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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

A CRITICAL INVESTIC‘ATION OF
LITERARY AND LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES IN
THE FICTION OF ZORA NEALE HUBSTON

presented by

Karla Francesca Clapp Holloway

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

"BILdegree in MEL

2 /< ‘ZZA‘Z—éhdaw.x

Major professor

Date _27 July 1978

0-7639

*3 ‘w-V.‘ " *‘.A“‘“

t

63 Copyright by
Karla Francesca Clapp Holloway

I978

A CRITICAL INVESTIGATION OF
LITERARY AND LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES
IN THE FICTION OF
ZORA NEALE HURSTON

By

KARLA FRANCESCA CLAPP HOLLOWAY

A DISSERTATION

Submitted To
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

I978

ABSTRACT

A CRITICAL INVESTIGATION OF
LITERARY AND LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES IN
THE FICTION OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON

By

Karla Francesca Clapp Holloway

Zora Neale Hurston has demonstrated that knowledge of a literary
text may be expanded through the use of the structures of the Black
dialect in her fiction. She has reminded her reading audience that
language is a reliable and constant illumination of truth. It can
reveal character in ways that no narrative commentary could because the
deep structure understanding that man holds of himself is illustrated
in the structure and intent of his language. I

Hurston's fiction, by using the Black dialect, asserts the use"
of the dialect as a conscious choice. It is the character's method of
verbally clarifying his spirit, and the artist's method of indicating
that this clarification is important. _

The assertion of this dissertation is that the critical reader‘.
who is prepared to make a linguistic judgement as well as a literary
one will find that the structures of the dialect, in both semantic and
svntactic categories, provide additional insight into the significance
of the text. I have illustrated in this thesis how deep structure

,r

competence is a feature of the Black dialect. Certain aspects of the

dialect make this competence far more visible to the linguistically
informed reader. These aspects include syntactic structures as well
as what Hurston described as the "adornment" of Black language.

Bv including dialect usage in her fiction, Hurston has further
distinguished the standard narrative voice from the voice of character.
The distinction between narrator and character is, however. diminished
as the characters of her fiction journey towards poetic self-awareness.
This original distinction and the gradual blend which is achieved by
these voices are the subject of careful analysis from two perspectives,
literary and linguistic.

The result of the analysis emphasizes the accuracy of literary
criticism which utilizes in its investigation a knowledge of a
linguistic system. ,Because the svstem belongs both to the character's
speech as well as to his cognitive self, surface structures and
deep structures remain linked when a dialect is preserved. It is the
linguistic deep structure which provides the clues to consciousness.
When an author makes his own consciousness subject and object of his
literature he becomes, like Hurston who was a speaker of the dialect as
well as creator of the literature, both mirror and lamp. By the
application of current linguistic theory and structural approaches to
literature. I have documented Hurston's successful illumination of

her people‘s language, thought, culture and action.

For Russell and Ayana, sustaining.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee,
James Stalker and Evan Watkins. Roger K. Meiners, the director of my
dissertation. has been consistently diligent in providhwjthe
professional insight which assisted me in organizing this thesis in
ways that made its creation a real joy. I am very grateful to him for
this guidance.

Joan Hoffman of the Yale University Library was particularly
helpful in supplying me with manuscripts and correspondences of and
about Hurston during my research at the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library in New Haven.

Finally. I also thank my parents, Claude and Ouida Clapp, who
not only were very helpful and critical editors of this manuscript,
but who have unfailingly provided the guidance and inspiration which

brought me to this point of my life.

iv

INTRODUCTION ..........................

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CONCLUSION
APPENDIX
ABBREVIATIONS
FOOTNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

"GREAT AND SUDDEN GROWTH" ............

Biographical ..................
Critical ....................

"SHIPS AT A DISTANCE" ..............
The Novels: A Critical Review .........
"THE URGE TO ADORN" ..............

The Narrative Function .............
The Narrative Role in Novelistic Structures . . .

"SOME LAWS IN DIALECT" ..............

Linguistic Structures ..............

Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching

 

God .......................

Simile and Metaphor; Double-Descriptives;

Verbal Nouns ..................
do (-pres) ....................

"FORMALIZED CURIOSITY" .............
Research Methods ................
Analysis of Texts ................

Selectional Criteria ..............
Organization ..................

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O I O O O .......

Page

12
18
41
46

49
54

85
85
no

ll5
ll8

lZl
121
128
I31
I33
I37
I49
153
154

159

INTRODUCTION

This paper is an investigation into language and character in the
work of twentieth century novelist, anthropologist and folklorist
Zora Neale Hurston. The assertion of this study will be that the
special nature of the Black dialect, in structural and morphemic
aspects. permits further investigations into components of fiction than
Standard language structures traditionally allow. It therefore functions
as an additional critical mechanism which may be used to assess the
form and intent of Hurston's fiction.

Because of Hurston's investigations into language and culture
in Black America, I will investigate the premise that this novelist's
attitudes and training in a specific school of structural and
descriptive linguistics, which during the l920's had not been linked to
the field of literature, were purposefully integrated into her
literature with a degree of skill and artistry not before appreciated.

This thesis will concern itself with the life and works of
Hurston and the sociolinguistic activity within her writings. The
exploration of the interaction between language and character will
formulate the basis for this study. Some attention to Hurston's
backgrounds in literature and linguistic anthropology is necessary to
assess accurately this author's novelistic skill in relation to the
proposed thesis.

The extension of character into linguistic activity is an area

of study only recently developed. It has been necessary for this
study to outline the areas of concern in linguistic science and
literary criticism which make the analogies drawn in this thesis valid.
That a man's language is reflective of his thought is the theoretical
basis of Benjamin Whort's collected essays in Language Thought and
Reality which date back to 1927. It has taken America linguists as
long a period to come up with convincing evidence that a language.
although reflective of thought, is not an adequate measure of thought.
The distinction between the mirror and the lamp, or the visual image
and the mechanism which illuminates that image, is the distinction
which is important when investigating the structures of a language or
dialect. This distinction mediates the kinds of conclusions which
may be drawn when illustrating the patterns of language and the
novelistic activity they provoke. The distinctions which this study
has found to be important are mainly concerned with levels of
dialogue -- that is, the level at which a language in a particular
work can be extended into the character's personality, his mental
activity. Therefore, it has been necessary to devote some time to
narrative as a form and as a tool for Hurston's varied voices.

The status of research into Black language, or the Black
dialect, is still in formulative stages. There is still as much
speculation about the actuality of the dialect as there is definitive
statement on its form. The actuality of the Black dialect will be
assumed in this investigation and corroborated with illustration of
appropriate evidence for this assumption. What remains to be

established by researchers in linguistics and dialectology are the

guidelines for study of this dialect as a formal science with the
structures and appurtenences of linguistic science as a standard.
There have been many investigations into Black language. The nature
of the investigations have often been too heavily weighted by the
social implications of dialect study for educational purposes, for
valuable and accurate linguistic information to emerge.

The study of minority languages and literature in this country
has only recently, within the past fifteen years, been voiced as a
concern of teachers in public schools, universities, and colleges. For
this reason, the discipline has been weighted by social and political
concerns and less attention to this language and literature as a
science has been possible. We find in consequence that Black language
has been studied less for its linguistic relativity than for finding
its niche in the scheme of recent political and social revolutions.

This paper will not voice the cause or concern of the Black
dialect as a political issue. Rather, its interest will be with the
in-group usage of this language as an expression of culture, and the
novelist's use of this language as a tool for extended characterizations
and proving psychological backdrops for characterizations.

For this reason, it has been necessary to devote some time to
the structure of the dialect as well as to analysis of the forms
appearing in Hurston's texts which indicate most extensive use of the

nuances of language and culture.

CHAPTER I
"GREAT AND SUDDEN GROWTH"

Much of Zora Neale Hurston's background reflects her training
and interest in sociolinguistics. Her tutelage under Dr. Franz Boas of
Columbia University between 1925 and 1927 developed so intimate an
academic relationship that she referred to him as "Papa Franz.‘I It was
Dr. Boas who arranged the Rosenwald Fellowship in 1935 for Hurston to
study for a Ph.D. in anthropology and folklore at Columbia.

Hurston was a member of the American Folklore Society, for
which she published a document on Negro folklore and Voodoo

practices.1

She also belonged to the American Anthropological Society
at a time when this organization paraded the important role of
descriptive linguistics in field methods. These memberships, as well
as her training under Dr. Boas, familiarized her with the then

current attitudes of linguistic investigation.

Dr. Boas, as one of the descendants of the neo-grammarians,
began a new tradition in American linguistics by his innovative
approaches to language study. He was an anthropologist who believed
in the diffusion of anthropology and the unity of cultures -- an
indication of belief in the theories of cultural relativism and

2 In the

equality in the ability of expression within each culture.
19th and early 20th centuries of America the linguistic/anthropologic

emphasis was on discovering genetic relationships in American Indian

languages. Boas' l9ll classic publication of the descriptive view is

the introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages. He

 

gave field work the primary place in his linguistic investigations.
Therefore, with Boas shaping Hurston's academic background, it should
not be surprising that her own field research was as interested in
documenting the anthropologic/social world of her informants as it was
in accurately recording their linguistic worlds.

One can only speculate, with her letters and autobiography as
evidence, on her own sociolinguistic attitudes. The following
considerations are important, however, in forming an educated guess
about this matter.

1. Given her training under Dr. Boas, Hurston probably felt
that the language of a people is as important an indication of their
culture as are other behavioral manifestations.

2. Each of her novels, as well as her autobiography and short
fiction, seems to be a careful attempt to record accurately the
phonologic, morphologic and graphemic chracteristics of the dialects
of the voices in these books. 0n various occasions, she "translates"
some vocabulary items that may be unfamiliar to her audience.

3. In her novels, where she delves into character and
analysis, a pattern emerges which will be the subject of investigation
in this paper. So careful and accurate a pattern is this --
connecting a character's personality, activity and his knowledge of
self with his linguistic activity -- that I cannot dismiss it as
accidental. It seems, rather, to be a deliberate effort to show the

twentieth century's descriptive-linguistic view as it relates to the

anthropologists' query. It is because of this pattern, and other
patterns connecting language and culture, that we can speculate that
her own attitudes on these subjects spring from a careful review of
the theories of her studies, and how these theories relate to her own
culture.

The research to date on Zora Hurston has been in the following
veins:

Biographical
Robert Hemenway, in October, l977, published the most

comprehensive biography of Hurston to this date. ZOra Neale Hurston,

 

A Literary Biography (hereafter referred to as HB and noted

 

parenthetically in the text), draws on manuscripts at the Beinecke
Library at Yale University, and the University of Florida Library, as
well as correspondence with writers of the Harlem school who knew
Hurston. Hemenway constructs a valuable text which blends
biographical data and informed analysis of her literature.

His text begins at the end of her life, when she writes a
letter “in painful longhand" requesting the editors of Harper and
Brothers to review her manuscript of "Herod the Great." From this
point, Robert Hemenway flashes back to the earliest parts of her life
to investigate what kinds of events would lead a woman who was a
"graduate of Barnard College, the author of four novels, two books of
folklore and an autobiography, more than fifty short stories and
essays; who had received honorary doctorates, published in national
magazines, been feature on the cover of the Saturdangeview, invited

to speak at major universities, praised by the New York Herald Tribune

as being in 'the front rank' of all American writers" to have to send
unsolicited manuscripts by mail from the confines of a welfare home in
St. Lucie County, Florida (H8 4).

He covers, in the next 350 pages, the absorbing story of
Zora Hurston, skillfully combining information from at least one
hundred different sources and piecing together obscured bits of her
life and works until his account of this enigmatic woman beings to fall
into place. Hemenway's research is absolutely thorough, which
reinforces the critical analysis within the text.

Most analyses attempt to draw a link between the events of her
life and their fictive results. Zora Hurston never could escape
herself through her writing, whether it was folktale, drama or
fiction. The events of her own life and attitudes lie curled between
the lines. This cultural and personal mirror is often the result in
Black art, and Hemenway seems to understand this artistic tendency.
His conclusions about Zora Hurston are based on a sensitive
understanding of her as a woman, Black and a writer. Whether his
analysis is looking at her in all three roles, or scrutinizing her in
one of them, it is a judicious and careful treatment of a writer who
has gone too long ignored in American letters.

His stated intent was to present a "new, closer examination of
the unusual career of this complex author." It seems to me that in
three very crucial areas he succeeded very well.

l. Biography
There is not a period in Hurston's life when Hemenway does not

offer some information. This is remarkable because her

autobiography was written almost twenty years before her death and
because in that twenty years some of the most significant moments in
her life were to occur. Hemenway is at his best during his

discussion of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement which he had written
about previously. Indeed, much of the section of his biography
concerning the Renaissance, parallels the structure and content of his
essay "Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology" contained

in Arna Bontemps' The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. This essay is

 

hereafter referred to as EA and noted parenthetically in the text.
However, in his biography, Hemenway spends more time with the
critical theories and attitudes of men like W.E.B. DuBois and
Alain Locke, both of whom had a considerable effect on the artistic
politics of the Renaissance. He carefully traces the influence of
Locke, whom Hurston first met while a student at Howard University,
and Locke's relationship with Hurston which eventually deteriorated
into an artistic squabble. She had once actively sought his advice
and counsel, but the end of their relationship is illustrated by an

article she wrote for Opportunity_which they wisely chose not to

 

publish. In this article, which lambasted Locke for not
understanding her style and themes, she calls her former mentor a
"malicious, spiteful snot."3 Because Hemenway fills in her character
and personality, the reader of his biography is led to understand the
motivations of Zora Hurston's lower moments, as well as the higher
ones.

2. Academics and Folklore

At the end of "Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville

 

Anthropology," Hemenway hypothesizes that "one reason Zora Neale
Hurston was attracted to the scientific conceptualization of her

racial experience during the late twenties and early thirties was its

 

prima facie offering of a structure for black folklore" (EA 212).
Hemenway has used his biography to offer evidence which supports that
early hypothesis. Although Hurston has been dealt with critically,
most reference to her had been as a writer of folktales and four
novels. No one sought to make that vital connection between her
academic training and the structures of her fiction. Although
Hemenway does not actually suggest a model which connects the two
aspects of Hurston, social scientist and author, he does suggest, with
a great deal of evidence to back him up, that that model is possible
to create.

She was faced, however, with a scholarly

problem: what was her responsibility in

explaining the lore? What stance should

she take in relation to the folk? How

could she make others see this great

cultural wealth (HB 159)?

Hemenway suggests that she found the final answers within the form

that her Mules and Men collection finally took. In this text, she

 

was able to blend the scholar and the folklorist and answer the
questions posited above. Hurston was fervently interested in letting
others experience the culture of her people. The dramatic performances
of folk songs, dance and stories, which took up a great deal of her
time during her career, was vitally important to her. This was a way,
she felt, of allowing her research to do more than decorate some

scientific journal. Hemenway has underscored this expressed interest

ID

of Hurston as being the method she created for the blending of her
careers. Although this is evidence which is indisputable, it is also
incomplete. Hurston's novels were also a platform for this blend.
Although she did not identify it as such, in the same manner in which
she expressed her desire that the folklore speak for her people, the
evidence of the blend also exists within her novels. It is the effort
of this dissertation to illustrate the results that Hurston's academic
training had in the structures of her fiction.
3. Politics
Although little attention has been given to Zora Hurston's

political efforts, they make up the bulk of the latter part of her
life, and perhaps suggest a reason why she ended up destitute in a
welfare home in Florida. Hemenway attempts to steer clear of the
thinking which implicates the morals scandal of 1948 as the reason for
her literary demise. Indeed, he says that she did not stop writing
after this incident, as some have suggested. But she produced very
little fiction, and instead turned to such articles as "I Saw Negro
Votes Pedaled“ and “Why the Negro Won't Buy Communism." The articles
had a very definite political intent. Hemenway suggests that:

Zora's problem came when she attempted in the

late forties and early fifties to transfer her

cultural perceptions to the political arena.

If she could have found a political outlet

for her cultural theories, she might have

altered the premises of the American racial

dialogue (HB 333).

There were some efforts at writing the kind of fiction which

had given her so much success in earlier days. They were largely

unsuccessful, or unfinished, or as in the case of the "Herod the

ll

Great? manuscript, rejected.

Poverty, poor health, and a diminishing of her great talent led
to the unhappy circumstances of her final years and her death.
Hemenway writes that the manuscript which Scribner's rejected “suffers
from poor characterization, pedantic scholarship, and inconsistent
style; the whole performance touches the heart by revealing a talent in
ruins" (HB 345).

The Hemenway biography does much to uncover the tracks of this
writer in the years after the publishing of her autobiography. But
more importantly, it projects a reasonable and qualified assessment of
the circumstances which led Zora Hurston to such a zenith of publicity
and renown, and then back down again, just one of the crowd in a
destitute and lonely welfare home.

Her ending is very similar to one she wrote for her character

John, in Jonah's Gourd Vine. She explained the theme of this novel in

 

a letter to Carl Van Vechten as “great and sudden growth, one act of
malice and it is withered and gone."4
Her growth, as a novelist, folklorist and anthropologist, was
not great and sudden for her as an individual, but for Hurston as a
Black novelist, folklorist and anthropologist, and Black woman, the
growth was quite sudden. She sprang up, like Jonah's gourd vine,
almost overnight. The act of malice? Perhaps it was the
misunderstanding of her intent, or her inability to bring the American
public to the point where it understood race and culture the way she

felt it should. Many events in her life and career indicate her

confusion over issues which seemed to be clear to her but placed her

12

at odds with the majority of her community, scientific, literary, or

social. Some of the malice must have extended from her arrest on the
morals charge -- this led her to question seriously American justice,
a system she had been almost too willing to have faith in.

Critical

We find that most short articles and essays on Hurston are
biographical rather than critical. In the 1976 issue of the Mbrggfl_
Magazine, Ruth Sheffey documented Hurston's connection with Morgan
State University.5 Sheffey used as her primary resource Hurston's

autobiography, Dust Tracks On A Road. Ellease Southerland and Mary

 

Helen Washington have also studied Hurston's works. Although
Southerland identifies her subject as a Novelist-Anthropologist, she
investigates her work mainly as a novelist and folklorist in the

August 1974 edition of Black World.6 This essay gives no attention to

 

the linguistic aspects of her anthropology. Washington's essay on

Hurston, in this same edition of Black World, is directed toward her

 

women characters as they exemplified the "Black women's search for
identity."7 This is a very dominant theme in Hurston's novels and
although our appetites are whetted by this essay, we catch only a
glimpse of the pervasiveness of this theme in the few pages alloted
Washington's discussion.

It is unfortunate that Hurston is not more frequently
anthologized. We find some of her short stories in the larger
collections of Black American literature. Darwin Turner's text,

Black American Literature comments that her short story "Sweat"

 

indicates three major emphases of her work: "skill in presenting the

13

picturesque idiom of Southern Negroes, credible characterizations and
her absorption with love and hatred in interfamilial relationships."8
This is a revealing and accurate analysis, but it is left for the
reader to discover the examples and interplay of these emphases in the
short sample which follows his analysis.

In Cavalcade, Davis and Redding also present a short
biographical statement about Hurston before reprinting a folktale from

the Mules and Men collection. They mistakenly credit her with a novel

 

in 1945, Voice of the Land, which is not among her works, but are

 

otherwise accurate enough, though they offer no critical comment.9
June Jordan writes of Hurston's novel of "Black Affirmation"

(Dust Tracks On A Road) in Black World. She comments in this article

 

 

that "Until recently no one had ever heard of her, certainly no one
read her books. . . . The fact is, we almost lost Zora to the
choose-between games played with Black Art."10

Robert Hemenway's very detailed and analytical essay about
Hurston appeared in Arna Bontemp's text, The Harlem Renaissance

Remembered. "Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology" is

 

the best and most thorough analysis of Hurston prior to the
l
publication of Hemenway's own biography.1

Their Eyes Were WatChing God is one of the novels which

 

Robert Bone discusses in The Negro Novel in America. He makes an

 

accurate appraisal of the novel's theme "the dramatic tension between
the sound business instincts of Janie's two husbands and her own
striving for a full life" and offers some interesting insights into

the form of its fiction: "the first half of the novel deals with the

14

prose 0f Janie's life. the latter half deals with its poetry."12

Jordan's comment about the “games played with Black Art? assesses
the primary state of affairs of most contemporary attention to Black
artists. In our choosing between, Hurston has not been chosen, except
to be briefly anthologized or essayed. The recent concern with her is,
I suspect, a by-product of the concern for women writers. The Black
movement too, has its women in literature, and the recent articles and
essays about Zora Hurston, especially the attention to her novel Their

Eyes Were Watching God, is owing in great measure, to this movement.

 

Unfortunately, as with most fads, there is little time to give in-depth
studies of the heroes or heroines of the moment. Therefore, we find
only cursory and expected essays about Zora Neale Hurston.

One of the more interesting articles to be recently published
was Alice Walker's "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," in the March,

1975, issue of Ms. Magazine. In it she narrates an actual journey

 

she took into the area of Eatonville, Florida, the novelist's home, and
the interviews she held with people who knew Hurston. This is an
interesting and lively sketch of Hurston's personality, especially in
her lateryears, but offers no new critical or biographical cement
and relies heavily on previously published information.13
It is my opinion that there is much more here to be researched.
She not only stands out among present day Black artists, but strongly
outdistances her own contemporary Black women artists. It may be
important here to explain the theory which governs my comprehension of

Hurston in relationship to Black writers, without the comparison to the

total spectrum of American writers.

15

The crucial aspect in the development of Black American
literature as a political expression is that our literature has been
mainly an expression of our culture. Sometimes it is a literature of
statement -- as a careful analysis of Richard Wright will indicate.
Often it is a literature of preservation. The careful documentation
of Black Life in America, in its external and internal (psychological)
manifestations, works to preserve accurately the activities of our
culture as history. Fiction writers pull beneath the skins of external
reality to draw intimate psychological portraits of our internal
selves.

For these reasons, Zora Hurston's works must be evaluated
critically within the Black aesthetic. For she too was a creator of
internal drama. A judicious analysis of her technique would discuss
how she functioned in comparison with other Black writers of her period.
Her unique perspective as a Black woman demands an even more specific
picture of her in comparison to some of the more prominent Black women
writers of the Renaissance and beyond.

Nella Larsen wrote two short novels in the last years of the
Renaissance. Quicksand was published by KnOpf in 1928 and PaSSing was
published a year later. Both these novels are tragic melodramas
depicting a Black woman who is light enough to pass into white society
as a white woman. It is an early theme in Black literature. William
Wells Brown deals with it in his late 19th century novels. Larsen
explores the theme with great sensitivity. The romantic triangles of
her novels are complicated by an intricate racial knot but are resolved

by death -- a fairly easy out. Her statement for the Renaissance

16

seemed designed to remind her readers that the difficult restrictions
of class and race in twentieth century America became a more serious
problem for Blacks who could Apass." DuBois' haunting prophecy of
1903 in Souls of BlaCk Folk that the “problem of the 20th century
would be the problem of the color line" is documented in Larsen's
novels.

