The Double Consciousness of the Afro-American
and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
A Thesis
Presented to
The Faculty of the Department of English Literature
Tokyo Metropolitan University
In Partial Fullfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
by
Yoshinao Hirao
January 1998
INTRODUCTION
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching Godhas
provoked a great deal of controversy since its first
publication in 1937.
At the time of publication,
it was
severely criticized for not being written in the protest
tradition.
The Great Depression since 1929 had brought
the flamboyant time of the Harlem Renaissance to an end,
and the mainstream of the Afro-American literature was
being dominated by fictions of social protestation. "A
love story" which Hurston made out of her "affair with a
man of West Indian parentage" (Hemenway 231) was regarded
as incommensurate with the dark social condition of the
day.
Alain Locke, in his yearly review of literature for
Opportunity, states that Hurston's "gift for poetic phrase,
for rare dialect, and folk humor keep her . . . from
diving down deep either to the inner psychology of
characterization or to sharp analysis of the social
background" (rev. of Their Eyes 18).
Richard Wright's
review of the novel for New Masses was more caustic.
"Miss Hurston," Wright asserts, "voluntarily continues in
her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in
the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes
the 'white folks' laugh" (17).
It is not until the late 1970s more than fifteen
years after her death in 1960 that the revaluation of
Hurston and her second novel came to the fore.
In March
of 1977, by the MLA Commission on Minority Groups and the
Study of Language and Literature, the novel was selected
for one of out-of-print books most in demand at a national
level.
Robert Hemenway's biography Zora Neale Hurston: A
Literary Biography was published the same year, and in the
next year the novel itself was reissued by the University
of Illinois Press.
Furthermore, in 1979, Alice Walker
edited and published an anthology I Love Myself When I Am
Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and
Impressive: Zora Neale Hurston Reader, which includes her
own essay about her travel around Hurston's home town
Eatonville, Florida.
In this current of the revaluation, an opinion
prevailed that Hurston's works were not nonpolitical or
ahistorical.
Mainly in two respects, they were
established as statements with political and historical
implications if they are not so straightforward as the
works of Richard Wright.
First, the embracement of the
Afro-American folk culture in her works, which had often
been regarded as a move merely obsequious to the
stereotyped anticipation of white America, came to take on
a different meaning in the era of black consciousness
after the 1960s in which "a new generation of black
intellectuals had emerged, and the voice of revolutionary
nationalism was heard across the land" (Bone ⅶ).
"[A]ffirmation of black values and lifestyle within the
American context is," June Jordan argues in her essay
issued in 1974, "indeed, an act of protest" (87). The
Afro-Americans, proud of being what they were, had craved
for the positive self-image of themselves and they found
it in Hurston's works.
Alice Walker, for example, in
"Foreword" to Hemenway's biography of Hurston, explains
how she "discovered" Mules and Men when she was writing "a
story that required accurate material on voodoo practices
among rural southern blacks of the thirties"
A number of white, racist anthropologists and folklorists
of the periodhad, not surprisingly, disappointed and
insulted me.
They thoughtblack inferior, peculiar, and
comic, and for me this undermined -- no,destroyed -- the
relevance of their books.
Fortunately, it was then that
Idiscovered Mules and Men, Zora's book on folklore,
collecting, herself,and her small, all-black community of
Eatonville, Florida.
. . . Theauthenticity of her
material was verified by her familiarity with itscontext,
and I was soothed by her assurance that she was exposing
not simply an adequate culture, but a superior one (ⅩⅠ).
Secondly, after 1960's, Hurston, especially in Their
Eyes Were Watching God, came to be seen as offering a
model for the Afro-American women who were seeking their
voice and self.
Afro-American women were disillusioned by
two reformist movements in the 1960s: Women's Liberation
and civil rights movements.
Most white feminists showed
little interest in the race problem and most male AfroAmericans stuck to their sexist ideas on women's role.
As
a result, in the movements in which it should be essential
to raise a voice, Afro-American women found themselves
degenerated into voiceless existence and keenly realized
the necessity to regain their own voice.
Creating Janie
Crawford, the protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Hurston showed a model "powerful, articulate, self-reliant,
and radically different from any women character they had
ever encountered in literature" (Washington, "Foreword" to
Their Eyes ⅸ).
The political importance of Hurston's works,
however, still leaves much room for further investigation.
As for the use of the Afro-American cultural inheritance,
there were other Afro-American writers contemporary with
or preceding to Hurston who were also committed with it.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, for instance, wrote many poems in
Afro-American dialect.
The dialect poems of Dunbar,
however, are often rejected today as just "depicting the
antics of blacks on a plantation and reflecting the
epitome of the 'happy darky' stereotype" (Laryea 109-10).
Dunbar, who "had higher regard for the . . . poems written
in standard English" (Laryea 110), could not find any
positive value in the black vernacular.
He wrote the
dialect poems just because they are "what his primarily
white audiences most wanted to read" (Laryea 110).
Whether Hurston found any positive value in the black folk
culture while Dunbar and other Afro-American regionalists
could not remain matter for debate.
What is also open to question is whether Hurston
and Their Eyes could introduce a realistic model to AfroAmerican women claiming for their voice.
At MLA
convention in December 1979, Robert Stepto raised the
issue which caused a stir in the Afro-American feministic
revaluation of Their Eyes.
What he called into question
is Janie's acquirement of her own voice, which AfroAmerican feminists had never doubted.
In the courtroom
scene in which Janie ought to speak most eloquently,
Hurston avoids a verbatim quotation from Janie's words and
has a third person narrator describe only the fact that
"she talked" (Their Eyes 178).
Stepto argues that the
author chooses the third-person narrative because she
cannot imagine what words Janie would use as a person with
one's own voice.
He repeats his argument in his book From
Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative:
Through the frame Hurston creates the essential illusion
that Janiehas achieved her voice (along with everything
else), and that she haseven wrestled from menfolk some
control of the tribal posture ofstoryteller.
But the tale
undercuts much of this, not because of itscontent-- indeed,
episodes such as the one in which Janie verballyabuses
Jody in public abets Hurston's strategy--but because
itsnarration.
Hurston's curious insistence on having
Janie's tale--herpersonal history in and as a literary
form--told by an omniscientthird person rather than by a
first-person narrator, implies that Janiehas not really
won her voice and self at all--that her author (who
is,quite likely, the omniscient narrating voice) cannot
see her way clearto giving Janie her voice outright (166).
Stepto suggests, in this passage, that a "powerful,
articulate, [and] self-reliant" woman many Afro-American
women found in Janie is a mere illusion Hurston created
rhetorically.
Stepto, however, lays too much emphasis on
Janie's ability to represent her experience.
We should
look more carefully into whether there is another way of
self-assrtion for Janie to choose when the only language
given to her is penetrated by male-chauvinistic ideas and
useless to represent her female experience.
The purpose of this paper is to show that Hurston's
second novel is an alternative political expression of a
complex situation in which Afro-Americans, particularly
Afro-American women, in their history, have been.
For
this purpose, we will investigate, in the first place, the
incomparable insight into the culture of her people
Hurston could gain, by making comparison with the
interpretation of Alain Locke, one of Afro-American
intellectuals who promoted the Harlem Renaissance.
Secondly, how a complex relationship Hurston had with the
native community as her cultural matrix, "the roosting
place of . . . [her] imagination" (Bone 144), is examined
in the connection with the matter of double-consciousness
historically intrinsic to the Afro-Americans.
Finally,
based on these investigations, we will inquire into the
novel as a story of an Afro-American woman who seeks for
self-realization.
ChapterⅠ: ALAIN LOCKE AND ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston is well known for her devotion to
folkloric study of black people in the United States.
In
1925, Hurston, who had already begun her career as a
writer, encountered a famous anthropologist, Franz Boas,
in Barnard Collage which she entered with a scholarship.
Idolizing him as "the greatest anthropologist alive" and
"the king of kings" (Dust Track 127, 123), she was
dedicated to "Boas' research to take a pair of calipers
and stand on a Harlem street corner measuring people's
skull" (Hemenway 63).
In February 1927, Hurston began her
first folkloric research on the black people in the rural
South but it resulted unsatisfactorily due to lack of
experience.
In December the same year, she made her
second research trip with a financial support of Charlotte
Osgood Mason and later wrote Mules and Men based on the
trip.
This folkloristic aspect of Hurston, in a sense,
reflected the trend among the black intellectuals in those
days.
From the beginning of this century to the 1920s,
black intellectuals tried to resuscitate their folk
heritage, which had been neglected by most middle-class
Afro-Americans as an obstacle to their struggles to be
accepted as a sharer of values established under the white
supremacy.
Jean Toomer's Cane, for instance, published in
1923, includes sympathetic delineations of everyday life
of illiterate Afro-Americans in the rural South to whom
the black bourgeoisie had assigned peasant images of their
race.
This epoch-making novel introduced a fresh current
into the tradition of the black novels, most of which had
dealt with the interracial subjects like "passing" or a
"tragic mulatto."
James Weldon Johnson's collection of
poems in 1927, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in
Verse, was based on the style of the Afro-American folk
preaching which had been regarded as a poor imitation of
that of white ministers.
In the field of music, W. C.
Handy published the first blues composition in 1912,1)
and
the renovated versions of the Negro spirituals were
gaining approval through the 1920s after meeting with
continual rejections.2)
The Harlem Renaissance was a
confluence of these resuscitating currents in what was
called "the Negro capital of the World" (McKay 16).
Hurston aligned herself with those black
intellectuals in resuscitating black folk elements, but
she took issue with such a formidable leader of this
movement as Alain Locke about how to deal with folkloric
materials.
Hurston, in "Spirituals and Neo-spirituals,"
for example, rejects the renovated versions of spirituals
while Locke regards the adaptation of the spirituals to
"the context of formal music" as a proof of their
classicality ("The Negro Spirituals" 199).
She
disapproves of the attempts by noted renovators of the
spirituals like Harry T. Burleigh, whom Locke regards as
one of "creative workmen who have been pioneers and
pathbreakers in the cultural development and recognition
of the Negro in the arts," and Nathaniel Dett, who is the
first on Locke's list of talented Afro-American musicians
in the younger generation ("Negro Youth Speak" 48-9).
Contrary to her teacher and supportive friend, Hurston is
critical of Burleigh and Dett for the reason that their
compositions based on the spirituals are "(a)ll good work
and beautiful, but not the spirituals" ("Spirituals and
Neo-spirituals" 80).
Moreover, in a letter to the
magazine Opportunity, she censures Locke himself for his
hypocritical approach to the spirituals:
. . . he was one of the leaders in the hullabaloo against
the singing of Negro spirituals.
That was before so many
people in high places had praised them.
Now he tootches
his lips all out ans [sic] shivers with ecstasy when he
speaks of "those beautiful and sensitive things."
I
remember him trembling with emotion over "the faithfulness
to Negro religion" in "The Green Pastures": Which is
anything you want to call it but the truth.
