Separating The Dancer and the Dance:

The Unearthing of Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston "A Genius of the South" 1901---1960 Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist

does not fully or acurately capture her multifaceted existance. She was a woman as Mary Helen Washington elequently observed "half in shadow." Even the birthdate printed on the tombstone, a birthdate that Hurston cites in her autobiography proves inaccurate as family records indicate that she was born a full decade earlier. Furthermore, Hurston held many more occupations than the three listed in her epigraph. She worked as a playwrite, an anthropologist, a high school and college Drama professor, a director, a librarian, a producer, and in her latter and more impoverished years a maid.

While this extensive list of occupations demonstrates Hurstons versatility perhaps her most influential role came as that of a performer. Just as she created fictional characters for her books and stories, Hurston created many fictional personas for herself and it is doubtful that anyone really knew the true Zora. Perhaps more than any other element of her character Zora's reputation as a performer explains the shadow of obscurity in which her work dwelt until recently. Captured notably by Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman.

In his autobiography, The Big SeaHughes described Hurston as a "most amusing" woman who only needed to write books in order to reach a wider audience "because she is a perfect book in and of herself"(Hughes 239). Hughes explained that Hurston's performances reaped wealthy rewards from "wealthy whites, some of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the negro race for them."

In his widely quoted and  damning personification of Hurston, Sweetie May Carr, in his fictional interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance Infants of the Spring, Wallace Thurman depicts Hurston as a writer only interested in reaping rewards from white patrons. In the her monologue Sweetie Mae Carr explains the financial  sources of her artistic information:"It's like this... I have to eat. I also wish to finish my education. Being a negro writer these days is a racket and I'm going to make the most of it while it lasts....My ultimate ambition...is to become an gynecologist[anthropologist]. And the only way I can have the requisite trainign is to pose as a writer of potential ability." Thurman's depiction further solidified Hurston's image as a perfomer, "Sure I cut the fool."   

For decades Thurman and Hughes' depiction of Hurston as a performer who pandered to white patrons proved definitive. In fact of the two short pages tha Nathan Huggins devotes to Hurston in his classic work Harlem Renaissance Thurman's depiction occupies at least half. Not until Alice Walker went in search of her grave, only to find it unmarked, did Hurston's reputation begin to elude this surface evaluation of her work and only in the past two decades have scholars begun to view Hurston not as a performer but as a woman of many lives.

Because of her reputation until Hemenway and Alice Walker's re-discovery of Hurston, many of her ironic comments were mostly taken at face value by those who misunderstood, and wrongly simplified her technique. To read such statements as Hurston makes in her essay "How It Feels To Be Colored Me," that "slavery is the price I paid for civilization," "straight up" is to fail to take into account Hurston's ironic tendencies, as well as her interest in anthropology, which is essentially the study of culture.

Read as cultural commentary Hurston's essay "How it Feels to be Colored Me," emerges as a catalogue of the stereotypes and the misguided ideas of white artists and intellectuals. Hurston represents these stereotypes as different forms of herself. Understanding that she was at "the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or weep," Hurston undertakes these many different roles in order to report on the culture out of which New Negro modernism emerged. Hurston's statement about slavery being the price for civilization mirrors the ideas of white artists and intellectuals, who looked to blacks for originality.

 Further miscuing readers, in this essay is the story Hurston tells of her own childhood, a story strikingly similar to the tale of "Isis, the joyful" in "Drenched in the Light." When she was young, Hurston tells readers, white people would ride through her town and stop "to hear me 'speak pieces' and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la," for which they would, to her astonishment, pay her. These white patrons were in effect seeking her sunshine much like the characters in "Drenched in the Light." Her depiction of Zora "the joyful" instead of "Isis" signifies the "happy darkie" stereotype that, according to Langston Hughes, many of Hurston's white friends expected. In addition to declaring her allegiance to the southern roots from which she worked her folk magic, Hurston concludes the essay by expressing the theme of black primitivism through a visceral response to jazz. Zora attends a jazz bar where a white man is in attendance:

"This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeooww! I am in the jungle living in the jungle way& I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

'Good music they have here,^'he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He had only heard what I felt."

The "primitive" Zora, who seeks the jungle when hearing jazz is ultimately a rendering of one of the most prevalent stereotypes of her day, but it is important to read beneath the surface of the passage.

