Kenneth Harper, who returns to practice medicine in the South and learns that an educated person of color and conscience cannot exist impervious to racism or outside a coalition of African Americans from all social classes. Jessie Fauset's There Is Confusion (1924) centers on the experiences of a middle-class African American female in New York who also comes to a recognition of racism but within gender discrimination. Fauset's Joanna Marshall, -420- the daughter of a Virginia slave who rises to economic prosperity and social prominence, however, insists on the exemplary individual's ability to overcome the structural barriers and personal attitudes that restrict the development and achievement of African Americans. Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), the last of the three racial novels responding to Stribling and encouraged by Mencken, assumes a more complex stance toward both race and gender identification and the limitations of both. Larsen's Helga Cane, similar to Kenneth Harper and Joanna Marshall, is positioned within the African American middle class, but her situation is more tenuous, because Larsen attends to the matter of Helga's heightened consciousness of gender and sexuality, along with race.
White, Fauset, and Larsen functioned as part of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, in which African Americans, acting out of race consciousness and self-determination called a 'transformed and transforming psychology' by Alain Locke in The New Negro (1925), initiated a literary and cultural movement based upon taking artistic control of their own images and representations. The novels of White, Fauset, and Larsen, appearing during the high point of literary activity in Harlem, combined with Toomer's groundbreaking Cane to chart the course for the modern African American novel in its struggle to emerge from the margins of literary enterprise and to assume the centrality of its vision of self, race, and society. Langston Hughes in Not Without Laughter (1930) and Arna Bontemps in God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936) were part of the development of the African American novel inspired by the revisioning of a racial self and an assumption of authorial control articulated by the first novels to issue from a New Negro consciousness.
One of the major voices first heard during the Harlem Renaissance in short stories and plays was that of Zora Neale Hurston, who like Toomer had an affinity for the folk. Hurston had come of age in Eatonville, Florida, where she had listened to the stories and talk of her relatives, friends, and neighbors. When she left the South, she was already grounded in the language and the nuances of folk existence. After having worked and studied in Baltimore and Washington, she settled in New York where she began to study anthropology with Dr. Franz Boas. 'I was glad,' Hurston recalled in Mules and Men (1935), 'when somebody told me, 'You may go and collect Negro folk-421- lore.'' She was already familiar with folklore, having listened to and absorbed the stories and customs of her all-black hometown:
Eatonville…was full of material…. As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folk particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times. As a child when I was sent to Joe Clark's store, I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more.
The talk and the folk of Eatonville made their way into The Eatonville Anthology (1926), a series of short sketches in which she recognized the value of folk such as Mrs. Tony Roberts (the Pleading Woman), Joe Clark, Mrs. Joe Clark (the prototype of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God), Coon Taylor, and Sister Cal'line Potts. These Eatonville characters were preparation for the people of her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), and her most accomplished novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Novelist, anthropologist, folklorist, and storyteller, Hurston remained both an insider and an outsider throughout her rich life. When she arrived in New York in January 1925, she had exactly $1.50, but 'a lot of hope,' and the advice of her dead mother Lucy, who had urged her to 'jump at de sun' and 'to have spirit,' so that she would never become 'a mealy mouthed rag doll.' Fun-loving, free-spirited, and sassy, Hurston was an audacious 'natural,' a down-home Southerner whose bold antics embarrassed her more high-toned African American associates in her Harlem. Her storytelling, or 'lies' as she termed it, made the uncultured, primitive black folk of the South all too vivid for the cultured New Negroes who, with the exception of Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, preferred to intellectualize and idealize life in the South and the Southern folk. Hurston was too ethnocentric even for the new racial awareness marking the literary movement in Harlem. Wallace Thurman satirized her antics in his novel about the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring (1932); the Hurston character, 'Sweetie May Carr,' is an opportunistic young artist frequenting Niggeratti Manor who is not embarrassed to manipulate white patrons with dialect tales of down South.
Precisely because she had 'spirit' and was not 'a mealy mouthed rag doll,' Hurston could take full advantage of her insider-outsider -422- position. She accepted not only the difference of her cultural heritage but also its validity. Through the folk she found a means of expressing a culturally grounded self and racial identity. She could therefore create images of African American life that are among the most powerful expressions of the strength and promise of African American culture in the United States. Jonah's Gourd Vine is an exploration of that culture based upon the position of Hurston's parents within it. The Reverend John Pearson and his wife Lucy are the central characters, who shape a marriage and a life out of different social backgrounds and values. Pearson is a mulatto whose sharecropping family function on a subsistence level; Lucy Potts is the daughter of landowners who object to her marrying beneath her. The difference in their socioeconomic status contributes to Pearson's feelings of inadequacy, manifested in his adultery, and to Lucy's attempts to conceal her husband's weaknesses. In telling their story, Hurston revises the picture of the African American minister and, though leveling his exalted position in the communal hierarchy, humanizes him. The concern with folk religion in the text anticipates the novel Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), in which Hurston employed humor and satire to render the legend of Moses and the Hebrews in the folk tradition and dialect of Southern African Americans, who connected their plight in slavery to that of the Hebrews.
While Jonah's Gourd Vine is a skillful treatment of the conflict between social classes and between religious and secular impulses contextualized by a vibrant folk culture, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a masterpiece of that culture. Janie Crawford Killicks Stark Woods is Hurston's testimony to the proud unselfconscious black folk, especially black womenfolk, who achieve a meaningful synthesis of self. Written in seven weeks in late 1926 when she was in Portau-Prince, Haiti, collecting folklore, the novel is a result partly of what she discovered, 'a peace I have never known anywhere else on earth.' This peace enabled her to see even more clearly the meaning of African American life as it was lived in Eatonville. The novel is a culmination of her knowledge of the folk, of her faith in folklore and folklife, and of her consciousness of a woman's right to selfhood and self-definition, so that it is an expression of freedom from the constrictions of black folklife even while it celebrates that life.
Because in Haiti Hurston also confronted the end of a love affair -423- that meant personal liberation and reconciliation of her artistic career and her personal emotions, she could represent through Janie's development and maturation the unpacking of multiple layers of domination and oppression operating upon the woman of color: 'the colored woman is de mule of the world.' Janie Crawford realizes that male domination exists in a world where only men sit on the porch and swap tales, where men view wives as property. She goes through three marriages — to Logan Killicks, to Joe Stark, and to Teacake Woods — but in the process she earns her freedom to speak, to express her own female self, her independence from subjugation, and her acceptance of her own life. Janie affirms herself because she has the courage and the verbal techniques to position herself in something other than a dependent relationship. Janie's strength lies in her recognition of power in language and the ability to speak for oneself. In telling Janie's story of learning to love self, Hurston reckons the value and the costs of being fully female in a society that would oppress on the basis of race and gender, and she introduces a discourse on female autonomy, agency, and power.
Hurston's novels, published after the concentrated activity of the Harlem Renaissance and during the Great Depression, generated limited audiences for her inscriptions of self and folk. In recent years, however, her novels — Their Eyes Were Watching God, in particular — have been reevaluated not in the context of race and the folk but rather in the contexts of gender identifications and feminist readings of her strategies for female liberation and autonomy.
In a sense, Hurston addressed in fiction the concerns with gender oppression in a regional society that Lillian Smith would explore in Killers of the Dream (1946). Smith, best known for the novel