But nobody
was going to catch Dr. Locke not chiming in with anything
so popular as that (qtd. in Wintz 116).
Alain Locke, chairman of the department of philosophy at
Howard University for more than 40 years, writing several
books on music, literature, play, and art of the AfroAmericans and editing The New Negro, an anthology which
signaled the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, is
regarded as "an interpreter and promoter of black culture"
(Low and Clift 539).
Hurston's critical comments to Locke
lead us to the questions what antagonized her to the AfroAmerican cultural leader, whether it is, as Cary D. Wintz
says, just "because of his view of her novel Their Eyes
Were Watching God" (117), and, if not, what kind of
disagreement there was between Hurston and Locke.
To make
these points clear, we shall, for the present, confine our
attention to Locke's essays on the folk culture included
in The New Negro.
The resuscitation of the folk tradition is, for
Locke, "the antidote for prejudice" (Schomburg 231), the
strategy against the stereotype of the Afro-American as a
passive existence. In those days, a racially prejudiced
belief in the black people's lack of self-determination
was still accepted without question among most white
Americans.
The middle-class Afro-American tried to
assimilate into the European civilization in order to
prove their respectability, but "their protective social
mimicry" ("The New Negro" 1) helped the white racists
stick to their faith in the subordination of the colored
people.
Locke argues in the introductory essay to The New
Negro
So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has
been more of a formula than a human being--a something to
be argued about, condemned or defended, to be "kept down,"
or "in his place," or "helped up," to be worried with or
worried over, harassed or patronized, a socialbogey or a
social burden" ("The New Negro" 3).
To establish the autonomy of the Afro-Americans, Locke
emphasizes unique contributions they have made to the
American culture.
In his opinion, the black folks, at
least culturally, have not been dependent; rather, it is
the culture of white southerners that was dependent on the
collective sentiments of them.
"For generations," he
argues, "the Negro has been the peasant matrix of their
section of America which has most undervalued him, . . .
The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folktemperament" ("The New Negro" 15).
Locke, as a strategist against the stereotype,
thinks that the cultural expression of the black folks has
not yet attained its full development.
It seems to Locke
that the black folks are too immature to have their "folk
sentiment" recognized generally as an alternative to the
stereotype.
"No sane observer," Locke asserts, "would
contend that the great masses are articulate as yet" ("The
New Negro" 7).
To demonstrate the spiritual autonomy of
the Afro-Americans, the folk-temperament should not be a
latent thing which is transmitted unconsciously
"underneath broken words, childish imagery, peasant
simplicity" ("The Negro Spirituals" 200).
The expression
of the black folks is, for Locke, so unsophisticated that
their cultural potentialities tend to be overlooked like
"(t)he slave songs" whose "potentiality of new musical
forms and new technical traditions" remains "so deep as to
be accessible only to genius" ("The Negro Spirituals" 200).
The premise of cultural immaturity brings Locke to
the conclusion that the universal styles are essential for
him to make the folk culture develop out of its folk
origin as the European classics did:
Indeed one wonders why something vitally new has not
already been contributed by Negro folk songs to modern
choral and orchestral music development.
And if it be
objected that it is too far a cry from the simple folk
music to the larger forms and idioms of modern music, let
us recall the folk song origins of the very tradition
which is now classic in European music ("The Negro
Spirituals" 209).
Accordingly, "the wonderfully potential music" of the
spirituals should not be confined "to the narrow confines
of
simple versions
and musically primitive molds"
("The Negro Spirituals" 208).
The renovated versions of
the spirituals, which "have escaped the lapsing conditions
and fragile vehicle of folk art, and come firmly into the
context of formal music" ("The Negro Spirituals" 199), are,
for Locke, the first example of the folk art which has
demonstrated its potentiality to the full through the
adoption of "the larger forms and idioms."
The outlook on the black folk culture Locke presents
in The New Negro was agreeable to other black
intellectuals of the first generation of the Harlem
Renaissance in supposing that the folk culture is
incomplete in spite of its potentialities and needs to be
rehashed with elaborate devices of talented artists.
For
instance, in the preface to the revised edition to The
Book of American Negro Poetry he edited, James Weldon
Johnson writes that the cultural products of the black
folks like the cakewalk and Ragtime music "are lower forms
of art, but they give evidence of a power that will some
day be applied to the higher forms" (17).3)
The idea
expressed in Locke's essay "The Negro Spirituals" is close
to Johnson's in terms of its linear view of history: *1
Negro folk song is not midway its artistic career as yet,
and while the preservation of the original folk forms is
for the moment the most pressing necessity, an inevitable
art development awaits them, as in the past it has awaited
all other great folk music (208).
As these comments of the two Afro-American leading
intellectuals show, the idea that the Afro-American folk
culture is underdeveloped was being established in the
1920s.
In marked contrast to Locke and Johnson, Hurston
never appraised the cultural maturity of the black folks
in terms of their communicative competence because she
knew that, in the context of the black folk culture, the
cultural expression is not necessarily a means of
conveying information. In "Spirituals and Neo-spirituals,"
Hurston points out that the spirituals usually allow
unrestrained expression of personal sentiments (80-1), but
no matter how informative the emotional expression appears,
it is not required to be received as a message.
In not a
few cases, the information supposedly involved is to be
forgotten before it is received.
In her essay
"Characteristics of Negro Expression," for instance,
Hurston refers to the Afro-American religious service in
which "(t)he supplication is forgotten in the frenzy of
creation" (54).
The transmission of their wishes to God
or somebody else is, for the congregation, of little
importance.
Nobody is required to read the meanings of
the religious service.
For the reason given above, the folk culture does
not need to be sophisticated, for Hurston, at least in its
representational function.
The purpose of the
participants in the cultural activities is not to make the
products sophisticated enough to be received, but to enjoy
the creative process itself.
The description of a
decorative room Hurston saw in Mobile offers the key to
where the black folks try to get to through their cultural
activities:
I saw in Mobile a room in which there was an over-stuffed
mohair living-room suite, an imitation mahogany bed and
chifforobe, a console victrola.
The walls were gaily
papered with Sundaysupplements of the Mobile Register.
There were seven calenders and three wall pockets.
One of
them with a scarf of deep home-made lace, looped up with a
huge bow of pink crepe paper.
Over the door was a huge
lithograph showing the Treaty of Versailles being signed
with a Waterman fountain pen ("Characteristics of Negro
Expression" 53).
Untidiness of the room with vulgar taste of the hostess is
not what she means to convey.
"The will to adorn" which
Hurston regards as "the second most notable characteristic
in Negro Expression" ("Characteristics of Negro
Expression" 50) is too unsatiable to be exhausted after
the completion of the decoration, so "decorating a
decoration . . . did not seem out of place to the hostess"
("Characteristics of Negro Expression" 53).
The pleasure
of decorating is, for the hostess, much more important
than the completion of the decoration.
Thus, in many
cases, the black folks do not adorn something to have the
complete decoration appreciated, but they derive great
pleasure from the creative process itself.
The cultural activities characterized by the
absence of appreciators can be sometimes more
communicative.
In a more collective case than the
decoration of a private room, the participants of the
activities have an alternative style of communication,
which is carried out not through what their expression is
supposed to represent, but through what they do together.
To explain such a style of communication, it may be
helpful to think of what we do when we play team sports.
When I speak of team sports, I do not wish to imply
professional one played in full view of the crowd, but
amateur one like sandlot baseball.
In order to win the
game, we should exchange messages with teammates and read
what the opponents are thinking, but these messages can be
forgotten after the game is over.
This reveals that we do
not participate in the game to convey the information, but
convey the information to participate in the game.
In
spite of subsidiary importance of what is represented, we
can communicate with each other through the game because a
player can shows that he/she feels so equal and bears so
little malice toward other players that he/she is willing
and able to share the experience with them.
This unrepresentational communication is not, as the
example of
team sports shows, peculiar to the black folk
culture, but, in what Walter Jackson Ong calls "cultures
deeply affected by the use of writing" (1), it is often
marginalized as a secondary means of communication.
The
dependence on the writing diminishes the possibility for
many people to participate in the same experience at the
same time, for the act of writing can not be shared, at
least, among many people.
On the other hand, the
characteristics of communication which Ong attributes to
oral discourse applies to every aspect of the black folk
culture which itself depends greatly on orality:
Narrative originality lodges not in making up new stories
but in managing a particular interaction with this
audience at this time--at every telling the story has to
be introduced uniquely into a unique situation, for in
oral cultures an audience must be brought to respond often
vigorously (41-2).
Through the cultural activities, the participants, with
their improvisatory competence, have an irreplaceable
experience that cannot be enjoyed except at a particular
time, reconstruct their relationship as one among
exclusive sharers of the same experience, and develop a
sense of unity with the experience as a common
experiential basis.
This is why Hurston emphasizes that
the spirituals "won't be the same thing next Sunday," and
"each time singing of the piece is a new creation"
("Spirituals and Neo-spirituals" 80).
For this style of communication, a mere
appreciator or a detached observer is not only an
unnecessary but also a disturbing existence which is to be
eliminated from the cultural activities, for an observer,
by treating the activities as the past he/she has just
left on record, not as the present he/she is living in,
undercuts the basic premise that the activities should be
shared, at a time, among all the people present.
An
observer remains a stranger, who may be ill-intentioned
because of their staying away from the unrepresentational
communication.
Actually, as Alice Walker points out in
Foreword to Hemenway's biography (・), outside observers,
most of whom have been racially prejudiced, have often
misinterpreted and exploited the black folk culture.
Hence, when an outsider is found looking into their
cultural activities, the black folks try to hide them from
him/her.
In the introduction to Mules and Men, Hurston
explains the difficulties of collecting folklore from
secretive black folks in the rural South.
What the black
folks give to a curious observer is poor substitutes for
real experiences, that is, what he/she wants.
"I'll put
this play toy in his hand," they conceive, "and he'll
seize it and go away.
song" (3).
Then I'll say my say and sing my
If you are not satisfied with this "play toy,"
you should cease to be a mere observer and "say [your] say
and sing [your] song" to them.
Hurston owed her success
in collecting the folklore to the fact that she was
regarded as a teller of "de biggest lie" when she wanted
to collect "de big lies we tell when we're just sitting
around here on the porch doin' nothin'" (Mules and Men 8).
She had versatility enough to be accepted as a participant
of a "lying session."
To extend the range of the sharing, the Afro-American folk
culture allows nobody to monopolize means of expression. A
performer has an obligation to encourage the spectators to
participate in the performance. Hurston describes how a
black dancer implicates the spectators in the performance:
Negro dancing is dynamic suggestion. No matter how violent
it mayappear to the beholder, every posture gives the
impression that thedancer will do much more. For example
the performer flexes one kneesharply, assumes a ferocious
face mask, thrusts the upper part of thebody forward with
clenched fists, elbows taut as in hard running orgrasping
a thrusting blade. That is all.
But the spectators
himselfadds the picture of ferocious assault, hears the
drums and findshimself keeping time with the music and
tensing himself for struggle. It is compelling insinuation.
