ZORA NEALE HURSTON: GENERAL COMMENTARY

CLAUDIA ROTH PIERPONT (ESSAY DATE 17 FEBRUARY 1997)

SOURCE: Pierpont, Claudia Roth. "A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian." New Yorker 73, no. 1 (17 February 1997): 80-91.

In the following essay, Pierpont provides an overview of Hurston's career and the public's response to it, and asserts that it is impossible to categorize Hurston's writing.

In the spring of 1938, Zora Neale Hurston informed readers of the Saturday Review of Literature that Mr. Richard Wright's first published book, Uncle Tom's Children, was made up of four novel-las 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. "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. Wright, the troubling newcomer, had already challenged her authority to speak for their race. 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. Worse, he accused Hurston of cynically perpetuating a minstrel tradition meant to make white audiences laugh. 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. For the first time in America, a substantial white audience preferred to be shot at.

Black 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. 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. The advent of Richard Wright was a political event as much as a literary one. 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. 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.

As 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. And she still doesn't. In this respect, she was the unlikeliest possible candidate for canonization by the black- and women's-studies departments. Nevertheless, since Alice Walker's "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" appeared in Ms. in 1975, interest in this neglected ancestress has developed a seemingly unstoppable momentum. 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. Yet, despite the almost sanctified status she has achieved, Hurston's social views are as obstreperous today as they were sixty years ago. 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.

Hurston was at the height of her powers in 1937, when she first fell seriously out of step with the times. She had written a love story—Their Eyes Were Watching God —and become a counter-revolutionary. 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. By implication, merely feminine. 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.

The "minstrel" charge was finally aimed less at Hurston's subjects, however, than at her language. Black dialect was at the heart of her work, and that was a dangerous business. Disowned by the founders of the Harlem Renaissance for its association with the shambling, watermelon-eating mockeries of American stage convention, dialect remained an irresistible if highly self-conscious resource for writers, from Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown to Wright himself (whose use of the idiom Hurston gleefully dismissed as tone deaf). But the feat of rescuing the dignity of the speakers from decades of humiliation required a rare and potentially treacherous combination of gifts: a delicate ear and a generous sympathy, a hellbent humor and a determined imperviousness to shame. All this Hurston brought to Their Eyes Were Watching God —a book that, despite its slender, private grace, aspires to the force of a national epic, akin to works by Mark Twain or Alessandro Manzoni, offering a people their own language freshly caught on paper and raised to the heights of poetry.

"It's sort of duskin' down dark," observes the otherwise unexceptional Mrs. Sumpkins, checking the sky and issuing the local evening variant of rosy-fingered dawn. "He's uh whirlwind among breezes," one front-porch sage notes of the town's mayor; another adds, "He's got uh throne in de seat of his pants." The simplest men and women of all-black Eatonville have this wealth of images easy at their lips. This is dialect not as a broken attempt at higher correctness but as an extravagant game of image and sound. It is a record of the unique explosion that occurred when African people with an intensely musical and oral culture came up hard against the King James Bible and the sweet-talking American South, under conditions that denied them all outlet for their visions and gifts except the transformation of the English language into song.

Hurston was born to a family of sharecroppers in tiny Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891—about ten years before any date she ever admitted to. Both her biographer, Robert E. Hemenway, and her admirer Alice Walker, who put up a tombstone in 1973 to mark Hurston's Florida grave (inscribed "'A Genius of the South' 1901-1960 Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist"), got this basic fact as wrong as their honored subject would have wished. Hurston was a woman used to getting away with things: her second marriage license lists her date of birth as 1910. Still, the ruse stemmed not from ordinary feminine vanity but from her desire for an education and her shame at how long it took her to get it. The lie apparently began when she entered high school, in 1917, at twenty-six.

She had been very young when the family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in America (by 1914 there would be some thirty of them throughout the South), in search of the jobs and the relief from racism that such a place promised. In many ways, they found precisely what they wanted: John Hurston became a preacher at the Zion Hope Baptist Church and served three terms as mayor. His daughter's depictions of this self-ruled colored Eden have become legend, and in recent years have seemed to hold out a ruefully tempting alternative to the ordeals of integration. The benefits of the self-segregated life have been attested to by the fact that Eatonville produced Hurston herself: a black writer uniquely whole-souled and self-possessed and imbued with (in Alice Walker's phrase) "racial health."