Ann Petry, writing in the late 40's and early 50's found some
of her best subjects within her own culture. Her 1946 novel, Ihg_
Strggt, revealed the difficulties of a Black woman trying to raise a
child alone. It is a novel of a naturalistic school, and finds its

closest kinship to Hurston's final novel, Seraph on the Suwannee

 

(1948). They are both stories of women who must salvage their selfhood
amid the odds of society's unequal afflictions and tortuous inner
conflicts. Petry went on to greater flame than Hurston was able

to achieve.

It was far easier to find Black women writing poetry than the
longer forms of fiction during the Renaissance years and immediately
beyond. Jessie Fauset wrote both poetry and longer fiction and is,
ironically, little remembered for either. Her poetry attracted the

attention of DuBois and began her alliance with the Crisis Magazine

 

staff. During this period, she published four novels. A constant
theme of hers is the recurring problem of color and class. Her
self-assumed literary mission was to document the fact that Blacks
were no different from the "best"class of white Americans. A strong
undercurrent of her fiction is her own upbringing in an upper class

Black family in Philadelphia. She sought to remind readers of her

17

Renaissance novels that Blacks do not have the negative and primitive
characteristics thrust on them by racism by creating Black characters
of an "obviously upper economic class.“ In that era it also meant a
class with much lighter skins. She taught her readers by teaching the
characters in her books through their contacts with poorer and darker
Black families that class and color are mainly a mental phenomenon.
The didacticism was often overwhelming in Fauset; however novels such

as There is Confusion SUCceed in documenting the consciousness of the

 

period.

Along with her male literary counterparts, Hurston lived the
paradoxical Renaissance existence of being both exploited and the
exploiter. She found herself tempted with financial rewards for
promoting the stereotyped picture her white sponsors held of the Black
man, but also drew heavily upon and illustrated clearly the complex
ramifications of deprivation and racism in Black America. Perhaps
unconsciously, but more likely because they wrote from their hearts,
these writers and Hurston unfolded a chronicle of joy, sorrow, love,
anger and humanity in Black America. Their pictures were colored by
their color. As a contemporary Black America we who cherish the
chronicle as a vital part of our history are grateful for these

imaginative and creative symbols of truth and faith.

CHAPTER II
"SHIPS AT A DISTANCE"

When Hurston was a child, a scene she describes as twelve
"searing steropticon visions" etched their way into her mind and
became a permanent fixture of her soul. She insisted that these
visions were prophecies of her future, and only after the scene of
each vision became a reality did they disappear, one by one, from her
waking and sleeping dreams. As a young child Hurston perceived that
her restless spirit would face many difficult conflicts. These
scenes, like clearcut slides, gave her a feeling of terrible
aloneness. "I stood on a soundless island in a tideless sea" she
wrote, and looked across the fabric of her fate, already woven by
those visions (DT 67).

With phrases resonant with the poetry of the deep South where
she was born and raised, Zora Neale Hurston describes the series of
events which placed her in the mainstream of American novelists and
researchers.

Reverend John Hurston, a Black Baptist minister who was also a
landowner and a principal in the governing of the Black township of
Eatonville, Florida, raised his children into a tradition which
embodied strong religious discipline. Perhaps it was the restriction
of this discipline which led Zora Hurston's adult life into such

unorthodox expressions of her individuality. It could have been the

18

19

exhortation of her mother, constantly repeated for all the Hurston
children to "Jump at de sun and you at least might catch halt to de
moon," which caused her to strive continually for very unique forms of
self expression. Her father, a physically and emotionally powerful
figure in the Hurston household, was a frequent image in her later
writings. He may also have been a frequent image for the woman who
could never extricate herself long enough, or fully enough, from her
career to allow herself the commitment of a permanent relationship with
any man. In her autobiography, Hurston uses a seemingly detached

voice to describe, with the precision of a scientist, the dissolution
of her brief marriage to Herbert Sheen; and uses another voice, full of
heartbreak and strength to describe the difficulties with the brief
relationship she had with another man. She lost both relationships
because she was unable to detach herself from her studies and

interests as was demanded of her (DT 257-73). Her voices, often found
themselves in conflict. Many of Hurston's personal and professional
difficulties were indirectly a result of this duality of her
professional needs and her individual needs.

The anecdotes of her youth, captured in the first section of her
autobiography, are a rich collection of the beacons of her childhood.
What strikes me most though, is the intimate account of the spiritual
side of this author, the mental quests she embarked on and their often
poignant conclusions. She was a child characterized as a dreamer who
captured nature for her personal playmate and became the commanding
officer in her games with the moon or the stars or the earth. She had

a mentor-type relationship with the old white man who helped birth her

20

and who called her "Snidlits." Most importantly, she had an almost
fanatical desire to see whatever lay down the dusty road which wound
past her father's farm.

Within the tales of a young girl who played better with the
boys than with the girls. and whose dolls “caught the devil" from her,
is the absorbing tale of the first time her "visions" came to her.
They began, she wrote, around her seventh year. She recalls that:

Soon I was asleep in a strange way. Like

clearcutstereooficon slides I saw twelve

scenes flash before me. . . . There was no

continuity as in an average dream. Just

disconnected scene after scene with blank

spaces in between. I knew that they were all

true, a preview of things to come, and my

soul writhed in agony and shrunk away (DT 65).
After this experience, which was to repeat itself into her adulthood
until each "slide" was replaced by its reality, she knew her fate.
As soon as one vision was fulfilled she wrote, it ceased to come.
But their initial occurrence, and her precocious understanding of an
inner soul that would find both fulfillment and heartbreak marked her
as a child who always "stood apart within." "A cosmiclcnwfliness,"
she wrote, was her "shadow" (DT 68).

It was this same child who allowed a "primeval” hatred for the
wdman her father married after her mother's death to drive her from
this home of her youth and lead her down that road past her father's
house. She took on a collection of jobs, usually domestic work,
which eventually allowed her to finish an often interrupted education.

While working in Baltimore, she became acquainted with Dr. Dwight

Oliver Holmes, who served as president of Morgan University (then

21

Morgan Academy). This influential English teacher encouraged her to
enroll in the high school department of Morgan. Later, financial
assistance offers from Washington enabled her to attend Howard
University in 1919 then considered the "capstone of Negro education in
the world" (DT 164).

After two years at Howard, "Drenched in Light" a short story
she had written under the direction and encouragement of Professor
Alain Locke, who later became a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance,
was noticed in a New York City literary circle headed by the editor of

Opportunity Magazine, Dr. Charles S. Johnson. At the time he wrote to

 

Hurston, she was out of school because of a lack of money, and she
decided that New York might be a place she could begin a profitable
writing career. In January, 1925, Hurston was in New York City. The
friendship which formed between her and the Johnsons, and also with
Fannie Hurst, paved the way for Hurston to enter Barnard College on
scholarship. She was the second Black woman to enter that
institution. This year was to be the turning point of her life and
career. The friends and acquaintances she made in New York were
to follow her for the rest of her life -- even when she lost contact
with them and went into literary and social isolation. The literary
circle which befriended her became some of the better known artists
of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was to become one of this circle
and offer a unique contribution to its literature.

The most important relationships she had during this period
were with the Carl Van Vechtens and with the woman known to her as

"Godmother," Mrs. R. Osgood Mason.

22

Godmother was the patron of Black and minority arts for many
New York artists. Her original interests had been in the arts and
culture of the Southwest Plains Indians. When she was younger, she

had lived among them for many months.14

But in New York, she saw what
she considered to be an untapped field of art, that of the American
Negro. This was the age, as Langston Hughes so aptly termed it in his
autobiography, that the "Negro came into vogue." It was considered
fashionable for New Yorkers to be concerned in some way with the "New"
Negro. The age of America known as the "Jazz Age" gave America's
leisure class the spare time to devote some of their interests to their
own personal visions of the "noble savage." Therefore we find the
vogue consisted of such activities as white New Yorkers streaming to
after-hours night spots in Harlem to gyrate to the "primitive tones"
and "jungle rhythms" of Black music. Those who could afford it, took
a far more definitive step towards their involvement with the Negroes.
PeOple like Godmother, the Van Vechtens, and even Fannie Hurst, who
became Hurston's employer for a number of important years, helped
Black art by financial sponsorship of Black and minority artists such
as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Hurston, Miguel Covarrubias,
Richmond Barthes and others. The sponsorship of these artists was

New York's own form of a "peculiar institution." The financial
backing constituted an implicit contract, where the writers and
artists would continue to make their work reflect the distorted
perceptions that these writers had concerning Blacks. Therefore, in

many cases, Black artists were forced to reinforce the stereotype; to

contribute, however unwittingly, to the well-being of the inferior

23

and comic Black stereotype that white America held. Of course the
sponsors did not feel this way. The art, they felt, was the surging
of the primitive in these "cultivated" Black Americans, the "Emperor
Jones" in them all. The Blacks found themselves being able to write
for profit, to be published and known in New York literary circles and
publishing houses. After some years of sponsorship, these artists,
who were simultaneously growing in their crafts and in their
independence from these sponsors, found they could create their own
audiences. Partly in consequence of this growth they rejected the
restrictions placed on their crafts by sponsors and ventured out into
the artistic world alone. Langston Hughes describes a traumatic

separation from Mrs. Mason in his autobiography, The Big Sea. He had

 

been under the impression that their relationship transcended the
limited realm of employer-employee and felt that when it came time for
him to tell her that she could no longer dictate the subject or
content of his writings, but that he would always respect her and
consider her a friend, she would reciprocate with a similar sentiment.
He was mistaken and left her apartment on that day, feeling dejected,
with many of his delusions broken.15 All Black artists did not suffer
the same way in their declarations of independence, but most did feel
themselves to be working under a yoke. Langston Hughes describes
Hurston as being a very "spirited and lively girl'I and that her
backers "felt that she should be very quiet and studious while
preparing her manuscripts.“ Hughes noted that these restrictions made

her restless and moody and caused her to work in a very nervous

manner.

24

But generally, this was a creative and positive age for the
Black artists. Few of the writers of the period who gathered in
New York were native New Yorkers. Many of them had formal educations
and it is therefore not surprising that this group came to represent
an image of success for middle class Black America. Their varied
backgrounds led to the great diversity in the writings of the
Renaissance. The discussion of the artistic themes reflected in
Renaissance literature can be disturbing to those who have carefully
studied the period. The outward restrictions of patronage, although
reflected in their art, was not definitive of the output of these
writers. Those who thought of them as "exotic-primitive" were
nearsighted. The noble savage theme was not characteristic of the
art of the period in which Hurston found herself involved. This was
the age of Countee Cullen's first volume of poetry, Colo: (1925).
This volume indicates his mastery of sophisticated and traditional
forms. It sings with a lyricism that fits well into the molds of his
"god" John Keats and "goddess" Edna St. Vincent Millway. It was the
age when Jean Toomer presented the literary world with the masterful
gapg, a series of poignantly written insights and stories centered
first in the fields of his native Georgia and then in the urban sprawl
of Washington, D.C. It was also the age when a young Langston Hughes
published the searching poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Nella
Larsen published Quicksand, a tragedy which details the psychological
toll that 'passing' could exert on a woman who straddled the color

line. Hurston won the short story prize of the Opportunity Awards for

 

Fiction with "Spunk“ during the Renaissance. It was a story of a

25

tragic love affair based in her home town of Eatonville. Her play
'Color Struck" won the second prize in the drama division the next
year that the awards were given out. The fiction of this period was
diverse -- a collection of the backgrounds and experiences of Black
writers across the United States who had come to New York with little
but the promise of being able to practice their craft in the company
of others. They took full advantage of white publishers who sought
to commercialize the latest fad of Jazz Age America and managed to
pave a very solid foundation for the generation of Black writers who
were to follow them.

Hurston felt that her relationship with Godmother was "curious."
She described a psychic bond which existed between them. Perhaps the
background for this bond may be discovered in an unpublished portion
of her autobiography. The publishers felt that her chapter on
"Friendship" was too lengthy and involved; they may also have felt
that the detailed descriptions of some personalities may eventually
have made their firm liable for its content. Whatever the reason,
this chapter, much to Hurston's chagrin, was never published. In
this section, she delves into much greater detail about her
relationship with Mrs. Mason than she does in the published portions
of her autobiography.

She writes that it was "decried [sic] in the beginning of
things" that she and Mrs. Mason should meet. This woman had appeared
in the last of Hurston's prophetic visions from the first moment of
their coming. The scene she describes on meeting Mrs. Mason is the

same scene she had seen hundreds of times.‘

26

There were two women, just as I had

always seen them but in the dream their

faces were misty. Miss Cornelia Chapin was

arranging a huge bowl of Calla Lillies as

I entered the room. These were the strange

flowers I had always seen (OT JWJYale).
Hurston writes that she had been "sent" to Mrs. Mason to get the key
to certain phases of her life which had been placed in the hands of
Godmother. She was indebted to her, not only for material help, but
for spiritual guidance.

Later critical analyses of Hurston suggest that she was not as
involved with the spiritual guidance of Godmother as she suggested in
her autobiography. Hughes suggests that she felt inhibited by the
restrictions on her lifestyle and that these inhibitions made her
nervous and difficult to work with. Wallace Thurman points out in his

caricature of Zora Hurston, "Sweetie Mae Carr" in Infants of the

 

Spripg, that the relationship with Godmother may have been an instance
of Hurston's taking advantage of the many kinds of assistance
available to Negroes who were "in vogue." Thurman suggests that her
acceptance was an example of her being out to get all that she could,
for as long as it was available.1

Whether or not it was with gratitude or deception that she
accepted the financial rewards of being popular and Black and female;
she certainly managed to produce the bulk of her writing during these
years and the twenty years following the Renaissance. The years
which followed her sponsorship were critically attached to the years
which preceeded it because it was during these earlier years that the

inroads with her major publishing house, J.B. Lippincott were made.18

27

Another important relationship which Hurston made and nourished
during her career was with Carl Van Vechten and his wife, Fania. The
Van Vechtens, too, were sponsors of many Black artists, making
connections for them with publishers and sponsors and contributing to
the success of the Renaissance years. Carl Van Vechten also
contributed to the collection of literature about Black America with

his highly criticized Nigger Heaven. His closest friends, including

 

Hurston and Hughes as well as Fannie Hurst, were quick to come to the
artistic defense of this novel which seemed, to the larger audience of
Black middle class America, to exploit the exotic "singularities" of

Black life. Sterling Brown, in The American Negro: His History and

 

His Literature, comments that the novelist Van Vechten seems to be

 

partial to scenes which were selected to prove "Negro primitivism."19

But Van Vechten's role as a friend to the Harlem "niggerati! as
Hurston coined the term,was by far the more important of his
contributions.

The letters in the Van Vechten collection at Yale University's
Beinecke Library are touching testimonies of the intimate and at times
curious relationship nurtured by these Black artists for the
Van Vechtens. Hurston's letters are incredibly revealing of the depth
of her feelings for him, as well as her excitement and pride in the
accomplishments of her career. They also reveal the basic
insecurities and need for encouragement that lay just under the
surface of most of her relations and professional activities. It
seems that it was when these insecurities were allowed to surface

that Hurston led herself into difficult and entangling relationships.

28

Van Vechten's hobby was photography. His photographs of the
Harlem artists, which have appeared almost whenever an anthology
which contains pictures of Hughes or Locke or Cullen or McKay or
Hurston has been published, are poignant reminders of the spirit of
these writers. He took a series of pictures of Hurston around
Thanksgiving, 1934. She was in Chicago at the time, and when she got
the photographs, which show her in moods which range from smiling to
serious to seductive in a fur trimmed coat and saucy hat, she wrote
him a note of appreciation. "Carl," she said, "I am conscious of the
honor you do me and feel flattered that you wanted to photograph me."
She writes that "the pictures look swell, I love myself when I am
laughing, and then again when I am looking mean and impressive. You
are a tall angel with the 'Balsm [sic]of gilead' in your hips. I
am wearing out my loud singing symbol talking about you."20

Hurston wrote Van Vechten on almost every important occasion of

her life. Her letters reflect the joy and not a little pride at

Lippincott's liking her books (Jonah's Gourd Vine and Mules and Men).

 

 

They describe her chance meeting with Langston Hughes in Charleston,
South Carolina in August of 1927 and how "they rolled into this town
tonight, tired, but happy." She relates unashamedly what some might
consider to be an embarrassing incident. "Somehow the back of my

skirt got torn away so that my little panties were panting right out

in public," as well as telling him her plan for more writing: "I

wish to work out some good nigger themes and show what can be done with
our magnificent imagery instead of fooling around with bastard drama

that can't be white and is too lacking in self respect to be gorgeously

29

Negro."2]

Her letters also reveal a feeling, at least on her part, that
seems to transcend the bonds of simple friendship yet not quite to
cross the boundary of requited love. In December, 1944 she wrote
Van Vechten and said:

What can I say to put form to my feelings?
I have thought and thought. I love you
very dearly. If in my struggle with life
and the press of the moment I seemed to be
llilfifi'illi $3423; 3? ”£21.21???” a

Van Vechten too, obviously felt this closeness with his friends
and with Zora Hurston. He was very confused and hurt about her
silence. The letters between him and Fannie Hurst, on the occasion of
Hurston's death, reveal some of these feelings. Hurst wrote him back
and said that I'I have often wondered why Zora chose to disconnect
herself from our deep interest and friendship."23

- This disconnection was, though, not uncharacteristic of
Hurston's flighty personality, and seemed to distress many of those
who knew her.

The relationship between Hurston and Fannie Hurst grew from an
employer-employee relationship. As a student at Barnard University
she found it necessary to work. She originally became a secretary to
Hurst, but her position gradually became more that of a member of the
household and friend than that of a professional secretary. Hurst
eventually "fired" her for her lack of secretarial ability, but she

continued to live in the house and be a companion to Hurst. In a

memorial essay to Zora Hurston, Fannie Hurst wrote:

30

She walked into my study one day, carelessly,
handsome and light yellow with no show of
desire for the position of secretary. We
'took a shine' to one another and I engaged
her on the spot. What a quaint gesture that
proved to be. Her shorthand was short on
legibility, her typing hit or miss, her
filing a game of find the thimble. Rebuke
bounced off of her. "Get rough with me if
you want results. I've been kicked around
most of my life tgat your kind of scolding is
duck soup to me." .

It was Hurst's opinion that the "inescapable conclusion
persists that Zora remains a figure in bas relief, only partially
emerging from her potential into the whole woman. She lived
laughingly, raffishly, and at least in the years I knew her, with a
blazing zest for life."25

Hurst's opinion is unfortunately the opinion of many who knew
Hurston. It is possibly based on the fact that Hurston let few see
her whole self -- she would emerge half-cloaked with most of her
friends and acquaintances. It is only through the medium of her
novels that we can begin to glimpse the whole woman -— author, free
spirit, researcher, voodoo priestess, and, as she conferred upon
herself, "Zora, Queen of the Niggerati."

Her association with Hurst as secretary, companion, and
chauffeur and as a student of Franz Boas are perhaps the better known
aspects of her life and works. Under Boas' guidance she became a
researcher and anthropologist who trekked through the south, visited
the Bahaman Islands, Haiti and South America and who recorded the
folklore of these islands and ceremonies in Tell My Horse.

Hurston's research in Hoodoo was an insider's view into these

31

mystic practices. In New Orleans, the "sympathetic magicians"
initiated her into its practices with an intricate ceremony. She left
Louisiana, fully a member of the 'sympathetic magicians' community, for
the Bahaman Islands. There she collected hundreds of songs, stories
and "tunes" which she resolved to make known to the world. In 1932
Hurston introduced the music from the sojourns in the form of a
concert at the Harold Golden Theatre in New York City. She undertook
this production with a great deal of criticism and very little
cooperation from the people she had gone to for help. When she wrote
a letter to Dr. Thomas E. Jones, the president of Fisk University
requesting a position in their drama department, she explained the
difficulty she had had with this concern.26
She wrote that she returned to New York City from the Bahamas
and began to see the "pity of all the flaming glory of being buried in
scientific journals. . . ." She felt that Hall Johnson, a Black
lyricist and composer, would help her arrange the tunes for
presentation. He held the music she gave him for six months and then
returned it saying that the world was not ready for Negro music
"unless it were highly arranged." She felt that she knew better than
this and attempted to present a concert with singers and dancers from
the West Indies. Hall Johnson only hindered her effort by promising
to show up for rehearsals and then reneging on those promises. She
finally presented her concert, with great success (the New School of
Social Research requested a performance) and was convinced that she
had given significant voice to the research she had conducted. This

concert was presented at other points of her career, often in the

32

South, in different forms and with different groups of performers.

The difficulty she had in arranging the concert was but one
minor instance of the many personality clashes throughout her career.
She was, as Hughes describes her, a strong-willed woman, and often
ran into trouble when trying to impose this will on others. She also
found that her massive sense of self-righteousness gave her trouble
in personal relationships. One further example of this spirit proved
to be the break-up of a long and very close relationship with
Langston Hughes.

Between 1927 and 1931 she was almost totally involved in her
research. Mrs. Mason, who had been funding her with two hundred
dollars a month for those years, extended her grant through another
year and allowed her to collect even more data. Some of this data
was eventually used as a thematic base for a play on which she and
Langston Hughes collaborated. The play was called "Mule Bone" and it
was never published because of a dispute which grew out of its
authorship. At the date of this dissertation, the play remains in
litigation due to the continuation of the authorial dispute. "Mule
Bone" is an illustration of her feeling that Black culture is
preserved in the beauty of its folklore and language. Her letters to
Hughes indicate that she had had enough training in linguistic
anthropology to recognize some "laws in dialect" as well as its
creativity and capacity to contain the most subtle variation of
thought and revelations of cultural concerns. Hurston and Hughes had
worked on "Mule Bone" together until Hurston's research called her

27

away on another field tour. It was when Hughes was in Cleveland in

33

1931 recuperating from a tonsillectomy that he had an opportunity to
speak with the director of the oldest Black theatre group in America,
Rowena Jelliffe. She had received the play from Samuel French
publications and was under the impression that the rights of ownership
belonged to Hurston, who had finished the play under her own power,
and with a few changes (which annoyed Hughes) sent it to Carl

Van Vechten. Van Vechten sent the play to French who sent it to
Jellif“fe without Van Vechten's knowledge. At the point when Jelliffe
spoke to Hughes, the play was already scheduled for production. After
many frantic phone calls to Hurston and a flurry of distressing letters
to Van Vechten, Hughes and Hurston finally met in Cleveland. Hurston
had told Hughes in a letter that "yes, she had finally sent the play
to her agent because she felt that if the play were ever produced he
would only take his half of the money and spend it on a girl she
didn't like." She also told him that she considered the "story to be
her story, the dialogue her dialogue, and the play her play -- even

if he had put it together, and that she did not want him to have any
part in it."

Hughes wrote Van Vechten that he had done the plot, the
construction and guided the dialogue toward the necessary situations
and climaxes and that Hurston had only supplied the "little" story
about the trial of a man who hit another with a mule bone and gave
the dialogue its southern flavor and many of the wise cracks. He
was very unhappy that she had submitted such an "unfinished, messed
up version" and that the result of her actions were a grand tangle.