That is the very reason the spectator isheld so rapt. He
is participating in the performance himself--carryingout
the suggestions of the performer ("Characteristics of
NegroExpression" 55-6).
The dancer suggests the infinite possibility of expression
by his posture and restricts his expression to leave room
for the spectators to express themselves. The spectators
"carrying out the suggestions of the performer" are no
longer mere spectators. They are themselves performers
whose "compelling insinuation" may implicate other
spectators in the performance. This chain reaction to
cause positive participation make possible the extensive
sharing of the same experience.
It is worth a mention in passing that Hurston's literary
works, as well as folkloric writings, are a repository for
samples of the unrepresentational communication.
Particularly, Their Eyes Were Watching God offers a lot of
good examples of the communication based on a shared
experience of cultural collaboration. In the chapter 6,
when Sam Watson and Lige Moss dispute about what "keeps a
man from gettin' burnt on uh red-hot stove--caution or
nature" (60), they don't really want to reach some
conclusion, but they just enjoy the process of disputing
together. In the scene following to the dispute, Charlie
Jones' performance of courtship entertains everybody on
the porch, but "they know it's not courtship. It's actingout courtship and everybody is in the play" (63).
Charlie
as a performer induces other persons to participate in his
play as a cast and some of them are allotted an important
role like that of a rival in love. They enjoy having
common experience of the play and communicate with one
another through it. This style of communication in
Eatonville the story is mainly set in has a great
significance for the protagonist Janie Crawford, but this
question will be considered in the third chapter. Let us
now return to Hurston's disagreement with Locke and other
promoters of neo-spirituals.
The unrepresentational communication of the black
folks, Hurston thinks, will be interrupted by the
renovation of the folk culture Locke and other AfroAmerican intellectuals promoted. Hurston is afraid that
the dissonance of the spirituals would be "ironed out by
the trained musician" and their "truth dies under training
like flowers under hot water" ("Spirituals and Neospirituals" 80). The educated artists tend to squeeze the
folk art into the fixed forms which have been thought
adequate from the standard in the conservatory tradition,
and to deprave it into the repetition of the precedents.
She observes that, in the "genuine" spirituals, "(t)he
various parts break in at any old time," and the singers
are allowed to care "nothing about pitch" ("Spirituals and
Neo-spirituals 80). This allowance of willful expressions
enhances the improvisatory possibility of the spirituals
and draws more participants into the cultural activities.
The renovators of the spirituals were undoubtedly short of
such unrestraint as the originators had.
It is concluded, from what has been said above, that
Zora Neale Hurston as a folklorist lays stress to the
point that the black folk culture should be estimated from
the standpoint of insiders who participate in its
activities, because its ultimate purpose is not to deliver
the cultural products to those who do not participate in
it, but to help the participants share the same experience
of the cultural activities. The cultural products the
latecomers might get is a mere remnant of the process, and
it is no use trying to read a message in it. This is not,
of course, to deny that the black folks have "the ability
to probe for deeper meanings of words as they relate to
various manifestations" (Cone 6), but, if we concentrate
attention just on the representation, there will be
something to be overlooked. The black folk culture can be
communicatory not only through what represents the
experience, but also through the shared experience. At
this point, Hurston is widely different from Locke and
other Afro-American intellectuals who regard the black
folk culture as an immature representation of the racial
experience or the folk temperament to outsiders like white
Americans or the middle-class Afro-Americans.
This will, however, end up as one-sided conclusion
if we do not take it into consideration that Hurston, in
spite of her emphasis on the unrepresentational way of
communication based mainly on orality, shared an eager
desire for literacy with other Afro-Americans. In the
slavery in which they were forbidden to be taught reading
and writing, and, later, under the segregated educational
system, the Afro-Americans have been prevented from
receiving the full benefits of literacy and the knowledge
it would offer. They have carried on the struggle against
this continued exclusion of their race from the culture
based on written texts. Frederick Douglass, for example,
like other authors of slave narratives, "set out with high
hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to
learn how to read," because he knew that reading was "the
pathway from slavery to freedom" (79, 78). Hurston also
went into "the culture deeply affected by the use of
writing" as a student and author. It was through the
writing that Hurston as the archivist of a folk custom
returned to her cultural matrix. As a result, in spite of
the primary importance she attached to the function which
the folk culture performs among the inside participants,
Hurston sometimes took an observant attitude to her people
herself. In the next chapter, we will examine in detail
this seemingly contradictory posture of Hurston.
Chapter Ⅱ: HURSTON AS A PARTICIPANT-OBSERVER
Hurston's ethnographical study, as we have seen in
the previous chapter, shows that, in the context of the
black folk culture, cultural activities are performed for
the inside participants to enjoy the process of creating
and to communicate with each other through what they
experience together, not through what are supposed to be
represented. For these meticulous observations on the folk
culture, Hurston was outstanding among other Afro-American
intellectuals, most of whom regarded it as immature
expression of the folk sentiments. It was her position as
an inside participant that enabled her to make such an
observation. The folk culture showed its real face which a
mere observer cannot see because her ability and
willingness to participate in the cultural activities
qualified Hurston to penetrate its sanctuary.
The fact that Hurston was a positive participant of
the cultural activities herself, however, does not mean
that she confined herself to the Afro-American esoterics.
She was sometimes more conscious of how important her
relationship with white America was than Locke and Weldon
Johnson, and utilized her position as an insider for
building up a relation to, or in a more direct way of
saying, getting financial aid from the outside world. As
Langston Hughes points out in his autobiography The Big
Sea, "she was always getting scholarship and things from
wealthy people, some of whom simply paid her just to sit
around and represent the Negro race for them, she did it
in such a racy style" (239). The patronage of Charlotte
Osgood Mason and the scholarships she received never let
Hurston damper the curiosity many white contemporaries
showed about her and her people.
As far as the financial reliance is concerned,
Hurston's was not a special case in the Harlem Renaissance,
during which most writers including Hughes financially
depended upon white patrons, but her salient advantage was
that she was from the rural south where there were
expected to be the secret heart of the Afro-Americanism
while most of her fellow writers came from the North or
the urban South. In her autobiography, Dust Track on a
Road, Hurston herself acknowledges that "(i)n the first
place, . . . I was a Southerner" (98), and her fellow
writers thought her to be "a living representative of
Southern folk idiom" (Hemenway 63). In the field of
anthropology, moreover, the supposed legitimacy of her
succession to the southern Afro-American legacy qualified
her to offer herself as a sample of her people's culture,
and enabled her to collect other samples effectively by
infiltrating into the heart of the folk culture as a
participant. The introduction to Mules and Men by Franz
Boas, under whose tutelage Hurston studied the
anthropology, exhibits what contribution Hurston was
required to make to the ethnographical research:
It is the great merit of Miss Hurston's work that she
entered into thehomely life of the southern Negro as one
of them and was fullyaccepted as such by the companions of
her childhood. Thus she hasbeen able to penetrate through
that affected demeanor by which theNegro excludes the
White observer effectively from participating in histrue
inner life (ⅹⅲ).
What is immediately apparent in this passage is that
Hurston was expected to play the role of a native
informant who would open sealed books of Afro-American
culture, and she answered the expectation "in such a racy
style." Even her literary works like her first novel
Jonah's Gourd Vine, as Alice Gambrell points out, were
often read "as a plain, unvarnished depiction of the
univocal reality of Afro-American culture" (113).
Academic necessity, however, forced Hurston to take an
observational attitude to her native community as well as
to immerse into it as a cultural participant. Let us
consider the following recollection quoted from the
introduction to Mules and Men:
In a way it [to collect the folklore] would not be a new
experience forme. When I pitched headforemost into the
world I landed in the crib of negroism. From the earliest
rocking of my cradle, I had known aboutthe capers Brer
Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl saysfrom the
house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise.
Icouldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was
off in college,away from my native surroundings, that I
could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look
at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of
Anthropology to look through at that (1).
Hurston presents herself here as an insider who has
learned, as an outside observer, to keep her distance from
the inside while she, on the next page, asserts that
education never alienated her from the community, saying
"I'd still be just Zora to the neighbors" (2). In addition,
Hurston, as many critics including Susan Willis and
Barbara Johnson point out (Wills 111; Johnson 325), using
both a first person pronoun and a third person one for
insiders of the Afro-American community, reveals that she
is undecided about where she belongs.
Graciela Hernández takes another example of
Hurston's "balancing act between the identities" (356). In
the beginning of the first chapter, when a townsman asks
her about why she wants to collect folklore, Hurston
replies, "We want to set them down before it's too late"
(Italics added 8). Hurston "uses black English vernacular
to assert her inclusion as an Afro-American woman,"
Hernández writes, "while the reference to 'we' specifies
that she sees herself as an anthropologist working in
conjunction with other anthropologists" (355). Hurston
regarded herself as something like what Robert Stepto
terms a "participant-observer" to depict Frederick
Douglass as an author of Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Negro.
Stepto, in From Behind the Veil, states that, unlike
preceding authors of slave narratives who represented
their experiences as emotional eruptions and relied upon
appendixes of white abolitionists for the textual
verification, Douglass places an experience in the light
of other experiences, and tries to let the text verify
itself as a story of an independent individual. "(H)is
goal is," Stepto observes using Albert Stone's term, "the
presentation of a 'historical self,' not the record of
temporary hysteria" (Stepto 21). One of the marked
characteristics of Douglass as a narrator is his "ability
to conjoin past and present, and to do so with images that
not only stand for different periods in his personal
history but also, in their fusion, speak of his evolution
from slavery to freedom" (Stepto 20). To represent one's
own experience in the correlation among experiences which
explain one another, the author has to convince the
readers that he/she preserves composure enough to give an
objective analysis of his/her own experience; indeed,
Douglass maintains his stylistic placidity even when his
narrative is approaching his severest experience.
According to Stepto, Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, thanks to this ability of Douglass to give
autonomy to his narrative, deserves the name autobiography,
rather than slave narrative.
Hurston as a participant-observer tries to do in the
realm of ethnography as a narrative on collective
experiences what Douglass does in his slave narrative or
autobiography as a narrative on individual experiences. In
this respect Hurston's ethnographies are nothing but "an
autobiography of the tribe" (Herskovits 89). Like Douglass,
she does not rely on white adjuvants for the verification
of the folkloric materials she has collected; rather, as
can be seen in Boas's preface to Mules and Men quoted
above, it is to the Afro-American ethnographer that white
anthropologists owed the verification of their research.