Her mother taught her to read before she started school, and encouraged her to "jump at de sun." Her father routinely smacked her back down and warned her not to act white; the child he adored was her docile older sister. One must go to Hurston's autobiographical novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, for a portrait of this highly charismatic but morally weak man, whose compulsive philandering eventually destroyed all he'd built. The death of Zora's mother, in 1904, began a period she would later seek to obliterate from the record of her life. Although her actual autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, is infamously evasive and sketchy (burying a decade does not encourage specificity), it does acknowledge her having been shunted among her brothers' families with the lure of school ever giving way to cleaning house and minding children. And all the while, she recalls, "I had a way of life inside me and I wanted it with a want that was twisting me."

Working at every kind of job—maid, waitress, manicurist—she managed to finish high school by June, 1918, and went on to Howard University, where she published her first story, in the literary-club magazine, in 1921. Harlem was just then on the verge of vogue, and the Howard club was headed by Alain Locke, founding prince of the Renaissance, a black aristocrat out of Harvard on the lookout for writers with a sense of the "folk." It was what everybody would soon be looking for. The first date that Hurston offers in the story of her life is January, 1925, when she arrived in New York City with no job, no friends, and a dollar and fifty cents in her pocket—a somewhat melodramatic account meant to lower the lights behind her rising glory.

One story had already been accepted by Opportunity, the premier magazine of "New Negro" writing. That May, at the first Opportunity banquet, she received two awards—one for fiction and one for drama—from such judges as Fannie Hurst, a best-selling, four-handkerchief novelist, and Eugene O'Neill. Hurston's flamboyant entrance at a party following the ceremonies, sailing a scarf over her shoulder and crying out the title of her play—" Color Struck !"—made a greater impression than her work would do for years. This was the new, public Zora, all bravado and laughter, happily startling her audience with the truth of its own preoccupations.

That night, she attached herself to Fannie Hurst, for whom she was soon working as a secretary and then, when it turned out that she couldn't type or keep anything in order, as a kind of rental exotic, complete with outlandish stories and a turban. (Her new boss once tried to pass her off in a segregated restaurant as an African princess.) Hurston's Harlem circle was loudly scornful of the part she was willing to play. For her, though, it was experience: it was not washing floors, it was going somewhere. And the somewhere still hadn't changed. At the banquet she had also met Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of Barnard College. In the fall of 1925, this ever-masquerading, newly glamorous Scott-within-Zelda of Lenox Avenue enrolled in school again—she had completed less than two years at Howard, and had finagled a scholarship out of Meyer—and discovered anthropology.

Hurston dived headlong into this new field of intellectual possibility, which had been conceived principally by her teacher, Franz Boas, a German-Jewish immigrant who'd founded the department at Columbia. (Like all his students, Hurston called him Papa Franz, and he teased that of course she was his daughter, "just one of my missteps.") The bedrock of Boas's frankly political theorizing was the adaptability and mutability of the races. Believing that culture and learning have as much influence on human development as heredity, he set out to prove how close the members of the family of man might really be. Probably no one except her mother influenced Hurston more.

Boas's fervent belief in the historic importance of African cultures had already had tremendous impact on W. E. B. Du Bois, and Hurston was similarly inspired by the sense of importance that Boas gave to Southern black culture, not just as a source of entertaining stories but as the transmitted legacy of Africa—and as an independent cultural achievement, in need of preservation and study. Boas literally turned Hurston around: he sent her back down South to put on paper the things that she'd always taken for granted. Furthermore, his sanction gave her confidence in the value of those things—the old familiar talk and byways—which was crucial to the sense of "racial health" and "easy self-acceptance" that so many relish in her work today. It seems safe to say that no black woman in America was ever simply allotted such strengths, no matter how strong she was or how uniformly black her home town. They had to be won, and every victory was precarious.

