Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes.
Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition 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.
Their Eyes Were Watching God was taken out of print in 1938 and remained in obscurity for forty years, until writer Alice Walker brought it back into the national spotlight. It was reissued in 1973, and the classic remains in print to this day.
Had Hurston bent to the will of her critics, she might have received her flowers while she was still alive. Ever the nonconformist, the willful Hurston, in her next book, yet again put the politics of race aside in favor of presenting Black people in all their glorious authenticity.
By the time Hurston published Tell My Horse in 1938, she was struggling financially. Tell My Horse is a travelogue of sorts, outlining the customs, superstitions, folk traditions, and religions found in Haiti and Jamaica. Hurston defied genre assignment by mixing and melding anthropology, folklore, and personal experience. This infuriated her critics. “It is a pity, therefore, that her real talents produced a work so badly—even carelessly—performed! She pays practically no attention to grammar or sentence structure,” complained Reece Stuart, Jr.
One of Hurston’s biographers, Robert Hemenway, describes Tell My Horse as “Hurston’s poorest book, chiefly because of its form.” Later that year Hurston reviewed Richard Wright’s novel Uncle Tom’s Children and had no qualms about repaying his unkindness, saying that Wright’s writing was “so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live.” Too much, too little, too late, Hurston’s star had fallen and was slowly burning away in the cold, looming shadow of Richard Wright.
In 1939 Hurston returned to Florida and went to work for the Federal Writers’ Project. Working alongside folklorist Stetson Kennedy, she and others collected songs and folktales from the culturally rich communities that dotted the Sunshine State. Hurston respected and revered the many iterations of Black language found in America and abroad and charged herself to do her part in collecting and preserving it for future generations.
For this, I am grateful God sent Zora Neale Hurston into the world. She has been a steady guide on this literary journey of mine. It is because of her refusal to participate in the contempt and erasure of Black dialect that I am able to proudly embrace and celebrate my bilinguality on and off the page.
* * *
—
God don come, he send. —Barbadian saying
COILED AND UNLEASHED
Patricia Smith
A whole people’s tumble into raw, untested century began
with one man, penning his serpentine sojourn up from slavery—
I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth,
but…I must have been born somewhere and at some time.
He began as another baby shoved directly into the wrong air.
Eavesdropping on the whispered blue archives of a scarring
passage—the passage that taught so well the gracelessness
of chains—Booker T. slowly untangled the acrid truths of his
own mother’s bondage. He knew how gingerly his people
had to sidle toward that blaring northern star. And words,
like feral soldiers, lined up for him, crafting that careful story—
his stern and measured gospel, the only breath in his body.
Screeching a story that feels like the only breath in his body,
Du Bois upended Booker, angled for agitation, commanded
there be nothing hushed and unhurried about our freedom.
He preferred the uncompromising clench, the coil, the strident
voice and stalwart stride. Make yourself do unpleasant things
so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. He meant the soul
of Black folk, and that soul’s upper hand was a fist—pierce
and pummel at the sleek white wall, prelude to the unfeigned,
unslaved voice. Restraint had no role or reason in revolution.
Between the tenets of those two men, a race strived to untangle
its convoluted root, urged its whole self forward, and hurtled
toward the door America had fought so hard to keep closed.
A thousand clamorous truths lurked behind that thick door.
To coax them loose, pens scarred its surface, keyboards clicked
and spat. In Chicago, which was destined to be ours, Black word
became Black bellow, warning of the menace seething behind
Jim Crow’s burgeoning growl. Word was soundtrack, it was
solace, salvage, defender of the defenseless. The Black word
would learn to hide in the deep pockets of Pullman porters,
cooing the brethren north, it would slip on the silken shouts
of Hughes, Brooks, and Ida B., sing to soldiers of boundaries
that wailed their color. The Defender and Crisis harbored
the merciless Black word, the us to us, the tongue of tenement,
of chittlins and factory, spinning the fractured tale of that
furious north star and where it had always meant to lead us.
It led us to Madame CJ Walker, who slathered Black crowns
with grease that clung and stank like flowers, oil that crackled
under a toothed and rabid heat. She schooled us in that sweet
torture until we shamed our own mirrors, until our whole nappy
heads spat glow. And she raised fists of her own damned money,
from us to us. Blue-black and hallelujah-crowned, Madame CJ
Walker American-dreamed. The star led us to the sharecroppers’
boy, who knew no star was the end of free, who drove his body up
through ice and into a startling sky. Matthew Henson stepped into
that sky and planted the flag of a country that was not yet his.