He also wrote that that was Zora's common problem, "no order at all."

34

Although he was not angry with her actions because "she has always
been strange in lots of ways" Hughes did get some legal advice and
found that with the proof he had, Hurston could do nothing about
publishing or consenting to have the play produced, without his
permission.

The result of their meeting in Cleveland was a great argument,
with Hurston storming out of the room, angering Hughes, his mother,
and embarrassing the Jeliffes who had come hoping to straighten out
the situation. Somehow it finally emerged that Hurston had been
jealous of Hughes' stenographer and when she saw that the girl was in
Cleveland with Hughes, withdrew any attempt at mediation.

This conflict of Hurston and Hughes reflects a part of her
personality that becomes visible on many other occasions and is
indicative of the tension I have mentioned between her professional
and personal worlds. Their stormy meeting in Cleveland marks the
demise of what had been a very intimate relationship between Hurston
and Langston Hughes.

Hurston was a displaced spirit, both socially and
professionally. Her frequent job changes, and mood changes from
happiness to deep despair, which she described once to Van Vechten as
being a "horrible period of grim stagnation" were characteristic
of the breadth of her moods and the reactions they drew from those who
were associated with her.

Between 1930 and 1942 she published most of her novels and
folk collections as well as her autobiography. She was never to

exceed that volume of publication again, and after 1948 wrote only

35

occasional political articles for magazines with relatively little

public attention. She published Mules and Men in 1935 -- a

 

collection which was the result of her forays into Black culture in
the southern rural United States. Her second folk collection was
published in 1938. A fairly large contribution to Nancy Cunard's
anthology, Negro (1934), has received little attention but holds some
good information on her interests in the linguistic aspects of Black
culture. Two Guggenheim fellowships sponsored the research which she
continued sporadically for ten years. She also found herself in such
varied occupations as a staff writer for Paramount Studios in
Hollywood, director of Drama at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona
Beach Florida and, shortly before she died, a librarian and sometimes
maid for a white woman in Florida. In 1948 she published her last
novel which received mixed critical response. It may have been that
the subject of the text, which concerned the demise and rejuvenation
of a white family's relationships, was not truly representative of
her skill, though the book received favorable reviews. The Saturday
Reyiew noted that:

Miss Hurston's wonderful ear for the

vernacular for the picturesque phrases and

the poetical turn of words that so often

is a part of the conversation of the

unlettered, makes the novel one that may be

read with constant surprise and delight,

somewhat aside from its intrinsic merits as

a piece of fiction. . . . All Miss

Hurston's fiction has had warmth of feeling

a happy combination of lustiness and

tenderness that gives it an appeal too

often missing from much of the day's

bloodless writing, which is sexless in

spite of gts frequently overwhelming
sexiness. 8

36

As usual in the reviews of her fiction, she is praised for her
insight into language. But what her audience enjoyed about the
language in her fiction, and the message Hurston was attempting to
convey, were thoughts very far apart.

The anniversary of the critical acceptance of this novel is
also important for the other anniversary it notes. In September,
1948, Hurston was arrested on a morals charge involving relationships
with three (it was later found that there was only one alleged
relationship) young boys in a New York city apartment building. A
New York paper quoted portions of the reviews of her latest novel in
an attempt to further sensationalize the story. The review they
quoted read: "Miss Hurston shuttles between the sexes, the
professions and the races as if she were a man and a woman, scientist
and creative writer, white and colored."29

Her arrest, and the charge of sodomy against her received much
publicity in the Black press. From Baltimore to New York and Chicago

this story was paraded, sometimes with headline publicity. The

Baltimore Afro-American was one paper which headlined the story and

 

noted that the review of the latest book she wrote included a
character who was "hungry for a knowing and a doing kind of love."30
That Hurston wrote so poignantly and sharply about intimate
relationships was not to her advantage during this time of trial.
Many of the more sensuous scenes from Seraph on the Suwannee were
pinpointed throughout the news articles as if they illustrated some

of the character of the novelist herself.

For Hurston, this was a devastating experience. She was

37

"prostrate and hysterical" in the courtroom, defending herself of

these charges. Later, both the case and the charges were dropped
because of "conflicting and contradictory stories" by the boy

involved and the news that the mother of the boy had resented

Hurston's advice that the child needed psychiatric care. There was
also evidence that she had not been in the country when some of the
charged were to have occurred. Fannie Hurst, in a letter to

Van Vechten commented on the incident by saying "the Zora incident -—
(certainly staged, I understand) is in her find old tradition. Naughty
but nice." and followed the comment with a drawing of a happy,

3] Whatever the truth of the story, even if it were some

smiling face.
sort of practical joke, for which she was famous, it certainly
backfired. It was surely not funny, and the histrionics in the
courtroom one cannot help but believe were the frightened and angry
reactions of a woman accused.

The only certainty is that after the incident Hurston cut off
almost all of her communications with her friends, went into a deep
but temporary depression during which she wroteaaletter to
Van Vechten indicating that she would kill herself, never returned to
New York City, and lived and died in relative obscurity.

It was in January of 1959 that Harper and Brothers received a
letter from Hurston which was, as Hemenway described, "in painful
longhand." It was the first such letter she had written in ten years.
She wrote to their editorial department and asked if they would be

interested in "seeing the book I am laboring on at present -- a life

of Herod the Great." This was possibly the same text which she had

38

described with such enthusaism in a letter to Carl Van Vechten some
eleven years earlier. When she wrote Van Vechten, she had intended

for the material to be worked into a play.32

It may have eventually
become so voluminous that she gave it the title "history." The five
hundred pages which were written at the time of her death were barely
rescued from a fire. She died one year after writing this letter to
Harper. She had had a stroke in the Welfare Home of St. Lucie County,
Florida, and was buried, up until the time Alice Walker "searched"
for Hurston, in an unmarked grave. In 1975 Walker left a monument at
the "Garden of Heavenly Rest" in Fort Pierce with the inscription,
"Zora Neale Hurston, a Genius of the South, 1901-1960, Novelist,
Folklorist, Anthropologist." It sits towering over a field of
scraggly bushes and weeds which choke the dusty road.

In Hurston's last years, she had gained weight, fulfilling the
prophecy of Fannie Hurst who wrote of her in that memorial essay "her
lust for life and food go hand in hand." She lost her lust for life,
and found her last years as a maid, librarian and a school teacher a
sharp descent from the zenith of the Renaissance years.

Zora Hurston's contribution to Black American literature was
unique. The familiarity members of the Harlem school of artists and
Black middle class held with the topics of her research was somewhat
dispersed and scanty. There had not been, before this time, any
interest in recording the folktales and practices which were the
objects of her studies. Robert Hemenway wrote that:

. . there seems little question that she

helped remind the Renaissance -- especially
its more bourgeois members —- of the

39

richness in the racial heritage; she also

added new dimensions to the interest in

exotic primitivism that was one of the most

ambiguous products of the age (EA 195).
Hemenway's comment is certainly valid when we think of Hurston, along
with Toomer, reminding their audiences of the richness of our rural
culture. But, because most Renaissance authors explored some aspect
of their culture, we find many examples reminded audiences of the
"richness in racial heritage.f

Of all the critics who have dealt with Hurston, only her
biographer, Robert Hemenway, seems to realize the importance of her
academic training in her development as a writer. He wrote that she
left Barnard in 1927 a "serious social scientist" and observed that
her critical and analytical tools gave her the ability to look at her
culture both as "subject and object." We can forgive and understand
her failure and sorrow after her first research expedition ended with
her crying "huge, salty tears" in front of Papa Franz. This was the
only attempt she made to erase her culture from her experience, and
she found her asceptic method of interviewing "Do you know any
stories?" was a miserable failure. But she understood the failure of
the "stilted Barnardese" and realized that her cultural heritage held
the key to the successful completion of her studies. The tools she
equipped herself with at Barnard Hurston put to use as a social and
linguistic scientist as well as a novelist.
Contrary to what Hemenway sees as a failure on Hurston's part

to find "an expressive instrument, and intellectual formula which

could accomodate her varied educational background," I do not feel

40

that Hurston could have felt her attempts to convert the Afro-American
cultural experience into prose were total failures. Perhaps the
reader who hasn't the critical equipment to make both a linguistic
judgement and a literary judgement on her works may be trapped into
that kind of evaluation. It is an understandable entrapment. But we
must be equipped to evaluate this author on the very grounds on which
her experience and knowledge were formulated. These grounds include
the total experience of a woman who combined linguistic anthropology
and fiction into some very compelling works.

Instead of agreeing with Hemenway that her silence was compelled
by a sense of artistic failure, I feel that the critical acceptance
and general praise for her works should not have led her to have any
overwhelming sense of failure at this point in her career. Certainly,
there were moments of anger with critics who could not share her
world-view. Her attack on Alain Locke is an example of this anger.

He had criticized Their Eyes Were Watching God as having "contemporary

 

folklore" as its main point. But its humor and folklore, he wrote,
kept it from 9diving down deep either to the inner psychology of
characterization or to sharp analysis of the social background."33
Hurston was justifiably angry with this short-sighted criticism. She
had become known as a short story collector and writer, and it was
difficult for some critics to take her seriously as a novelist.
Locke's evaluation of this novel as folklore is very misplaced. Her
bombastic attack on his review is also an overreaction, but not out

of character. The satiric article which she wrote for Opportunity

said that "Dr. Locke knows nothing about editing or criticism, would

41

not know a folk tale if he saw one and is abstifically [sic] a

d."34 Obviously, that was one of the occasions Hurston may have

frau
felt she was writing for an audience who could not appreciate her
subject.

I do not believe that she ever felt either her folklore or her
fiction would find wide acceptance in the Black community. Hemenway
has suggested that her bitterness over this issue led to her literary
demise. I feel, rather, that her critical success, the success of her
performances and novels must have brought a very real satisfaction.

But this woman, who was a sensitive and insecure writer, could not

deal with the kind of publicity which surrounded her after her trial --
a publicity which mentioned her successes and skill and creativity
only in the light of what the public considered to be a woman who had
always, in the phrasing of Langston Hughes, "been strange in lots of
ways."

The Novels: A Critical Review

 

.Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) is Hurston's first novel. In it beat

 

strong reminders of her upbringing, her mother's gentility, her
father's sternness and the problem of color and class which permeated
Black twentieth century America. The characters John and Lucy Pitts
of this novel were based on her own parents. We can better understand
the tradition a preacher's child inherits through a letter Hurston
wrote to James Weldon Johnson in April, 1934:

Just a word about my novel. . . . I have tried

to present a Negro preacher who is neither

funny nor an imitation Puritan ram-rod in

pants. Just the human being and poet that he
must be to succeed in a Negro pulpit. . . .

42

I mean the common run of us who love

magnificence, beauty, poetry and color so much

that there can never be too much of it. . . .

I see a preacher as a man outside of his

pulpit and so far as I am concerned he should

be free to follow his bent as other men. He

becomes the voice of ghe spirit when he

ascends the rostrom.3
Like Hurston's own father, the preacher of this novel fights an
endless battle between the spirit and the flesh. The underlying
conflict which Hurston exposes draws us much further into the
cultural manifestations of being a Black man under a Judaeo-Christian
cloak. This man also fights the paradox that in his African heritage
there is no such spiritual/physical conflict. The weight of fighting
one's natural soul and one's "ordained and Christianized soul" is the
tragedy of this novel. It becomes doubly tragic because the Black
preacher is God's "trombone," his personal voice to the community.
Through him the spirit of the flock is buoyed up or brought down. He
carries their salvation and damnation and is symbol of their
heritage.

The journey towards some balancing point, a "spiritual
equilibrium" as Larry Neal notes in his introduction to this novel,
is indeed the theme of the text. gJohn's eulogy, "nobody knowed 'im
but God" is a fitting epitaph when we remember the God Cudjo Lewis
defined in Hurston's interview with this last descendant of the

36 "We know it a God, you unner'stand,"

African slave ships in America.
he explained to her. We understand that it is our spirit in conflict
only with a superimposed and ever alien culture.

Their Eyes Were WatchinggGod (1937) has become her most

43

popular novel. ‘This is a novel of many women. The poignant main
character, Janie, is juxtaposed against age and wisdom in the
character of the grandmother who raises her; she is also compared with
many other characters who personify various traits of womanhood and
levels of self-actualization. Janie is determined, proud, strong, and
searching for the fulfillment found by the wedding of a spiritually
and physically satisfying love. The tragedy of this novel, and its
Iirony, is that when Janie finds this lover in Mr. Vergible (Tea Cake)
Woods, she is forced to murder him to save her own life. It is a
powerful and tragic novel which, in our day, could be described as a
novel of liberation. Janie is not afraid to balk at the conventions
of culture and upbringing to follow what she feels is the best course
for her life. Yet, the traps of unsatisfying marriage and economic
hardship delay her, as they often do for women. The theme of this
novel is that of a spiritual freedom and spiritual strength which is
'equal to the often cruel and demanding tasks of reality. For this
reason, it has been described by Ellease Southerland as "a work of joy

37 Hurston knew from personal

and love . . . positive vibrations."
experience at that time, and was to learn even more bitterly later,
that an intelligent Black woman who could write, and who felt she
should reap some profit from her talent, would sometimes find herself
on the outside of many circles with her credentials questioned and
snickered at. When Jody (Janie's husband) says that somebody "got tuh
think for women and chillun and chickens and cows" he is echoing the

attitudes Hurston and other Black women fought all their lives.

As if to embody all her traditions and experiences under one

 

44

allegorical roof, Hurston presents us with Moses, Man of the

Mountain (1939). It is a revelation of the affinities between Voodoo
and Christianity, and an imaginative and well constructed salute to
the power of human ritual and the failings of human nature. Moses, in
an elaborate folktale which follows the oral tradition and is
therefore an excellent record of language and character, is the Voodoo

god Damballah. This god, Hurston says in Tell My Horse and again in

 

this tale, is the supreme god whose signature is the serpent. (Her
novelistic ties between Moses and this god do not seem so fictional
when we remember what things Moses did with his staff in the Biblical
account of this period.) Damballah's day is Wednesday, and therefore
this is the day which Moses, as student of this god and chief
magician for the Hebrew children, promises to return to Pharoah to
collect their freedom from him. The ceremony, ritual and
relationships probed in the surrounding tale of the battle of Moses
are cloaked in the story of the Old Testament. Under the guise of
the Moses story Hurston reveals the history of her people. It is a
tale very reminiscent of the message of Paul Dunbar's preacher in
"38

"AnteBellum Sermon.

Finally, Seraph on the Suwannee marked the end (1948) of her

 

career as a published novelist. This novel deals with the
difficulties of a white woman, Arvay Henson Meserve, and her husband
and family in realizing and meeting each other's demands for different
kinds of love and commitments. Insecure, often sniveling and
groveling, Arvay almost loses the love and security of her family.

Tortured by self-guilt, repressed sexuality, and an overwhelming

 

45

feeling of unworthiness, Arvay must come to some sort of admission of
her own value. In the background is the stable and secure
relationships within a Black family, the model that suggests the kind
of relationship which is normal and loving in a family. Arvay, in
her search for a "knowing and doing kind of love" almost bypasses any
chance for happiness. The symbol of her idiot son, a boy who dies
after a series of tragic and criminal events, seems to remind the
reader of the emptiness of her spirit. Although Arvay succeeds in
winning back the affections of her husband, the reader is left with a
strong sense of her failure to ever feel herself in the real depths
of a knowing and doing -- a spiritual love. The final lines of this
novel seem to suggest some hope for this to happen:

A breeze of dawn sprang up, and the boat rocked

gently with it. The slightly increased motion

made Arvay look out upon the sea. She saw that

the sun was rising. It seemed to her that the

big globe of light leaped up from a bed fixed on

the eastern horizon and mounted, trailing the

red covers of his bed behind him. . . . The

sunlight rose higher, climbed the rail and came

on board. Arvay sat up as best she could

without disturbing Jim and switched off the

artificial light overhead, and met the look of

the sun with confidence. Yes, she was doing39
what the big light had told her to do. . . .

 

CHAPTER III
"THE URGE TO ADORN"

In Hurston, language and character have an important link. This
link established a dependency that is more linguistic than literary.

A person's lexical knowledge -- that degree of language ability which
is performative -- is dependent on his linguistic competence.
Competence is a deeper structure of language than performance and is
linked in some vital, but yet to be determined manner, to
consciousness. The mental activity of a person's language is that
area which reflects his cognitive backgrounds and therefore his
cultural acquisitions. It is this grey area for which linguists offer
many structural conceptions (transformational grammars, tagmemic
structures, generative grammars), and in which they consider the crux
of language ability to be located.

Hurston's interest in folklore illustrated not only her
interest in language attitudes and customs, but reflected the kinds of
information which grew from her academic association with Franz Boas.
It also indicated how she, as a member of the race whose cultural
deprivation was constantly being discussed by white anthropologists,
sought to offer an alternative view of her culture through the medium
of a literature which was concerned with language. According to
Hemenway:

Hurston's folklore collections refuted these

46

47

stereotypes by celebrating the distinctiveness
of traditional black culture, and her
scholarship is now recognized by revisionist
scientists questioning the racial assumptions
of modern cultural theory (HB 330).

At the time of her studies, Boas had not been able to reconcile the

now accepted sociolinguistic and anthropologic view that culture and
race were related. John Szwed's essay "An Anthropological Dilemma,

The Politics of Afro-American Culture" illustrates the serious

misapprehension" of anthropologists who followed Boas' early

assumption that race and culture were conceptually distinct.40

Hemenway analyzes this section of Szwed's essay:

Once race and culture were separated, racial
differences could be shown to be statistically
insignificant. But while proving that there
were no racial differences in mental capacity,
anthropologists went on to claim that there
were no significant cultural differences
between the races. Out of a zeal to refute
genetic racism, but with an ethnocentric bias,
many argued that black Americans "shared
essentially the same culture as white
Americans, and where they differed, the
differences could be accounted for exclusively
as a result of environmental deprivation or
cultural 'stripping,‘ but certainly not as the
result of any normal cultural procedures."

The implication grew that lower-class black
Americans had no distinctive culture or
subculture of their own (HB 330).

The failure on the part of Boas to realize the inherent kinship
between race and culture did seem to translate itself to some of
Hurston's attitudes about her race, such as various comments
concerning the significance of featural differences in race and their
relationship to language differences. However, they did not flaw the

theory of culture and language which she was to illustrate in her

48

fiction. Indeed, we must give Hurston major credit for moving away
from what must have been the persuasive influence of Boas on this issue
as she "defiantly affirmed the cultural practices manifest in the
folklore of 'the Negro farthest down'" (HB 332). Although Hemenway
uses only her folklore to illustrate her rebellion on this issue, it
is as clearb/seen through her longer fiction. Because some of the
information the characters reveal about themselves in Hurston comes
from the structures of their language, we must be able to conclude
that Hurston, who shared this dialect with her characters, was aware
of the linguistic capabilities of the dialect.

There is another point which it is essential to recognize
here. I do not propose that Hurston's choice of this style and
structure was a consciously studied scientific approach. There have
been many examples in her biography which suggested that Hurston's
dual role as a serious social scientist (with linguistic interests)
and as a novelist often conflicted. Her novels were, on many
occasions, criticized by her reviewers as containing too much folklore
(such as the Locke review of Their Eyes Were Watchianod)4] or by
other reviewers (usually white) as not containing enough. Her readers
were looking for either a good narrative or a good folk story.' They
were not looking for scientific statement. When she was forced to
organize the mass of folklore data she had collected on her various

expeditions for the Mules and Men collection, her publishers pushed it

 

into a form which represented a collection of folklore humorously
narrated instead of the results of a scientific expedition which

included an analysis of the form and function and intent of the folk

49

tale. Hurston is not blameless in this matter. She allowed her
material to be used this way. Perhaps she hoped that her understanding
of it as a representation of the culture of a group of Americans who
were thoroughly competent in the linguistic performances of their
backgrounds would also be understood by her audience. Hurston's
political statement (left unstated or understated) was that she was
presenting this material as evidence of a different culture in America.
Her books were designed to illustrate the lack of any cultural
deficiencies.

Therefore, the mixture between the scientific study and the
novelistic results should not be ignored. Although Hurston never
published commentary which clearly indicated her academic
understandings of language and culture without also presenting the
audience with a wealth of data in the guise of a highly amusing story
or an absorbing novel, this does not mean that the data is not there
to be analyzed, or that the data is not legitimate. Instead, to gain
the most information we can about the conjunction of her academic
studies and novelistic skills, it is necessary to dissect structurally
that system which she recognized, a recognition verified in her
correspondence. Then we can see what kinds of materials she chose to
help her formalize her attitudes into the structures of literature.

The Narrative Function

 

The Narrator's role is the key to understanding her system.
An interesting dichotomy presents itself. Hurston, I have

mentioned, could function on both the subject and object levels of

her scientific studies. As a member of the culture she closely

50

scrutinized, she could also abandon her academic garb and become a
member of the group of people who sat on the steps of Joe Clark's
store in Eatonville (an image which frequently appears in her fiction)
exchanging lies and telling stories with the best of them. The same
spirit who, when coached by Boas or Melville Herskovits of Columbia,
would prowl the streets of Harlem with calipers in hand, stopping any
Black person she wished, and asked to measure the size of their
skulls, would join the story telling group in Eatonville shedding the
vestiges of the formal education and status. Once, to retain her
membership in this group, she had to explain away a $12.00 dress she
foolishly wore (she had plenty of a less expensive variety in her
suitcase) by saying it was the gift of her boyfriend. Darwin Turner
tells a similar story about her doing the same thing with the car she
drove to Eatonville. The dress she had bought at Macy's in New York;
the car had been a gift from Godmother.
In Mules and Men she wrote:

From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I

had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is

apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says

from the house tap. But it was fitting me

like a tight chemise. I couldn'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 (MM 17).

She seems to perform a similar operation, which Hemenway refers

to as a "dissociation of sensibility," with the narrator's role in

her fiction. On many occasions the narrator is objectively

scrutinizing the characters, revealing more to the reader than the

51

characters know about themselves. But, as the prose progresses, she
allows the narrator to almost become the subject of the text. The
narrative voice blends into the character's linguistic style so
closely (or the character's style becomes his), that it frequently is
difficult to separate the two voices.

Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction includes a discussion which

 

describes the possibilities for the narrative voice in fiction. I
have structured Booth's analysis to illustrate how Hurston's use of
narrative falls outside of traditionally assigned roles and why an
alternative structure must be proposed for her novels. Booth
describes, using terms like “Dramatized and Undramatized, Privilege
and Reliability," how each type of narration (that which occurs either
inside or outside of the story) functions for the text. Hurston's
narrative voice is one which functions within the story. This
category of narration, for Booth, has two possibilities. The view of
the narrator who is "inside" is either "dramatized" or "undramatized."
Hurston's narration fits none of the explanationshe offers for the
”undramatized" or "restricted" narrator. She has not let the narrator
be the one to whom the action happens. However, there are some
categories where Restricted Narrative View, as defined by Booth,

does seem to apply. The following illustration of Booth's discussion
is an indication of how Hurston's narrative voice functions alongside

the more traditional elements defined by Booth:42

52

 

INSIDE NARRATORS

 

~DRAMATIZED

RESTRICTED

HURSTON

 

Identity in
the story

Voice
Access to

Character's
Consciousness

Presence

Reliability

 

A Character

First-person

Access to
consciousness of
one character --
himself

Dominates story;
relates his own
experiences or,
as witness,
someone else's.