As a child, Hurston informs us in her autobiography, she was confused by the talk of Negro equality and Negro superiority which she heard in the town all around her: "If it was so honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people among us had so much prestige?" Even in first grade, she saw the disparity: "The light-skinned children were always the angels, fairies and queens of school plays." She was not a light-skinned child, although her racial heritage was mixed. If the peculiarities of a segregated childhood spared her the harshest brunt of white racism, the crippling consciousness of color in the black community and in the black soul was a subject she knew well and could not leave alone.

Such color-consciousness has a long history in African-American writing, starting with the first novel written by a black American, William Wells Brown's 1853 Clotel (a fantasy about Thomas Jefferson's gorgeous mulatto daughter), which takes color prejudice "among the negroes themselves" as its premise. By 1929, the heroine of Wallace Thurman's bitterly funny novel The Blacker the Berry … was drenching her face with peroxide before going off to dance in Harlem's Renaissance Casino. But there is no more disconcertingly morbid document of this phenomenon than Hurston's prize-winning Color Struck. This brief, almost surreal play tracks a talented and very dark-skinned woman's decline into self-destructive madness, a result of her inability to believe that any man could love a woman so black. Although the intended lesson of Color Struck seems clear in the retelling, the play's fevered, hallucinatory vehemence suggests a far more complex response to color than Hurston's champions today can comfortably allow—a response not entirely under the author's control.

It would be wrong to say that whites did not figure prominently in Hurston's early life, despite their scarcity. It was precisely because of that scarcity that she took hold of racism not at its source but as it reverberated through the black community. Whites around Eatonville were not the murderous tyrants of Richard Wright's Deep South childhood, but they exerted, perhaps, an equally powerful force—as tantalizing, world-withholding gods, and as a higher court (however unlikely) of personal justice.

There is a fairy-tale aspect to the whites who pass through her autobiography: The "white man of many acres and things" who chanced upon her birth and cut her umbilical cord with his knife; the strangers who would drive past her house and give her rides out toward the horizon. (She had to walk back, and was invariably punished for her boldness.) Most important was a pair of white ladies who visited her school and were so impressed by her reading aloud—it was the myth of Persephone, crossing between realms of dark and light, which, she recalls, she read exceptionally well because it "exalted" her—that they made her a present of a hundred new pennies and the first real books she ever owned.

Hurston's autobiography won an award for race relations, in 1943, and put her on the cover of the Saturday Review. The book has since been reviled by the very people who rescued her fiction from oblivion, and for the same reason that the fiction was once consigned there: a sense that she was putting on a song and dance for whites. In fact, there is nothing in Dust Tracks on a Road that is inconsistent with the romantic images of white judges and jurors and plantation owners which form a fundamental part of Hurston's most deeply admired work. The heroine of Their Eyes Were Watching God ends up on trial for the murder—in self-defense—of the man she loved. (Having been infected by a rabid dog, he lost his senses and came at her with a gun.) The black folks who knew the couple have sided against her at the trial, hoping to see her hanged. It is the whites—the judge and jury and a group of women gathered for curiosity's sake—who see into the anguished depths of a black woman's love, and acknowledge her dignity and her innocence.

Does this reflect honest human complexity or racial confusion? In what world, if any, was Hurston ever at home? While at Barnard, she apparently told the anthropologist Melville Herskovits that, as he put it, she was "more white than Negro in her ancestry." On her first trip back South to gather evidence of her native culture she could not be understood because of her Barnard intonations. She couldn't gain people's confidence; the locals claimed to have no idea what she wanted. When Hurston returned to New York, she and Boas agreed that a white person could have discovered as much.

So she learned, in effect, to pass for black. In the fall of 1927, in need of a patron, she offered her services to Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, a wealthy white widow bent on saving Western culture from rigor mortis through her support of Negro artistic primitivism. For more than three years, Mrs. Mason paid for Hurston to make forays to the South to collect Negro folk material. Hurston's findings were not always as splendidly invigorating nor her attitude as positive as they later appeared. "I have changed my mind about the place," she wrote despairingly from Eatonville, in an unpublished letter of 1932. "They steal everything here, even greens out of a garden." But she became increasingly accomplished at ferreting out what she had been hired to find, and the results (if not always objectively reliable) have proved invaluable. Alan Lomax, who worked with Hurston on a seminal 1935 Library of Congress folk-music-recording expedition, wrote of her unique ability to win over the locals, since she "talks their language and can out-nigger any of them."