Though Hurston was highly evaluated as a native
informant, it is not only the author's position as an
insider that gave persuasive power to her ethnographical
writings. Hurston tries to provide substantiation for a
folkloric material she has collected by setting it in the
correlation with other materials and the people who enjoy
them. In Mules and Men, Hurston attempts "to indicate a
context for each tale and to hold together the desperate
experience" (Hemenway 175). She writes in a letter that,
in the book she is to publish, she tries to present "folk
tales with background so that they are in atmosphere and
not just stuck out into cold space" (June 15, 1932. qtd.
in Hemenway 163). To take a simple example, Robert
Williams' tale about a father who has his daughter write
his letter is introduced as another example of a man with
a daughter after B. Moseley's tale about a father whose
daughter is courted by three men, and it awakes Henry
"Nigger" Byrds' association of another tale about a letter
(39-41). To convince the readers that she could seize the
inside correlation between their cultural elements and
give her folkloric materials such an autobiographical
autonomy as Douglass attained, Hurston needed "to
establish credibility . . . as one who is able to distance
herself from African-American culture" as an observer
(Hernández 253).
It is in her childhood long before acquiring "the
spy-glass of Anthropology" that Hurston's personality
began to assume the dual role as a participant-observer.
According to her autobiography, Dust Track on a Road,
Hurston even as a child was fascinated by southern folk
idiom. She "really loved to hear . . . the menfolks
holding a 'lying' session" and "began to make up stories"
herself (47, 52). She, on the other hand, looked at common
sense in the community with a cool, realistic eye as an
outside observer:
Grown people know that they do not always know the why of
things,and even if they think they know, they do not know
where and howthey got the proof. Hence the irritation they
show when children keepon demanding to know if a thing is
so and how the grown folks got theproof of it. It is
troublesome because it is disturbing to the pigeonholeway
of life. It is upsetting because until the elders are
pushed for ananswer,they have never looked to see if it
was so, nor how they came by what passes for proof to
acceptances of certain things as true (25).
Whether or not we should accept everything in this
autobiography which Maya Angelou regards as "offer(ing)
enough confusions, contusions and contradictions to
confound the most sympathetic researcher" (ⅸ), at least,
this passage suggests that Hurston has intention of
defining herself as a born outsider. As Claude LeviStrauss notes in Tristes Tropiques, an anthropologist
"acquires a kind of chronic rootlessness; eventually, he
comes to feel at home nowhere" and "can discover it in
oneself, even though one may have been taught nothing
about it " (55).
Her ambivalent feeling towards vagrancy also gives a
good account of Hurston's complex position as a
participant-observer. According to Dust Track on a Road,
Hurston had a deep attachment to wandering since her
childhood. "I always wanted to go," Hurston writes, "I
would wander off in the woods all alone, following inside
urge to go places" (22). For this curious girl who tries
to "walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the
world was like," to wander is to see the world and to
acquire knowledge, that is, to gratify "the thirst for
experience" which "was always strong in . . . [her] soul"
(Bone 141). "My search for knowledge of things," she notes,
"took me into many strange places and adventure" (Dust
Track 129). In the chapters 8 and 9 of Dust Track, many
people who had an intellectual influence on Hurston are
depicted in terms of their experience of wandering.
4)
It
is obvious that experience of vagrancy is, for Hurston, an
essential step to the acquisition of knowledge.
The wanderers, however, could not release themselves
from the restricted confines of the community without
running a risk of being expelled from the community which
also gave protection to them. "(T)he search for knowledge
of things" was an obstacle to the struggle of the southern
Afro-American community to survive by avoiding the danger
of antagonizing white southerners, who justified their
racism by assuming the intellectual inferiority of the
black folks. "Everywhere she [Hurston] turned," Robert
Bone indicates, "she encountered restrictive boundaries
which designated certain areas as 'off limits' to a
Southern black girl. These limits were enforced no less by
the black than the white South" (142). When Hurston as a
child wanted a saddle horse to "take . . . me to the end
of the world" for Christmas, her father got enraged and
said: "A saddle horse! . . . It's a sin and a shame! Lemme
tell you something right now, my young lady; you ain't
white!" (29). Wandering was such a cursed action that the
wanderer might be ostracized and lose the place to return
forever. As a result, Hurston internalized the injunction
against vagrancy, getting used to regarding herself as a
cursed existence that cannot help wandering:
I had always thought I would be in some lone, arctic
wasteland withno one under the sound of my voice. . . . My
vagrancy had begun inreality. I knew that. There was an
end to my journey and it hadhappiness in it for me. It was
certain and sure. But the way! Itsagony was equally
certain. It was before me, and no one could spareme my
pilgrimage. The rod of complement was laid on my back. I
must go the way (Dust Track 83-4).
The ambivalence to vagrancy, or separation from the native
community is not peculiar to Hurston, but intrinsic to the
Afro-American people because in spite of the community's
injunction against vagrancy, mobility has had special
significance in the Afro-American history. Robert Stepto
remarks that there are two currents in the Afro-American
narrative: "an ascent narrative" and "an immersion
narrative." "(T)he hero or heroine of an ascent
narrative," Stepto points out, "must be willing to forsake
familial or communal postures in the narrative's most
oppressive social structure for a new posture in the least
oppressive environment," while that of "an immersion
narrative must be willing to forsake highly individualized
mobility in the narrative's least oppressive social
structure for a posture of relative stasis in the most
oppressive environment" (167). These two currents in the
Afro-American literature reflect the real-life ambivalence
to protection and restriction of the community. In Dust
Track on a Road, Hurston depicts, with quotations from
blues and work songs, the eager desire for wandering among
black track layers who could rarely use the railroad they
were constructing (131-133). In his autobiography, Here I
Stand, Paul Robeson5) explains the significance of
traveling for the Afro- American people:
From the very beginning of Negro history in our land,
Negroes haveasserted their right to freedom of movement.
Tens of thousands ofNegro slaves, like my own father,
traveled the Underground Railroad tofreedom in the North-not only to the northern part of the UnitedStates but
farther into Canada. Many of these freedom-seekers
wereconcerned with their people who were left behind in
bondage, and theyjoined with good white Americans, their
fellow-Abolitionists, inpromoting such travel. From the
days of chattel slavery until today,the concept of travel
has been separably linked in the mind of ourpeople with
the concept of freedom (66-7).
This is interesting in that the famous singer, who is one
of "the concert artists" ("Spirituals and Neo-spirituals"
80) Hurston criticizes as the promoters of sham
spirituals, , shared his attachment to mobility with his
critic.
In the beginning of this century, many Afro-American
intellectuals paid attention to the problem of dual
identity, whereas it was, for them, the problem of whether
they should go back to the cultural matrix of the South
for they had already gotten out of the rural community in
search of knowledge and comfortable life. In James Weldon
Johnson's novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man,
for instance, the Afro-American protagonist, who has grown
without doubting of his Caucasian lineage and internalized
the white middle-class sense of value, confronts the
problem of dual identity when a school teacher let him
know that he is "colored" (11). Such a dilemma among the
Afro-Americans is described best by W. E. B. DuBois in The
Soul of Black Folk:
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the
Teuton andMongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son,
born with a veil, andgifted with second-sight in this
American world, --a world which yieldhim no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself throughthe
revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,
thisdouble-consciousness, this sense of always looking at
one's selfthrough the eyes of others, of measuring one's
soul by the tape of aworld that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One never feels histwoness, --an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
twounreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
body, whosedogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder (45).
What the passage makes clear is that many Afro-Americans
were in so strained a condition that they would "burst
apart" as Franz Fanon confesses he did in Black Skin,
White Masks(109). "In the Weltanshauung of a colonized
people," Fanon argues, "there is an impurity, a flaw that
outlaws any ontological explanation" (109-10). For black
intellectuals including DuBois and Fanon, "the doubleconsciousness" was a kind of pathology which should be
cured as soon as possible.
In the pursuit of unified, sound consciousness, many
Afro-Americans wavered between a supposedly African
viewpoint and a supposedly white one. Some tended toward
black nationalism to realize their black identity as a
whole, not as "relative stasis," while others tried to
eliminate African elements to live as a white man who is
"extremely brown" (Fanon 55). Black nationalism "found
expression during the nineteenth century in the Negrosponsored emigration as well as in Negroes' response
(though limited) to the emigration scheme of the American
Colonization Society" (Essien-Udom 32). American
Colonization Society founded in 1816 was no more than a
hypocritical attempt of racists "to remove
systematically . . . all the free colored people in the
United States" (Essien-Udom 33), whereas in 1850s some of
Afro-American leaders including James Theodore Holly,
Henry Highland Garnet, James M. Whitfield, and Martin R.
Delany made plans for emigration of their people in order
to establish a black nation. In the era of aggravated
opposition between the North and the South before the
Civil War, expectation for the abolition of slavery and
the establishment of integrated society decreased this
separatist tendency, which manifested itself in the
Garveyism from 1910s to 1920s.
On the other hand, most middle-class Afro-Americans
wished to be accepted as equal to a white citizen and
tried to sever relations with things which suggested their
African lineage. As Charles S. Johnson points out, they
thought they should "rule out the Sorrow Songs as the
product of ignorant slaves, taboo dialect as incorrect
English, and the priceless folklore as the uncultured
expression of illiterate" (297). This tendency to
bleaching among black bourgeois is briefly delineated by
LeRoi Jones in Blues People:
The African gods were thrown into disrepute first, and
that was easysince they were banned by the whites anyway.
As always, the massesof black men adapted, rather than
completely assimilated; appropriated, rather than traded,
one god or one culture for another. . . . It was growing
black middle class who believed that the best way
tosurvive in America would be to disappear completely,
leaving no traceat all that there had never been an Africa,
or a slavery, or even, finally, a black man. This was the
only way, they thought, to be citizens (124).
Both nationalists and assimilationists tried to neglect
one of the two viewpoints, "projecting onto the world an
antinomy that coexist with him" (Fanon 8). The color line
segregating the two viewpoints existed in reality, of
course, but nationalists and assimilationists thought that
it did not exist in the inside of their mind. They tried
to overcome the pathology of "double- consciousness" by
repressing part of their consciousness and taking one side
of the segregated world.
Their consciousness itself, however, rejected such
naive solutions. As for the black nationalists, they were
not Africans any longer. They were Americans who happened
to be descended from Africa. Emigration would have been to
give up the right to live in their homeland where they
were born and whose civilization they contributed their
labor and intelligence to. Henry Highland Garnet as a
black emigrationist who "suggested Jamaica as a good
emigration spot" (Low and Clift 282) agreed with his
adversaries including Frederick Douglass about their
patriotism towards their country when he said, "it
[America] is the home of the colored man, and it is my
home." (Stuckey 181). Emigration to Africa or West Indies
"could only mean defeat or escape from oppression: in all
of manifestations, it was fundamentally a negative
response to repressive condition at home" (Low and Clift
284). The fact that, during the Civil War, main promoters
of emigration were eagerly engaged in recruitment of a
famous black corps, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers
provides a positive evidence of this.
Marcus Garvey inherited the black nationalism in a
more flamboyant manner. Garvey came to the United States
from Jamaica in 1916 and acted in the belief that "the
black people should have a country of their own where they
should be given the fullest opportunity to develop
politically, socially, industrially" (Garvey 132).