Frequently
unreliable
because his
self-knowledge
and knowledge
is imperfect.

 

Not a Character

Third-person

Access to
consciousness of
one character or
to a community of
characters through
whose perceptions
he conveys the
story.

Speaks in his own
voice but submerges
his vision into the
character(s) whose
perspective(s)
serve as the
narrative focus.

Ranges from
reliable to
unreliable,
depending on the
character(s) whose
consciousness(es)
he reveals and on
the presence or
absence of "clues"
affirming or
negating implicit
attitudes and
values.

 

Not a Character

Third-person

Same, but offers
perspectives of
the characters
which they only
realize later in
the story.

Speaks in his own
voice until the
perspective of
character and
narrator blend;
then there is a
single voice for
the entire
structure.*

Entirely
reliable, because
his task is to
bring the
characters to the
self-knowledge
he has had of
them since the
beginning of
their stories.

 

*at times, the voice of the narrator slips into the voice of character.

For example:

if the character is using the Black dialect. and the

narrator had been using a Standard English, the narrator may shift
Rather than being an error in construction, this seems
to be a device to alert the reader to the approaching synthesis of
narrator and character.

into dialect.

 

 

 

53

The disembodied status of the narrative voice gives it a sort of
Faulknerian purpose; it presides over the activity of the novel, it is
omniscient, and it functions as a link between the conscious and
visible activity of the novel and unconscious, passive thought. The
division between narrator and character can be explained using
linguistic terms. The narrator, as the deep structure of the novel,
is the underlying competence of a character who eventually is brought
to a realization of self. The character, as the surface structure,
only externally participates until this level of self-knowledge is
attained. Hurston does not allow a character's underlying competence
to be exhibited until, through a series of activities by which the
literary areas of plot and theme are structured, he comes to a degree
of self-knowledge which matches the narrative understanding of him.
These activities usually seem to involve a soul-searching on the part
of the character, accompanied by a linguistic silence. The narrative
voice is dominant during these silences.

Because Hurston's novels are journeys toward self-awareness
and actualization, the external voices of character gradually blend
into the narrative structure, relinquishing themselves to its greater
knowledge and finally blending into its deep structure competence.

The transition is gradual, and the final marriage of voices is
accomplished almost without the reader's awareness.

Why does this happen?

It could be that Hurston was unconsciously assigning to the
narrator the tradition which the folk tale follows. As the folk story

is orally presented, the teller of the tale relinquishes his narration

54

to the characters. These characters are then left with the duty of
presenting the summation of the plot. It seems that her novels,
using a parallel structure, also blend into 1a single voice which
summarizes and concludes the events of the story. For someone who was
trained in anthropology and who did her field work recording folk
literature, it should not seem unusual for the elements of her fiction

to be structurally similar to the folk tradition.

The Narrative Role in Novelistic Structures

 

The first sections of Hurston's novels often contain
proportionately more dialogue than the final sections. This dialogue
serves to establish the history and tone for the characters who are
presented. In these sections, the characters introduce themselves,
interact, and set a stage for the events which will occur. Sometimes,
it is the task of the narrator to set this stage. But if the narrator
does appear in these opening sections, it is a different voice from
the commentator's. It seems to take, for this brief moment, a role
similar to one Booth assigns the "Outside Narrators" except that he
seems almost a person, a character standing back and making

observations like the one opening Their Eyes Were Watching God:

 

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on
board. For some they come 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 (TEWWG 5).

For four more paragraphs, this voice philosophizes like a distant and

wise observer on the scene, and then disappears. Its re-emergence is

not with this same philosophical perspective which allowed it to say

55

of the people who sit on the porches in late evening that they "made
burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It
was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without master;
walking altogether like harmony in a song." Instead, his voice works
to establish its relationship within the characters rather than

outside of them.

Most frequently, the narrative relationship established with the
character who is to come to the self-actualization within the course of
the story, complements this character by drawing parallels between him
and gatgpg, It is a strange choice. But it functions to surround the
dialogue with some measure of the truth which it will eventually come
to realize. It is an African concept, and an ancient concept that
truth is constant in nature. Whatever deceit may occur to obfuscate
the soul, nature is a consistent symbol of what is right.

For example, Hemenway identifies what he terms a "contradiction"
at the center of Jonah's Gourd Vine. "John creates poetry," he writes
"perceiving the world in striking images, but he can never really
understand himself. He is a poet who graces his world with language
but cannot find the words to secure his own personal grace . . ."
(HB 196).

But this language can be understood as a narrator speaking
through him, the one who possesses the knowledge towards which the
action of the novel compels John. It is significant that before John
begins the sermons which prompt Hemenway's comment, he tells his
congregation "When Ah speak tuh yuh from dis pulpit, dat ain't me

talkin', dat's de voice uh God speakin' thru me. When de voice is

56

thew, Ah jus' uhnother one uh God's crumblin' clods" (JGV 197).

After the separation between the narrator's vision and the
character's point of view has been established, the narrative voice
works to establish a blend between its activity and the activity of
the characters it has introduced. It is no longer as apparent, in this
stage, where the narrative voice begins and the characters take over
for themselves. Commentary is blended neatly together with comment.

Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, seems to bend over

 

backwards to establish this point -- that language is a controlling
element in one's life. To the reader who is not aware that an
illustration of character and an explication of text can be seen
through the structure of language, this book seems confusing, as it
does to Hemenway who writes: "John's crisis is not important to the
sermon; only his language compels, and it is this separation of
confused self from inspired utterance that frustrates him" (HB 196).
Her biographer also seems to feel that this separation frustrates the
text. However, it seems as easy to see this separation as a tool of
illustration Hurston has used to suggest the power and control of
language, especially when in dialect.

The blend which the narrative voice eventually seeks between
character's utterance and its own is documented very closely in the
sermons of Jonah's ecurd Vine. It is because it is God speaking
through John on these occasions that we cannot expect him to have the
power to recognize the ambivalences between his external actions and
his internal motivations, symbolized in the deep structures of his

language. It is with this purpose in mind, to illustrate that John

57

has not yet come to the position of self-awareness, that the narrative
commentary remains distinct from John's external activities and only
blends the images of nature and the settings which already hold some
degrees of truth. The sermons where God (truth) speaks through John
are Hurston's hints to the reader of the existence of this structure.
The narrative which describes the reaction of Pearson's congregation,
after hearing a sermon designed to extricate himself from the
accusations of adultery, artistically blends the forgiveness of the
congregation (an emotion which comes from within the soul) with the
symbolic nature of his position, another element which holds truth:

The church surged up, a weeping wave about

him. . . . His weight seemed nothing in

many hands while he was roughly, lovingly

forced back into his throne-like seat.

After a few minutes of concerted weeping

he moved down to the communion table and

in a feeling whisper went thru the sacrifice

of a God (JGV 198).

The blending narration works in this way also in Their Eyes Were

 

Watching God.

 

She was stretched on her back beneath the
pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the
visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the
panting breath of the breeze when the
inaudible voice of it all came to her. She
saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the
sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-
calyxes arch to meet the love embrace from
root to tiniest branch creaming in every
blossom and frothing with delight. . . .
Than Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet
that left her limp and languid (TEWWG 13).

The dialogue which dominates the second portion of this novel
is infused with the voice of the narrator. The early dialogue clearly

separates the narrative voice from the voice of the characters. This

58

leads to some confusion, and has prompted some reviewers to feel that
the persona of the narrator changes inexplicably towards the end of
the novel (HB 233). But the purpose of this text, to indicate Janie's
growth into a woman who comes to an awareness of self, could not have
been better illustrated than for Janie to grow towards the same
awareness the narrator has had throughout the text. Hemenway refers to
Janie's growth as a “poetic self-awareness." It was. The narrative
voice, especially in this text, is infused with poetry, as its opening
lines have indicated. The closer Janie grows towards the narrative
knowledge, the closer her voice becomes linked to its poetry. At one
stage of the novel, it is difficult to tell exactly who is speaking --
character or narrator.

But here come Bootsie, and Teodie and Big 'oman

down the street making out they are pretty by

the way they walk. They have got that fresh

new taste about them like young mustard greens

in the spring. . . (TEWWG 58).
When describing the activity on the porch of Jody Stark's store, the
narrator seems to instigate the action: ". . . and the young men on
the porch are just bound to tell them about it and buy them some
treats. . . (TEWWG 58)."

In the act of reading this passage, if one is not interrupted,
he may read it as if it were dialogue, not narration. This is an
example of the blending narrative voice. When the narrative activity
and the activity of the characters are so closely merged, this type

paragraph is the artistic result.

This voice, in Moses, Man of the Mountain, is an even deeper

 

blend of the character and narrator. Hurston uses little actual

59

dialogue here. The structure of this mid-section is primarily internal
and it allows the narrator to write the thoughts of the character as if
it were active voice, and to combine these thoughts and observations

as if it were all a substitute for dialogue. The reading act again

may lead one to think it is dialogue. But more careful examination
indicates an absence of the structural marks of dialogue and the
intrusive voice of commentary.

The structure of narration here gives away its commentative
role. The abundance of poetic devices (symbols, simile, metaphor and
personification), are appropriate for narrative comment:

The years went by with a loping gait. A
profound calm took up in the face of Moses.
It grew rugged like the mountain but held
its power inside. . . . He lived on the
1223123813823 $5,123,293“ “em

The thin line between description and analysis is exhibited in
the preceeding paragraph. It is indicative of a blending voice which is
bringing the character closer to its own knowledge.

Finally, the narrative voice succeeds in bringing the character
or the external action of the novel to a realization of its truth.
llnsstage of Hurston's fiction involves a complete departure from
artistic blend and a takeover of the tone and attitude of the
narrative. The concept of tone is important here. Earlier narrative
voices establish for the reader the narrative point-of—view. It is
not the view of either the protagonist or the antagonist because it

has had deeper insight into their characters than they themselves

possess. Neither can these characters comment on circumstances in the

narrative manner. The intrusion of the narrative in the earliest

60

pages of Hurston's fiction is clear and undisguised. It is easy, at
this stage, to isolate the tone and intention of the narrator.

Jonah's Gourd Vine for example, demonstrates narrative

 

intervention which reveals the relationships which will become a part
of the plot of the novel in sections like: "The children came leaping
in, in tense, laughing competition." In another section of this early
narrative, the voice uses events inside and outside of the home to
render symbolically the feelings of animosity, and conflict within the
family:

In the frenzied silence, Amy noticed that the

rain had ceased; that the iron kettle was

boiling; that a coon dog struck a trail way

down the Creek, and was coming nearer, singing

his threat and challenge (JGV 19).

The sarcastic and ironic tone of the narrator in the opening
pages of Seraph on the Suwannee admonishes the reader not to take
Arvay Henson seriously as it describes her peculiarities and quirks
with an unsympathetic tone:

Arvay's tearful speech followed the usual
pattern, and everybody said it was just

fine. . . . Five years had passed since
Arvay had turned her back on the world. . . .
It was not too difficult for her, because
the community soon put Arvay Hensaa down as
queer, if not a little "tetched."

By the time the novels reach the blending voice of narration,
it is possible to separate, with a little scratching beneath the
surface, the distinct points-of—view -- the various character's and
the narrative. Analysis of the final narrative voice reveals that
the characters have submitted themselves to the more powerful

knowledge of the narrator.

61

John, in Jonah's Gourd Vine, finally grows wise to Hattie's

 

hoodoo and bemoans the loss of his first wife, Lucy, with the same
wisdom the narrator blended into the earlier sections of the novel:

Look 1ak ah been sleep. Ah ain't never

meant tuh marry you. Ain't got no

recollection uh even tryin' tuh marry yuh,

but here us is married, Hattie, how come

that. . . ?

Suddenly a seven-year-old picture came

before him. Lucy's bright eyes in the

sunken face. Helpless and defensive. The

look. Above all, the look! .hfluistared at

it in fascinated horror for a moment. The

sea of the soul, heaving after a calm,

giving up its dead (JGV 224).

It is the final stage of his awareness. The symbolic
suggestion that he had been "asleep" during the events of the novel,
the events which were mainly concerned with the activities of his
body, suggest that he was for this time soulless. Only after he drags
the depths of the sea, does he retrieve his soul. The linguistic
correlation which is possible here suggests that language as a
behavioral manifestation is not enough to account for motivation. We
need the deeper structures of language, its soul, to understand our
performances.

Each of Hurston's novels, in different fashion, enjoins a
search for truth. Usually the search ends in some internal
recognition of sin or weakness. The search can end in a fulfillment
after rectifying this weakness. Janie finds the fulfillment of love
she sought throughout the novel. In its early sections, she bends to
the wishes of her grandmother, who believes stability and contentment

are to be found in things like a husband who owns sixty acres of land

62

and a house "bought and paid for." Later, she runs away with Jody
Starks and finds herself bending to his definitions of womanhood and
roles. The narrative voice in each of these sections voices her
unhappiness for her: "A feeling of coldness and fear took hold of her.
She felt far away from things and lonely."

She had not, at these points of the novel, the strength of
character nor the inner conviction to voice these fears. Her actions,
as well as her dialogue, were purely superficial. But the
revelations and criticisms of the narrator filled in the deep structure
for her. The powerful presence of Jody Starks drove her away from
these external cares into a journey within her soul. The closer she
came to recognizing her own feelings, the more the spirit struggled to
free itself. The conveyor of this spirit becomes the narrative voice,
pushing itself to the control of all the activity and thought in the
novel. Shortly before Jody's death, she began to recognize the
existence of that spirit. The narrative voice telhsus: ". . . the
years took all the fight out of Janie's face. For a while she thought
it was gone from her soul." But upon the death of her husband, she
stopped "reaching outside" herself for survival "nor did the things of
death reach inside to disturb her calm." She found an interior peace.

The final narrative voice in this novel is difficult to
distinguish from Janie's voice. The blend of this section is the
result of her internalizing her passions and desires and finding that
she could control her own destiny. The dialect and marks of dialogue
distinguish Janie's speech from the standard prose of the narrator.

Other than this distinction, they could speak for each other. Her

63

language becomes poetic, as has the narrative language throughout the
novel. Following the tragedy of Tea Cake's death, when Janie is
forced to kill him to prevent his attacking her after he had been
bitten by a rabid dog and had lost his mind, Janie rationalizes her
love to her friend Pheoby:

"Dey gointuh make 'miration' cause mah love

didn't work 1ak they love, if dey ever had

any. Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't

somethin 1ak uh grindstone dat's de same

thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh

everything it touch. Love is 1ak de sea.

Its uh movin' thing, but still and all, it

takes its shape from de shore it meets, and

it's different with every shore" (TEWWG 158).
It is significant that Hurston does not give this passage to the
narrator. She is saying that the dialect, contrary to what her
contemporaries in the fields of anthropology and linguistics were
saying, could hold and communicate such abstract thought, and further,
this thought comes from the deepest levels of our consciousness. It
appears because we allow our souls to speak for us.

Janie's wisdom is a far cry from the obedient granddaughter and
wife of the early pages of the novel, and the subservient wife of
Mayor Starks in the mid-section. The bond that narrator and
protagonist now share has dissolved the boundary between surface
structures and deep structures. Language and character can finally be

synthesized.

This goal of synthesis is as apparent in Jonah's Gourd Vine.

 

The immediate and first effects of narrative blend cause Reverend
Pearson temporarily to lose his voice. It is as if internalization

takes place, as it did with Janie, with a putting aside of

64

outward things.

John said nothing. His words had been very
few since his divorce. He was going about
learning old truths for himself as all men
must. . . . The world has suddenly turned
cold. . . . Oh for the wings, for the wings
of a dove! That he might see no more what
men's faces held (JGV 267).

When John is able to loose himself of the fearful burden of
Hattie, recognizing at last the roots she had worked to keep him under
her power, he achieves the first stage of freedom from an outward
power. It remains for him to recognize his soul. The major conflict
of this novel is a battle between spirit and flesh. John's ministry
demands he sacrifice one for the other. Hurston defines the theme of
this novel in her letter explaining the novel's title to Carl
Van Vechten. She wrote:

Oh yes. the title you didn't understand

(Jonah 4:6-10). You see the prophet of

God sat up under a gourd vine that had

grown up in one night. But a cut worm

came along and cut it down. Great and

sudden growth. One act of malice and it

is withered and gone. The book of a

thousand million leaves was closed.
Recurrent dreams he has about his first wife, Lucy, are significant at
this stage. Lucy is the only one, other than the narrative voice, who
understands John's motivation. She knows his fleshly cravings in no
way obviate his belief in God. She is able to recognize the two
because her outlook is more reflective of the original religion --
faith to the spirit which is whole in nature and reflected in man.
She has looked upon her husband with scorn because he has not been

able to reconcile the conflicts of spirit, flesh and religion.

65

In a letter to James Weldon Johnson, Hurston notes that John

Pearson is a poet:
That is to say, one who manipulates words
in order to convey to others the mystery
. of God. But . . . he is also human
and, as such, beset with the burdens and
temptations of human existence. As poet
his power rests in his projection of the
Word. As bearer of the Word, he is both
the Son of God and the Son of Man. His
tragic dilemma is that he can be fully
neither one nor the other; especially on
the basis of some abstract morality. 6

In his preface to this novel, Larry Neal says its theme is
"man's search for spiritual equilibrium." The irony of this novel is
that John never really comes to an awareness that this imbalance is
his problem. Language in this text serves to hold the truths for him.
Only when his spirit speaks, symbolically rendered through his
preaching, is John able to achieve that union of spirit and flesh
which Hurston suggests is an African union. But the spiritual voice,
like the narrative voice in this novel forever operates on the
linguistic deep structure level, and never becomes a part of the
surface structures.

At this point the reader, the narrator and John know he is
fighting an unresolvable battle. His final church, the Pilgrim Rest
Church, symbolizes the ending of his spiritual journey. He cannot
keep out of the way of Ora, who tries to seduce him, no matter how
much he has promised himself to be faithful to his newest wife. On his
way back to his new home and new church, John is struck by a train

and instantly killed. The conflict had to be resolved for him,

because he would only try to find ways around or through the battle

66

without turning to the offering of truth which the spirit holds for
him. Significantly, this is the only character of Hurston's fiction
who dies in the end of the text, rather than reaches an understanding
of self. Hurston seems to offer death as an alternative to this truth.

The narrator of Jonah's Gourd Vine tells us that his funeral drum,

 

reminiscent of that African spirit which John denied through
Christianity, was the voice of Death that promises nothing, that
speaks with tears only, and of the past. We are led to realize that
the past was his African heritage. "He wuz uh man, and nobody knowed
'im but God" is the final pronouncement of this novel. His "access" as
Hemenway defines it, to a "pre-Christian memory," that memory the
narrative language evoked, was the true key to his salvation. But he
was unable to surmount the cultural restraints of Christianity and
meet with the deeper elements of his heritage.

Moses does achieve the poetic understanding of the omniscient

narrator in the final pages of Moses, Man of the Mountain. His final

 

ascent of the mountain is not, for the first time, at the bequest of
another. First Jethro had taught him that there was magic to be
learned from the mountain and begged him to go up. Then God beckoned
him up there to receive His wisdom and instructions. This final
ascent, as it was in a way for Janie, was at his own initiative. Once
there he realized, like the narrative voice had known all along and
illustrated again and again, that "no man may make another free.
Freedom was something within. The outside signs were just the signs
and symbols of the man inside" (313). Again, we find the narrative

voice bringing us to an internal realization. It is significant to

67

the premise of the blending narrative voice that Moses, in his final
mountain-top ruminations, realizes that in the people of Israel whom
he had brought to the foot of the mountain, God "had a voice." This
gift of language, the voice to express God and spirit, becomes Moses'
ultimate gift to the people.

Arvay, in the last pages of Seraph on the Suwannee, realizes

 

what her husband had been trying to accomplish with their marriage. He
did not want to settle for only the outward shows of affection, care
and concern without an inner devotion and commitment. Arvay could
never manage to turn over her soul to the man she married. But

this is not a positive statement of sexual independence; Arvay has
deep feelings of insecurity and inferiority. Her doubts, fears and
mistrusting nature had too firm a hold on her spirit for love, trust
or independence to intrude. There is a fierce struggle between the
narrative voice and Arvay throughout the novel. This voice indicates
the love and intense devotion Jim (with all the chauvinism implied by
his name, "Me-serve“) held for Arvay. He was confused and
disappointed when it wasn't returned in kind. It indicates through
the symbol of the swamp (which becomes the burial ground for her idiot
son), the muddied and confused field of Arvay's feelings. The snake
incident (where her husband is almost killed because of her inability
to act) is overwhelmingly phallic in intent, and reveals again the
sexual repression suggested throughout the novel. These incidents and
symbols are resolved in the blend of the final pages. Once more we
find narrator and protagonist speaking for each other. Arvay

realizes that:

68

All that had happened to her, good or bad,
was a part of her own self and had come out
of her. Within her own flesh were many
mysteries. . . . What was in you was bound
to come out and stand (309).

Narrative voice describing her feelings now is also describing
her outer actions. There is no longer a battle between the two.

The symbols employed by the narrative voice in Hurston's works
seems to be a conscious attempt on her part to drag us beneath the
surface of the dialogue and indicate to the reader where the
characters have to go to resolve the conflicts and finish the
journeys they each have begin in her novels.

When Hurston labels John Pearson as a poet or "one who
manipulates words in order to convey to others the mysteries" we should
understand that the emphasis on poetic devices in narrative voices
serves the same purpose, and that she, as author, is attempting the
same thing. This voice and her writing is a key to the mysteries of
the spirits of her characters. Both her readers and the major
characters must reach this understanding.

The characters of Hurston's novels seem to be developed along
very specific patterns. Through thoughtful blending of several
elements, the total character is realized. The elements which blend to
create character are (1) narrative voice, (2) setting, (3) interpersonal
relationships and (4) language. Since this thesis is most concerned
with the developments of language and character in Hurston, discussion
of element (4), which is concerned with dialect, extends into Chapter

Four.

(1) Narrative Voice

69

Narrative Voice has been discussed at length in the preceeding
section. Because this voice often serves as spokesperson for a
character who has not yet found his own voice, the narrative voice is
often our first clue to character. Although the blend of elements is
essential to the full character, the early voice of the narrator can
reveal some important aspects of the developing character. In Mpgggg

Man of the Mountain, the narrator tells us, as early as page 58 (when

 

Moses was still a young prince in training) that:
He was a born trooper. . . . There was
something about him that assured them he was
a companion to be relied on in times of danger.
They wanted to follow him into whatever
escapade he thought up. He was the young
men's choice for a leader (58-9).

This voice gives us reason to understand why, at a much later
point of the novel, this man could convince an entire nation to follow
him for years into the desert across the Red Sea.

The history of these beginning pages, although it is not
analytical appraisal of the Hebrew nation, prepares the reader for
the important element of setting in this text. Because the conflict
between Pharoah and Moses and the Egyptian and Hebrew people is so
central to this novel it is important for these opening pages to
establish this tone so that the reader is prepared for the underlying
conflict explored in the novel. Such lines as the following
illustrate this point:

They had trampled on the proud breast of
Egyptian liberty for more than three

hundred years. But the gods had used the
courage of the real Egyptians to conquer

and expel those sheep-herding
interlopers. . . . All he [Pharoah] had

70

required of them was that they work and

build him a few cities here and there to
pay back some of the wealth they had so

ruthlessly raped from the helpless body

of Egypt when she was in no position to

defend herself (30).

The early narrative voice usually acts to describe the freedom
which must be achieved by or for the protagonist in the novel. Janie,

for example, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, struggles to free

 

herself from the control of Jody Starks. Moses is learning the
wizardry of Damballah to help wrench the Hebrew's freedom from the

hands of Pharoah. Arvay, in Seraph on the Suwannee, is fighting the

 

emotional reins of her idiot son as well as her many levels of guilt;

John, in Jonah's Gourd Vine, is embroiled in the hypocrisy of church

 

and flesh. The task of the narrative voice in these sections is to
internalize successfully the character so they may realize their own
potential and value. In these mid-sections, the complications of plot
emerge and illustrate the conflicts the characters must overcome
before they can be self-reliant. Here the narrative voice (as
discussed in the previous section of this paper) often provides
structural clues which indicate how close the characters are to
reaching their individual awareness of self.
(2) Setting

The role of setting is perhaps the most poetic element of
character development. This element must achieve the distinction of
putting character into a situation which serves as his l'1eit motif."
It should be like the thematic interplay of a sonata. Through the

various shifts of this theme from major to minor key, from andante to

71

allegro tempos, the theme continues to be recognized. When it appears
again in recapitulation, in its original form, it is a broader, better
defined, and fuller statement because of its development. The same can
be said of the development of character in Hurston. The setting which
is attached to character grows fuller with each change. The final
picture of character emerges, with the well—established element of
setting bound into our conception of this character. For example,
when Moses leaves the increasingly hostile company of the Egyptians
and crosses the Red Sea for the first time, Hurston describes him as
an alienated soul, no longer an Egyptian, bereft of all but the
outward signs of birth and power, denied his house, facing neither
friend nor enemies and "as empty as a post hole, for he was none of
the things he once had been." But he was a "man sitting on a rock.
He had crossed over." This rock becomes the early symbol of the
mountain on which Moses was to regain all and more than he had lost by
leaving the Egyptians. The power which he gleaned from this mountain
became the strength of the Hebrew children. This symbolic clue, at
this early point of the novel, is therefore crucial. It is carefully
developed from this point on. As he travels away from the Red Sea,
he catches first sight of his mountain:

He saw it at a distance, lifting its rocky

crown above the world, and he was dumbstruck

with awe. To him it had its being in

grandeur, so it was right and proper to draw

itself apart from the surrounding country

and hide its mysteries in its heart. It was

near; it was far. It called, it forbade.

He must believe in gods again, for here was

the tomb of a god a thousand greater than

pyramids. No, it was not a vain thing like
a pyramid. . . . It had an aura of clouds

72

upon its brow. This sublime earth form was

surely the living-place of a god. It had

peace and fury in its face (100).
This is the setting which serves as a backdrop for the most important
activity of this novel. Moses and the mountain, as the title
indicates, soon become synonymous.

There is setting as dramatic in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

It does not become an identifiably important element until the section
of the novel where the character of Janie is most fully realized. The
relationships of this novel are crucial to character development, as
will be illustrated shortly. But the setting of the relationship
between Janie and Tea Cake plays as important a role. It is
interesting that as Janie becOmes more of her 'natural' self, that is,
less a victim of the whims of others, the setting of the novel moves
back to nature. Its movement (and Janie's) begins from the long-
cultivated farm of Logan Killicks. The establishment of those
surroundings was about as planned as their relationship. There is no
spontaneity, no gaiety, there are no surprises. From this
marriage, she moves with Jody Starks to Eatonville, a town just being
developed from a clearing in Florida. As the plan of the town grows
more and more developed, the relationship between Jody and Janie grows
more and more artificial and strained. Jody, upon arriving in
Eatonville, promptly begins to build up the town, cutting down trees
for roads, putting up its first streetlamp, building his store and
generally "taming" the wilderness. Eventually he becomes mayor of the
town and in the process, "tames" Janie's spirit. She becomes a silent,

sullen wife, the natural beauty of her hair hidden behind a cloth

73

handkerchief, and her self and spirit relegated to the back of the
store which Jody runs. When Janie escapes this setting and takes off
with Tea Cake, we find a very different kind of relationship. He is a
free spirit, a sojourning man, traveling wherever work takes him.
They become migrant workers, moving with the crops and not seeking to
control any aspects of nature. The irony and bitter ending to this
story is that untamed nature (a hurricane) initiates a chain of events
against Janie and Tea Cake which eventually forces her to kill the
only man she ever loved freely, with her spirit as well as her body.
We get some indications of the impending tragedy during the bitter
sweep of the storm:

The wind came back with a triple fury and

put out the light for the last time. They

sat in company with the others, their eyes

straining aginst crude walls and their

souls asking if He meant to measure their

puny might against His. They seemed to be

staring at the dark, but their eyes were

watching God (TEWWG 131).
(3) Interpersonal Relationships

It is not unexpected that a novelist would seek to expand some

of her reader's knowledge of characters by using the relationships
they have with other personalities of the novels. Therefore,
Hurston's use of this technique is not in the least unique or unusual.
However, what'Hsunique is the minimal but important role that this
element plays in the development of her characters. The four novels
under consideration here each develop a paradoxically dependent/

independent relationship between main and subsidiary characters.

Their dependence is usually quite literal. Arvay needs Jim Meserve to

74

care for her, love her and provide for family. Moses needs Jethro,
who works as the human extension of the mountain, to guide him to the
magic well springs of the mountain's powers. Janie needs her
grandmother, Jody, Logan and Tea Cake to give her the spiritual fuel
she needs to examine the quality of her own desires. John Pearson
needs Lucy and Hattie to satisfy his physical needs and Lucy to
vocalize his spiritual goals. The dependencies of these main
characters are all quite real and binding. But their independence in
these interpersonal relationships comes about because of the various
dependencies. Herein the paradox. Arvay's needing Jim leads her to
realize she is a woman who has something of her own to offer. Why
else, she finally realizes, has her husband stayed with her and fought
so hard to get her to have some sense of self-worth? Moses learns
through Jethro that the secrets to all magic lie within the mountain.
Once he masters these powers, his strength is greater than Jethro's.
who has been his mentor. Through his learning, he becomes a teacher.
Pitiful John Pearson, haunted by Lucy's truths and Hattie's mojos,
takes a flight of independence away from them both. But his flight
is into the hand of another protector, Sally. Finally, the ultimate
act of liberation is accomplished for him -- death. The reader
understands at this point that John will never come to the point of
awareness on his own; death is undeniable liberation.
(4) Language

Hurston uses Black dialects, Standard usage and literary
languages to fill out her characters. Each usage, whether dialect,

Standard, or literary, illuminates an event she wishes to underscore

75

in a special manner.

Much of her dialogue between characters is within the grammar
which has been defined as the Black dialect. Excluded from this
dialect is the dialogue between the Hensons and the Meserves, the

white characters of Seraph on the Suwannee. Therefore, her usages of

 

dialect are both historical and illustrative. She obviously wishes to
improve the historical accuracy of her novels by capturing the way
folk talked. But what is more important is that through the use of
dialect, Hurston reveals to the astute reader the many nuances of
meaning and intention carried within its morphophonemic frame.

For example, the newly liberated Hebrews begin grumbling among
themselves about the authority Moses seems to have. Moses, who is by
modern-day definition bi-dialectal, chooses to speak the dialect of
the Hebrews to try to settle their differences. He says; "It's no
use for me to try to talk any higher court language with these people,
I might as well get right down with them. . . ."47

The Hebrews are not unaware of the psychological advantage
Moses is trying to claim by "talking our language just like we talk it
ourselves." They also realize that what makes Moses' attempts
humorous and ineffective is "he forgets . . . and goes back to
talking his proper talk when he gets excited." Later, we see
evidences in another novel of a character going futher into
dialectical usage when she gets excited. Hurston is making an
observation about character here that cannot be ignored.

The author illustrates the instrumentality of language in this

type of interchange, especially with someone who is bi-dialectal.

76

That she is aware of the social benefits and hazards of bi—
dialectalism is revealed in her discussion on the origin of the
hostility between the Hebrews and Moses. On a larger scale, of
course, she is making a comment about those who attempt to use the
dialect for subterfuge, and who do not succeed at their games.

The use of dialect also functions to deepen the level of
communication between characters who share the dialect. This is
illustrated by the fact that the dialect uses fewer and fewer
Standard features the more deeply the characters are involved in
nuance and exchanges in, for example, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Conversation on the store porch between shoppers and proprietors are
usually lively and heated discussions of a variety of topics and
people. They are also very deeply imbued with the phonemic and
phonetic features of the dialect. They indicate that the level of
involvement of the participants is full and uninhibited by what, in
those days, was considered "proper" English. The implication is
that "proper" English, for speakers whose native language is the
Black dialect, is an escape from the depths of existence and feeling.
It is the difference between language which observes and language
which participates. This reasoning may also be aligned with the
Standard English observations of the narrative voice, and the
dialectal involvement of the characters with their lives. When
Janie Starks finally loses patience with her status as Jody's silent
partner, her retribution minces no words;

You big-bellies around here and put out a

lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin to it but
yo' big voice. . . . Talkin' bout mg

77
lookin' old! When you pull down yo britches,
you look lak de change uh life (TEWWG 68—69)!

The more hotly involved she is with her diatribe, the less her
language resembles the standard. Notice that "of" becomes "uh." In
less heated conversations, the more standardizations we find, including
the use of "of." The more emotional the exchange, the more dialectical
terms are present.

This rule holds true in most of the dialect usage for Hurston.
It becomes an important key to the strength and importance of the
dialogue, for purposes of characterization.

The poetic prose belongs to both the narrator's usually
Standard usage, and the character's dialect. It is important to note
that Hurston recognizes the power of dialect to carry eloquently the
poetic statement. The preacher as poet illustrates the strength of
poetry in dialect in Jonah's Gourd Vine. Unfortunately, much of the
strength of the sermon of pages 271-281 of this text lies in being
able to imagine hearing its delivery. The rhythm and intonation of
the sermon are only apparent to those who are familiar with the
dialect and the form and technique of the Black sermon. But the
skilled use of metaphor and imagery are possible for anyone to
appreciate.

In this sermon, the personified Sun begs God to create man in
its image:

De Sun, Ah!

Gethered up de fiery skirts of her garments
And wheeled around de throne, Ah!

Saying, Ah, make man after men, ha!

God gazed upon the sun
And sent her back to her blood-red socket

78

The moon is surrounded by the silvery images of the sea:
De Moon, ha!
Grabbed up de reins of de tides
And dragged a thousand seas behind her. . . .
as Jesus commands His armies:
And he arose
And de storm was in its pitch
And de lightnin' played on His raiments as
He stood on the prow of the boat
And placed His foot upon the neck of the storm
And spoke to the Howlin' winds
And de sea fell at His feet like a marble floor
And de thunders went back in their vault
Then He set down on de rim of de ship
And took de hooks of His power
And lifted de billows in His lap
And rocked de winds to sleep on His arm
And said, "Peace, be still" (JGV 271-281).
The sermon on these pages is an authentic delivery of one of
God's "trombones” (Rev. C.C. Lovelace of Eau Gallie, Florida).48 It
includes the interlocutionary remarks "Ah!" and "Ha!" as further
illustrations of the style of delivery. Both Hurston and James
Weldon Johnson, as illustrated in their correspondence and in their
literature, assign the Black preacher the role of poet for the race.
The poetry of the dialect is not only exhibited in sermons, but
in dialogue as well. Before Janie begins her reminiscing with Pheoby,
she explains how she has "been a delegate to de big 'ssociation of
life. Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin' is just
where Ah been dis year and a half. . . ."
Later, after telling her story to Phoeby, Janie's mood is
described by the narrator in abundantly poetic prose. Just after
Janie has described her love as being like the sea "uh moving

thing . . . takes its shape from de shore it meets. . . ." the

79

narrator, who speaks as poetically as Janie, says poignantly:

Janie mounted the stairs with her lamp. The
light in her hand was like a spark of sun-

stuff washing her face in fire. . . . The

kiss of his [Tea Cake'SJmemory made pictures

of love and light again against the wall.

Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon

like a great fish net. . ." (TEWWG) 159).

For John Pearson, the force of the narration begs for him to
realize that he has sacrificed his manhood for his Christianized
spirit. For Arvay Meserve, the interpersonal relationships of her
familial and marital ties help lead her to self-knowledge. Janie is
victim in every relationship but the final one. There, the
overwhelming forces of nature finally exert their external control.
But she retains her inner peace. Moses, too, finds strength and
receives his knowledge and power from God-In—Nature.

All these elements of fiction work to strengthen the
information which the reader receives through the narrative and
dialogue structures of the text. If he has not picked up the clues that
language usages offer, these elements alone convey the thematic
intents of her fiction. But there is so much more insight available
to the attentive reader who looks at language both externally and
internally and who realizes Hurston has used both the performances
and the competence of the language user to probe his consciousness
and reveal the quality of his cultural possession.

By way of further explanation of the conjunction achieved in
Hurston's literature between character and narrative voice, the

following illustration is offered.

In the samples which follow, taken from Their Eyes Were

 

80

Watching God, I have selected portions of both dialogue and narration

 

which illustrate the gradual movement of blend. In the earliest
samples (A), the narrative voice articulates the conceptual
self-awareness that the characters lack at the beginning of the

novels. Samples taken from the middle sections of the novel (8),
indicate the alternating voices of character and narrator. They often,
in these sections, imitate each other's style. But the mid-section
imitation is brief and each voice quickly regains its still distinct
style.

The next chapter of this dissertation discusses some of the
structural aspects which characterize the dialect. Narrative voice
using these structures, which are underlined in the samples below,
indicates an imitation of a style other than its own. The characters
quoted in (B) are beginning to gain insight into the personality of
the flamboyant Jody Sparks. They use the adorned language of the
dialect to assess the mayor's personality. These heavily adorned
structures are usually reserved for moments of insight. Janie uses it
on these occasions also. What should be noted here is that insight is
some aspect of consciousness, it is more cognitive than behavioristic.
For that reason language which reveals consciousness is revealing an
aspect of its spiritual being. ‘It is the linguistic deep structure
which the dialeCt offers on the occasions when c0nSciousness is
prgbgg, Because whatever insight the characters may have at the
middle sections of the novel is temporary and brief, adorned language

is limited in this section of Their Eyes Were Watching God as well

 

as Hurston's other novels.

81

In the final sections of the novel (C), we find both the
narrative voice enriched by the spiritual concepts gained from the
dialect, and the dialect submerged into a fully "adorned" language
which is capable of expressing knowledge of self and the insight into
motivation and being which it has gained. The language is now
characteristic of dialect in both its structure and intent.

(A) Early Sections:

Now, women forget all those things they
don't want to remember, and remember
everything they don't want to forget.
The dream is the truth. They act and do
things accordingly (5).

There are years that ask questions and
years that answer. Janie had had no
chance to know things, so she had to
ask. Did marriage end the cosmic
loneliness of the unmated?

So Janie waited a bloomtime, and a green
time and an orange time. But when the
pollen again gilded the sun and sifted
down on the world she began to stand
around the gate and expect things. What
things? She didn't know exactly (24).

Janie pulled back a long time because
he [Jody] did not represent sun-up and
pollen and blooming trees, but he
spoke for far horizon (28).
(B) Middle Sections:
1. Narrator

A big-mouthed [my emphasis] burst of
laughter cut him short (38).

 

. . . Joe would hustle her off inside
the store to sell something. Look
like [my emphasis] he took pleasure in
doing it (47).

Starks left the store to Hezekiah

82

Potts, the delivery boy, and come took
[my emphasis] a seat in his high
chair (57).

Daisy is walking a drum tune. You can
almost hear it by looking at the way
she walks (59).

She wasn't petal-open [my emphasis]
anymore with him (62).

 

2. Character

Folkses, de sun is goin' down. De Sun-
maker brings it up in de mornin', and
de Sun-maker sends it tuh bed at

night. . . . let de light penetrate
inside of yuh, and let it shine, let it
shine, let it shine (40-41).

"You kin feel a switch in his hand
when he's talkin' to yuh," Oscar Scott
complained. "Dat chastisin' feelin' he
totes sorter give yuh de protolapsis uh
de cutinary linin'."

"He's uh whirlwind among breezes,"
Jeff Bruce threw in.

"Speakin' of winds, he's de wind
and we'se de grass. We bend ever way
he blows. . ." (44).

"Whut Ah don't 1ak 'bout de man is,
he talks tuh unlettered folks wid books
in his jaws. . ." (44).

"He's got uh throne in de seat of
his pants" (44).

"Pheoby, for de longest time, Ah
[Janie] been feelin' dat somethin' set
for still-bait. . . . Sorrow dogged by
sorrow is in mah heart. . . . Ah'm
stone-dead from standin' still and
tryin' tuh smile" (71).

"Listen, Jody, you ain't de Jody
ah [Janie] run off down the road wid.
You'se whut's left after he died. Ah
run off tuh keep house wid you in uh
wonderful way. But you wasn't
satisfied wid me de way Ah was. Naw!

83

Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and
crowded out tuh make room for yours
in me. . . . All dis bowin' down all
dis obedience under yo' voice -- dat
ain't whut Ah rushed off down de road
tuh find out about you" (74-75).

(C) Final Sections:

1.

Narrator

Night was striding across nothingness
with the whole round world in his
hands (130).

In a little wind-lull. Tea Cake touched
Janie. . . (130).

The monstropolous beast had left his
bed. The two hundred miles an hour
wind had loosed his chains. He

seized hold of his dikes and ran
forward until he met the quarters;
uprooted them like grass and rushed on
after his supposed-to-be conquerors,
rolling the dike, rolling the houses,
rolling the people in the houses along
with other heavy timbers. The sea was
walking the earth with a heavy

heel (133).

And then again Him-with-the-square-
toes [Death] had gone back to his
house. He stood once more and again
in his high flat house without sides
to it and without a roof with his
soulless sword standing upright in his
hand. His pale white horse had
galloped over waters, and thundered
over land. The time of dying was

over (138).

It was the meanest moment of eternity.
A minute before she was just a scared
human being fighting for its life.

Now she was sacrificing self with

Tea Cake's head in her lap. She had
wanted him to live so much and he was
dead. No hour is ever eternity, but
it has its right to weep. . . . the
grief of outer darkness descended (52).

84

2. Character

"If you kin see de light at daybreak,
you don't keer if you die at dusk.
It's so many people never seen de
light at all. Ah [Janie] wuz fumblin'
around and God opened de door" (131).

"Dis house ain't so absent of things
1ak it used tuh be befo Tea Cake come
along. It's full uh thoughts" (158).
"And listenin' tuh dat kind uh talk

is jus' 1ak openin' yo' mouth and
lettin' de moon shine down yo' throat.
It's uh known fact, Pheoby, you got
tuh gg_there tuh know there" (159).

Because narrator and character speak with almost identical
adornment in Hurston's final section of this novel; there is little
need for both voices to appear. This is the final test of the blend
which has been achieved. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, narrator is
the dominant final voice. But we are certain at this point that the
deep structure consciousness of narrative voice and the deep
structure consciousness of character are identical. This is clearly
illustrated when we find in the final sentences of this novel a
voice which seems to be consciousness speaking. It is neither the
direct dialogue of a character nor the objective commentary of the
narrator who says:

Then Tea Cake came prancing around

her where she was and the song of the
sigh flew out of the window and lit

in the t0p of the pine trees. Tea
Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of
course he wasn't dead. . . . The kiss

of his memory made pictures of love
and light against the wall (159).

CHAPTER IV

"SOME LAWS IN DIALECT"

In order to more clearly understand how the dialect structures
in Hurston's literature work to illustrate the consciousness of the
characters, it is necessary to explain which aspects of Black language
can inform literature's deep structures. Therefore, this chapter will
offer a linguistic explication of the literary judgements made in the
previous chapter.

Linguistic Structures

 

A. Dialect and Theory

In Linguistics and Language, Julia Falk points out that much of

 

the study in dialect geography in the United States illustrates
answers to the question "What do people say?" rather than to the more
informative question "What do people know?"49 Realizing that the area
of competence in language ability assumes that there is an answer to
this basic question in linguistics is the first reason for
investigating linguistic deep structures to account for the performance
differences in languages. Dialects especially could offer invaluable
information about the kinds of underlying differences which exist.
This is because dialects, which appear as variations of a parent
languge, are often indicative not only of regional differences within
a population, but of cultural differences as well. Cultural

anthropologists have already laid a framework for this type of study by

85

86

insisting that a person's culture is manifest on many behavioral
levels, one of these levels being his linguistic performance.
Psycholinguistics has moved cognitive theories into areas of language
investigation. The resultant work inevitably led to the areas of
linguistic deep structures and George Miller's famous summary that "the
most obvious thing we can say about the significance of a sentence is
that it is not given as the linear sum of the significance of the
words that comprise it."50 His use of the terms "meaning" and
"reference" suggests the same line of research that Falk urges
dialectologists to follow when she predicts that "the future task for
the dialectologist will be to combine reference and meaning, i.e.,
what people say as well as what they know."51 I agree with Falk that
the understanding of dialects will come from careful investigations of
linguistic deep structures and the transformations which occur before
they reach the surface, or performative levels. These investigations
could reveal some of the underlying features of the language which,
though deleted from performances, are nonetheless apparent in the
underlying competence, and therefore, in conjunction with theories of
psycholinguistics, as valid an indication of meaning and intent as
the performance features. If the attack of transformationaland
generative grammarians is correct, and this study assumes that the
essential direction is valid, then these operations are indicative of
a psychological process of meaning and indentification which to the

speaker, as well as to the listener who shares these features, are

 

contributing factors of whatever message is communicated. The speaker

who does not share these features (and this is the reason why dialect

87

is an area which can so clearly illustrate the viability of this
analysis) but who does understand the surface, or performance
categories of the language, will therefore receive only a portion of
the original message; the rest is lost in translation. Because a
dialect is one of several different "versions“ of a language, the
versions must be analyzed to see what kinds of changes propelled these
versions into existence. Some of the changes are linguistic; but the
aspects of the changes which are cultural and social, those aspects
which linguistic anthropologists like Hurston and Boas took great
pains to record, offer valuable insights into the versions of meaning
and intent which can only be implied between speakers of this dialect.
The Black dialect seems to fall very easily into this scheme.
Historically, it is a version of English which was mixed with the
various Africanisms, French, and Creole influences which Blacks
brought to America as well as to the other countries in this
hemisphere which participated in the slave trade. Culturally, it has
operated to separate linguistically, and sometimes socially, this
group of speakers from majority life in America; and in consequence to
preserve certain cultural experiences which could well have been lost
if this Black culture had been more thoroughly submerged in the
American mainstream. But it has not been submerged in this fashion.
The very existence of the dialect, in 1978, is testimony to that
fact. And in 1928, when Hurston began to gather her linguistic and
anthropological data, Blacks in America were even less a part of the
majority culture than they are today. We can therefore expect that

the 1928 language samples would reveal more than contemporary samples

88

about the culture of Blacks in America.