The fruits of her field work appeared in various forms throughout the early thirties: stories, plays, musical revues, academic articles. Her research is almost as evident in the 1934 novel Jonah's Gourd Vine as in her book of folklore, Mules and Men, which appeared the following year. Now routinely saluted as the first history of black American folklore by a black author, Mules and Men was faulted by black critics of its own time for its adamant exclusion of certain elements of the Southern Negro experience: exploitation, terror, misery, and bitterness.

By this time, however, Hurston had won enough recognition to go off on a Guggenheim grant to study voodoo practices in the Caribbean. It was not a happy trip. The anecdotal study she produced—Tell My Horse, published in 1938—is tetchy and belligerent, its author disgusted by the virulent racism of light-skinned mulattoes toward blacks in Jamaica, and as distinctly put out by the unreliability and habitual lying she experienced among the Haitians. In any case, this particular trip had been prompted less by an interest in research than by a need to escape from New York, where she'd left the man she thought of as the love of her life—a still mysterious figure who belongs less to her biography than to her art. In a period of seven weeks, in Haiti, in the fall of 1936, she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel meant to "embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him."

In her autobiography, Hurston quickly dismisses her first marriage and entirely neglects to mention her second; each lasted only a matter of months. She wed her longtime Howard University boyfriend in May, 1927, and bailed out that August. (Apparently unruffled, Hurston wrote her friends that her husband had been an obstacle, and had held her back.) In 1939, her marriage to a twenty-three-year-old W.P.A. playground worker dissolved with her claims that he drank and his claims that she'd failed to pay for his college education and had threatened him with voodoo. "The great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last night's moment to a day which has no knowledge of it," she writes in DustTracksonaRoad. She concludes, "I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find."

Those admirers who wish Hurston to be a model feminist as well as a racial symbol have seized on the issue of a woman's historic choice between love and work, and have claimed that Hurston instinctively took the less travelled path. On the basis of Hurston's public insouciance, Alice Walker describes, with delicious offhand aplomb, "the way she tended to marry or not marry men, but enjoyed them anyway, while never missing a beat in her work." No sweat, no tears—one for the girls. It is true that Hurston was never financially supported by a man—or by anyone except Mrs. Mason. Hemenway, her biographer, writes that it was precisely because of her desire to avoid "such encroachment" on her freedom that her marriages failed.

Without doubt, Hurston was a woman of strong character, and she went through life mostly alone. She burned sorrow and fear like fuel, to keep herself going. She made a point of not needing what she could not have: whites who avoided her company suffered their own loss; she claimed not to have "ever really wanted" her father's affection. Other needs were just as unwelcome. About love, she knew the way it could make a woman take "second place in her own life." Repeatedly, she fought the pull.

There is little insouciance in the way Hurston writes of the man she calls P.M.P. in Dust Tracks on a Road. He was "tall, dark brown, magnificently built," with "a fine mind and that intrigued me.…He stood on his own feet so firmly that he reared back." In fact, he was her "perfect" love—although he was only twenty-five or so to her forty, and he resented her career. It is hard to know whether his youth or his resentment or his perfection was the central problem. Resolved to "fight myself free from my obsession," she took little experimental trips away from him to see if she could stand it. When she found she couldn't, she left him for good.

Her diligent biographer, who located the man decades later, reports that he had never known exactly what had happened. She'd simply packed her bags and gone off to the Caribbean. Once there, of course, she wrote a book in which a woman who has spent her life searching for passion finally finds it, lets herself go within its embrace, and learns that her lover is honest and true, and that she is not being played for a fool—despite the familiar fact that he is only twenty-five or so and she is forty. (He tells her, "God made it so you spent yo' ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo' young girl days to spend wid me.") And then, in the midst of love's perfection, the woman is forced—not out of anger or betrayal but by a hurricane and a mad dog and a higher fate—to shoot him dead, and return to a state of enlightened solitude.

