Their Eyes Were Watching God

metaphors of black culture. Always more of a novelist than a social scientist, even Hurston’s academic collections center on the quality of imagination that makes these lives whole and splendid. But it is in the novel that Hurston’s use of the black idiom realizes its fullest effect. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, her first novel, for instance, the errant preacher, John, as described by Robert Hemenway “is a poet who graces his world with language but cannot find the words to secure his own personal grace.” This concern for language and for the “natural” poets who “bring barbaric splendor of word and song into the very camp of the mockers” not only connects her two disciplines but also makes of “the suspended linguistic moment” a thing to behold indeed. Invariably, Hurston’s writing depends for its strength on the text, not the context, as does John’s climactic sermon, a tour de force of black image and metaphor. Image and metaphor define John’s world; his failure to interpret himself leads finally to his self-destruction. As Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s biographer, concludes, “Such passages eventually add up to a theory of language and behavior.”

Using “the spy-glass of Anthropology,” her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that “both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.” As author, she functions as “a midwife participating in the birth of a body of folk-lore,…the first wondering contacts with natural law.” The myths she describes so accurately are in fact “alternative modes for perceiving reality,” and never just condescending depictions of the quaint. Hurston sees “the Dozens,” for example, that age- old black ritual of graceful insult, as, among other things, a verbal defense of the sanctity of the family, conjured through ingenious plays on words. Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston’s ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed. IV.

We can understand Hurston’s complex and contradictory legacy more fully if we examine Dust Tracks on a Road, her own controversial account of her life. Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions. In this way, Hurston wrote herself, and sought in her works to rewrite the “self” of “the race,” in its several private and public guises, largely for ideological reasons. That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment. That which she silences or deletes, similarly, is all that her readership would draw upon to delimit or pigeonhole her life as a synecdoche of “the race problem,” an exceptional part standing for the debased whole.

Hurston’s achievement in Dust Tracks is twofold. First, she gives us a writer’s life, rather than an account, as she says, of “the Negro problem.” So many events in this text are figured in terms of Hurston’s growing awareness and mastery of books and language, language and linguistic rituals as spoken and written both by masters of the Western tradition and by ordinary members of the black community. These two “speech communities,” as it were, are Hurston’s great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.

The representation of her sources of language seems to be her principal 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 these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly, just as she does in Their Eyes to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double-consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.

Her language, variegated by the twin voices that intertwine throughout the text, retains the power to unsettle.

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.

Elsewhere she analyzes black “idioms” used by a culture “raised on simile and invective. They know how to call names,’ she concludes, then lists some, such as ’gator-mouthed, box-ankled, puzzle-gutted, shovel-footed: “Eyes looking like skint-ginny nuts, and mouth looking like a dishpan full of broke-up crockery!”

Immediately following the passage about her mother’s death, she writes:

The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death. Made him with big, soft feet and square toes. Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere. Made the body of death out of infinite hunger. Made a weapon of his hand to satisfy his needs. This was the morning of the day of the beginning of things.

Language, in these passages, is not merely “adornment,” as Hurston described a key black linguistic practice; rather, manner and meaning are perfectly in tune: she says the thing in the most meaningful manner. Nor is she being “cute,” or pandering to a condescending white readership. She is “naming” emotions, as she says, in a language both deeply personal and culturally specific.

The second reason that Dust Tracks succeeds as literature arises from the first: Hurston’s unresolved tension between her double voices signifies her full understanding of modernism. Hurston uses the two voices in her text to celebrate the psychological fragmentation both of modernity and of the black American. As Barbara Johnson has written, hers is a rhetoric of division, rather than a fiction of psychological or cultural unity. Zora Neale Hurston, the “real” Zora Neale Hurston that we long to locate in this text, dwells in the silence that separates these two voices: she is both, and neither; bilingual, and mute. This strategy helps to explain her attraction to so many contemporary critics and writers, who can turn to her works again and again only to be startled at her remarkable artistry.

But the life that Hurston could write was not the life she could live. In fact, Hurston’s life, so much more readily than does the standard sociological rendering, reveals how economic limits determine our choices even more than does violence or love. Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not. Financial problems—book sales, grants and fellowships too few and too paltry, ignorant editors and a smothering patron—produced the sort of dependence that affects, if not determines, her style, a relation she explored somewhat ironically in “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” We cannot oversimplify the relation between Hurston’s art and her life; nor can we reduce the complexity of her postwar politics, which, rooted in her distaste for the pathological image of blacks, were markedly conservative and Republican.

Nor can we sentimentalize her disastrous final decade, when she found herself working as a maid on the very day the Saturday Evening Post published her short story “Conscience of the Court” and often found herself without money, surviving after 1957 on unemployment benefits, substitute teaching, and welfare checks. “In her last days,” Hemenway concludes dispassionately, “Zora lived a difficult life—alone, proud, ill, obsessed with a book she could not finish.”

The excavation of her buried life helped a new generation read Hurston again. But ultimately we must find Hurston’s legacy in her art, where she “ploughed up some literacy and laid by some alphabets.” Her importance rests with the legacy of fiction and lore she constructed so cannily. As Hurston herself noted, “Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are