By considering Hurston's adherence to folk forms, forms which "were a code of communication-- interracial propaganda-that would protect the race from the psychological encroachments of racism," the statements made in "How it Feels to be Colored Me," can be considered subversive. Like the creators of folk culture, Hurston here subscribed to a "communicative tone that could simultaneously protest the effects of racism and maintain the secrecy of that very same protest." While she enacts these stereotypes, she is simultaneously decrying their presence. It is only with a white man for company that she becomes the "primitive" Zora. It is white patrons who commodify her activities as a child because of their desire for the "sunshine" she provided through her childish play. The last paragraph of the essay points to Hurston's innate belief that people are all the same, they are different colored paper bags "that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the contents of any greatly." The contrast between this appraisal of humanity and the stereotypes that Hurston allows her persona to take on, illustrates the incongruity between stereotypical personifications of black experience and reality.

Hurston did write stories and articles that could be read by unenlightened audiences as pandering to the white pursuit of primitivism. Yet, understanding her role as an anthropologist, essentially as a reporter of culture, as well as her adherence to folk forms, is key to understanding her work. Although Hurston understood the commercial value of being a black artist during the vogue of the Negro, she also understood how to use that commercial value to explore, report on, and render the culture in which she lived.

Although her reputation as a performer who placated white audiences with racy storys in order to financially support herself proved damaging in terms of the scholarly perception of her work, the timing of her career in terms of African American literature also shaded her into obscurity. At a time when Naturalists like Richard Wright ruled the presses Hurston's poetic tales and novels dealt not with issues  inherent to the black race but instead with issues "so universal as to be taken for granted"( art and such 144). As she wrote in "How it Feels to be Colored Me" Hurston did "not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it." Hurston was "not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes"(How 153).

Contradicting Richard Wright's idea that the Negro writer had no less responsibility than to "create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die" (A Blue-print for Negro Writers) Hurston wrote about characters who laugh and cry and work and love essentially who were above all universally human. As she wrote in her autobiography:"From what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed to write about the Race problem. I was and am thoroughly disinterested in that subject. My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-do, regardless of his color"(Dust Tracks 171).

When Hurston's epic text Their Eyes Were Watching God was published it was into an atmosphere dominated by aesthetics congruent to Wrights and in which there was no place for a mere love-story. With the publication of this text Hurston was critically assaulted and once again labeled as a performer.Failing to see the inherent gender and racial politics of the text, Wright viewed Hurston's text as a minstrel show:

"Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in the traditon which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is the minstrel technique that makes the "white folks" laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears."

Wright's review was echoed by the upper-eschelon of a group that Hurston termed the Niggerati and it was not until the seventies that the book received its much deserved recognition as an American Classic.

Mules and Men:The Rewards of Hurston's Performances

Although critically and financially her reputation as a performer damaged her career immeasurably it was her ability to assume many roles that allowed Hurston to become a first-rate collector of folk material and a imaginative and innovative writer. In reality Hurston's life was made up of a variety of performances. She might have been, as she characterizes herself in "How it Feels to Be Colored Me," "everybody's Zora," but she was a different Zora to everyone(How 153). Even her physical appearance was perceived differently by her friends as Mary Washington points out descriptions of Zora range from Fannie Hurst's impression "a big-boned, good-boned young woman handsome and light yellow," to Theodore Pratt's observation of her being, "short, squat, and black as coal"(Washington 7).

Although nothing quite explains the disparity between the different physical descriptions of Hurston the fact that she was simultaneously engaged in many different projects,ideas, and worlds perhaps helps to reveal why she seemed so different to so many people. During the time she wrote Mules and Men she was both an artist who lived and worked in Harlem, hung out with notable New Negroes like Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Nugent and did graduate work at Barnard and an ambitious folklorist who assumed many different roles, including that of a fugitive gun-toting bootlegger, in order to gather the tales of the "Negro farthest down."

In 1927, when Zora Neale Hurston first traveled back to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida to collect folklore at the bequest of Franz Boas she met with little success.  According to her autobiography Hurston's first experiences as a folklorist "were disappointing. I found out later that it was not because I had no talents for research, but because I did not have the right approach." Hurston's experiences at Barnard College and Howard University had distanced her from the small-town girl she once was and at first denied her the ability to assimilate with her former neighbors and friends. As she explained it ,

 "The glamour of Barnard College was still upon me. I dwelt in marble halls.....I went about asking in carefully accented Barnardese, 'Pardon me, but do you know any folk tales or folk songs?' The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through thier pores, looked at me and shook thier heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there."