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Variations Around a Theme: The Place of Eatonville in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston by Jennifer Lewis A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literature March 2001 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 111 Abstract IV Preface V Introduction 1 'Slipping into Neutral' in Mules and Men 33 'Four Walls Squeezing Breath Out': The Limitations of Place in Their Eyes Were Watching God 89 'The Jagged Hole Where My Home Used To Be': Dust Tracks on a Road 148 Conclusion 210 Bibliography 217 11 Acknowledgements My grateful thanks to Helen Taylor for her guidance, support and friendship over the last five years. Thanks also to Bridget Bennett, Liz Cameron, Cheryl Cave, Gill Frith, Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Tracey Potts, Jane Treglown and all my colleagues at Warwick. I am especially indebted to Rosemary and Robert Lewis, Sarah and Ken Elliott, Margaret, Brian and Richard Welsh for caring for my daughter so often and so well. Finally, thanks go to Karen and Stephen Williams for their assistance in printing this thesis. iii Abstract Zora Neale Hurston is a complicated figure whose work has always aroused contradictory responses. During her lifetime she was often more readily appreciated by white readers who enjoyed her boisterous accounts of apparently unthreatening 'Negroes', than by other African American writers who felt that she pandered to white stereotypes, simplifying the black experience and the black psyche. Neglected for several decades, Hurston was again brought to the attention of literary and cultural critics in the late seventies by Robert Hemenway and Alice Walker, who published seminal reconsiderations of her work. Since then Hurston has become a central figure, not only in the African American canon, but also in the mainstream, becoming, to paraphrase the critic Hazel Carby, a veritable industry in her own right. Yet she remains a writer who evokes mixed responses. For some she is an exemplary Womanist and an uncomplicated role model. For others, though, she is a reactionary individualist who offers her readers little more than escapism and unexamined nostalgia. Particularly contested is the sort of African American space Hurston describes in her work. Centred on the all-black town of Eatonville, it has seemed to some an ideal space worth recovering for the potential it possesses for sustaining a model of authentic African American life. For others though, it has seemed an irrelevant and reactionary retreat from the complexities and realities of twentieth century life and an ideal, which has little relevance for an increasingly urban black population. In this thesis I intend to examine more closely the space and place that Hurston creates in order to argue that the Eatonville of her texts is more complex and ambiguous than either of these accounts allow. iv Preface In the last twenty-five years Zora Neale Hurston has become an African American icon. Resurrected in the late seventies by writers such as Alice Walker and Robert Hemenway, I she has emerged as a central figure in a revised American and African American canon; a 'quintessential feminist and Womanist" who has not simply restored 'funkiness and folk roots to black women's discourse',' but also brought back to a dispersed, increasingly disparate ethnic group, a sense of themselves as a discrete, authentic 'bodacious" community. In general, re-evaluations of Hurston's work have positioned her intellectually, culturally and geographically, not in the 'Nigger Heaven' of Harlem in which she had gained notoriety as the self-styled 'Queen of the niggerati', but in its virtual antithesis; Hurston's rural hometown Eatonville, Florida. Explaining her political, artistic and cultural ethos as the result of the years she spent there enjoying the sort of innocent childhood that African Americans are supposed to have been denied, critics have 1 Alice Walker began 'looking for Zora' in the mid seventies, publishing 'Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View' and 'Looking For Zora' in her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1983; rept. London: The Women's Press, 1984), pp.83-92; 93-116. Robert Hemenway published his autobiography of Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography in 1977 (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1977, rept; London: Camden Press, 1986). Since then she has become a substantial presence in the field of African American studies. For a comprehensive account of the explosion of interest in Hurston see Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph's Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers 1900-1945 (Cambridge, Massachusets: Harvard University Press, 1990). 2 Deborah G. Plant, Every Tub Must Sit on its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p.l. 3 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 'My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women', in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Shari Benstock (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 63-89, p.83. 4 Alice Walker, 'Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View', p.85. v presented this 'pure Negro town' as a 'matrix', a 'source of inspiration', and an 'eden's (sic) which brought into being Hurston's apparently indomitable sense of 'racial health' and made possible her expressions of 'complete, complex, undiminished human beings" which were 'so colored', that all around them 'pale[d]' by comparison.' These critical responses are in a sense inevitable. After all, the majority of Hurston's books are grounded in this 'pure Negro' town," 'The Eatonville Anthology', Mules and Men, Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God all evoke it and although Moses, Man of the Mountain is set in North Africa, echoes of the Eatonville folk can still be heard in the communal voice of the gossipy Israelites. Even Dust Tracks on a s Hemenway, p.277; Michael Awkward, 'Introduction', to New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. ed. by Awkward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.I-18, p.l; Steve Glassman, 'Introduction', to Zora In Florida. ed. by Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel (Orlando: Florida University Press, 1991), pp.iix-xv, p.x. 6 Walker, 'Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View', p.85. 7 Hurston, 'How It Feels to be Colored Me', The World Tomorrow. May 1928, rept. in Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore. Memoirs. and Other Writings, compiled by Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), pp.826-829, p.829. Of course there have been other autobiographical accounts by women which describe periods of pre-racialised innocence similar to those Hurston conjured up in numerous books and essays. In fact the striking similarities between Hurston's representation of her coming-into-consciousness and Harriet Jacobs' in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861, rept. in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr., & Nellie McKay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp.209-245), suggests that Hurston may have been 'signifying' on this narrative by reproducing it in her own. For passages from Harriet Jacob's narrative which describe how she was 'shielded' from her status as a slave until she was six years old (op. cit .• p.211), only learning of her powerlessness on the occasion of her mother's death, find their way into Hurston's narratives, Janie Crawford, for example, finding out that she 'wuzn't white' when she was 'round six years old' (Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York, 1938, rept. London: Virago, 1987), p.2l), while in 'How It Feels to be Colored Me', Hurston presented herself as 'suffer[ing] a sea change' when her mother died, becoming a 'little colored girl' when she is sent to Jacksonville (1928; rept. in Hurston. pp.826-829, p.827). The difference between Hurston's use of this trope and others' however, is that in other narratives innocence is presented as a form of, albeit benign false- consciousness the result of protective mothers who shield from their daughters their true existence. In Hurston's work however, the notion of essential blackness, and all that it signifies is dismantled. For blackness is not hidden in Eatonville. Rather it does not signify, having no symbolic power in the space in which she is raised. 8 Those that did not tend to be disregarded as ineffective, 'poor' and over-ambitious. See Hemenway, pp.246-307; Walker, 'Looking for Zora', pp.89-91. vi Road which charts Hurston's journey away from her home town, dwells in Eatonville for over fifty pages," Furthermore, Hurston's own self-portraits generally orientated themselves through references to Eatonville. She repeatedly wrote of herself as a woman whose emotional and cultural home was literal rather than literary; a woman whose identity was so embedded within an 'exclusive' and self-sufficient 'colored town' that she had no need either to slough off an 'old' degraded 'Negro', or to be born again into a 'New' Harlem- based 'Race'. to Thus while she was generally reluctant to pin herself down to anyone group - repeatedly undercutting affiliations by asserting her intellectual and cultural independence, 'I have no race, I am me' t 1 - she regularly distinguished herself from the rest of the Harlem crowd by flaunting the extent to which she possessed and was possessed by a unique 'colored' community: Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida.