ZORA NEALE HURSTON

by Jared Hackworth (2023)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an American author and anthropologist born in Macon County, Alabama. Hurston (1995a: 961) grew up in Eatonville, Florida, a town that she describes “as the first incorporated black community in America.” As she grew up, Hurston traveled a good deal as a maid to the lead singer in a Gilbert & Sullivan troupe, attended courses at Howard University, and began writing short stories. In 1925, Hurston relocated to Harlem, New York City, and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout the 1930s, Hurston hopped between an authorial life of a New York City socialite and her fieldwork in the South, collecting Black folklore and Haitian voodoo, funded through patrons and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In the late 1930s, Hurston’s most famous works, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and the ethnographic study Mules and Men, were published and received critical acclaim. In the 1940s, Hurston relocated to Florida and was largely forgotten in the literary and anthropological communities, dying in poverty in the St. Lucie Welfare Home in 1960. The novelist Alice Walker brought Hurston’s work back into prominence in the 1980s, and she has been respected in literary studies and sociology ever since. 

Hurston’s ethnography explores Black folklore and voodoo across the U.S. South and the Caribbean. In vivid prose, Zora Neale Hurston’s novels, ethnographies, and essays examine Black life in the early 20th century—with a careful ear attuned to Black speech, the intricacies of daily life, and gendered power dynamics. With this lens, Hurston’s work showcases a theory of race and racism, gendered oppression, and class distinctions, engaging with the intersectional issues at the core of American democracy. Hurston’s work explores how and why America engages in systems of oppression and how we might reckon with their legacies today.

BECOMING "COLORED:" HURSTON'S THEORY OF RACE AND GENDER

In her essays and ethnographies, Hurston promotes a theory of race, class, and gender that critiques Jim Crow laws in the American South by emphasizing white people’s enforcement of racism and Black men’s abuse of women.  In her essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” Hurston (1995a: 826) writes, “I remember the very day that I became colored.” With this, Hurston delves into a lengthy anecdote in which she left her hometown at the age of thirteen and faced discrimination, exposing racism as constructed through external power structures. Racism, then, is a learned experience that happens in childhood when people of color are confronted by white supremacy.

In addition to race, gender is also paramount to Hurston’s assessment of inequality. Hurston sees that Black women are positioned below men. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston (1995b: 186) writes,

“Honey, de white man is the de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de n**** man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De n**** woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”

With this masterful use of idiomatic language, Hurston sets out the problem facing Black women—forced to bear the load no one else desires. The load of struggle goes from the white man to the Black man, to the Black woman. In this process, Black women are pushed to be the “mule uh de world” (Hurston 1995b: 186).  In this process of muleification, Hurston argues that Black women face the greatest brunt of sexism, classism, and racism together—forced to toil and labor due to their social position. Examining structures and patterns of racism based upon Jim Crow laws, Hurston (1995a: 936) writes that she felt “the pathos of Anglo-Saxon civilization. And I still mean pathos, for I know that anything with such a false foundation cannot last. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Hurston argues that race is not bound by any factor other than its enforcement by white people, and is therefore a power structure doomed to fail due to its false hierarchy. Since racism and sexism are built upon a false foundation, the structures cannot remain forever.

Hurston engages with American democracy as a potential mechanism that could protect against inequality if appropriately deployed. For Hurston, genuine democracy is necessary for a nation to be considered a democracy, which she notes that the United States is not practicing. She writes, “I thought that when they said the Atlantic Charter, that meant me and everybody In Africa and Asia and everywhere. But it seems like the Atlantic is an ocean that does not touch anywhere but North America and Europe,” critiquing the Eurocentricity of what America proclaims as global “democracy” (Hurston 1995a: 945). She continues this critique, noting that “the inference is, that God has restated the superiority of the West” as “God always does like that when a thousand white people surround one dark one” (Hurston 1995a: 946). The idea of racism and race, then, depends upon white superiority that white people have created for themselves. She critiques the current state of America, writing, “The only thing that keeps me from pitching headlong into the thing [democracy] is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of democracy. I want to see how it feels…The Hurstons have already been waiting eighty years for that. I want it here and now” (Hurston 1995a: 947). Hurston, then, calls for transformative removal of racist laws immediately, demanding social change.   

THE OYSTER KNIFE, THE SOBBING SCHOOL, AND LANGUAGE AS THE SITE OF RESISTANCE

Despite these patterns of discrimination, for Hurston, there is no reason to be angry about white racism. Anger, in fact, is the reaction that White people in power desire. Hurston (1995a: 827) writes that “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negro-hood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.” This movement, which she terms “The Sobbing School,” is ubiquitous in the early 20th century. The “race man,” someone like Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. Du Bois, has a negative impact on the Black community. Race men “rush around seeking for something he can ‘resent’” (Hurston 1995a: 908). In her later years, she criticized Richard Wright for living in “the Dismal Swamp of Race Hatred.” For Hurston, Blackness should not give in and match white disdain.

Instead of race hatred, Hurston proposes elevating joy through engaging with Black culture as a stronger resistance to white rage. Hurston (1995a: 827) writes, “I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” For Hurston, then, the racist structures of oppression are complex; she believes Jim Crow laws should be overturned, but at the same time, she does not want to be resentful or hateful. Hurston would rather live life to the fullest. Although “someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she thinks, “slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you!” (Hurston 1995a: 827). This jocular tone, however, is not to say there is no discrimination—instead, it is to celebrate as “no one on earth ever has a greater chance for glory” (Hurston 1995a: 827).

For Hurston, as an ethnographer and an author, language works as the perfect space for dealing with the split reality of experiencing racism/wanting racist structures overturned and celebrating Black life and culture in the face of that discrimination. A careful ethnographer, Hurston (1995a: 846) writes that “We may go directly to the Negro and let him speak for himself.” Hurston writes copious field notes collecting Black vernacular across the South, from Folk tales to voodoo recipes. She wrote that she found her success in “the telling of the story in the idiom—not the dialect—of the Negro” as “the Negro’s poetical flow of language, his thinking in images and figures was called to the attention of the outside world” (Hurston 1995a: 910). The subject, then, is equally about any specific content and the written idiom—allowing Blackness to show itself through the creation of language. Religious services and music function as a “jagged harmony” and a “conscious art expression” of “evert syllable and every breath” as a mode of Black performance (Hurston 1995a: 871).  Language, for Hurston, provides the medium of social change in both her fiction and ethnography.

HURSTON AND COLLINS

Patricia Hill Collins incorporates Hurston into the canon of Black Feminist Thought and would appreciate Hurston’s means of exploring Black women’s self-identification as an affront to hegemonic power through language, contributing to a complex resistance of the domains of power. Collins uses Hurston throughout the text of Black Feminist Thought to emphasize the need to unite the tradition, highlight intersectionality in Hurston’s work, and focus on the importance of language. However, Collins’ citations of Hurston do not go in depth about the interconnections of their sociologies. Therefore, I stage what Hurston’s arguments provide more broadly to Collins’ project of Black Feminist Thought.

Storytelling and Black Women’s Self-Definition

Collins would adopt Hurston into the tradition of Black Feminist Thought to emphasize self-definition within Blackness. Collins (2000: 10) writes that “individual African-American women fashioned their own ideas about the meaning of Black womanhood” and “when these ideas found collective expression, Black women’s self-definitions enabled them to refashion African-influenced conceptions of self and community” that could “resist the negative controlling images of Black womanhood advanced by Whites as well as the discriminatory social practices that these controlling images supported.” Hurston adds her personal voice, through the act of storytelling about Black women’s self-definition and her critical voice, through her fieldwork documenting discriminatory practices that both practice self-definition and exhibit it across disparate Black communities. Hurston’s work celebrates Black women’s storytelling power; after all, Their Eyes Were Watching God takes place during a front porch conversation. Collins (2000: 119) writes that storytelling is “a prime example of the rearticulating process essential for Black feminist thought).” Hurston’s work demonstrates the importance of Black women’s self-definitions through literature and ethnography; the pieces of self-evaluation and respect are already present in the Black cultural mythology, which she records through fieldwork. Hurston’s work creates a site of collective expression that allows Black women space to define themselves. This dialectical process, between collective expression and individual Black women’s self-definition, allows for strategies of resistance against the hegemonic domain of power that justifies oppression. Collins’ (2000: 10) idea that “the discriminatory social practices” that “controlling images supported” fall away through the process of Black women’s self-definition holds true as Hurston pairs into Black Feminist Thought.

Collins would appreciate Hurston’s work to provide new controlling images to bring about Black self-identification through storytelling. Hurston (1995a: 10) writes, “I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm or danger. As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folks 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.” In the verbal tradition, storytelling is passed down for generations, and Black folklore, inaccessible to white people, does not get an opportunity to control Black women’s narratives. Hurston (1995a: 10) writes, “We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.” Hurston takes on this project as a means of reestablishing Black storytelling that is outside of whiteness and, therefore, not susceptible to its controlling images.