Garvey's strategy, however, exposes an inherent
contradiction. While he aimed at the establishment of a
black nation separated from white America, to raise funds
for it he needed his economical success in the United
States. In 1920s, the proto-facist belief that "different
race types . . . were suited to different types of
civilization" and "only Northern Europeans . . . have the
proper racial characteristics for assimilation to 'the
American way of life'" (Hutchinson 65) was widespread
among Anglo-Saxon people in the United States who were
repelled by increasing emigrants. Garvey's idea of a
nation for Africans corresponded to this faith in
different civilizations according to different races which
would have restricted his economical activities in the
American civilization. In the end, Garvey's separatist
attempt suffered an economical setback due to the
bankruptcy of Black Star Line, a steamship company set up
by him before having the extensive backing of other AfroAmerican leaders.
Those who tried to deracialize themselves, on the
other hand, became aware that to act like white people did
not qualify them as a full citizen and found themselves
falling into a trap of double-binding. Fanon gives an
analysis of the trap in Black Skin, White Masks. Negative
images given to their complexion urges African descendants
in the colonized world to bleach themselves. For them,
"there is only one way out," Fanon argues, "and it leads
into the white world" (51). Nevertheless, when they acts
like whites, they are found guilty of conceit because "the
black man is supposed to be a good nigger," that is, "to
fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison
him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance
for which he is not responsible" (Fanon 35). As Rap H.
Brown indicates, the message of "white america" has been
always: "Think white or I'll kill you. / And if you think
too white, I'll kill you" (3). The closer ambitious AfroAmericans get to the white society, the more clearly they
realizes that they can not be white.
DuBois's prescription is not so simple as these
naive solutions were. He acknowledges that the AfroAmerican cannot abandon the "African" viewpoint nor the
"American" one. After the passage quoted above, he
continues:
The history of the American Negro is the history of this
strife, --thislonging to attain self-conscious manhood, to
merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this
merging he wishes neither of the olderselves to be lost.
He would not Africanize America, for America has too much
to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his
Negrosoul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows
that Negro bloodhas a message for the world. He simply
wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and
an American, without being crusted andspit upon by his
fellows, without having the doors of Opportunityclosed
roughly in his face (The Soul of Black Folk 45-6).
DuBois's argument is that it is not the abandonment nor
suppression of one part of double-consciousness, but the
fusion of "double self" that makes it possible to attain
sound "self-conscious manhood." The problem which
confronts him is how to make "a better and truer self"
from two selves which seem to be incompatible with each
other.
The attainment of a unified self, however, is not so
easy as it sounds. DuBois himself remarks later in "Whiter
Now and Why" that "to lay down a line of thought and
action which will accomplish two things . . . is not easy"
(151). The protagonist of Weldon Johnson's The
Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, for example,
unconsciously tries to unify black and white culture by
"turning classic music into ragtime" and, after a long
interval of elegant life with his patron in Europe, he
makes up his mind to take "ragtime music and [make] it
classic" (103). This determination makes him "go back into
the very heart of the South," to look for "not only modern
ragtime, but also the old slave songs--materials which no
one had yet touched" (104). Nonetheless, when he witnesses
a lynching there and feels "(s)hame that . . . [he]
belong[s] to a race that could be so dealt with" (137), he
gives up his Afro-American identity and decides to live,
with his light complexion, as a white man. In spite of his
first ambition, he cannot find a way out in anything but
"bleach[ing] his Negro soul."
Weldon Johnson, who served as field secretary of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
was not similar to the protagonist of his novel while "by
issuing it anonymously Johnson hoped that it [the novel]
would be read as a true story" (Kinnamon 172), but the
methodology of the young musician is identical with that
of promoters of neo-spirituals including Johnson and Alain
Locke as far as the use of Afro-American materials are
concerned. When Johnson and Locke emphasized the
significance of subject matter peculiar to the AfroAmerican people, they did it with the proviso that the
materials should be presented in such a sophisticated way
that they would be accepted by the white establishment.
It is debatable, however, whether the adoption of the
"sophisticated" style is not a mere assimilation into
Europeanism.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, Hurston was
critical of such an arbitrary adaptation of the AfroAmerican heritage that Locke and Johnson made. For Hurston,
what enables the culture to preserve its originality is
not the thematic peculiarity since "(i)t is obvious that
to get back to original source is much difficult for any
group to claim very much as a certainty" ("Characteristics
of Negro Expression" 58). The black folk culture does not
reject any kind of materials if they were employable in
its activities as we have already seen in the example of a
hostess who adorned her room grotesquely. The essence of
the culture, for Hurston, lies in the way how the
materials should be used, which Johnson and Locke altered
without hesitation.
From Hurston's point of view, to use
the supposedly Afro-American materials in a bleached
manner is nothing but the absorption of African
consciousness into (white middle-class) American
consciousness, and it is no wonder that the protagonist of
Johnson's novel arrives at the conclusion that he should
pass the color line.
Hurston, unlike her contemporaries, did not regard
the double-consciousness as a pathology. She did not
suppress part of her consciousness, or try to sublimate
her double-conscious self into a sound, unified one. In
her essay, "How it feels to be a Colored Me," Hurston
writes: "I have no separate feeling about being an
American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of
the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries" (155).
She thinks that plural viewpoints can coexist in her
consciousness, as can be seen in the following quotation
from the same essay:
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany
propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with
other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents,
and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless
and worthless. A first water diamond, an empty spool, bits
of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long
since crumbledaway, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved
for a road that never wasand never will be, a nail bent
under the weight of things too heavy forany bag. On the
ground before you is the jumble it held--so much likethe
jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might
bedumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without
altering thecontent of any greatly. A bit of colored glass
more or less would notmatter. Perhaps that is how the
Great Stuffer of Bags filled them inthe first place--who
knows? (154).
For Hurston, consciousness is something capacious like a
bag, in which plural viewpoints can be interactively
coexistent. The owner can empty the bag and pick up the
contents one by one, so she can change her viewpoints to
suit the situation without being self-deceptive. She is
sometimes a first water diamond, sometimes an empty spool,
sometimes bits of broken glass, sometimes lengths of
string, sometimes a key to a door, sometimes a rusty
knife-blade, and sometimes old shoes while she always
remains all of them.
The difficulty in deciding Hurston's identity as a
partcipant-observer derives from this pluralism of her
consciousness. She can be sometimes an outside observer
and sometimes an inside participant if she needs to be,
but she is still both of them. In the introduction of
Mules and Men, she delineates folklore of her native
community not as unchangeable skin, but as a "chemise"
which she can change however tightly it is fitting to her.
Actually, Hurston changes her participant clothes to
observant ones without no difficulty whatsoever as we have
already seen. Furthermore, she finds her ethnical identity
in the ability to cross the borders which are supposed to
be between plural viewpoints. Let us consider another
passage from "How it feels to be a Colored Me." When she
listens to jazz orchestra with her white friend in the
"New World Cabaret," Hurston finds that the performance
calls forth a response in her breast utterly different
from her friend :
This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs
and attacksthe tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it,
clawing it until breaksthrough to the jungle beyond. I
follow those heathen--follow themexultingly. I dance
wildly inside myself: I yell within, I whoop; I shakemy
assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark
yeeeeooww! I amin the jungle and living in the jungle way.
My face is painted red andyellow and my body is painted
blue. My pulse is throbbing like a wardrum. I want to
slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, Ido
not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra
wipe theirlips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly
to the veneer we callcivilization with the last tone and
find the white friend sittingmotionless in his seat,
smoking calmly. (154).
This might appear just to "[flirt] racist stereotypes of
black people as only partially civilized savages whose
veneer of civilization slips away at times of stress"
(Hemenway 75), but careful reading leads us to a different
conclusion. Hurston's intention is far from perpetuating
the stereotype.
"(T)he colors that come in the passage
are," Barbara Johnson points out in "Threshold of
Difference," "skin paint, not skin complexion: red, yellow,
and purple. . . . The move into the jungle is a move into
mask; the return to civilization is a return to veneer.
Either way, what is at stake is an artificial, ornamental
surface" (322). Unlike her white friend, Hurston can put
off the mask of the American civilization and paint
herself to play a role of a "heathen," and vice versa. We
cannot decide whether Hurston is a savage "yelling within"
or a sophisticated lady having a pleasant chat with a
friend. She is both of them and she is something going
back and forth between them, someone who keeps on crossing.
Hurston finds her identity in her ability to cross, "to
assume and articulate the incompatible forces involved in
her own division" (Johnson, "Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice
in Their Eyes" 212), and she concludes that "(h)e is so
pale with his whiteness then I am so colored" ("How it
Feels to Be Colored Me" 154).
Hurston's spiritual pluralism will acquire more
complex aspect if we take it into consideration that
Hurston was an Afro-American woman. To be an Afro-American
woman does not only mean to be an Afro-American and a
woman, but also means to be neither a white nor a man.
Afro-American women have not unconditionally endorsed the
Afro-American liberation nor the woman's rights movement.
They keenly realized the necessity of these reformist
movements and were often willing to play an active role in
them, but male-dominant communities of Afro-Americans
often prevented the self- realization of their female
members while white women often denied Afro-Americans the
right they claimed themselves. Anna Julia Cooper remarks
in A Voice from the South published so early as 1892: "The
Colored Women of today occupies, one may say, a unique
position in this country. . . . She is confronted by both
a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an
unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both" (134). It
will be clear from this passage that Afro-American women
recognized from the very early stage that they are dually
marginalized.
Most of white women who fought against patriarchy
showed little interest in the predicament of AfroAmericans. There were those who schemed the solidarity of
black and white women like Susan B. Anthony, a founder of
National American Women's Suffrage Association, but
"(d)iscrimination against Afro-American women reformers
was," Rosalyn Terborg-Penn points out, "rule rather than
the exception within the woman's rights movement"
("Discrimination Against Afro-American Women" 17). Even
Anthony often compromised with southern white female
racists. In 1918, the Jones Amendment, which was the
result of alteration made on the first draft worked out by
Anthony, was presented to enfranchise women. Under the
altered Amendment, the enforcement clause reads: "That the
several status shall have the authority to enforce this
article by necessary legislation, but if any state shall
enforce or enact any law in conflict therewith then
Congress shall not be excluded from enacting appropriate
legislation to enforce it" (Giddings 160). Practically,
this means disfranchisement of Afro-Americans in the
southern states. Carrie Chapman Catt, who was to be a
chairman of the National American Woman's Suffrage
Association, went as far as to say, "The danger lies in
the votes possessed by the males in the slums of the
cities, and ignorant foreign vote." The solution was,
according to Catt, to "cut off the vote of the slums and
[give] it to women" (Giddings 124). If they did not have
such an outspoken attitude of racism, "(w)hite women-fictional or actual, writers or subjects--rarely perceive
or acknowledge . . . the humanity of their black sisters.
Most of these white women in life and literature see black
women as a color, as servants, as children, as adjuncts,
as sexual competition, as dark sides of their own sexual
selves--as Black Other" (Gwin 5).