Their Eyes Were Watching God brought a heartbeat and breath to all Hurston's years of research. Raising a folk culture to the heights of art, it fulfilled the Harlem Renaissance dream just a few years after it had been abandoned; Alain Locke himself complained that the novel failed to come to grips with the challenges of "social document fiction." The recent incarnation of Hurston's lyric drama as a black feminist textbook is touched with many ironies, not the least of which is the need to consider it as a social document. The paramount ironies, however, are two: the heroine is not quite black, and becomes even less black as the story goes on; and the author offers perhaps the most serious Lawrentian vision ever penned by a woman of sexual love as the fundamental spring and power of life itself.

The heroine of Eyes, Janie Crawford, is raised by her grandmother, who grew up in "slavery time," and who looks on in horror as black women give up their precious freedom for chains they forge themselves. "Dis love! Dat's just whut's got us uh pullin' and uh haulin' and sweatin' and doin' from can't see in de mornin' till can't see at night." But no one can give a woman what she will not claim. Nanny's immovable goal to see Janie "school out" meets its match in the teenager's bursting sexuality. Apprehensive, Nanny marries her off to a man with a house and sixty acres and a pone of fat on the back of his neck. "But Nanny, Ah wants to want him sometimes. Ah don't want him to do all de wantin'," Janie complains, and she walks off one day down the road, tossing her apron onto a bush.

It isn't exactly Nora slamming the door. There's another man in a buggy waiting for Janie, and another unhappy marriage—this time to a bully who won't let her join in the dazzling talk, the wildly spiralling stories, the earnest games of an Eatonville that Hurston raises up now like a darktown Camelot. After his death, a full twenty years later, she is rather enjoying the first freedom of widowhood when a tall, laughing man enters the general store and asks her to play checkers: "She looked him over and got little thrills from every one of his good points. Those full, lazy eyes with the lashes curling sharply away like drawn scimitars. The lean, overpadded shoulders and narrow waist. Even nice!"

It's the checkers almost as much as the sex. After Nanny, this man, who is called Tea Cake ("Tea Cake! So you sweet as all dat?"), is the staunchest feminist in the novel. He pushes Janie to play the games, talk the talk, "have de nerve tuh say whut you mean." They get married and set off together to work in the Everglades, picking beans side by side all day and rolling dice and dancing to piano blues at night. Hurston isn't unaware of the harsh background to these lives—trucks come chugging through the mud carrying migrant workers, "people ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor"—but she's willing to leave further study to the Wrights and the Steinbecks. Her concern is with the flame that won't go out, the making of laughter out of nothing, the rhythm, the intensity of feeling that transcends it all.

During the nineteen-seventies, when Their Eyes Were Watching God was being rediscovered with high excitement, Janie Crawford was granted the status of "earliest … heroic black woman in the Afro-American literary tradition." But many impatient questions have since been asked about this new icon. Why doesn't Janie speak up sooner? Why can't she go off alone? Why is she always waiting for some man to show her the way? Apologies have been made for the difficulties of giving power and daring to a female character in 1936, but then Scarlett O'Hara didn't fare too badly with the general public that year. The fact is that Janie was not made to suit independent-minded female specifications of any era. She is not a stand-in for her author but a creation meant to live out other possibilities, which are permitted her in large part because—unlike her author—she has no ambition except to live, and because she is beautiful.

"I got an overwhelming complex about my looks before I was grown," Hurston wrote her friend and editor Burroughs Mitchell in 1947, but went on to declare that she had triumphed over it. "I don't care how homely I am now. I know that it doesn't really matter, and so my relations with others are easier." Despite the possible exaggerations of a moment, this vibrantly attractive woman was well acquainted with what might be called the aesthetic burdens of race ("as ugly as Cinderella's sisters" is a phrase meaning Negro, Hurston reported to Mrs. Mason), and she spared her romantic heroine every one of them.