Self-Definition and the Hegemonic Domain of Power

With self-definition outside of whiteness and maleness, Collins would argue that this allows Black women to challenge the hegemonic domain of power through language. Collins (2000: 284) writes that the hegemonic domain “acts as a link between social institutions (structural domain), their organizational practices (disciplinary domain), and the level of everyday social interaction (interpersonal domain” as those in power “create and maintain a popular system of ‘commonsense’ ideas that support their right to rule.” The hegemonic domain of power acts as a sticky collective imagination for Collins, which Hurston’s work directly engages with by making space for critiquing oppression through self-definition. Collins (2000: 284) writes that this domain works through “ideas, images, symbols, and ideologies” controlled by power figures, which Hurston directly refutes through the collection of folklore and the creation of complex Black women characters. Lastly, Hurston would tell Collins that in the case of Black activism through storytelling, the medium is the message. Hurston was very careful to notate the exact speech patterns of the communities she studied. She did not have one style of idiomatic writing. Rather, the language she uses to describe Eatonville and New Orleans differs despite both being Black communities. These differences show her attention to language as the aspect of Black speech that is highlighted emphasizes their differences and creates a complex resistance to white and male domination. Collins (2000: 262) establishes the importance of “dialogue in assessing knowledge claims;” as for Collins, Hurston’s emphasis on story is essential to a reading of her texts, which Collins would say is vital. The medium of language and the practice of storytelling is a critical piece in the tradition of Black Feminist Thought—it cannot be abstracted from the specifics of Black speech and images. Collins’ 23 citations of Hurston in Black Feminist Thought emphasize this—there is simply no escape from language as a foundational facet of intersectional analysis that makes up the hegemonic domain.  

With this emphasis on language, all four facets of Collins’ domains of power come into play in Hurston’s work. As discussed above, hegemonic commonsense power can be dismantled through Hurston’s self-defining Black women characters. Through Hurston’s unsettling of hegemonic power, the structural and disciplinary domains of power can also begin to break down. As these white-controlled images break down, the power dynamic between institutions and their practices begins to bend. Since the hegemonic domain “acts as a link,” as the link starts to fray, so does the once unshakeable power the other domains once held (Collins 2000: 284). While I do not suggest that this causes an immediate removal of structures of power, the changed “commonsense” (Collins 2000: 284) allows for other complex interventions in structural and disciplinary domains. This deconstruction process also aids with taking apart the ideological domain of power through changing the “repertoire” of the “imagination” across gendered and racialized traditions (Collins 2000: 288) by working to both encourage readers to discuss inequality collectively and to challenge the existing domains in day-to-day lives and imaginations.

CONCLUSION

Through this analysis, Hurston’s ability to feature Black language through storytelling and social critique stands out as a complex resistance strategy that Collins would incorporate into Black Feminist Thought. The opening of her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, showcases this positionality, with Black resistance through speech, silent weeping, and protest. The text opens, “Have Mercy! Lord, have mercy on my poor soul!’ as Hurston leans into tropes of Black language to celebrate them (Hurston 1995b: 341). The Egyptian law similarly takes a mocking tone, as “Babies take notice” remains a key tenant of the law (Hurston 1995b: 342). The solution the two men see is to go “protest these new decrees” and talk about hiding weapons. Hurston is in favor of resisting oppression, but advocates doing so without losing one’s full humanity. On the way to the protest, the men discuss their wives, children, games, Gods, and loss; she refuses to make stock characters that utilize controlling white images. In her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston (1995b: 181) presents Black language as she records it, writing, “Ah know exactly what Ah got to tell yuh” and “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered.” With this mastery of several idiomatic styles, Hurston showcases the images of Black folklore with the tree and the Black vernacular language. Hurston exhibits the pull between the constraints of the world and Black joyfulness through artistry. Through this reading of the fictional text alongside the work in the summaries, I argue her sociology is equally clear in the novels, as the subject of language mediates between the polls of oppression and celebration in both genres.

One major weakness of Hurston is her lack of clarity at times due to her play with language in her essays. This often dispels readers through her overzealous statements. As seen in her fiction, Hurston is not opposed to protesting and causing social change; she just desires to do it through celebration, which is often unappreciated. Another major weakness is her criticisms of those with a stronger social presence in their careers, such as W.E.B. Du Bois at the start of her career and Richard Wright at the end. Her criticisms of major leaders and respected sociologists, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright, often makes her appear as less willing to work for social change, which I think is a weakness on her part. However, her main strength of celebrating language as an active tool and as a part of Blackness worthy of sociological investigation provides a unique voice to sociology.

Hurston’s work is worth engaging with, especially considering her social position in the early 20th century. Building on traditions of Black social leaders that she disagreed with and Black literature, Hurston bridges them together through her unique voice. Even today, very few authors are equally respected for their ethnographic and literary output. This unique positionality, with her attention to the discrimination faced by Black people, including women, the structure of racism, and Black language and art as productive, makes her work worth exploring today. Through the process of self-definition as a way of complex resistance to hegemonic power structures, Hurston (1995b: 186) works to challenge domains of power that place Black women as the “mule of de world.”

REFERENCES 

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995a. Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings. New York, New York: Library of America. 

Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995b. Novels and Stories. New York, New York: Library of America.