The sexism in Afro-American communities, on the other
hand, often required Afro-American women to refrain from
public affairs in spite of their contribution to the
liberation of their race. As Terborg-Penn indicates in
"Black Male Perspectives on the Nineteen-Century Woman,"
many Afro-American male leaders served the woman suffrage
movement and insisted that they should abandon sexism in
the struggle against racism, but this does not mean that
Afro-American men were free from male chauvinistic ideas.
For example, there is no doubt that the black male leaders,
who attended a convention in 1855, regarded women as their
property when they adopted the declaration that "we have
been denied the ownership of our bodies, our wives, home,
children and the products of our own labor" (Bell 33).
Martin R. Delany "was opposed to black women who worked
when their husbands could provide for them" (Harley 12).
In Condition, Elevation, Emigration of the Colored People
of the United States, Delany argues:
As an evidence of the deep degradation of our race, in the
U.S. . . .there are those among us, . . . whose husbands
are industrious, ableand willing to support them, who
voluntarily leave home and becomechamber-maids, and
stewardesses, . . . in all probability, to enablethem to
obtain more fine or costly articles of dress or furniture
(199).
Janie Crawford, the protagonist of Their Eyes
Were Watching God, is prohibited from speaking publicly by
her husband, and many Afro-American women had similar
experiences. Jarena Lee, the first female preacher of the
First African Methodist Episcopal Church founded by
Richard Allen, describes in Religious Experience and
Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of her Call
to Preach the Gospel, how often she was denied the use of
the church buildings by "those who are determined not to
believe that it is right for a woman to preach" (12). When
Lee asked for permission to preach the gospel in his
church, for example, Richard Allen replied that "as to
women preaching, . . .our Discipline knew nothing at all
about it--that it did not call for women preachers" (11).
Many Afro-American men, like Truman Held in Alice Walker's
novel Meridian, "did not want a general [like Harriet
Tubman] beside him" and "did not want a woman who tried,
however encumbered by guilts and fears and remorse, to
claim her own lifej" (106-7).
Afro-American women resisted the sexism of male
members of their race. A famous abolitionist Sojourner
Truth, in her poem "Ain't I a Woman" published in 1855,
makes a critical remark on a man who says "a woman can't
have as much right as a man / cause Christ wasn't a
woman," by raising a question "(w)here did your Christ
come from? / From God and a woman!" (25). Francis E. W.
Harper's poem "Double Standard" is biting sarcasm to an
Afro-American man who thinks the right of Afro-Americans
to be that of the male member of the race:
Can you blame me if I've learned to think
Your hate of vice a sham,
When you so coldly crushed me down,
And then excused the man? (27)There were few women,
however, who, like Truth and Harper, had an occasion to
acquire the language to represent their female experience.
Most of them were forced to use the language penetrated by
male-chauvinistic ideas. Nevertheless, their resistance
has been offered in other way than linguistic or
representational one. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, as
we shall see later in the next chapter, Hurston, by
depicting the life of Janie Crawford, shows how the AfroAmerican women resisted the male-dominant society, in
which their possibility of representation is restricted.
These double-binding circumstances, in which they
could not identify themselves with either of white women
and Afro-American men, led Afro-American women to realize
that consciousness would not be a monolithic substance,
but a capacious one like a bag including variety of things.
Even if Afro-American male-dominant society tried to
confine their sisters in a domestic role to serve their
husbands and to give a home training to their children,
and white women sought to suspend the claim of their black
sisters on behalf of "all the women," and no matter how
contradictory the interest of Afro-Americans and that of
women appears, Afro-American women, sometimes as women and
sometimes as Afro-Americans, raised their voice against
their male or white counterparts. As a result, they
correlated one viewpoint with another and sought their
identity in the correlation. "What is at once
characteristic and suggestive about black women's writings
is," Mae Gwendolyn Henderson points out, "its
interlocutory, or dialogic, character, reflecting not only
a relationship with the 'other(s),' but an internal
dialogue with the plural aspects of self that constitute
the matrix of black female subjectivity" (17-8).
One can
cite many examples which seem to support this. In her poem
"Be Nobody's Darling," Alice Walker writes, "Take the
contradictions / Of your life / And wrap around / You like
a shawl," (193). Audre Lorde likens herself to carbon,
which can be either a "tota(ly) black" coal or a diamond
"coloured by who pays what for speaking" (6). Toni
Morrison says in the interview by Claudia Tate:
I think women probably do write out of a different place.
There is some difference in the ways they approach conflict,
dominion, and power. . . . But I do think black women write
differently from white women. . . .Aggression is not as
new to black women as it is to white women. Black women
seem able to combine the nest and adventure. Theydon't see
conflicts in certain areas as do white women (Tate 122).
Hurston and her writings offer a precedent to these AfroAmerican women when they try to express their multiplicate
self.6)
We are now in a position to say that the thinking of
Zora Neale Hurston is penetrated by the affirmation of
plural viewpoints in one's consciousness, which was deeply
connected with the historical background of Afro-Americans,
particularly Afro-American women. In this sense, Hurston's
novels, which appear to be non-political, pose the
political problem of how Afro-American, particularly AfroAmerican women, should identify themselves in the society
in which they are repressed by a trap of double-binding.
That is why many Afro-American women chose Janie Crawford
as their model in 1970s when they turned their eyes to
their double-binding circumstances. In the next chapter,
we will examine closely what kind of model Their Eyes Were
Watching God offers.
Chapter Ⅲ: THE DIVIDED SELF OF JANIE CRAWFORD
In the previous chapter, we have seen that Hurston's
identity is deeply connected with the affirmation of
plural viewpoints in one's consciousness, which has
developed in the double-binding circumstances of AfroAmericans, particularly Afro-American women. If we read
Their Eyes Were Watching God in this context, we can
regard it as a story in which the protagonist Janie
Crawford, through three marriages, becomes aware of plural
viewpoints in her consciousness, learns to relate them
with one another and tries to control them as she likes.
In this chapter, we will examine how the author presents
the divided self of Janie, and this examination will offer
the key to a clear understanding of Janie's acquisition of
voice.
When her marriage with her second husband Joe
"Jody" Starks turns out to be a blunder, Janie faces up to
her split personality :
She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never
let Jodyknow about. Things packed up and put away in parts
of her heartwhere he could never find them. She was saving
up feelings for someman she had never seen. She had an
inside and an outside now andsuddenly she knew how not to
mix them (68).
This is the first time that Janie acknowledges to herself
that her self is divided. To that point, while the author
shows that there has been the division within her mind,
Janie has been unaware of it owing to her grandmother's
explanation that is supposed to bring parts of her self
into reconciliation for the time being.
One part of Janie's personality is symbolized in the
image of a pear tree and a bee. She is given some
revelation when she, lying under a pear tree, sees a bee
enter into a flower of the tree:
She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a
bloom; thethousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love
embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to
tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with
delight. So this was marriage! She had beensummoned to
behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain
remorselesssweet that left her limp and languid (10-11).
As the word "marriage" implies, the pear tree visited by
the bee is a symbol of sexual maturity. Actually,
immediately after this awakening, Janie kisses a young man
who "in her former blindness she had known . . . as
shiftless Johnny Taylor, tall and lean" (11). Nonetheless,
the image signifies more than love affairs as Janie
acquires experience in her life, for Janie's heart is
filled with determination that "she was going to have
flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything" (31)
when she leaves her first husband Logan Killicks whom she
has been forced to marry by her grandmother. Janie's wish
is to have such a relationship with everything she will
meet as one between the pear tree and the pollinating bee
and the image of the pollination shifts its focal point
from a relationship with a lover to more general, "organic
union with another" (Wall 89).
Another part of Janie's self derives from what her
grandmother "Nanny" has fostered in white male-dominant
society of the antebellum south. When she marries Janie to
a middle-aged farmer Logan Killicks, Nanny hopes that her
granddaughter gets "lawful husband same as Mis' Washburn
or somebody else" (21) and becomes a lady "everybody got
tuh tip dey hat tuh . . . and call . . . Mis' Killicks"
(22). In a sense, she accepts that her granddaughter
should live as subsidiary existence called by the name of
somebody else and in the traditional confines of "True
Womanhood" (Foster 52) which feminists have tried to fend
off. As Michael Awkward indicates, Nanny may commit a
"serious error that has disastrous results" (24) by
compelling her granddaughter to embrace a role
traditionally allotted to women. If so, however, we should
also take it into consideration that she has survived the
slavery in which Afro-American women have suffered from
the sexism in a way quite different from their white
counterpart.
The white male-dominant society demanded its female
members to remain domestic, chaste, and modest while it
did not require Afro-American women to do so for the
reason that they were not women. An Afro-American woman
was, like Mrs. Hill in Alice Walker's Meridian, regarded
by white America as "a female," not a "lady, not even
woman, since these words conjured up something larger than
sex" (104). This does not mean, of course, she was free
from the sexism. White men exploited this woman-like thing
to satisfy their sexual desire and economical needs.
"(T)he patriarchy of the old south," as Minrose C. Gwin
puts it, "seems to have firmly assisted its ladies up onto
the pedestal, that emblem of chastity and powerlessness,
just as surely as it forced black women into the dark
corners of the Big House to be used as vessels of sexual
pleasure or to breed new property" (4). Thus, in the
slavery, Afro- American women were forced to sacrifice
their family for the master, to have their chastity
despoiled by the master, and to reproduce property of the
master.
It is natural that Nanny, who bore Janie's mother as
a result of rape by her white master and whose daughter
was also raped by a school teacher, wishes her
granddaughter, like white women, should be recognized as
an "emblem of chastity and powerlessness."
When she says
about Logan Killicks, "Ah know dat grassgut, liver-lipted
nigger ain't done took and beat mah baby already!"
(Italics added, 21), the word "already" suggests, as
Michael Awkward points out, she knows "that such an abuse
is inevitable in marriage" (23), but Nanny needs to employ
anything useful to survive the time in which "(d)e nigger
woman is de mule uh de world" (14). While Afro-American
women have often been denied by their male counterpart the
rights to "preach a great sermon about colored women" (15)
as Jarena Lee experienced in her missionary work and Janie
does later in the novel, a far more urgent problem for
women born in servitude was how to protect themselves and
their children from the arbitrary exploitation of their
masters. The bitter experience of the slavery has taught
Nanny to receive financial aid and patronizing protection
that in male- chauvinistic communities a respectable man
is supposed to give a "true woman."
Nanny's idea of marriage as a "protection" (14)
strikes Janie as incongruous in the beginning, but, in the
course of time, she internalizes it in a simplistic manner.
At first, Janie feels there is a gap between the image of
the pollination and Logan Killicks whose vision "was
desecrating the pear tree" (13). In order to justify the
marriage without love, Janie jumps at Nanny's remark that
"she would love Logan after they were married" (20). Nanny
knows, however, her statement about love is fabrication
she has contrived to persuade her granddaughter to marry
the middle-aged farmer. The word "love" is used by Nanny
as an institutional lie as it is in the wedding ceremony
of a middle-aged couple delineated by Hurston in Tell My
Horse. They do their wedding after they have lived
together and gotten enough money. "Surely there could be
no mystery and glamor left for them to find in each
other," while "the couple and all the district were making
believe that there was" (14-5).