Janie recalls of an early photograph, "Ah couldn't recognize dat dark chile as me," and by the middle of the book neither can we. By then, we've heard a good deal about her breasts and buttocks and so extraordinarily much about her "great rope of black hair"—a standard feature of the gorgeous literary mulatto—that one critic wrote that it seemed to be a separate character. But it is only when Janie and Tea Cake get to the Everglades and confront the singularly racist Mrs. Turner, eager to "class off" with other white-featured blacks ("Ah ain't got no flat nose and liver lips. Ah'm uh featured woman"), that we hear of Janie's "coffee-and-cream complexion" and "Caucasian characteristics." The transformation is both touching and embarrassing—something like George Eliot's suddenly making Dorothea sublimely beautiful in the Roman-museum scene of Middlemarch. It's as though the author could no longer withhold from her beloved creation the ultimate reward: Dorothea starts to look like a Madonna, and Janie starts to look white.

With Hurston, though, pride always rushes back in after a fall. These alternating emotional axes are what make her so unclassifiable, so easily susceptible to widely different readings, all of which she may intend. For Janie never acts white, or even seems to care whether she looks that way. She is sincerely mystified by Mrs. Turner's tirades. "We'se uh mingled people," she responds, seeming to rebuke her author's own reflexive notions of beauty, too. "How come you so against black?"

Although Janie spends much of the book struggling to gain the right to speak her mind, she is not particularly notable for her eloquence. There is, however, a great deal of poetry of observation running through her head, which we hear not as her thoughts, precisely, but in the way the story is told. Those who analyze "narrative strategies" have pulped small forests trying to define Hurston's way of slipping in and out of a storytelling voice that sometimes belongs to Janie and sometimes doesn't and, by design, isn't always clear. (As in "Mrs. Dalloway," the effect is of a woman's sensual dispersal through the world.) Janie's panting teen-age sexuality is rendered in a self-consciously hyper-adolescent prose of kissing bees and creaming blossoms—prose that Wright seized on for its "facile sensuality" and that Hurston's admirers now quote with dismaying regularity as an example of her literary art. But Hurston at her best is simple, light, lucid, nearly offhand, or else just as simply, Biblically passionate. Janie wakes to see the sun rise: "He peeped up over the door sill of the world and made a little foolishness with red." (There is an archaic sense of power in Hurston's sexing of all things: "Havoc was there with her mouth wide open.") As for Tea Cake, even as Janie tries to push his image away he "seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps," Hurston writes. "Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God."

This is a sermon from the woman's church of Eros. And, like the sermons in which Hurston was schooled—like her entire book, as it winds in and out of this realization of sexual grace—her message lives in its music. At her truest as a writer, Hurston was a musician. The delightfully quotable sayings that she "discovered" on her field trips (many of which recur as plucked examples in Mules and Men and her other books) are embedded in this single volume like folk tunes in Dvořák or Chopin: seamlessly, with beauties of invention often indistinguishable from beauties of discovery. The rhythms of talk in her poetry and the substance of poetry in her talk fuse into a radiant suspension. "He done taught me de maiden language all over," Janie says of Tea Cake, and there may be some truth to the tribute: Hurston had never written this way before, and she never rose to it again. It seems likely that without the intensity of her feelings for "P.M.P." this famously independent woman would not have written the novel that is her highest achievement and her lasting legacy. It perhaps complicates the issue of a woman's life and work that the love she tore herself away from so that she could be free, and free to write, turned out to have been the Muse.

Hurston's ability to write fiction seems to have dried up after the commercial failure of Their Eyes Were Watching God, which sank without a trace soon after publication. Her next novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, published in 1939, seems a failed reprise of the Bible-based all-Negro Broadway hit Green Pastures, with the story of Exodus as its blackface subject. ("Oh, er—Moses, did you ask about them Hebrews while you was knocking around in Egypt?") Gone is the miraculous ear. Gone, too, are her great humor and heart. Moses is a weary book, heavy with accumulated resentments. Hurston's disillusionment is fully evident in her mordant, angry journalism of the nineteen-forties, in which she witheringly commends the Southern custom of whites favoring their own "pet Negroes" (and their eager pets returning the favor) as a functioning racial system, and rails against the substandard Negro colleges she calls "begging joints." The title of one article—"Negroes Without Self-Pity" —speaks for itself.