It is not enough for this paper to support the definition of
linguistics as a "scientific study of language," it must offer the
evidence which allows the scientific study to be also a study of the
literature.

As a science, linguistics was first applied to reconstruction
and comparative studies of the Indo European languages. It was
natural for those interested in descriptive language behaviors to
rely on the scientific nature of linguistics which suggests biological
performance is an integral part of language study. But it is language
as culture and language as thought which shifts the emphasis of
linguistics from that natural aspect of science to areas of psychology
and sociology. These areas suggest additional implications of
language behavior for man and society, and further suggest that
literary investigations, which serve to illustrate the behaviors of
man and society, should also be a means of describing this behavior.

Therefore, the liaison of natural science and human science.
the link between biological patterns and behavioristic patterns in
man, function as the basis for any language assumptions of this text.
They cannot be stratified; the link is vital.

Both the knowledge of language (langue) and performance of
that skill (parole) is accounted for within the theory of
transformational grammar. Although completely satisfactory
explanations of the impetus behind the speech act have not yet been
offered by linguists or psychologists, the attempt to account for

these phenomena is an area of research which is being given constant

89

attention by these scholars. But, as Falk suggests, they seem to be
overlooking an area of linguistics which could offer some enlightening
information concerning these acts: dialectology.

In transformational grammar, linguists attempt to explain the
operant processes of making our memory a live and shared experience.
For this reason investigations into linguistic deep structures should
open the door to illustrating a conceptual model of the mental
processes of behavior.52 The area of dialectology should be fertile
gnxnulfor this type of investigation. If we know that a people
differ culturally, and we know further that there are linguistic
differences between people who share the same geographic regions,
then these linguistic differences may be a key to understanding what
cultural differences exist, and further, what the relationship
between language and culture includes. Knowing that the surface
structures of dialects are mutually intelligible, but that some
transformations take place on the deep structures which alter the
patterns, should tell us that it is on the competence level where the
bulk of information is to be found.

B. Methodology

To explain adequately the role of grammar and dialect in
Hurston's literature, and to use this grammar to speculate on the
more "literary" investigations into text, this study supports the
following assumptions:53

1. The Priority of the Phonic Element

Especially because the original constitution of the Black

dialect was oral as is the case with any language, this section will

90

address seriously the possibilities for analyses based on written
representation of the phonic intent. It is the phonic element which
indicates, for example, that a difference from the standard structure
exists. It therefore becomes necessary to understand the concept of
speech as an indication of human behavior when an author such as
Hurston, who was aware of this concept, takes such pains to record the
speech sound as well as the speech act. She did not allow the more
traditional literary cues to suggest merely that there was a speech
difference between characters and the narrative structure. Because she
did not, we must assume that the recording of the speech act was of
importance to her text. Investigation into these textual forms must be
able to suggest that there is a parallel between written surface
structures and assumed deep structures, and the phonetic literary
representations of these structures within the text was an intentional
device on the part of the author to indicate that parallel.
2. Distribution and Functional Load
a) Distribution
The linguistic appearance of certain aspects of the dialect may

be equivalent to "the notion of distribution" presented in Lyons'
Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, Lyons explains:

The term distribution is applied to the range

of contexts in which a linguistic unit occurs

insofar as that range of contexts can be

brought within the scope of a systematic

statement of the restrictions deterplning the
occurrence of the unit in question.

 

Because Hurston's literature fluctuates between Standard and

dialect usage, the element of distribution is especially important to

91

the literary statement which is made when dialect does occur. This
dissertation is using language to make an investigative statement of
the user. If there is distribution of feature or structure, then this
distribution will be investigated to determine what kinds of literary
conclusions are available from this linguistic clue.

b) Functional Load

The appearance of dialect features may in some situations
present the occasion for analyzing the functional load. If the
dialect were consistent in Hurston, less could be said about this
feature. However, fluctuation between dialect and Standard usage
breaks down the inter-language contrasts and sets up the potential for
an intra-linguistic contrast. Not only does inter—language
distribution play a revelatory role, but intra-linguistic function
becomes an important investigative element.

For both distribution and functional load, frequency is the
determining element for whether or not that structure or feature
merits our application of it to textual investigation. Frequency for
this text shall therefore be determined by the following restrictions:
1. Character type: if the element is used consistently by a

character in Hurston who meets a “restrictive“ classification,

then its distribution will be considered contributory to that
type.

2. Situation: If the element is used consistently in situations
which are determined to extend from similar situations, then
further analysis is indicated. These situations may be

further stratified by determining whether they are a) character

92

provoked, b) narrator provoked, or c) provoked by some external
event or force.

Lyons points out that the validity and informational capability
of a linguistic unit is determined by its frequency. "The information
content of a particular unit is defined as a function of its
probability" (84). Probability and information content are inversely

related; that is, the greater our predictability concerning a particular

unit, the less the receiver of that unit would lose information if that
unit did not occur. High probability predicts high redundancy.
Therefore, this analysis is looking for items which are less
predictable and therefore higher in informational content.

Finally, the information content of these selected features will
be evaluated. Those judged sufficiently high in this content will be
used as the samples which can explicate certain aspects of text.

Because the volume of a wider application and investigation of these

features would inversely affect the ability to evaluate their textual
implications, the presentation of data will be considered sufficient
proof of the validity of applying information theory to textual
material. The selected explications of the data will be offered as
evidence of methodology and conclusions of this theory as it applies to

literary criticism.

Much of what Hurston says concerning the Black dialect does
not come under the heading of "dialect" in her writings. She
mentions, in various communications to Hughes some of what she has
found concerning "some laws in dialect. Aspirate 'H' in certain

positions. . . ."55 Also, in Nancy Cunard's Negro (1934) Hurston

93

addresses herself to the subject of dialect, mentioning again her
findings about the aspirate /h/ but also saying that she can mention
"only the most general rules in dialect because there are so many
quirks that belong only to certain localities that nothing less than a
volume would be adequate."56 But, when writing about information she
would label cultural, she does give more information about her
attitudes concerning Black speech.

The primitive man exchanges descriptive words.

His terms are all close fitting. Frequently

the Negro, even with detached words in his

vocabulary -- not evolved in him but

transplanted on his tongue . . . must add

action to it to make it do. So we have

"chop-axe" sitting-chair" "cook-pot" and the

like because the speaker has in his mind the

picture of the object ig use. Action.

Everything illustrated. 7

Hurston continues her observation about the morphologic content

of Black speech to say that the "Negro's greatest contribution to the
language is (l) the use of metaphor and simile; (2) the use of the
double-descriptive; (3) the use of verbal-nouns."58 She gives
several examples of each of these categories including:

(1) Metaphor and Simile:

 

You sho is propaganda.
Sobbing hearted.

Kyting along.
Syndicating--gossiping

To put yo'self on de ladder.

(2) Double-Descriptives:

 

High—tall

94

Little-tee-ninchy

low-down

kill dead

de watch wall
(3) Verbal-Nouns:

Funeralize

She features somebody I know.

_Sense me into it.

I wouldn't friend with her.

Uglying away.

Her comment about the reasons these phrases have become
apparent in the dialect are that the "stark, trimmed phrases of the
Occident seem too bare for the voluptuous child of the sun, hence the
adornment. It arises out of the same impulse as the wearing of
jewelry and the making of sculpture -- the urge to adorn."59

Her choices of items similar to these, to include in the
dialogue of her novels and stories, serves to emphasize the point that
she felt she was capturing something important about the character of
the person who was speaking, as well as recording his language.

I have chosen, for this study, to illustrate one of the
syntactic features which contains linguistic information in its deep
structure which has no semantic equivalent in Standard English. For
the features which are semantically concerned, I have taken the clue
from Hurston's observations in'Nggrg and chosen to illustrate examples
from the categories of verbal-nouns, double-descriptives and metaphor

and simile. Because of the cultural and dialectal use of these

95

items, their meaning and appropriateness can only be judged by
speakers of the dialect. They have become, in many situations, idioms
of the dialect. An idiom often finds that its meaning cannot be
adduced by the context in which it is found, rather, its meaning lies
in a deep structure lexical knowledge of the entire phrase. Hurston
uses these descriptors as adornment for language which cannot be
sufficiently described by the Standard within the Black dialect or

the traditional adornments of the narrator's language.

My purpose in this section of the dissertation is to
illustrate the method of linguistic inquiry which is possible with
dialect and with writers of dialect fiction rather than to explore
every feature which Hurston has presented. I have selected her two
first novels for the purposes of this illustration, Jonah's Gourd

Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Of her short stories, I will be

 

using those from Mules and Men. The criteria for these selections
were not particularly strict. This is true because all of Hurston's
fiction contained these samples, and there was not great

preponderance in any. I did not use Seraph on the Suwannee because the

 

majority of the characters of this novel are.white, and their
dialectal differences would reveal differences in culture not relevant
to the scope of this dissertation. However, I do imagine that it
would be interesting to analyze the differences between the dialect
Hurston uses in this text, and the texts where the major characters

are Black.

For the analysis which follows, the language may contain any

96

and/or all of these features. The features will be analyzed according
to the methodology already discussed. The prime consideration is that
the higher the frequency of a feature, the less informational content
is revealed. However, the features which appear in addition to another
feature will be assigned a greater informational content. For example,
a language sample which includes both feature (1) and feature (4)
below, will be a higher informational sample than one which simply
included feature (4).

These are the features to be studied:
(1) The language may be dialect.
(2) The language may include an aphorism.

(3) The language may include metaphor and simile, the double-
descriptive or verbal-nouns.

(4) The language may include the syntactic structure gg_<¥pres).

(5) The language may be Standard usage of English within the
structure of the narrative voice.

The following is an explanation of the criteria the language
sample must meet to fit the feature specifications.
(1) The language may be dialect:

Because the structural differences between narrative voice and
the voices of Hurston's Black characters are so clear, it will be
sufficient, for the purposes of this analysis, to define dialect as
the language patterns of the Black characters within Hurston's fiction
which differ in structure and sound from the narrative voice, and the
voice of the white characters. The distinction of sound may be
assumed when the graphemic representation of a dialectal item, which

seems equivalent in meaning to a Standard item, is different. For

97

example, "Ah" is morphologically equivalent to Standard first person
singular pronoun "I," but the graphemic representation and its use by
a Black character, indicate it is an aspect of the dialect.

(2) The language may include an aphorism:

 

Aphorisms are deep structure exchanges of information on the
part of the speaker and the hearer. These aphorisms may not be
semantically clear to non-speakers of the dialect or to non-participants
in the situations which provoked their use. An example of an aphorism
is "God don't eat okra" (JGV 204).
(3) The language may include metaphor and simile, the double-

descriptive or verbal-nouns -- those elements Hurston
described as the "urge to adorn:"

 

 

 

The inclusion of the items Hurston mentions in her flggrg_
contribution in the analysis to follow is important. They serve as
the standard for defining the very dialectal items she thought
important indications of the culture of her characters. If metaphor
and simile, the use of the verbal-nouns and double-descriptive are
indications of the "urge to adorn,“ then it is the analyst's task to
decide why this urge is a part of the culture being expressed in
Hurston's novels. It is as important to recognize that they exist.
Some of the fullest expressions of these morphologic categories come
within the Black sermon. Hurston uses the same explanatory footnote

in Jonah's Gourd Vine and Mules and Men in reference to the sermons

 

 

included in these texts. She writes:

In his cooler passages the colored preacher
attempts to achieve what to him is
grammatical correctness, but as he warms
up, he goes natural. . . (JGV 3l6).

98

Hurston's assessment is accurate. However I also believe that
there are some marks of dialect that Hurston adds in order to reinforce
her idea of "adornment." The latter becomes even more visible without
the syntactic structures of the Black dialect, and for an author who
was interested in her audience being able to note these features, the
'stripping' serves the literary purpose as well as her own. It is
interesting to note that in the dialogue of her novels and short
stories which include "warmer" exchanges, that is, exchanges which
have an emotional basis, the appearance of language which adorns
increases. The narrator, in Standard English, also plays a part in
this adornment. Although Hurston usually manages to keep the
dialectal syntactic structure away from the narrative structure, there
are points in her novels when the narrative voice is attempting to
blend with the dialectal voice. This occurrence has been discussed in
the previous chapter. The blend takes place, not through structural
or syntactic sharing, but through the sharing of the "adorned"
language which has been saved for the exchanges which indicate emotional
intensity and/or the bOnd which narrator and character reach when the
latter finally comes to an acceptable stage of self-awareness. Here is
an example of the adorned language of emotion. In the following

example from Their EyeS'Were WatChing God, Janie has finally been

 

pushed too far by the crude and demeaning behavior of her husband
towards her. This is her response to one of his insults

You big-bellies round here and put out a

lot of brag, but 'tain't nothing to it but

yo' big voice. Humph! Talkin' 'bout me_
lookin' old! When you pull down yo' britches,
you look lak de change uh life (TEWWG 68-69)!

99

In another example from the same book, Janie is expressing her love
for Tea Cake in the face of a hurricane she is sure will kill them
both. She says:

We been tuhgether round two years. If you

kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer
if you die at dusk. It's so many people never
seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round
and God opened de door (TEWWG lBl).

The narrator matches the poetry of this type language when it says:

By morning Gabriel was playing the deep tones

in the center of the drum. So when Janie

looked out of her door she saw the drifting
mists gathered in the west -- that cloud field
of the sky —- to arm themselves with thunder

and march forth against the world. Louder and
higher and lower and wider the sound and motion
spread, mounting, sinking, darking (TEWGl29-30).

In the final pages, the narrative tone and style match the tone and
style of Janie, who has come full circle and who feels her experience
with life has been unassailable:

Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now
Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by
comparisons. . . . Dey'gointuh make 'miration
'cause mah love didn't work lak they love, if
dey ever had any. Then you must tell 'em

dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone
dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same
thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak
de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still

and all, it takes its shape from de shore

it meets, and it's different with every

shore (TEWWG l58).

The narrative assessment is:

The light in her hand was like a spark of
sun-stuff washing her face in fire. . . .
The kiss of his memory made pictures of love
and light against the wall. Here was

peace. She pulled in her horizon like a
great fish-net. Pulled it from around the
waist of the world and draped it over her

lOO
shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She
called in her soul to come and see (TEWWG l59).

Because the structure of the short story is quite different from
the novel, we do not find the same aspect of blend between narrator and
character in the short story form. But the meth9g_is analogous. The
narrative structure of the short story alters itself so that it can
include a different structure under the following situations: (1) the
actual speech of the characters, (2) the initial omniscient structure
of the narrative voice and (3) the terminal blend of character's
thought and action within the structure of the narrative.

The result is that the character, in situation (l) will say,
"Well, Ah done de bes Ah could. If things aint right, Gawd knows
taint mah fault." The initial structure of the narrative voice will
continue to use third person references for (2). "She sped to the
darkness of the yard, slamming the door after her before she thought
to set down the lamp." And the terminal blending structure of the
narrative voice in the short story vvill allow a structure like this
one, which seems consciously to avoid the use of persona: "Hours of
this. A period of introspection a space of retrospection, then a
mixture of both. Out of this awful calm."60

The structure is similar to a stream of consciousness. It is
meant to suggest the type of internal monologue which that method
allows.

Further examples of character adornments, lifted from their
relevant structures in Their Eyes Were Watching God, indicate the

kinds of structures Hurston outlines in Negro:

101

--An envious heart makes a treacherous ear (9).

--Us colored folks is branches without roots (l7).
--They's a lost ball in high grass (9).

--She . . . left her wintertime wid me (19).

--Ah wanted yuh to pick from a higher bush (15).

--You got uh willin' mind, but youse too light behind (34).
--. . . he's de wind and we'se de grass (44).

—-He was a man wid salt in him (58).

--. . . what dat multiplied cockroach told you. . . (74).
--still-bait (7l).

--big-bellies (68).

--gentlemanfied man (64).

--cemetary-dead (65).

--black-dark (74).

Within the structure of the sermon, this type of language is

quite evident. Here are some examples from Jonah's Gourd Vine and

 

Mules and Men:

 

--I can see him--/Molding de world out of thought. . .(MM l8l).
-- . . when y 'all is passin' nations thew yo' mouf.
(JGV l97).

--I can see' '/Him seize de mighty axe of his proving power (MM 81).

--I am the teeth of time/That comprehended de dust of de
earth (JGV l9).

--Faith hasn't got no eyes, but she long- legged (JGV 274).

-- . . and de white capts marbilized themselves like an army
And walked out like soldiers goin' to battle (JGV 276).

--I can see- eee- -ee/De mountains fall to their rocky knees
(JGV 278).

--And then de sacrificial energy penetrated de mighty strata
(JGV 280).

--Two thousand years have went by on their rusty ankles
(JGV 275).

--And de sun . . . laid down in de cradle of eternity/And
rocked herself into sleep and slumber (JGV 278).

Both the sermon as well as other opportunities for linguistic
adornment fall into a minority status within the actual dialogue of
the characters and the diction of the narrator. It can be safely
assumed, with reference to informational content and Lyon's stated
theory, that the informational content of these occurrences is

relatively higher than the occurrences of dialect structures without

102

this situational adornment. It is a much less speculative task to
assign various cultural interpretations to these occasions than it is
to speculate about the more subtle structural forms. We have
additional information on the culture through the various traditional
structures of fiction which are, of course, included in Hurston's
writing. The adornment which is present in the dialect on some
occasions is not unlike the adornment given to literature as a genre.
It has traditionally been a "loftier" language. The interesting

aspect of this loftiness lies within its expected association with
poetry. Hurston, in a previously quoted letter to James Weldon
Johnson, said that the Negro preacher is a "poet —- one who manipulates
words in order to convey to others the mystery of that Unknowable force

d."6] Therefore the parallel is applicable that she

which we call Go
has found occasions when the dialect is poetry: an attempt to convey
not necessarily God in a Judeo-Christian sense, but to convey self in
a very spiritual sense. When the preacher gets warmer, the use of

his dialect increases. When exchanges get more emotional, the use of
adornment increases. When the narrative structure gets closest to
that aspect of character which reveals spiritual self-knowledge and
awareness, its use of adornment increases. These parallels cannot be
accidental for an author who, as I have indicated, noted the
existence of these features and whose novels extended those structures

into characterization.

(4) The language may include the syntactic structure do {-pres> .

 

I have chosen to analyze a category of the dialect's syntactic

structure which gives indication of tense because investigative

103

evidence in anthropological linguistics often reveals that the concept
of time is culturally specific. One such study is Whorf's
investigation of this concept in Hopi.62 Studies in the Black dialect,
by such researchers as William Stewart, William Labov, J.L. Dillard
and Arthur Smith63 suggest that some correlations may be made between
categories of tense within the Black dialect and some Creole dialects.
Although (as Dillard is careful to point out) there have been no
thorough studies of comparisons of the dialects to West African
languages or forms of English, the historical connection of Black
American dialects to the Caribbean Islands and West Africa makes a
preliminary connection between these languages and cultures historically
accurate and linguistically sound.

An analysis of do shows that within the Black dialect g9_will
occur under the following circumstances (Figure l). Figure 2
illustrates the parallel occurrences (or deletions) in the Standard

English structures.

1.1 Q AU

X

1.2 * AUX

1.3 fl AUX

1.4 * AUX

1.5 Q AUX

1.6 fl AUX

Figure l.

E+modali
gfinal)
+perfect)

+progressiv

+copula)
_+perfect,>
+intensive)
+copula)
+progressive

+perf3ct)
1
_.1

+fina

 

flintensive)
+copula>
+habitual>
+progre siv$
(+perfec

 

(wast)
-perfect>

-progressiv

 

Black Dialect Structures

104

 

(D AUX +modalfl
D AUX +perfec£g

p AUX +progressiv§
+copul a)
+perfect

- NA (Not Applicable)

(0 AUX +past>
~perfect>
-progressiv

Figure 2.
Standard English Structures

B - indicates the feature does not appear
* - indicates the appearance of the feature

105

The difference between the dialect and the Standard within the
dialogue in Hurston's texts may be viewed on the historical grounds of
language variations and change and/or cultural grounds where cultural
distinctions mandate such differences. If we had a clearer
understanding of the African origins of the dialect, the latter
distinction might be easier to identify. But, because research in this
area is lacking, only the following speculations seem appropriate:

First, because information theory tells us that the greater the
frequency of an item, the potential for significant information
decreases, it is reasonable to decide that the differences in
structure of features l.l, l.2, l.3 and l.6 do not significantly
alter the lexical information in the surface structure. The
exception to this assumption is the category of finality, which will
be discussed later.

Second, because features 1.4 and 1.5 have very low frequencies.
and because variations which indicate cultural differences have, for
the purposes of this study a higher informational content, these
features need analysis under the literary structures of character and
situation.

Finally, because in some situations g9_appears in the Black
dialect where it cannot be generated in the Standard, some attention
is necessary to the semantic construct of this feature. This analysis
should reveal some differences in morphology which suggest
alternative views which are culture-specific.

Feature (4) of the Black dialect has the potential to contain

more information within its linguistic deep structure (DS) than is

106

apparent in its surface structure (SS). For this reason, it may be

used to illustrate the assertion of this thesis that the Black

dialect, in its competence levels, may contain information which

surface structures don't immediately suggest. Further, that

information may include cultural distinctions from the Standard forms.
The linguistic information reveals that do <-pres> is a feature

which, in Standard English, is deleted or does not occur in the DS,

under the same conditions when it appears in the Black dialect. For

conditions l.l - l.6, I will give illustrations of the structures

where they appear, with the examples taken from Hurston's texts:

- . . . no varmint kin eat no house

- Ah done finished

Us been here

Uh brute beast had done cotched yuh

he bes drunk
the worst Ah ever knowed

——l-—l—l—l-—J——l
0101wa—!
0

It is important to note the form gong_when it appears in a
<+perfec9 structure is 1153 the equivalent of the SE hag or has in
the same syntactic structure. If this were the case, example l.3 could
not occur in the dialect because the SE equivalent would be have been
hgrg_(See Appendix Note #2). Examples such as these in a dialect,
create a stronger case for the assertion that more than syntactic
differences exist within a DS level. Further illustrations and
explanations of these categories are included as an appendix.

Another interesting finding is that the intensive marker can

generate, in structure 1.4 had dOne Cotched or been done + VB. The

 

pattern seems to be that if the subject of the intensity is a person,

then the copula is used:

107

(our child)_i§ done come home (MM 62)

(we) coulda done been gone (MM 126)

(you all) done been over in Pentecost (MM 179)
But if the subject of the intensity is a place or thing, the hag_or ha§_
is generated:

(Uh beast) had done cotched yuh (JGV l07)
(a cat-fish) had done jumped up (MM 130)

Even when blending between the dialect and the Standard occur,
as in "Robert's son had done been kilt" (TEWWG l8), the semantic
construct of the intensive remains along with the "had" which seems to
be an aspect of the Standard usage interfering with the dialect.

