aimed less at Hurston’s subjects, however, than at her language. In Wright’s account, her novel contained “no theme, no message, no thought.” By depicting a Southern small-town world in which blacks enjoyed their own rich cultural traditions, and were able to assume responsibility for their own lives, Hurston appeared a blithely reassuring supporter of the status quo. Against the tide of racial anger, she wrote about sex and talk and work and music and life’s unpoisoned pleasures, suggesting that these things existed even for people of color, even in America and she was judged superficial. She had written a love story-“Their Eyes Were Watching God”-and become a counter-revolutionary. Hurston was at the height of her powers in 1937, when she first fell seriously out of step with the times. ![]() For anyone who looks at her difficult life and extraordinary legacy straight on, it is nearly impossible to get this disarming conjure artist to represent any cause except the freedom to write what she wanted. Yet, despite the almost sanctified status she has achieved, Hurston’s social views are as obstreperous today as they were sixty years ago. All her major work has been republished (most recently by the Library of America), she is the subject of conferences and doctoral dissertations, and the movie rights to “Their Eyes Were Watching God”-which has sold more than a million copies since 1990-have been bought by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones. in 1975, interest in this neglected ancestress has developed a seemingly unstoppable momentum. Nevertheless, since Alice Walker’s “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” appeared in Ms. In this respect, she was the unlikeliest possible candidate for canonization by the black- and women’s-studies departments. Southern literature was filled with Negro portraits not so different from that of Bigger Thomas, the hero of Wright’s 1940 bombshell, “Native Son.” In the making of a revolution, all that had shifted was the author’s color and the blame.Īs for Hurston, the most brazenly impious of the Harlem literary avant-garde-she called them “the niggerati”-she had never fit happily within any political group. In American fiction, after all, there was nothing new in the image of the black man as an inarticulate savage for whom rape and murder were a nearly inevitable means of expression. The advent of Richard Wright was a political event as much as a literary one. That famed outpouring of novels and poems and plays of the twenties, anxiously demonstrating the Negro’s humanity and cultural citizenship, counted for nothing against the bludgeoning facts of the Depression, the Scottsboro trials, and the first-ever riot in Harlem itself, in 1935. For the first time in America, a substantial white audience preferred to be shot at.īlack anger had come out of hiding, out of the ruins of the Harlem Renaissance and its splendid illusions of justice willingly offered up to art. It says something about the social complexity of the next few years that it was Wright who became a Book-of-the-Month Club favorite, while Hurston’s work went out of print and she nearly starved. ![]() Worse, he accused Hurston of cynically perpetuating a minstrel tradition meant to make white audiences laugh. Reviewing Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in the New Masses the previous fall, he had dismissed her prose for its “facile sensuality”-a problem in Negro writing that he traced to the first black American female to earn literary fame, the slave Phillis Wheatley. Wright, the troubling newcomer, had already challenged her authority to speak for their race. “There is lavish killing here,” she wrote, “perhaps enough to satisfy all male black readers.” Hurston, who had swept onto the Harlem scene a decade before, was one of the very few black women in a position to write for the pallidly conventional Saturday Review. Richard Wright’s first published book, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” was made up of four novellas set in a Dismal Swamp of race hatred, in which not a single act of understanding or sympathy occurred, and in which the white man was generally shot dead. In the spring of 1938, Zora Neale Hurston informed readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Mr. First celebrated, then vilified, and finally idolized, Hurston is a writer who still raises difficult questions. ![]()
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