This was her life's theme, and she sounded it all the louder as two new novels were rejected, her poverty went from bohemian to chronic, and her health gave way. She bought a houseboat and spent much of the mid-forties sailing Florida rivers: individualism, her refuge from racism, had lapsed into nearly total isolation. She returned to New York in 1946, looking for work, and wound up in the campaign office of the Republican congressional candidate running against Adam Clayton Powell. When her side lost, she was stranded for a terrible winter in a room on 124th Street, in a different sort of isolation. She didn't ask for help, and she didn't get any. She felt herself slipping, surrounded by racists and haters, the whole city "a basement to Hell."

It was just after this that she wrote her last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee. The story of a white Southern woman and her family, it contains no prominent black characters. Among Hurston's supporters, Alice Walker has called it "reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid," and Mary Helen Washington has called it "vacuous as a soap opera." Everyone agrees that Hurston had fallen into the common trap of believing that a real writer must be "universal"—that is to say, must write about whites—and that she had simply strayed too far from the sources that fed her. In fact the book is poisonously fascinating, and suggests, rather, that she came too close.

The story of beautiful, golden-haired Arvay Henson, who believes herself ugly and unworthy of love, contains many echoes of Hurston's earlier work, but its most striking counterpart is the long-ago play Color Struck. The works set a beginning and an end to years of struggle with their shared essential theme—the destructive power of fear and bitterness in a woman's tortured psyche. Arvay is born to a poor-white "cracker" family; in a refraction of Hurston's own history, a preference for her older sister "had done something to Arvay's soul across the years." She falls in love with a magnificent fallen aristocrat, who rapes her—for Arvay this is an act of ecstatic, binding possession—and marries her. Tormented by her failure to live up to his perfection, she comes to hate him almost as much as she hates herself.

The book is a choking mixture of cynicism and compulsion. Hurston was desperate for a success, and hoped for a movie sale—hence, no doubt, the formulaic rape and the book's mawkish ending, in which Arvay learns to sing happily in her marital chains. But to reach this peace Arvay must admit, after years of pretense, that she is not really proud of her own miserably poor and uneducated family, that poverty and ignorance lend them neither moral superiority nor charm, and that she is, in fact, shamed and disgusted by them. Arvay's last attempt to go home to her own people results in her burning down the house in which she was raised.

The book was sharply criticized because Hurston's white Southerners speak no differently from the Eatonville blacks of her earlier work. The inflections, the rhythms, the actual expressions that had been declared examples of a distinctive black culture were all now simply transferred to white mouths. The incongruous effects, as in her Moses book, point to a failure of technique, an aural exhaustion. But in a letter to her editor Hurston gave an even more dispiriting explanation for what she'd done. "I think that it should be pointed out that what is known as Negro dialect in the South is no such thing," she wrote, in a repudiation nearly as sweeping as Arvay's, at once laying waste to her professional past and her extraordinary personal achievement. The qualities of Southern speech—black and white alike, she claimed—were a relic of the Elizabethan past preserved by Southern whites in their own closed and static society. "They did not get it from the Negroes. The Africans coming to America got it from them."

The novel's publication, in the fall of 1948, was swallowed up in a court case that tested all Hurston's capacity for resisting bitterness. That September, in New York, an emotionally disturbed ten-year-old boy accused her of sexual molestation. The Children's Society filed charges, and Hurston was arrested and indicted. Although the case was eventually thrown out, a court employee spilled the news to one of the city's black newspapers—the white papers were presumably not interested—and the lurid story made headlines. Hurston contemplated suicide, but slowly came back to herself on a long sailing trip.

