Zora Neale Hurston S Perfect Tool

LeComte 1

Derek LeComte

Professor Richards

English 357-01

November 16, 2010

Zora Neale Hurston’s Perfect Tool

After a career of writing short stories and anthropological studies, by 1934 Zora Neale Hurston turned her attention to something different – a novel. The final product was Jonah’s Gourd Vine, the contents of which were a scathing indictment of her father’s corruptive nature. Through a study of

Hurston’s autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, it becomes possible to read Jonah’s Gourd Vine as being a tool which Hurston uses to craft her hate and anger toward her father.

Being her first novel, Hurston certainly wasn’t afraid to broach the topic of her father. A biographical reading of Jonah’s Gourd Vine shows that she was more than willing to tell of all the reprehensible actions her father committed. He was a hated man by Hurston, and the novel was the perfect way for Hurston to illustrate this. A biographical reading of Jonah’s Gourd Vine allows the reader to see this and it is able to elevate the importance of the novel, which was Peter Ripley did for Frederick

Douglass in his essay “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass.” Through Ripley’s biographical research, he was able to successfully show how Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick

Douglass was “a classic statement on slavery” that also “underscored his increasing intellectual skills as well as his independence and self-confidence; forced him into temporary exile, and accelerated a process that eventually caused a breach with his Garrisonian friends” (Ripley 146). The following biographical study will hopefully do the same.

Even with just one first, quick glance, Jonah’s Gourd Vine is clearly an autobiographical text of

Dust Tracks. The characters and events in Jonah’s Gourd Vine identically match every part of Hurston’s autobiography. Hurston’s father, named John, was described as being “one of dem niggers from over de LeComte 2 creek” (Dust Tracks 7), echoing the phrase about John in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, “who musta come from over de Big Creek” (14 Jonah). In Dust Tracks, Hurston tells how John “met up with dark-brown Lucy Ann

Potts, of the land-owning Richard Potts” who was always “looking and looking at her up there in the choir” (Dust Tracks 10). Again, this replicates what was read in Jonah’s Gourd Vine where John “saw her

[Lucy] in church, and she was always in his consciousness” (Jonah 32). From John’s marriage to Lucy all the way to John’s death on the train tracks, everything is identical.

Yet why was Jonah’s Gourd Vine based entirely around her father? Naturally, the first and most important place to look would be to analyze Hurston’s relationship with her father. Here we discover

John was never present or supportive of Hurston, ever. He was never around for her birth and subsequently never close to her at all. As Hurston writes in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, John speaks of “de new country openin' up” and its lure of “good times, good money, and no mules and cotton” (Jonah 103).

While Jonah’s Gourd Vine tells of an entrepreneurial John, Hurston tells of his departure in more blunt terms in Dust Tracks, stating, he “left his wife and three children behind and went out to seek and see”

(Dust Tracks 9). John officially left in 1890, but aside from leaving behind Lucy and his three kids, he missed out on the birth of Hurston. She writes in Dust Tracks that “My mother's time had come and my father was not there… It seems that my father was away from home for months this time. I have never been told why” (Dust Tracks 19). Interestingly enough, Hurston gives herself a mention in Jonah’s Gourd

Vine when Lucy and John are reunited at the train station. John says, “Look how our lit gal done growed,” to which Lucy replies, “`Yeah she walkin’ and talkin’. You been ‘way from us might nigh uh yeah” (Jonah 108).

Yet not only was John away for a full year, he was deeply irked that he had given birth to yet another girl. According to Hurston, John “threatened to cut his throat when he got the news. It seems that one daughter was all that he figured he could stand” (Dust Tracks 19). Even when Hurston says

“the old man had to put up with me”, she states, “He was nice about it in a way. He didn’t tie me in a LeComte 3 sack and drop me in the lake, as he probably felt like doing” (Dust Tracks 20). Whether Hurston is sarcastic or not, the message is clear: the two were never close.

While Hurston never had any bond with her father, this did allow her to become very close with

Lucy, her mother. In Dust Tracks, Hurston writes how “Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground” (Dust Tracks 13). While Hurston took to the ambition Lucy instilled in her, John did not approve: “Papa did not feel so hopeful. Let well enough alone. It did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit. He was always threatening to break mine or kill me in the attempt. My mother was always standing between us” (Dust Tracks 13).

With Lucy allied with Hurston, it strengthened the bond between Hurston and her mother but also deepened the divide with her father. The two would only further grow apart in character, with John

“predicting dire things for me. The white folks were not going to stand for it. I was going to be hung before I got grown… Mama was going to suck sorrow for not beating my temper out of me before it was too late” (Dust Tracks 14). Not only that, but John would grow closer to his eldest daughter Sarah, who had the same temperament John did. Lucy defines the growing disparity between the two pairs as such:

“Mama would keep right on with whatever she was doing and remark, ‘Zora is my young’un, and Sarah is yours. I’ll be bound mine will come out more than conquer. You leave her alone. I’ll tend to her when

I figger she needs it.’ She meant by that that Sarah had a disposition like Papa’s, while mine was like hers” (Dust Tracks 14).