Similarly, Nanny knows
that Janie will not find love in her marriage with
Killicks, but she making believe there will be. It is not
long, however, before Janie realizes she cannot love
Killicks nor get "things sweet wid mah marriage lak when
you sit under a pear tree" (23). Nanny's fantasy of love
does not obliterate her sense of incongruity.
After Nanny's death, Janie makes up her mind to
leave her first husband, but it is not because she
perceives that the restrictive "protection" of men
deprives women of their voice. Janie and Killicks come to
a crucial rupture when Killicks abandons a patronizing
attitude to Janie by demanding her to help his farm work.
In addition, the man Janie chooses as a partner of her new
life is Joe "Jody" Starks who declares that he will "be de
one tuh show" her "what it was to be treated lak a lady"
(28). Janie seems to believe this "assertive, selfconfident striver" (Hemenway 232) will offer her "change
and chance" (28) which Nanny has wished her granddaughter
to obtain under the guardianship of the rich farmer. At
this point, Janie is not a powerful, articulate, and selfreliant woman; rather, she easily accepts the idea of
female powerlessness and male guardianship.
Her second marriage, however, far from offering
Janie "change and chance," results in restricting her
possibility and mobility. Jody Starks, as he has promised,
succeeds to give Janie the social and economical pedestal
suitable to a respectable lady. As soon as he arrives with
Janie in Eatonville, the town made "all outa colored
folks" (27), he buys 200 acres of land, sets up a store,
secures a post office, and campaigns for mayor. Jody is
recognized as an extraordinary person with knowledge and
economical power which nobody but white men has been
permitted to gain. Amos Hicks expresses open-mouthed
astonishment of the townsmen at what Jody is carrying out
when he says, "Y'all let dat stray darkey tell y'all any
ole lie! Uh colored man sittin' up in uh post office!"
(36). Jody secures his social status through consciously
differentiating himself from other inhabitants of the town.
To preserve his authority as an extraordinary man, Jody
always takes a detached attitude to the community.
He
never participates in the conversation on the porch of his
store while "he sat and laughed at it" (51) and builds his
new house for which "(t)he rest of the town looked like
servants quarters surrounding 'the big house'" (44). The
town, as he has expected, "bowed down to him . . . because
he was all of them [his positions and possessions], and
then again he was all of these things because the town
bowed down" (47).
His lust for power not only leads Jody to maintain
an aloofness, but also severs Janie from the community.
Janie "couldn't get but so close to most of them in
spirit" since "(s)he slept with authority and so she was
part of it in the town mind" (44). Moreover, Jody tries to
segregate his wife from other inhabitants of the town by
all means necessary. At the meeting held for giving a
welcome to the new mayor and his wife, for example, Jody
refuses a request of the assembled people to let them
"listen tuh uh few words uh encouragement from Mrs. Mayor
Starks," saying, "Ah never married her for nothin' lak dat.
She's uh woman and her place is in de home" (40-1). He
also dissuades Janie from taking an interest in the
conversations on the porch and thinking up good stories
herself, saying that he "can't see what uh woman uh yo'
stability would want tuh be treasurin' all dat gum-grease
from folks dat don't even own de house dey sleep in" (501). He doesn't even permit Janie to attend the funeral of
a mule the town has made a pet of (56). Janie's isolation
helps Jody to show off his privileged capability to
maintain an exceptional woman who "ain't been brought up
on no teppentine still, and no saw-mill camp" (37). Jody
compels his wife to serve as an emblem of his authority in
return for "a high chair" he has built "for her to sit in"
(58). Janie must be "there in the store for him to look at,
not those others" (52) because to give up the exclusive
privilege of Janie would besmirch Jody's absolute
authority she emblematizes.
Jody's patriarchal protection and restriction bring
to the foreground again the gap between the real-life
marriage and the image of the pollination, since the
latter has come to imply the communication with others in
general. The detached attitude of an observer Janie is
compelled to take brings her into final isolation from
positive participants in unrepresentational communication,
of which Eatonville, as we have already seen, is a
repository. Janie begins to realize that it is the
patriarchal idea of male guardianship itself that prevents
her from "organic union with another" and defies male
chauvinism of Jody and other male persons in the town.
When Jody says, "Somebody got to think for women and
chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don't think
none theirselves," Janie retorts him that she "knows uh
few things, womenfolks thinks sometimes theirselves" (67).
The chauvinistic conversation Joe Lindsey and Jim Stone
have about Tonny Robbins who "won't never hit" his wife
leads Janie to say:
Somethings God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and
talks Hisinside business. He told me how surprised He was
'bout y'all turningout so smart after Him makin' yuh
different; and how surprised y'all isgoin' tuh be if you
ever find out you don't know half as you tink youdo. It's
so easy to make yo'self out God Almighty when you ain't
gotnothin' tuh strain against but women and chickens (71).
In the end, Janie's revolt results in driving her husband
into a corner. To Jody's ridicule on her "rump hangin'
nearly to . . . [her] knees" (74), Janie returns a biting
remark on the physical decline of Jody himself: "When you
pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life."
(75). Insulted by his own wife in public, Jody loses
allegiance of the townspeople and self-confidence in his
ability to "[cow] the town" (44), and soon dies in a
sickbed. Janie, according to Henry Louis Gate Jr., "kills
her husband rhetorically" (290).
In spite of the occasional causticity of her words,
however, Janie often seems to be too cautious of being
articulate. After the repeated quarrels with Jody, Janie
"pressed her teeth together and learned to hush" (67), and
"she received all things with the solidness of the earth
which soaks up urine and perfume with the same
indifference" (73). Even after Jody's death leads Janie to
take off the kerchief she has been forced to wear, Janie,
against the readers' expectation of her liberation from
the patronizing influence of her former husband, goes back
to the prudent silence again. Janie tacitly permits the
townspeople to regard her as "Mrs. Mayor Starks" (105) and
make exception of her as if "she might have been the
Empress of Japan" (88). For some reason, she dares not
reveal her inside to enter into a candid relationship with
the townspeople though "she had wanted to walk where
people could see her and gleam it [a jewel down inside
herself] around" (85-6).
There are two reasons for Janie's prudence, One is
the double-binding circumstances the male-dominant
community imposes on her. On the one hand, the community
of Eatonville introduces to Janie the people she could
have an organic relationship with; on the other, it
supports the patriarchy, which assumes Mrs. Mayor Starks
to be a detached exception. If she disobeys the tacit will
of her deceased husband that she should remain his
exclusive possession, her disregard would be thought
defiance to the patriarchal principles of the town.
Another is that, as Mary Helen Washington points out in
Invented Lives, the linguistic activities are deeply
connected with male- chauvinistic ideas in the maledominant society, of which Afro-American communities are
not an exception:
When the voice of the black oral tradition is summoned in
Their Eyes,it is not used to represent the collective
black community, but toinvoke and valorize the voice of
black male community. . . . [O]ur attentiveness to the
possibility that women are excludedcategorically from the
language of the dominant discourse should helpus to be
aware of the inadequacy of language, its ability to
representfemale experience, its tendency not only to
silence women but to makewomen complicitous in that
silence. (238).
In order not to be removed from "the dominant discourse,"
Janie is required to be "complicitous in . . . [women's]
silence," and speak in the language penetrated with the
male chauvinism.
It is a seasonal worker and gambler Virgible "Tea
Cake" Woods who helps Janie to relieve herself from the
isolated stasis. Tea Cake shows her how to enjoy
unrepresentational communication through a shared
experience of checker game he encourages Janie to play
with him. The townspeople accept her as a qualified
participant in their cultural activities when they are
"surprised at Janie playing checkers but they [like] it"
(97). In addition, Janie claims that Tea Cake always let
her participate in experiences he shares with others
however vulgar they are.
In Richmond, when Tea Cake comes
back to her after throwing the party with two hundred
dollars Janie has kept "inside her shirt" (112), Janie
reproaches him not for taking her money without her
permission, but for "go[ing] off from me and hav[ing] a
good time" and declares her will "tuh partake wid
everything" (119). After having moved to the plantation in
the Everglades, Tea Cake encourages Janie to "come git uh
job uh work out dere lak de rest uh de women" (127). Janie,
who "was already getting to be a special case on the muck"
and assumed to think "herself too good to work like the
rest uh the women" (127), comes to be recognized as a
sharer of the same experiences of farm work and qualified
to participate in unrepresentational communication among
the seasonal laborers there. This initiation enables Janie
to "listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she
wanted to" and "tell big stories herself from listening to
the rest" (128). Thus, she establishes "organic union with
another" with the help of Tea Cake as an initiator.
The human relationship in the community offers her
an alternative way to assert herself instead of permitting
Janie to represent her female experience. The portrayal of
Big Sweat, a woman Hurston delineates in Dust Track and
Mules and Men, as Cheryl A. Wall points out, "anticipates
the process of self-discovery Hurston's fictional heroines
undergo" (83). Big Sweat, whom Hurston "had friended with"
(Dust Track 136) during her research in Polk County, is
one of a few women who have cultivated a capacity to
participate in oral activities of the community, but she
doesn't tell "tales about women told from a female
perspective" (Wall 80). This self-assertive woman,
becoming to a participant in the culture based on
unrepresentational communication, shows self-respect, not
through saying what she wants to convey, but proving her
ability to fight out quarrels by "playing dozens" or
"specifying."
This "ability to back up words with actions
was a(n) . . . indicator of an independent self" (Wall 84),
for, you should not attack others rhetorically, as
Hurston's landlady puts it,"if you have no faith in your
personal courage and confidence in your arsenal" (Dust
Track 136).
Janie, like Big Sweat, challenges the patriarchy by
demonstrating that she is so self-reliant as to
participate in the cultural activities of the community.
Janie's rhetorical murder of Jody can be overlooked by the
townspeople just because she is in accordance with the
sexist terminology when she uses as a curse the words "de
change uh life," which usually mean a woman's menopause.
She knows the words will degrade Jody to a woman and
"[rob] him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that
all men cherish" (75). Janie emasculates her husband by
utilizing the chauvinistic logic of sexual hierarchy.
Janie, with the initiation of Tea Cake, begins to
demonstrate this ability to participate in the cultural
activities fully.
Tea Cake is, however, not different from Joe Starks
and other male characters in his unabashed sexism. Robert
Hemenway is wrong when he says "Tea Cake accepts Janie as
an equal" (233), for, as Michael Awkward points out, "in a
number of instances, he, too, exhibits traditionally
sexist behavior that undermines a reader's ability to
interpret his character in a wholly positive way" (36).
Tea Cake reveals his chauvinistic idea that women should
give themselves to the tyrannical protection of their
husbands when he says to Janie, "Ah no need no assistance
tuh help me feed mah woman. From now on, you gointuh eat
whutever mah money can buy yuh and wear de same. When Ah
ain't got nothin' you don't git nothin'" (122). When Mrs.