Jacobs and Rosenbaum, in English Transformational Grammar
explain that "Knowledge of the idiosyncratic properties of words may
be represented as a kind of internalized dictionary . . . a lexicon."64

The selectional restrictions of language use come from the way
a language is learned. If that language is learned via a specific
culture, which has a world-view specific to that culture, then the
selectional restrictions on language use within that culture may very
well express that point of view. Whorf's investigations into the
aspect of "time" in Hopi are illustrative of this theory. Within the
Black culture, a more careful statement must be made because instead
of dealing with a language difference, we deal with a dialectal
difference. Therefore, the areas of distinction between the dialect
and the Standard language are the areas to investigate for potential
cultural differences.

For structural differences such as the syntactic distinctions

between Standard English and the Black dialect with the feature do

108

<-present>, it is necessary to investigate the deep structure lexicon
to indicate the understanding a particular item may convey to its user.

It is particularly important in the analysis of this feature to
incorporate the use of a lexicon because Standard dialect eliminates
this feature in almost all the environments where the Black dialect
retains the features. In addition, the dialect seems to possess
lexical environments that have no parallel in the Standard. What
lexical information is the Black dialect interested not only in
maintaining, through its non-deletions of go, but in creating?

The dg_<}present> feature of this dialect, under the
conditions when it is deleted as well as conditions when it appears,
gives most information to the reader when its deep structure lexicon
illustrates the feature <4intensive> . For the dialect speaker, the
extremely common use of a lexicon which includes features such as
<0)(-) progressive) or <(+)(-)perfect> etc., indicates that the
feature is well woven into the dialect and the speaker's internalized
dictionary. Although some additional lexical markers for this
dialect seem to appear when they do not appear for the Standard (the
marker I have designated as indicating <1finality> ), the high
frequency of its appearance means that it is less likely to carry
significant information.

The list of structures included in the Appendix include
representations of the forms of do <—present>which appear in
Hurston's fiction, and indicate that the least commonly appearing

structures are structures l.4 and 1.5.

l09
(5) The lanQUage may be Standard USage of EngliSh within the
structure of the NarratiVe Voice.

The inclusion of this final feature will allow analysis of the
structures in Hurston which attempt a blend between the voice of the
narrator and the voice of character. This occurrence has already been
discussed. But, analysis within a linguistic framework explains the
appearance of language which had been assigned to the dialect
(adorned structures). Under circumstances where the distinction
between the structures of narration and the dialectal structures of
dialogue diminish, this type of language may easily be understood as
an aspect of the language usually reserved for literature. However,
within the scope of this dissertation, it is possible to see how an
author can create what amounts to a third point of view by the blend
of dialectal and narrative structures.

The data included in the Appendix suggests that the items
which are most worthy of analysis, in view of their frequency and
distribution, are the syntactic structures 1.4 and l.5 and the
morphologic descriptors included in the aphorism, the sermon, and the
blending aspects of the narrative voice.

The following analyses include explications of the environments
surrounding these features. They will be analyzed with reference to
the specifications of situation and character already described.
Because the basic structure of Hurston's novels is different from her
short stories, these two forms of fiction will receive separate
treatment. However, one of the results of a linguistic analysis of

literary structures in Hurston has indicated that the structure of

110

the short fiction abbreviates the narrative structure of the novel in a
way which suggests that the same authorial intent (to use these
structures to give a clearer view of character) was present in both.

Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God

 

The syntactic structures which create strings similar to *"he

had done got you" and *"he bes sick," seem to appear in these novels

without regard to character. Zeke, John's bosom friend in the novel,
is capable of producing the string: "Skeered uh brute-beast had done
kotched yuh." But the situation in which this structure occurs offers
more information about why the dialect possesses a category of meaning
such as<+intensive>. Zeke has just run down a large hill,
frightened by the talk of the men at the camp that his best friend is
in danger. Hurston writes: "All alarm, Ezekial leaped up and flew
down the path he had seen John take" (JGV l07). The alarm in the
situation caused the marker which could suggest that intensity which
appears in his speech.

The semantic construct of this structure dg_<}preé> can perhaps
best be explained by a comment that Janie's grandmother makes to her

in Their Eyes Were Watching God. She tells her granddaughter that

 

"Ah ain't gittin' ole, honey. Ah'm ggfle_ole" (TEWWG 17). It is clear
that this is a catégory of time. But further than that, it is a
category which suggests finality in a way that "I am old" could not
suggest. For this reason, a string which includes an Aux (be or had) +
'done' + VB would have the additional marker on it of this finality.
This semantic construct would even be more apparent in the

environments which do not have semantic equivalents in the Standard

111

English forms.

This dialect has also found it necessary to include a semantic
construct which suggests a distinction between times when something is
done habitually and times when something is done occasionally. When

Amy tells her son in Jonah's Gourd Vine that his stepfather "be's drunk

 

when he keer on like dat" (JGV 80), she is suggesting to him that this
is something which is habitual to Ned Crittenden. When Lucy tells her
daughter Isis in this same novel not to let the women "be covering up
de clock" (JGV 207) when she dies, she is indicating that this is
something which habitually happens when someone dies. In her culture,
that habit is fact. The ritual of death in the Black community
included the notion that it was necessary to cover the faces of any
clocks in the room of a dying person because if the clock was running
when time ran out and the spirit looked upon the clock's face, it
would be forever ruined. A person who was unaware of that myth would
not understand the implications of the text. But if he were attuned
to the linguistic clue that the language structure offers, at least
the suspicion that there was a 05 level to that string would be
possible for the reader.

Neither of these structures appears frequently in her fiction.
When they do appear, the clue to meaning is given entirely within that
structure. Hurston did find it necessary, on many occasions, to
translate dialectal items, or to offer some explanation for the
behavior of her characters in footnote references. The fact that she
felt this was necessary indicates that she is aware that her language

can carry structures and meanings which are culture-specific.

112

The final statement Sop makes about Tea Cake is a true summary
of the plot and theme of his life. After Tea Cake's death, Sop says
that "Tea Cake had done gone crazy" (TEWWG 157). This is an example
of the intensive category. Sop regily_means it. But more than that,
Hurston indicates that that is the only assessment of his friend
possible from the story. It includes the beauty of his craziness --
his taking a woman seventeen years his junior and making her his
lover. In the eyes of the world "he had done gone crazy." If
Hurston had not used this category of intensity at that point in the
text, the sentiment could not have been the same.

The morphologic structures of these texts, which also present
clues for analysis of character and situation in their g§e_as well as
their meaning, include a use of descriptive categories within the
dialect and the use of these categories within the narration.

Of course it is true that all literature describes, that it
attempts to paint an image with vocabulary. What happens with the
dialect, and with the narrator's alignment with the dialect, is that
same idea of adornment Hurston had explained in Negrg, Even "literary
language" was an aspect of the "stark, trimmed phrases of the Occident."
If this were not true for Hurston, there would be no need for the
narrator to change his commentative structure at those points of
text which suggest the "blending'' explained earlier. Hurston is
saying that there is more room, within the semantic and syntactic
constructs of the dialect for illustration; that the dialect is better
able to picture the mental or 03 experience. It uses double-

descriptives and verbal-nouns and a wealth of poetic tools

u I.‘
.t...
.3...

113

(personification being one Hurston did not pinpoint) to underscore
experiences which were spiritual. The language of both characters and
narrator becomes almost metaphysical when the sermon is introduced in

Jonah's Gourd Vine. Because in this novel the character never achieves

 

that level of self-awareness which the narrative voice has of him, it
is only the medium of the sermon that the language can become
spiritual. John does realize this. He had told his wife, as well as
his congregation that when he gets up in the pulpit it is not him
speaking, it is the voice of God speaking through him. So the blend we
should expect in the final pages of this novel, if the proposed
narrative structure is accurate, is that John will not become "one"
with the narrative voice, but that the sermon will blend with the
narrative structure. That is exactly what happens.

And the preacher preached a barbaric requiem

poem. 0n the pale white horse of Death.

0n the cold icy hands of Death. 0n the

golden streets of glory. 0n Amen Avenue.

0n Halleluyah Street. On the delight of God

when such as John appeared among the singers

about His throne. 0n the weeping sun and

moon. 0n Death who gives a cloak to the man

who walked with a feeling of terrible loss.

They beat upon the O-go-doe, the ancient

drum. O-go-doe, O-go-doe, O-go-doe! Their

hearts turned to fire and their shin-bones

leaped unknowing to the drum . . . the voice

of Death -- that promises nothing, that

speaks with tears only, and of the past (JGV 63).

This structure, apparent at the end of the text, not only
suggests that the measure of truth is found in the blend of ancestral
spirit with the outwardly Christian cloak, but it also serves to
explicate an earlier segment of the text.

Early in this novel, there is a celebration after all the

114

plantation's cotton had been picked. It is an African celebration. The
narrator writes that "they danced. They called for the instrument

that they had brought to America in their skins -- the drum -- and they
played upon it)‘ It was said, "He will serve us better if we bring him
from Africa naked and thingless" (JGV 59). A purely literary

analysis at this point of the novel, would offer two possibilities:

(1) that "He" is, as the text suggests, the white man speaking of the
African, Cuffy, or (2) that "He" could have an alternative intent. If
it has an alternative at this point of the novel, it is quite moot.
However, with the knowledge that the blending structure suggests at

the text's end, that there is reason and truth lying between the
African celebration and the Christian soul, this passage has a far
greater significance. It could be the Black African, who has not lost
his self-knowledge reasoning that his god ("He“) could serve him better
if he did not cloak him over with some other religion. The final
message of the book is that if John had been true to his spirit as well
as to his flesh, he could have survived. It is an African truth

which he had lost.

Within the structures of the folk stories in Mules and Men,

 

the literary functions of these syntactic structures becomes very
evident. This is partly because the abbreviated form of this fiction
allows such literary signals to play a more important role. It is
also due to the fact that in this text, the narrators of the stories
are themselves speakers of the dialect, so it becomes possible to
make a distinction between the language of the characters within the

folk story, and the language of the teller of the tale.

115

Simile and Metaphor; Double-Descriptives;
Verbal-Nouns

 

 

These structures are abundant. It is as if the folk tale is an

Opportunity to use a "special" form of language. And it is. Many of
the narrators in Mules and Men "begin" their stories with something
which is reminiscent of an invocation to a Muse in classical
literature. On page 70, Shug says that "Ah got to say a piece of
litery fust to git mah wind on," and proceeds to recite a bit of

poetry to "warm him up" for the story telling which follows. The
equivalent to something like "once upon a time" gives precedence to the
word, or the language which is to follow and becomes in the dialect

"Let me talk some chat," or "lemme spread my mess, or "Hurry up an
plough up some literary, lay by some alphabets." Characters in these
stories have such soliloquoys as:

Ole Maker, wid de mawnin' stars glitterin in

yo shinin crown, wid de dust from yo

footsteps makin worlds upon worlds, wid de

blazin bird we call de sun flying out of yo

right hand in de mawnin and consumin all day

de flesh and blood of stump-black

darkness. . . (MM 50).
In examples such as these, personification, simile, and metaphor abound.
It is interesting that the most poetic dialect in the folkstories is
found in conjunction with stories which have a religious theme, or
stories which in some way identify heaven for the audience. This form
of story, and the language found within it, is very similar to the
Black sermon, which also relies on abundantly poetic language. It is
as if the "spiritual" topic demands a language which can accommodate it.

But, that language is not restricted to the story telling.

116

Talking about telling a story can provoke language structures as
dramatic. I'Let de dollars hush whilst de nickel speak" says one adult
character to the others, when trying to clear the way for a young

child to tell his story. Criticizing the abilities of another provoked
this comment: "You mens don't draw no pay. You don't do nothin but
stand around and draw lightnin." And the spirit which storytelling
provokes is a competitive spirit which led the participants to
challenge even the most natural descriptors within the language:

“Man, he's too ugly. If a spell of sickness
ever tried to slip up on him, he'd skeer it
into a three weeks' spasm."

". . . He ain't so ugly. Ye all jus ain't
seen no real ugly. Ah seen a man so ugly till
he could get behind a jimson weed and hatch
monkies."

". . . Ah seen a man so ugly till they had to
spread a sheet over his head at night so
sleep could slip up on him."

". . . Ah knowed one so ugly till you could
throw him the Mississippi river and skim

ugly for six months."

". . . Ah knowed dat same man. He didn't

die -- he jus' uglied away" (MM 94).

The important element within the storytelling environment is

that within this culture, it causes such a consciousness of language

 

abilities and patterns, that the language becomes what Hurston
described as "adorned."

Hurston is indicating through the language, and through the
character's consciousness of that language, that they'grg_the story,
as well as telling the story. Hemenway speculates in his biography

that Hurston chose the form for Mules and Men because of a need to

 

illustrate not only the stories which she had gathered for her

sponsors, but also because of a need to illustrate the origins of

117

these stories. They could not have been presented outside of the
cultural setting. The adornment of the language within the stories was
the adornment of the story tellers. These phrases are by no means as
apparent in her longer fiction. Here, Hurston has had a chance to
present the perspective of a nonparticipant narrator. Within the
structures of the short fiction there is no non-participation. After
the stories are finished, the narrators are still so caught up in the
language patterns they have been using, that they need "cooling off"

in much the same way they needed "warming up." We find such
terminations as:

Biddy, biddy, bend my story is end.
Turn loose de rooster and hold de hen (MM 132).

Stepped on a pin, de pin bent
And dat's de way de story went (MM 54).

Stories often begin with poems, such as the one on page 70 in

Mules and Men:

 

Well Ah went up on dat meat-skin

An Ah come down on dat bone

And Ah grabbed dat piece of corn-bread

And Ah made dat biscuit moan.
Adorned language within the Black dialect, is, in other words, an
identification of another level of consciousness. It is a
consciousness of self and the potential for creation that most
language has lost. It is certainly not equivalent to a standard
narrative structure, betause it compels involvement of narrator and
audience in the actual content of the fiction. It is this involvement

and participation which distinguishes Hurston's dialectal fiction from

other forms of fiction. No other forms demand an eventual merging

118

of character and narrator, a linguistic blend which suggests a final
understanding and/or resolution. No other forms demand an audience's
participation which creates a sermon between preacher and congregation,
rather than a sermon frgm_preacher. The shared aspect between speaker
and listener was perhaps created from the structures of the language
which connected a group of speakers in a positive way, a brotherhood
which the systems of slavery and racism in this country have sought to
erase. It was a means of preservation, and became a means of 08
communication.
do {-preszy

Within the syntactic category of gg.(—pres> the short story and
folk tales add to the examples present in the longer literature, and
reinforce the assumptions concerning the semantic categories. The use
of "done" suggests a finality not possible with the simple past,
however, not completely equivalent to the SE perfect. This is
illustrated in structures which permit the SE "had" in the perfect
tense "dat mosquito had done cleaned up ten acres" and also "done" in
the perfect tense "Ah done dropped my hammer." "Had" and "done"
cannot both be perfect. The dialect indicates again, that the form
carries an additional lexical marker. The "done" is a final deed.
When it appears alone in a string, the finality is underlined. When it
appears in addition to the perfective marker, that finality is again
underlined. It is as if the speaker is indicating that no matter what
accoutrements of the SE he uses, his own language must be included for
semantic sense. He is communicating more than a language. He is

communicating a cultural understanding. His responsibility to his

119

audience is to forward that message. Hurston's responsibility to

her audience is to make us aware that that poential exists.

When the critical reader becomes aware of the potential for

the structure of the dialect to carry such messages as intensity and

finality, he is equipped to make a more accurage judgement about
character. When this reader is also aware of the aspects of the
dialect which adorn the language, then the judgement is further
strengthened. The link between a syntactic structure such as gg_and
the more semantic aspects of adornment is very fundamental to language.

They comprise two of its three most basic elements: order and sense.
The third element of language, sound, is also an extremely important
aspect of dialect, but because the thrust in this thesis is

towards literature, order and sense are primary. Both elements work

to increase the cognitive potential for the language user and the

language listener. Variations in structure can produce subtle nuances

in meaning. Because aspects of meaning are often culture-specific,
than any element of language which informs "sense" can give the
listener (or reader, in the case of literature) who is informed of
this potential mgrg_information.

When, in the conversation near the saw mill in Mules and Men

 

the men discovered they need not have reported for work that day,

Black Baby says, "We coulda gggg_been gone. . ." (126). Hurston has
italicized the gggg, The reader who is prepared to make a
linguistic judgement on this dialectal structure would know, even
without the emphasis, that Black Baby is frustrated and angry with

someone. For the many times when similar structure appears which is

120

ggt_italicized, the additional insight into the character's
consciousness is available to a reader clued to look for dialect
structures for textual explications.

John understands that his father is habitually drunk during
his ragings at his son when his mother says "he bgL§_[my emphasis]
drunk when he keer on lak dat." John acknowledges this structure "Ah
don't keer if he do bg_[my emphasis] . . ." (80). The reader who
understands will not only be able to see something more of Ned
Crittenden's character than is alloted in the short space of this book
devoted to him, but can make a further judgement about John's reaction
as well as develop some idea of the kind of background Hurston has
envisioned for her characters. Dialect can be a way to fill in
information, to Speculate on authorial intent, and to further clarify
the critical judgements we make concerning literature.

Finally, we should be able to see that dialect can do for
language what poetry does to prose. In the same manner that a line of
poetry loses its force and beauty and concise sense of construction
when 'translated' into prose, dialect loses those same qualities
when translated into the Standard. Dialect and poetry both intensify.
Their adornment and 'special' structures are conscious machinations of
language by their users to render their experiences as they have felt
them. It is an effort to give more. An informed and critical reading
audience must be both aware of the effort and equipped to receive the

message of an author who specializes her language with dialect.

CHAPTER V

"FORMALIZED CURIOSITY"

Research Methods

 

Hurston referred to research as "formalized curiosity." Her
curiosity was directed towards investigating the culture of Blacks in
the southern part of America and in the Caribbean. Her methods were
those of the socio-anthropologist Franz Boas, who directed her
research and instilled in her the tools of a skilled linguistic
anthropologist. He made it very clear that the primary tool of the
researcher was a command of the language of the community he was to

study. In Linguistics and Ethnology_Boas stated that a "command of

 

the language is an indispensible means of obtaining accurate and

thorough knowledge."65
Hurston was a native of that area of the United States which she

researched for folklore; she was already familiar with and competent

in the dialect. Although she possessed this competence as a native

speaker, it was not until she made her first venture into field work

that the lessons of Boas were learned for life. During her first

six months she ventured into the field using what she describes in her

autobiography as "carefully accented Barnardese," the result of her

education in New York at Barnard College. The glamour of this

institution followed her into the field and made these first attempts

failures.

121

122

It is likely that Boas reminded her when she returned from the

South that the same concepts he noted in his HandboOk of American

 

Indian Languages (1911) held true for her research.66 In that book he

 

had discussed the practical service language lends to the investigator.
It gives him not only an important adjunct to a full understanding of
the customs and beliefs of the people under study, but is also a means
to a clearer understanding of ethnological phenomena unrelated to
linguistic problems.

It was obvious when she went to the Caribbean for research that
she had learned the necessity of sharing the language of her
informants. She notes in the text which documents much of this

research, Tell My Horse, Voodoo Gods An Inquiry, that before venturing

 

into any gathering from which she might elicit information, she was
very careful to learn the Creole dialect of the islands. Boas' theory,
that a knowledge of the language enables the investigator not only to
include linguistic configurations, but to see how grammatical features
are evidence of cultural patterns of meaning and thought, is

exemplified in the manner Hurston chooses to translate some "island

 

sayings" in Tell My Horse. For example, she 'translates' the

 

linguistic phrase l'Rockatone at ribber bottom no know sun bot," into
this formal equivalent: "the person in easy circumstances cannot
appreciate the sufferings of the poor," rather than its exact Standard
English equivalent. Some items of poetry and song she chooses not to
translate, most likely because Boas taught her the same principle he

espoused in the first chapter of his Handbook of American Indian

 

Languages:

123

[for poetry] no translation can possibly be
considered as an adequate substitute for the
original. The form of rhythm the treatment
of the language, the adjustment of the text
to music, the imagery, the use of metaphors

. can only be interpreted by the
investigator who has equal command of the
ethnologigal traits of the people and their
language.

Her methods of inquiry were in these ways finely tuned by her
experiences at Barnard with Boas. There are two major bodies of
research which she explored. The first was with the rural southern
Black in America, most notably around the area of Eatonville, Florida
and the Gulf Coast in America (Mobile and New Orleans). The second
was, as mentioned, with the Caribbean Blacks. Though we find Langston
Hughes chucklhugin his biography over Zora Hurston walking through
the streets of Harlem stopping Negroes and asking if she could
measure their skulls, we can assume that her experiences in New York
were only to solidify the education she was getting at Columbia and
Barnard. It was in the South that she independently began her
formalized research.

Each of her regional explorations has some similarity with the
other. The similarities we find were due to the shared cultural
generation of Blacks on this side of the Atlantic. Africanisms have
survived in varied forms among Blacks in America as well as Blacks in
the Caribbean. The most interesting form of survival, for Hurston,
was documented in the ceremonies and mysticisms of Voodoo or Hoodoo.
In New Orleans, Hoodoo was called sympathetic magic and practiced by

two-headed doctors. In the Caribbean community, less stripped of

African linguistic patterns than the Afro-American communities,

124

Blacks remained faithful to the African pronunciation of the
Dahoymeyan term /vudu/.

The fact that the term is traceable to this particular African
region is significant. Dahomey's port of departure of many slave ships
bound for the Americas and the Caribbean was named "Ouidah." The
major Voodoo god is named "Damballah Ouedo." The Rada gods of Voodoo
are "good" gods who originated in Dahomey. (Evil gods are claimed by
the Congo region). But Dahomean place names are included in the names

of Rada deities, as Hurston points out in Tell My Horse. The Ouidah-

 

Ouedo similarity is an example of the incidence. Many Black American
women today are named 0uida/widah/, a name traceable to these African
roots.

Hurston has noted that there is some conflict between the initial
consonants in Voodoo and Hoodoo. She has used them interchangeably in
her texts, her only comment being that in America the white
pronunciation is faithful to the African and that Blacks used the term
Hoodoo. If her observation is correct, then it is a puzzling issue.

A possible explanation would be that the whites who traveled and
traded with the Caribbean colonies used the pronunciation of the
islands and that the isolated Black Americans, once the initial
syllable underwent a phonetic change, continued the phenomenon. This
linguistic occurrence is not unusual and is consistent with the
phenomenon of linguistic change due to displacement.

The two texts in which Hurston describes and explores the
religion of Voodoo are Tell My Horse, V00doo Gods; An Inquiry, which

discusses her research and findings in the Caribbean; and Mules and

125

Mgg_which concentrates on practices in the Southern United States,
specifically, New Orleans, which Hurston describes as the "hoodoo
capital of America."