She never returned to New York. For the rest of her life, she lived in Florida, on scant money and whatever dignity she was able to salvage. In Miami, she worked as a maid. Later, she moved to a cabin up the coast that rented for five dollars a week, where she grew much of her own food. She labored over several books, none considered publishable. Her radical independence was more than ever reflected in her politics: fervently anti-Communist, officially Republican, resisting anything that smacked of special pleading. When Brown v. Board of Education was decided, in 1954, she was furious—and wrote furiously—over the implication that blacks could learn only when seated next to whites, or that anyone white should be forced to sit beside anyone black. It was plain "insulting." Although there was some hard wisdom in her conclusion—"the next ten years would be better spent in appointing truant officers and looking after conditions in the homes from which the children come"—her defiant segregationist position was happily taken up by whites of the same persuasion. Her reputation as a traitor to her people overshadowed and outlasted her reasoning, her works, and her life.

Hurston died in January, 1960, in the Saint Lucie County welfare home, in Fort Pierce, Florida, four days before the first sit-in took place, at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce. All her books were out of print. In 1971, in one of the first important reconsiderations of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the critic Darwin Turner wrote that Hurston's relative anonymity was understandable, for, despite her skills, she had never been more than a "wandering minstrel." He went on to say that it was "eccentric but perhaps appropriate"—one must pause over the choice of words—for her "to return to Florida to take a job as a cook and maid for a white family and to die in poverty." There was a certain justice in these actions, he declared, in that "she had returned to the level of life which she proposed for her people."

The gleaming two-volume Library of America edition of Hurston's Novels and Stories and Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings makes for a different kind of justice. These books bring Hurston a long way from the smudged photocopies that used to circulate, like samizdat, at academic conventions, and usher her into the national literary canon in highly respectable hardback. She is the fourth African-American to be published in this august series, and the fifth woman, and the first writer who happens to be both. Although the Hurston revival may have been driven in part by her official double-victim status—a possibility that many will take as a sign that her literary status has been inflated—Their Eyes Were Watching God can stand unsupported in any company. Harold Bloom has written of Hurston as continuing in the line of the Wife of Bath and Falstaff and Whitman, as a figure of outrageous vitality, fulfilling the Nietzschean charge that we try to live as though it were always morning.

Outside of fiction, this kind of strength is mainly a matter of determination. For many who have embodied it in literature—Nietzsche, Whitman, Lawrence, Hurston—it is a passionate dream of health (dreamed while the simply healthy are sound asleep) which stirs a rare insistence and bravado. "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry," Hurston wrote in 1928. "It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company!" In the venerable African-American game of "the dozens," the players hurl monstrous insults back and forth as they try to rip each other apart with words. (Hurston and Wright both call up the game, and quote the same now rather quaint chant of abuse: "Yo' mama don't wear no draws, Ah seen her when she took 'em off "). The near-Darwinian purpose was to get so strong that, no matter what you heard about whomever you loved, you would not let on that you cared to do anything but laugh. It's a game that Richard Wright must have lost every time. But Zora Neale Hurston was the champ.

It is important not to blink at what she had to face and how it made her feel. Envy, fury, confusion, desire to escape: there is no wonder in it. We know too well the world she came from. It is the world she rebuilt out of words and the extraordinary song of the words themselves—about love and picking beans and fighting through hurricanes—that have given us something entirely new. And who is to say that this is not a political achievement? Early in Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston describes a gathering of the folks of Eatonville on their porches at sundown: "It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed notions through their mouths. They sat in judgment."

The powerless become lords of sounds, the dispossessed rule all creation with their tongues. Language is not a small victory. It was out of this last, irreducible possession that the Jews made a counter-world of words, the Irish vanquished England, and Russian poetry bloomed thick over Stalin's burial grounds. And in a single book one woman managed to suggest what another such heroic tradition, rising out of American slavery, might have been—a literature as profound and original as the spirituals. There is the sense of a long, ghostly procession behind Hurston: what might have existed if only more of the words and stories had been written down decades earlier, if only Phillis Wheatley had not tried to write like Alexander Pope, if only literate slaves and their generations of children had not felt pressed to prove their claim to the sworn civilities. She had to try to make up for all of this, and more. If out of broken bits of talk and memory she pieced together something that may once have existed, out of will and desire she added what never was. Hurston created a myth that has been gratefully mistaken for history, and in which she herself plays a mythic role—a myth about a time and place fair enough, funny enough, unbitter enough, glad enough to have produced a woman black and truly free.