With Hurston so close to her mother and so distant from her father, the events following

September 19, 1904 would cause a rift so irreconcilable that it would forever scar Hurston. On that

September day, Lucy died and Hurston was still at the impressionable age of 14. Yet it wasn’t the death that stung Hurston so hard, but rather the quick remarriage of John to 20-year old Mattie Moge (Hattie in Jonah’s Gourd Vine) just six months after her death (Dust Tracks 61). The one parent who understood LeComte 4 and sympathized with Hurston was suddenly replaced with a 20-year old described in Jonah’s Gourd

Vine as someone who “ain’t never done nothin’ but run up and down de road from one sawmill camp tuh de other and from de looks of her, times was hard” (Jonah 138).

It didn’t take long for things to reach a boiling point. According to Hurston, “my step mother threatened to beat me for my impudence”, which immediately set off Hurston into a violent rage where she tried to kill Mattie: “I wanted her blood, and plenty of it. That is the way I went into the fight, and that is the way I fought it … She gave way before my first rush and found herself pinned against the wall with my fists pounding at her face without pity. I could see her face when she realized that I meant to kill her” (Dust Tracks 74). After that, Hurston was out of the door. She could no longer live with someone she had sought to kill and so “one by one we four younger ones were shifted to the homes of

Mama's friends. Perhaps it could be no other way” (Dust Tracks 82).

Just mere months after Lucy died, Hurston moved away from John and would never see him again. “In reality, my father was the baby of the family. With my mother gone and nobody to guide him, life had not hurt him, but it had turned him loose to hurt himself... Old Maker had left out the steering gear when He gave Papa his talents” (Dust Tracks 124-25). Those would be Hurston’s final comments on her father in Dust Tracks.

In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston does more than show someone driving without a steering gear.

Instead, she portrays her father as an uncaring, unfaithful and corruptive character. On Lucy’s death bed, John isn’t afraid to hit his wife and yell, “Ah tole yuh tuh hush” (Johah 129). Yet there is no mention of this episode at all in Dust Tracks. Still, Hurston puts this in her novel, showing a complete lack of remorse from her father. Furthermore, Hurston goes inside John’s mind and writes that after

Lucy had died, “He was free. He was sad, but underneath his sorrow was an exultation like a live coal under gray ashes. There was no longer guilt … Just a free man having his will of women. He was glad in his sadness” (Jonah 136). Obviously Hurston had no clue what was really going through John’s head LeComte 5 when Lucy passed away, but she’s more than willing to fill in the blanks herself and pencil in thoughts of selfishness and overtly sexual thoughts.

Hurston does her best to showcase her father as someone who had little care for when Lucy died, but she also revels in the fact that he was a corruptive preacher. “No whippin’ de Devil ‘round de stump. He got tuh be told” (Jonah 137), were Deacon Hambo’s words about John’s sexual indiscretions.

Although he was “roughly, lovingly forced back into his throne-like seat” (Jonah 123) after he offered to step down from the pulpit, his actions eventually get the best of him following his divorce with Hattie, which prompts his congregation to remove him. Hurston again doesn’t pull any punches, placing him in a world of despair that her mother had predicted: “The world had suddenly turned cold. It was not new and shiny and full of laughter. Mouldy, maggoty, full of suck-holes – one had to watch out for one’s feet. Lucy must have had good eyes” (Jonah 173).

After remarrying for the third time, this time to Sally Lovelace, Hurston has John down on his knees begging for forgivness: “he begged his God to keep his path out of the way of snares and to bear him up … ‘Let Lucy see it too, Lawd, so she kin rest’” (Jonah 190-91). Ultimately, John fails again, but in a stunning move, Hurston has John’s unfaithfulness as the reason for his death on the train tracks, stating, “The car droned, ‘ho-o-ome’ and tortured the man. False pretender! Outside show to the world” (Jonah 200)! The parting words and thoughts with which she gives John before he dies provides his ultimate damnation: “He had prayed for Lucy’s return and God had answered with Sally” (200). In the next paragraph, John is dead.

However, Hurston greatly exaggerates the facts. John did in fact die in a train-automobile accident, but his divorce from Mattie and marriage to Sally was completely fabricated. As biographer

Pam Bordelon found in Census records, “At the time of John's death in Memphis in 1918, Mattie was still his wife; there was no ‘third’ Mrs. Hurston” (Bordelon). More so, Bordelon says John never had any problems with his congregation. Instead, he moved away from Eatonville because his “health may have LeComte 6 been failing” which would explain why he moved in with his oldest son in Memphis, who “had established a thriving medical practice” (Bordelon).

Hurston only wished her father had divorced Mattie. She only wished that her father be exposed for being a corrupt preacher. She only wished that in the end, Lucy would be right and John would be wrong. In writing Jonah’s Gourd Vine, she’s able to make those wishes a reality. She dedicates an entire novel to portray her father as someone that is disgraceful to his wives, family and congregation. In reality, John was liked by many, but reviled by Hurston. In writing a novel, she would be provided the perfect tool to craft her father in such an irreprehensible light that it would forever validate her hate and anger towards him. It worked. LeComte 7

WORKS CITED

Hurston, Zora Neale. Jonah's Gourd Vine. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 2008. Print.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Print.

Ripley, Peter. "The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass." (1985): 135-46. Print.

Pam Bordelon, “New Tracks on 'Dust Tracks’: Toward a Reassessment of the Life of Zora Neale Hurston,” African American Review 31.1 (1997), Questia, Web, 16 Nov. 2010.