Turner brings her brother with the intention of having
Janie married to him, Tea Cake, out of jealousy, "slapped
her [Janie] around a bit to show he was boss" (Italic
added 140). In view of his statement after the slapping
that he loves Janie because she is a kind of wife who "is
wherever Ah wants tuh be" (141), it is clear that he
thinks Janie to be his possession, not to be an equal.
Tea Cake is not more equalitarian than Jody Starks.
If Tea Cake is a sexist, it appears strange that
Janie, who has been always sarcastic, at least, in her
mind, to the sexism of Jody and other male characters, is
so submissive to Tea Cake's violence that "the helpless
way she hung on him made men dream dreams" (140). Her
apparently obedient attitude drives us to the question
whether Janie really tells her own story, the question
that might smear the reputation of Their Eyes as a story
of the protagonist's acquisition of her own voice.
Actually, as I have mentioned before, Robert Stepto, at
the MLA convention in 1979, raised a question whether
Janie really gains her voice. In Invented Lives, Mary
Helen Washington, in spite of her initial resistance to
Stepto's criticism of Their Eyes, goes more deeply into
the matter of Janie's lack of voice. She calls into the
question the opinion of "(m)ost contemporary critics" that
"Janie is the articulate voice in the tradition, that the
novel celebrates a women [sic] coming to self-discovery
and self-discovery leads her ultimately to a meaningful
participation in black folk tradition," and maintains
Their Eyes is "the novel about a woman outside of the folk
community" (237).
Washington's argument is generally valid, but in
order to see clearly how Janie tries to assert herself in
the restricted circumstances of male-dominant society in
which Janie lives, we should listen to Alice Walker's
opinion. According to Washington, at the MLA convention,
Walker refuted Stepto saying that "woman did not have to
speak when men thought they should, that they would choose
when and where they wish to speak because while many women
had found their own voices, they knew when it was better
not to use it" ("Foreword" ⅶ). Janie thinks it better not
to use her voice in her married life with Tea Cake.
Neither the marriage with Tea Cake, who is a sexist
himself, nor the move to the Everglades with him releases
Janie from male chauvinism. Tea Cake, however, is
different from Janie's former husbands because his
chauvinism doesn't put any hindrance to Janie's "search of
people" (85), and this is the most important point to
Janie. When she resists the patriarchal restriction, she
does so insofar as she needs to release herself from it to
get organically connected with others, and the connection
itself is a means of resistance because she can prove her
autonomy by showing her versatility to participate in the
communal activities. The male-chauvinism of her third
husband doesn't prevent her extensive communication, while
her declared resistance to it may make her ostracized and
isolated again.
Janie's acquiescence to Tea Cake's sexism, however,
does not exhort the readers to "interpret his [Tea Cake's]
character in a wholly positive way." The consideration of
the chauvinistic nature of Tea Cake reveals the fragility
of their pastoral life on the Everglades, because, as long
as Tea Cake sticks to chauvinistic ideas, there always
remains a possibility that his checked possessiveness may
burst out and induce its harborer to pursue exclusive
possession of his wife as he does after a hurricane which
has attacked the Florida Peninsula. The calamity changes
the life of the two, not only because it turns the place
they live into "dis dirty, slouchy place" (160), but also
Tea Cake, bitten by a mad dog to protect his wife from it
during the hurricane, in hydrophobic insanity, falls into
a delusion that Janie will desert him with someone else.
Overwhelmed by jealousy and madness, Tea Cake tries to
kill her with a six shooter and, instead, is shot to death
by Janie in self-defense. The chauvinistic possessiveness
in Tea Cake, unhooped by the rabies insanity, bursts out
and obliges Janie to kill him.
The death of Tea Cake forces Janie to be confronted
with the patriarchy as an obstacle to her communication
with others. Janie's conduct is regarded as an open revolt
against male supremacy because she kills her husband who
has been so good to her that "(n)o nigger woman ain't
never been treated no better" (177). The townsmen,
misinterpreting Janie to leave her sick husband and take
"up with other man," thought that she avoids her duty to
reward for Tea Cake's kindness (177). Moreover, being
tried on a charge of murder and surrounded by a "strange
white man that was going to talk for her" and white women
who "cried and stood around her like a protecting wall"
(179), she becomes a special case again and loses means to
communicate with her former companions who have rushed to
the court in anger.
What concerns Robert Stepto and, later, Mary Helen
Washington in the argument about the lack of Janie's voice
is this courtroom scene, in which she "is called on not
only to preserve her own life and liberty but also make
the jury, as well as of us who hear her tale, understand
the meaning of her life" (Washington, Foreword ⅵ).
Strangely enough, as Washington points out, "in the
courtroom scene the story of Janie and Tea Cake is told
entirely in third person. . . . We do not hear Janie
speaking in her own voice" (Invented Lives 245).
Washington and Stepto regard the third-person narrative of
Janie's tale as an evidence that "Janie has not really won
her voice and self after all--that the author . . . cannot
see her way clear to giving Janie her voice outright"
(Stepto 166).
The estranged condition Janie again falls into,
however, may give another account of the persistent use of
the third person narrative in the courtroom scene, because
it enables the readers to experience vicariously her sense
of estrangement from the former companions who fail to
understand Janie. The indirectness of the narrative
expresses Janie's distance from the people who can no
longer accept her as a qualified participant even if they
can understand what her statement represents. Janie
realizes that the language is helpless here to convey
one's experience to others who don't undergo it. When she
returns to Eatonville, Janie says to her friend Pheoby:
" . . . It's uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there
tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else
can't tell yuh and show yuh" (183).
Janie, however, can no longer rely on the
unrepresentational communication, though she recognizes
that there is something that can not be represented. She
was thoroughly disappointed in "people" whom she has
searched for. In the beginning of the novel, Janie, who
comes back to Eatonville "from burying the dead" (1),
rejects the anticipation of gossiping women for her to
talk with them. They want her just to show that she has
"manners enough to stop and let folks know how she been
makin' out" (3). Janie rejects such a style of
communication itself when she says to Pheoby, "You can
tell 'em [gossiping women] what Ah say you if you wants
to" (6). Janie refuses to understand that what they want
is not the information about her, but her participation in
gossiping.
In the closing paragraph of the novel, Janie, who
"pulls in her horizon like a great fish-net," seems to
withdraw into her shell and separate herself from
communication, representational or unrepresentational, but
the fact that she makes confidence to Pheoby implies that
Janie begins to grope for the language "to represent
female experience" (Washington, Invented Life 238) outside
unrepresentational communication, even if the novel ends
in failure to endow the protagonist with it. When she
"(p)ulled it [the horizon] from around the waist of the
world and draped it over her shoulder," she finds "(s)o
much of the life in its meshes" (184). Janie does not only
change her selves as the occasion demands, but also learns
to form a conceptual framework for her experiences which,
in the white male-dominant society, are thought to be
inconsistent. She obtains her "brown bag of miscellany" in
which plural viewpoints can coexist.
CONCLUSION
The Afro-American folks were, for Hurston, more open
to new elements than any other people in the world. The
originality of their culture lies not in particular
elements, but in the manner not to limit what should be
dealt with. The "voluptuous child[ren] of the sun"
("Characteristics of Negro Expression" 53) adorned their
life by employing anything in hand. "(E)ven the Bible was
made over to suit [their] vivid imagination" (Mules and
Men 3). This cross-cultural quality of their culture,
Hurston thinks, enables the Afro- Americans to contribute
to the American civilization for "a new art in the
civilized world, and thus has our so-called civilization
come" from "(t)he exchange and reexchange of ideas between
groups" ("Characteristics of Negro Expression 59).
In a society in which one culture is subordinated to
another, however, the cultural exchange is under the
influence of political dynamics. Those who have been
raised in the subordinate cultural tradition should assert
themselves in the world in which utterly different values
are dominant. If they insist on their universality as a
human being, the cultural differences in reality will be
regarded as an evidence of their under-development or
pathology, while, if they emphasizes their cultural
originality, it will be marginalized as a deviation from
orthodoxy. In such circumstances, the cultural hybridism
of the Afro-Americans was thought to be defensive reaction
to white actions: ignorance of the universal orthodoxy, or
half-hearted assimilation into it.
Hurston's works, however, shows that the
marginalized people, in spite of inconsistency which has
been assigned to them by the dominant culture, maintain
consistent autonomy in their life. The cultural hybridism
and double-consciousness of the Afro-Americans are not a
result of their unfinished assimilation into the American
civilization; instead, as we have seen, they are an
evidence of their vitality to, by using what can be used,
survive and make their life beautiful. Hurston, in the
opening paragraph of Their Eyes, also attributes to women
this capacity of employing whatever they need in their
life and living an active life:
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For
some theycome in with the tide. For others they sail
forever on the horizon,never out of sight, never landing
until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his
dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to
remember,and remember everything they don't want to forget.
The dream is thetruth. Then they act and do things
accordingly (1)
Thus, the Afro-Americans and women have a strong will to
live their life as the subject. The whites and men are,
for them, just the object to be remembered or to be
forgotten.
In conclusion, Hurston, creating Janie Crawford who
accepts her multiplicate self and tries to live as the
subject, made a model for the Afro-American, particularly,
the Afro-American women. Janie, as we have seen in the
third chapter, discovers a multiplicity of her
consciousness, controls her plural selves, and, at last,
tries to give a comprehensive definition of them. Janie's
affirmation of her multiple self gave the Afro-American
women writers a courage to assert themselves when they
confronted the question that "And if I dared open my mouth
to speak, must I always be correct? And by whose
standard?" (Walker "Foreword" ⅹⅳ). In this sense,
Hurston's works including Their Eyes Were Watching God
could acquire its political influence on the AfroAmericans, particularly, the Afro-American women.
NOTES
1) titled "The Memphis Blues"
2) On this point, see Zora Neale Hurston, "The Hue and Cry about Howard
University." Messenger, 7 (Sept.,1925), 315-19, 338.
3) Johnson lets the protagonist of The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man say the
same thing (63).
4) Those persons includes: a tenor of the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire who "had
traveled on the Continent" and offered his books to Hurston(102); E.C. Williams,
Librarian and head of the Romance Language department in Howard University who
"was cosmopolitan and world-traveled" (120); the family of Eleanor Beer, her friend
in Barnard, who also "were traveled cosmopolitan (122).
5) Hurston writes about Robeson: "Robeson sings Negro songs better than most,
because, thank God, he lacks musical education. But we have a cathead man in
Florida who can sing so that if you heard him you wouldn't want to hear Hayes or
Robeson. He hasn't the voice of either one. It the effect" (qtd. in Hemenway 54).
6) This is not to say that Hurston is the first writer who gave expression to the
multiplicate self of the Afro-American women. Clarissa Scott Delany, for example,
writes in her poem "Mask" published in 1927: "So detached and cool she is / No
motion e'er betrays / The secret life within her soul / The anguish of her days"
(189).
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