Thus Spake Zora

John McWhorter, a linguistics professor and moderate-liberal Democratic commentator, writes on how the writings of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) - the libertarian Republican author and anthropologist - challenged black people as well as white people: "[Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937] arrived at a time when Howard [University] students were dismissing spirituals as a primitive practice from a past best forgotten, and when black writers were supposed to show how well they could pull off mainstream forms, with ten-dollar words, inverted syntax, and references to Keats and Shelley. Many readers today, consulting black literature before the twenties, expect 'authenticity' and instead find black characters talking like books in antimaccasared living rooms. Anticipating contemporary sensibilities, Hurston bucked against what she called the 'oleomargarine era in Negro writing' and urged black writers to resist merely imitating whites. 'Fawn as you will,' she wrote. 'Spend an eternity standing awe-struck. Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something on his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.'"

Professor McWhorter continues his commentary: "This insistence that the humblest folkways of black America were a precious heritage crying for documentation was the bedrock of Hurston’s work. Though today her novels get the most attention, she tended to dash them off in a few months and rarely felt satisfied with them. The years-long sweat and tears that many writers devote to their novels she put instead into gathering folktales. Hot on the heels of Jonah’s Gourd Vine came Mules and Men, a collection of folk materials from Eatonville and New Orleans. Hurston struck a balance between scientist and participant, knitting together the descriptions of voodoo rituals with vivid personal testimony. For her follow-up, Tell My Horse, she underwent initiation as a healer in order to document healing rituals in Jamaica and Haiti. Today, we must read Mules and Men and Tell My Horse as history. Desegregation, roads, and media spelled the death of the folkways that Hurston documented. The signal was already fading in the thirties, as she wrote to Boas: 'It is fortunate that it is being collected now, for a great many people say, ‘I used to know some of that old stuff, but I done forgot it all.’ You see, the Negro is not living his lore to the extent of the Indian. He is not on a reservation, being kept pure. His negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white culture.' Hurston’s embrace of black folk culture was far ahead of its time. In her day, a somber musical about black sharecroppers would have been hooted off the stage, even by black audiences; today, a musical version of Walker’s novel The Color Purple is touring the country after playing for over two years on Broadway. But while Hurston’s once-radical point of view about folkways has become mainstream, other aspects of her vision of black authenticity have not taken hold — above all, her politics."

More: "For one thing, Hurston held a fiercely asserted black conservative politics akin to Clarence Thomas’s. Her most famous statement in this vein comes from 'How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” an essay of 1928: 'I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes....I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.' To be sure, Hurston knew what racism was, and she deplored Jim Crow: 'I am for complete repeal of All Jim Crow Laws in the United States once and for all, and right now....Not in some future generation, but repeal NOW and forever!' She became even more militant through the 1940s, occasionally writing things that would delight the leftist wing of the college-town set: 'The Anglo-Saxon is the most intolereant [sic] of human beings in the matter of any other group darker than themselves.' But she also acknowledged, 'You are bound to be jostled in the ‘crowded street of life,’' exemplifying what Thomas Sowell calls 'tragic vision.' For her, the key was self-reliance: 'It’s the old idea, trite but true, of helping people to help themselves that will be the only salvation of the Negro in this country. No one from the outside can do it for him.' Unsurprisingly, she admired Booker T. Washington. (A preacher in Jonah’s Gourd Vine yells, 'DuBois? Who is dat? ’Nother smart n__r? Man, he can’t be smart ez Booger T.!')" Hurston decried the assumption that successful blacks were somehow 'beside the point,' arguing that 'these comfortable, contented Negros are as real as the sharecroppers.' In saying that the black vote should not be one 'dark, amorphous lump,' she anticipated today’s black conservatives in pointing out the pitfalls of reflexively supporting one party: 'It’s time for us to cease to allow ourselves to be delivered as a mob by persuasive ‘friends’ and become individual citizens.'

Professor McWhorter continues: "To many today, Hurston’s impatience with groupthink suggests an underlying discomfort with being black. But for Hurston, it was a simple matter of inner pride. Her anthropological and literary work puts paid to the slightest question of whether she loved black culture and her own people. Yet she still understood that seeking individual validation in race 'pride' amounted mostly to smoke and mirrors:

Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable?...The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison....If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit.

Hurston would likely irk many today with skepticism about the black community’s pride in Barack Obama’s election. She would also have no patience for the slavery reparations movement that flowered most recently in the early 2000s, in the wake of Randall Robinson’s best-selling manifesto The Debt...."

More: "Hurston’s modern fan base doesn’t know quite what to do with all this. 'I think we are better off if we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period — rather than as the artist/politician most black writers have been required to be,' Walker writes. 'This frees us to appreciate the complexity and richness of her work in the same way we can appreciate Billie Holiday’s glorious phrasing or Bessie Smith’s perfect and raunchy lyrics, without the necessity of ridiculing the former’s addiction to heroin or the later’s [sic] excessive love of gin.' Sure — but if Hurston had been more inclined to sing about what happens to a raisin in the sun, one suspects that Walker would have had no trouble celebrating her as an 'artist/politician.' Many have tried to compartmentalize Hurston’s conservatism, calling it an aberration of her declining last decade. Carla Kaplan proposes that she veered rightward out of paranoid despair after three preadolescent boys falsely accused her of sodomizing them — a charge that the black press reveled in, though it was dismissed. But Hurston had been writing things that would have gotten her chased out of an NAACP meeting since the 1920s. Her ideology became clearer in the 1950s, true, but only because she started writing more political essays when she could no longer get her novels published."

Parting thoughts from the professor: "Legions of writers would be content to produce just one book on the level of Eyes, of course, but overall, Hurston’s light burned brightest in her lovingly rendered folk documentation. Her soulful rendition of black folk speech was unprecedentedly accurate, embodying a kind of standing character in itself. Mules and Men is among her most resonant works, and The Great Day was, by all accounts, a theatrical treasure. In a time when many of the black literati sought legitimacy in mimicking white artistic forms, Hurston was an educated, cosmopolitan soul who joyously rooted herself in the folkways of the poorest of her people. That alone required a rigorous equipoise, a manner of standing at the same time within and outside herself that was unfamiliar in her time. And she exhibited a further quintessence of sophistication that remains elusive even today: refraining from translating her folk allegiance into the politics of pity. We have much to learn from someone who is — as quiet as the secret is kept — America’s favorite black conservative."

Booker Rising response: I'm not a fan of Ms. Hurston's novels. I found them to be meandering prose when I read her work in college. Perhaps I'd have a different take almost 20 years later, if I re-read her work. However, I do give props to liberal writer Alice Walker for basically resurrecting Ms. Hurston's work from obscure history. That move in turn has pot more spotlight on Ms. Hurston's politics (much, not all, of which I agree) and where I take a lot more interest in Ms. Hurston. I wouldn't say that Ms. Hurston's politics were similar to Justice Thomas's, unless he is somehow not a social conservative, is a feminist, and opposes war.