May 5, 2002

“A GENIUS of the South”. That is what Alice Walker, author of The colour purple, inscribed on Zora Neale Hurston’s headstone after discovering her unmarked grave. The cemetery where Hurston was buried lies at the end of a dead-end street in a small residential neighbourhood. The surrounding area is undeveloped. This is the wild, native country that inspired Hurston’s writings. She wrote about farms, swamps, fields of sugar cane, alligators and hurricanes. Her work gives Florida, where she grew up and returned to, a history and depth that reaches beyond the sun-drenched beaches and tourist hotels. Her stories are of a slower time, when people sat on rockers on the front porch to share a quiet story or two.

Hurston’s finest works of fiction appeared at a time in the 1930s, when artistic statements were informed by purely political motives. Hurston’s own political statements, relating to racial issues, did not ingratiate her with her black male contemporaries. The end result was that, her most evocative novel, Their eyes were watching God, went out of print not long after its appearance.

Walker’s writings led to a revival of Hurston’s work. Watching God, which was out-of-print for almost 30 years, is now a staple for women’s literature and Southern literature classes in universities in the US. Many critics now consider Hurston a literary genius. She captured the essence of the African-American folklore traditions of the South and as she had herself said, “Folklore is the art people create before they find out there is such a thing as art; it comes from a folks’ first wondering contact with natural law.” Alice Walker, Robert Hemenway, Toni Cade Bambara, and other writers and scholars made sure that all her books are now back in print and she has taken her rightful place among American authors.

She was a writer, a storyteller, but perhaps most importantly, an anthropologist. Hurston did not apologize for focusing solely on African-American culture in her work, she revelled in it. Early in the novel, Watching God, one of Hurston’s characters says, “You know, honey, us coloured folks is branches without roots...”

With her stories, Hurston was able to plant those roots. The style that Hurston brings to literature uses the narrative made of free indirect discourse. She creates this voice not only to be able to express herself as an artist but to give literary voice to her people. In her free indirect discourse, Hurston supplies her characters with words to enable them to articulate their thoughts.

“Soon everything around downstairs was shut and fastened. Janie mounted the stairs with her lamp. The light in her hand was like a spark of sun-stuff washing her face in fire. Her shadow fell black and headlong down the stairs. Now, in her room, the place tasted fresh again. The wind through the open window had broomed out all the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness. She closed it and sat down. Combing the road-dust out of her hair. Thinking.”

After Hurston’s mother died, she moved from Eatonville, Florida, and supported herself as she earned her associate’s degree at Howard University in Washington DC. She then moved to Harlem, where she became the life of the party becoming part of the so-called Harlem Renaissance. Here Hurston developed an interest in anthropology and earned her bachelor of arts degree from Barnard College in 1928.

She travelled extensively through Florida and the Caribbean to collect and write stories about what she saw. She wrote a number of short stories and contributed to a variety of magazines. In 1935, she published Men and mules, a written history of Southern African-American folklore. When the book was published, readers who had previously dismissed African-American culture as frivolous and juvenile learned that African-Americans had a rich and complex literary tradition.

Hurston travelled to Jamaica and Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship. While in Haiti, Hurston wrote her second book, Their eyes were watching God. When this book was published in 1937, Hurston was shunned by her peers. Readers criticized Hurston for focusing on black culture, not race relations.

As a folklorist and social anthropologist, Hurston rejected the impersonal scientific attitude of researchers and concentrated on culture. In two volumes, Mules and men (1935) and Tell my horse (1938), Hurston gathered the tales of the American South and the Caribbean. Hurston is most known, however, for Watching God, a novel that created controversy by refusing to admit black inferiority while simultaneously not depicting its characters as victims of a world that thought them inferior.

The book is about a proud, independent black woman’s quest for identity. This is Hurston’s masterpiece, a gorgeous novel. Mesmerizing and haunting, it tells the story of Janie Crawford — fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy woman — who comes of age expecting better treatment than what she gets from her three husbands and community.

Janie Crawford’s life, told here in her own confident voice, is not without its frustrations, terrors, and tragedies. But the power of her story comes from her optimism. Through all the changes she goes through she keeps vice-like commitment to live on her own terms. In Janie, Hurston created a character that reflected her own strong belief that the most important mission we have is to discover ourselves.

The language in this novel is crucial. It is through the beautiful idiosyncrasies of southern speech and storytelling that Janie expresses her own will toward self-definition. For Hurston the language seems to be her principle 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 three distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this usage of divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that is her great achievement. So on the first page as Janie comes back from burying her husband:

“The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches besides the road. 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 skin felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”

Hurston never did return to the bright lights of Harlem. Instead, she remained in the South for the rest of her years. After suffering from a stroke, Hurston was forced to enter a welfare home, where she died and was buried in an unmarked grave. The most prolific African-American woman writer of her time or earlier, the power of her imagery and the richness of the culture which she brings to life through her writings have now been resurrected. Hurston herself was unable to make a living from her writings and worked as a teacher, a librarian and a domestic in order to earn her livelihood.

Their eyes were watching God has been called the first African-American feminist novel. However, in the final analysis this is not a novel that looks out to the world to make political protest or social commentary. It describes the power that lies within us to define ourselves and our lives unfettered by society’s limitations and prejudices.

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