Voodoo is a religion which, like all theologies, explains
creation and life. It is the worship of natural things and involves
a complex use of linguistic ritual. This probably originates in the
Voodoo belief that God created the world in six days of magic spells
and incantations: a linguistic phenomenon. The verbal beginnings of
the world in African theology, are paralleled in the Christain gospel:
"In the beginning was the Word." Hurston's book, Moses, Man of the
Mountain, uses a great deal of the creation theology for its text.

Mules and Men begins its discussion of Voodoo with the creation story.

 

Tell My Horse repeats this theology, but the creation stories of the

 

Caribbean include more sensual symbology than does the Black
American version. Both theologies have a large mixture of
Catholicism, which Hurston explains is due to the heavy French
influence in the islands and Gulf coast. The pictures of saints
which are included in the practice of Hoodoo are not the Haitian gods
in white face. These pictures serve instead as approximations of the
Haitian Gods or Loa. It is a way to put a linguistic myth into a
visual form.

These texts comprise the research on the Voodoo practices of
the two countries. At times she makes comparisons between practices in
New Orleans and Haiti or Jamaica, but the books largely restrict
themselves to the specific regions under study.

Voodoo has been, according to Hurston, largely ignored and/or

126

misunderstood by ethnographers. The major area of misunderstanding is
the link between Hoodoo and Catholicism. Because this link is often
the only knowledge eilay person has of the practices of this religion,
some attention here is appropriate.

The influence ofthe Catholic church has been especially strong
in America in the southern regions spotted by French and Spanish
settlements. This is also true of the Caribbean. Linguistically, the
French influence is well documented by the Creole dialect with blends
French, English and African lexica to form a special dialect of the
American Black. Culturally, the French influence in Voodoo is seen
through its link to the church.

God, as an anthropomorphic creation, is not restricted to
Hebrew mythology. The phenomena of God-in-nature and the in-dwelling
God is an ancient African theological premise. It is not surprising
to see the survival of this premise in Black America and the
Caribbeans. The ritual and symbolism of the Catholic church in many
ways appealed to the displaced Africans whose religions involved very
specific methods of worship and deification. The multitude of
Catholic saints in this way became the perfect vehicles for the
Africans to visualize their gods. Hurston cautions her readers not
to mistake this for metamorphosis. Instead, she says, it is a method
to make the ceremonies to the loa more visual. Damballah Ouedo, a
Rada god of Voodoo worship, is found in the picture of St. Patrick.
This cultural assimilation is expected when language and culture come

into contact. Uriel Weinreich, in his book, Languagesin C0ntact notes

 

that what decides whether a cultural practice that is introduced to

127

another culture is sustained by that culture or changed by it, is
whether or not it becomes a part of an organized system of ideas and

sentiments.68

Certainly the saints were part of an organized
sentiment, but they were taken out of this context by Voodoo and placed
into another highly organized system. Therefore, we find them
retaining a Catholic identity outside of the Voodoo sect, but
submerging that identity to a Voodoo loa, for those within the sect.
Like so many religions of the world, the actual visualization of the
deity is an impossibility. No Haitian artists, according to Hurston,
have ever given an interpretation of concept of the loa. In Haiti,
each houngan, or priest of Voodoo, has his own personal conception of
the loa drawn into his "book of notes" and passes this concept down
to those who come under him for tutelage. But here too, the concept
is an approximation only.

Hurston describes Voodoo as rites and deeds which keep alive
the powers of Africa. In this religion, the actual worship
ceremonies are bound in secrecy. Brother and sister, husband and
wife, hide their adherence to the sect from each other. The
publicized versions of Voodoo ritual and magic are ridiculously
exaggerated and misconceived according to Hurston. Voodoo sects
confine their conversations only to "sympathetic" ears.

It is somewhat ironic that Hurston, as an initiate of the
secret religion, chooses to tell all in the books under discussion.
From what she describes, she is committing a very obvious sacrilege.
One must assume that her commitment to linguistic and anthropological

field work, as well as her allegiance to the foundations which were

128

sponsoring her research and who expected from publishable material to
be its result, played a stronger hand than the Voodoo gods. Therefore,
we have access to the remarkable journeys into this religion in Tell

My Horse, and Mules and Men.

 

Analysis of Texts

 

Part Two of Mules and Men (1935) is concerned with Voodoo
practices in the South. In its 1970 introduction by Darwin Turner, we
find the statement that the world of Hoodoo could only have been
effectively explored by a Black person. Franz Boas notes that “she
has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the
Negro excludes the white observor from participating in his true inner
life" (MM 16).

It is interesting that Boas does not assume that Hurston, as
a Black woman, also possessed that "affected demeanor" and that it is
by virtue of her membership in the community she studies that she is
able to gather such excellent examples of folktales and Voodoo
practices. It is understandable from the view of this analysis that
Hurston would (and did, as noted in previous discussions) encounter
some difficulty in gathering material because of her affectations
toward members of her own race. Once she abandoned these, she made
valuable journalistic investigation and inquiry.

Perhaps it is because of her identification with the Southern
community that Hurston does not employ the standard methods of an

anthropological researcher in Mules and Men. Neither has she delved

 

into any analytical dissection of the folk tales and practices of

Hoodoo. Instead, she writes as a participant, with the polished eye

129

of someone who is at once sympathetic and scrutinizing. She found

it necessary to earn the confidence of her informants. After all, how
many of their race had before asked questions about the informal story
telling of an early evening porch gathering? What had always been
taken for granted among the community as a standard form of
entertainment and an accepted religious practice had suddenly come
under the scrutiny of a woman who seemed to be a member of that
community. The statements of both Turner and Boas concerning
Hurston's natural intimacy and her community's initial mistrust of

her are true. It was not the first or the last paradoxical situation
she would need to resolve.

In both her texts on Voodoo, Hurston follows her established
pattern as a teller of folktales as well as attempting to introduce
the reader to some of the political and social implications of life
in the Bahamas. Her detailed descriptions of life in this area make

excellent reference material for the ethnographer. In Tell My Horse,

 

Jamaica provides the material for her sociological investigations.

Her narrative reads like a travel folder written by someone who is
concerned with the patterns of life in the islands. Therefore, her
discussions of the rituals of the islands (birth, death and marriage,
and the special section devoted to the position of women in the
Caribbean) are informative pieces. Most of the discussion of Voodoo

is left for the section on Haiti. This section is also the subject

of her political scrutiny. With the eye and skill of a sociohistorian,
Hurston uses a historical perspective to explore the nationhood of

Haiti, and speculate on its future in a quasi-prophetic chapter

130

titled "The Next Hundred Years," before she delves into the substance

of this text, "Voodoo in Haiti."

A Guggenheim fellowship enabled her to study the culture of the
areas around New Orleans. After many months of visiting and
questioning, Hurston decided that the student of the Voodoo priestess
Marie Leveau was the most powerful and respected priestin that
region. She chose him for her teacher. The story that follows her
discovery of Turner (the teacher) and his reluctant agreement to take

her on as a pupil is the most fascinating section of Mules and Men.

 

With precise attention to detail she describes her initiation under
Turner and the ceremony which required her to lie naked with her navel
resting on a snake skin for a three day "search for the spirit." Her
silent and fasting body lay still in this position for sixty-nine
hours. She writes that during this period she experienced five psychic
phenomena. Medically, that is not surprising. The religious practices
which include fasting in their doctrines do so for very specific
purposes. The psychological disorientation which results from a lack
of food are the very stuff on which the religion builds testimonies
for visions, miracles or other such occurrences. The Biblical
experience of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane is one such incident.
The intense and specific rituals involved in Voodoo worship
could have been explored by Hurston more fully. She leaves the reader
who looks for more than the absorbing account of the various
ceremonies and performances disappointed. The researcher who is
looking for a purely scientific anthropological report would judge

this section of Mules and Men as a failure. But from a sociological

 

131

perspective, she has done a remarkable job in both her texts in three
ways.

First, her criteria for selection of the significant cultural
and historical points to discuss and/or illustrate, are apparent and
well—executed.

Second, her organization of data reveals the methodology of
someone familiar with research methods.

Third, her inclusion of an appendix which functions for both
texts as a glossary, a sampling of folksongs, prescriptions from the
famous Root Doctors and worship songs of Voodoo, is a valuable aid to
one who needs direction in these areas.

The following pages explore her selectional criteria and
organization of these books.

Selectional Criteria

 

Her major basis for including material seems to be whether or
not she has had a personal experience by which she could verify the
data given her in inquiry within the Voodoo community. It should be
obvious that this is an excellent way to establish credibility and
objectivity. It has already been suggested that Hurston's writing as
a narrator in the folk stories seems to imitate the style we would
expect from a reporter. But this reporter was not content to glean
her information from passers-by. Her method involved direct
contact. For four months in New Orleans she asked questions and
received answers but "nothing was put on paper." She followed a
similar plan of attack in the Caribbean. She scientifically organized

the data she collected and found the references in New Orleans seemed

132

to continually point to Marie Leveau. The information she collected
about this woman was varied and indirect. She continued to search for
a direct source and was finally able to locate the nephew of Marie
Leveau, Luke Turner, who was himself a Voodoo doctor. He had been
trained personally by his aunt, who was dead, and it was this man

that Hurston succeeded in persuading to teach her. This is the point

in Mules and Men when the detailed discussion of Voodoo practices

 

begins. She has deleted all second-hand information received during
her first months and begun with her own experience and accumulated
knowledge.

A second criterion for reporting the phenomena is the use of
the style of first person narration. I call this employment of
persona a criterion because she seems to distinguish between her
experiences with Voodoo and the conversations held during these
ceremonies, and others' experiences or telling of their tales. The
former is accomplished without dialogue. The point is significant
because Hurston captures the sound of the dialect in her dialogue.
We understand that she feels it is important not only to the
authenticity of her story to remain faithful to the dialect, but to
capture the flavor which the language reveals to her reader, as one
more aspect of the sect she is exploring. We are privy, in a
fashion, to a much keener view of Voodoo. The cures, potions and
spells she and her teacher prepare for others are recorded in the
style of her folktales. In this manner she tells not only the method
Voodoo doctors employ in various situations, but also the story of

the man who kills (using Voodoo) and his lover's husband, and the

133

story of the woman who seeks revenge on a man who had shot her
husband. She also includes a section she labels "Conjure Stories"
which illustrate the attitude of Blacks in the deep South toward this
subject, as if to reinforce for the reader the effect she has already
created.

Another criticism seems to be that the stories and experiences
she chooses to illustrate in these texts all stem from some direct
contact with a Voodoo doctor. These are not the tales of people
whom she has found in her homes or at work who ghgg§g_to tell her
their experiences with Voodoo, but the stories of people who have come
to the various doctors who taught her while she was a student, and
who came to her for cures after her training under Turner was
completed. The result of this selectional criteria is more accuracy
and information than the style and her subject may have allowed

under more relaxed investigation.

Organization

 

The organization of the two texts is similar. Hurston begins
with a historical survey of the areas in which Voodoo has been
practiced. In Mules and Men this survey's emphasis is on telling the
origins of Hoodoo "the way we tell it." Testimony follows this survey
and statement of origins, with her expected form of making this
testimony a conversation between two neighbors. In this way, she
keeps the scientific approach of having the practice of Hoodoo
verified by the community, as well as salvaging the audience's
interest in reading an absorbing narrative.

Following these opening formalities, Hurston tells us how she

 

 

134

located her teacher, Turner, and the methods of her indoctrination to
the various rituals of Voodoo practices. Her detachment in these
sections is amazing. Although she is narrating a sequence of personal
events which must have been overwhelmingly emotional (she tells of
Turner becoming ". . . more and more voluble. The animal struggled.
A knife flashed and the sheep dropped to its knees, then fell prone
with its mouth open in a weak cry. . ." (MM 250-1)), there is no hint
in the narration of the degree of involvement on her part. Here we
cannot doubt that Hurston has achieved the detachment of a "serious
social scientist." I suspect, that if it had not been for the unusual
and absorbing nature of her narration, that detachment would have
detracted from the text's appeal to a "general" audience. As it was,
this book was very successful, and satisfied both Godmother's wish for
her material to be published in a "respectable'I form, and Hurston's
desire to let pe0ple know about her culture.

Tell My Horse, Voodoo Gods; An Inquiry is a much longer and
much more detailed book. However, it still follows the general plan

of organization of Mules and Men. Its opening sections are historical

 

survey. Jamaica and Haiti are scrutinized for their cultural
practices (outside of Voodoo), the status of women in the Caribbean,
the speculation on their futures and nationhood, and investigations
into some of their most famous political leaders.

Again, like the Mules and Men collection, the organizational

 

plan calls for an investigation into the origins of Voodoo within the
mythology of the islands. In this text, Hurston devotes some time to

the Voodoo gods and their African origins. Finally, after these

135

preliminaries are accomplished, Hurston details her investigations into
the communities which practice Voodoo, outlines some of the rituals
which she has observed and in which she participated, and manages to

achieve that same narrative detachment noted in Mules and Men.

 

Both books couple her own experiences with the larger topics of
origins and practices of Voodoo. The network which joins these topics

is established first by a discussion (in Mules and Men) of the history

 

of Marie Leveau and her kin who were Hurston's first teachers. Their
lessons led to contacts with clients. The contact with clients leads
the reader to a larger chapter of conjure stories, told by those
clients who came to her for cures.

The network of Tell My Horse is similar, but has an additional

 

feature. Those members of the community who inform her concerning
Voodoo also give her the opportunity to reflect on the effects of
history within the culture of those islands.

Both these books signify a departure from the form of the
novel. This departure from fiction to non-fiction is indicative of
Hurston's major concern to use her writing skills to illustrate the
markings of her culture. Although as a novelist she managed to
create some excellent fiction, and as a researcher to capture some
exciting and amusing stories, the jgtggt_in both forms was the same.
Hurston was aware that by being both subject and object she could
give her white reading audience a view of Black America they would
not otherwise be privy to. Therefore, in addition to testifying to

the diverse skills of the author, Tell My Horse and Mules and Men

 

 

indicate the contemporary concern of the Black Aesthetic: that Black

136

Art must be a political expression and dedicated to a nationalistic
view of all aspects of Black life in America. They were texts which

anticipated nationalism thirty years before Black America defined it.

CONCLUSION

 

In March, 1973, J. Mitchell Morse wrote an article entitled "The
Shuffling Speech of Slavery: Black English."69 This article expounds
a philOSOphy of language use and meaning, and more specifically
dialect use and meaning, which Hurston sought to eradicate through
the examples of her fiction. Current linguistic theory, especially
psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic theories, lends no support to
Morse's position. Scholars who follow these disciplines usually find
themselves directly opposed to Morse.

But the difficulty which Zora Neale Hurston faced in 1928, in
convincing her reading audience that a language could reflect the
thought of a culture, is similar to the difficulty which scholars
face today. The problem today is compounded because the notions of
race in our society have made it necessary both to convince scholars
that thought and language are related in some deep structure way
having nothing to do with basic competence (either behavioral or
cognitive), and that the dialect is a linguistic system held and used
by intelligent people capable of holding and producing intelligent
thought.

The comments which Morse makes in his article in College English

 

punctuate the need for this kind of linguistic education today:

Black English is not . . . accepted as a
legitimate language. . . . because it is
not a satisfactory medium for the
communication of precise information or
the development of clear ideas. . . . It
doesn't lend itself to clear expression

. . A person who has difficulty with the

137

138

agreement of subject and verb can't think
clearly. . . (388-90).

It is not easy to see, with comments such as these in mind,
how unclear and imprecise thought could work to create such compelling,
full, and straightforward pictures of Black life in America as did the
dialect literature of Zora Neale Hurston.

I began this paper with the assertion that in Hurston, language
and character have an important link. That statement needs
broadening. In all literature, language and character have the
potential to be linked very closely. That closeness would be, or could
be, the same bond which exists between language and personality,
between a human's consciousness of himself and his world and his
ability to translate that consciousness into a communicable form. It
is one of the most basic definitions of language -- that language is
man's expression of self. It should not be unusual that self-expression
in life be the same expression in literature. What happens is that
when a poet works at creating the poetic word, he creates an
instrument. The instrument begins to function on its own power,

the power of the poem, and the original creator is forgotten.

Hurston has reminded us of that primal creator.

The affirmation we find in Hurston's literature is the
affirmation of self. She has superseded that old controversy
between form and content by remembering that the form of a person's
language is the content of his self. Translating that concept into
her literature simply meant to remember that her characters were more
than the artist's instruments. They were multi-dimensional. The

contents of their minds had to be expressed whenever they spoke.

139

Therefore, she gave them spirits in the same manner which she realized
her own.

Her reminder to her reading audience was that language is a
reliable and constant illumination of truth. It can reveal character
in ways that no narrative commentary could, and in ways that no
external structure could, and can create characters who are factual
representations of their culture. What is remarkable about this
reminder, is that it was offered during a time when anthropological
science was bent on indicating the lack of difference between cultures.
It was a powerful school of thought to dispute. For a long time past
the era of Boas, the anthropological assumption was that language
ability is evenly distributed among all cultures, and therefore these
cultures essentially have no differences. Hurston took Boas' theory
to task in two very crucial areas:

First, she indicated that although Black speech was not a
separate 'language,' it was a form of communication capable of holding
the same levels and complications of thought as any "fully—formed"
language. Boas would hardly have agreed with this view. The common
assumption at this time was that the linguistic patterns of minority
cultures in America was a "broken" form of the English language, an
unsuccessful attempt at mimicry. It is important to note that
although Hurston may not have argued with the latter part of that
assumption, she did recognize enough differences in the dialect to be
able to point to them as differences due to a cultural distinction,
rather than a cultural deficit. In other words, Hurston could not

have believed that it was because Blacks were unable to speak like

140

whites that the dialect emerged. If she had, there would be no
explanation for her comments in Nggrg that the Negro uses certain
words and structures for adornment, because the language of the West
has such sterility. She is affirming that the Black dialect exists
because of conscious, or subconscious choice. It was neither the
theory of Boas, nor the theory of the then current school of
descriptive linguists. Instead, it was the informed view of an

artist who had been able to participate in her art both as subject and
object and who therefore held the 'insider's' view when it came to
writing about her subject.

As an artist who understood all the relevancies of language and
culture, the 'power' she gave to her literature could not ignore
linguistic power. Taking language into consideration meant she also
had tothink about what language meant to the person who used it,
of what it was an indication. It was the ability to give so much more
dimension to literature than was normally possible which creates the
kinds of novels which reviewers have praised for their depth, without
even knowing what kinds of depth were actually present.

When Hurston calls John Pearson a poet, and defines the poet
to James Weldon Johnson as someone who manipulates words, she is also
speaking of the artist who manipulates words. She is speaking of
herself. In Jonah's Gourd Vine, John's tragedy is that he is never
able to reconcile God speaking through him with his own speech and
actions. He cannot recognize the interdependence of language and
behavior. Although this theme is clear within the novel, it takes

an evaluation of the form and content of her literature before it

141

becomes clear that Hurston feels this in a much larger spectrum.
After this analysis is accomplished, it is possible to see the theory
of language behavior and overt behavior working its way throughout
her fiction. These behaviors were not independent, and we can see
that Hurston not only realized their dependency, but that she also

realized that the consciousness of their dependency was as vital as

 

documenting its existence. This consciousness is clearly exhibited in

Jonah's Gourd Vine. Because John lacks it, John dies. In Moses, Man

 

 

of the Mountain, because Moses realized that what he says to the

 

Hebrews is as important as the way in which it is stated (the dialect
he used) we realize that he is aware of the power of the word. The
characteristic diminishing of dialogue in Hurston's novels, when the
character's internal retreats are about to bring them to some

greater levels of awareness, is an indication that Hurston believed
that whoever uses language, the artisan-author or the speaker outside
of a literary reference, must be in control of that language, and
conscious of its power. If he is not, some level of consciousness --
a deeper level -- is lost.

It was not necessary for Hurston to illustrate, as I have in
this dissertation, the deep structure syntactical changes and meanings
which are preserved in the surfaces of the dialect. I do not doubt
that she was unaware of these structures in the forms I have offered
them here. For one thing, mine is a contemporary analysis of the
structures of language. For another, Hurston's contribution was a far
more subtle awareness than structures which rely in transformational-

grammars permit one to offer. Because she did not have the

142

accoutrements of modern—day linguistic theory, and because her formal
education was working against her rather than for her in the
linguistic theories which her literature indicates, Hurston's
contribution to language/thought theories is far more valuable. It
means that it was a speaker's knowledge and a hearer's knowledge of
the dialect, as well as a skill for poetry (in an Aristotelian sense)
that allowed her to come to the conclusions she did about language.
She never made a formal denial of Boas' theory of language and
culture. It is almost as if she was not fully aware that what she
was doing was in direct contradiction to the lessons of her mentor.
What was most important to her was not to contradict, but to affirm
the validity and capability of her race in any of its behaviors,
linguistic behavior, although by no means the least of them, was an
aspect to use for this process of affirmation.

June Jordan's comment that Their Eyes Were Watching God was

 

Hurston's novel of Black affirmation means even more when seen within
the total offering of the novel: its language, its character, its
plot, its setting, and its theme.70 All of these elements gain more
because Hurston made the effort to preserve that aspect of humanity
which tells most about man - his expression. When the content of her
literature drew on this linguistic potential, as it did for the

preacher in Jonah's Gourd Vine, and the leader in Moses, Man of the

 

 

Mountain, and the mayor in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the

 

various folk of her folk tales; we realize that Hurston was aware of
the power of his tool to create a fictional environment which seemed

to be vignettes of life. When the form of her language reinforced

143

that telling by the changes in narrative structures, and the blends
accomplished by the voices of characters and the voices of her
various narrators, and when the whole novel moves with an internal
poetry as soon as the characters move to recognize their poetic
selves; then we, as readers, must admit that Hurston realized that
language could also be used to enforce a structural environment which
underlined the message held within the content.

As far as linguistic ability is concerned, there is no void
between form and content: only a very powerful and dependent
structure.

When Hurston illustrates that language is a competent means of
expressing thought by having her characters express that thought,
and having her structure reflect it, she is issuing rebuttal to such
scholars as Morse who claim that people who have difficulty with the

agreement of subject and verb can't "think clearly,‘ in at least two
different ways.

First, she indicates that the structures of dialect are not
necessarily structures which copy poorly or incorrectly a Standard
language. Instead, dialect structures are independent of the
Standard in an effort to express a thought which the Standard is not
capable of carrying. The “adornment" she describes is an indication
of her knowledge of this dialectal distinction. The attempt to give
a language something more, in many instances, forced the Black dialect
into linguistic differences from the Standard. Blacks were interested

in being more descriptive, more vibrant, and in indicating more

activity within the linguistic environment. This did not necessarily

144

cause deviation from the Standard subject-verb agreement (although
on some occasions it very well could have); but I do not believe that
Morse's comment was meant to be understood only in that very limited
environment. Morse's comment about "clear thinking" indicates an
assumption that language performance is in some way indicative of
thinking ability: abstract reasoning, the power to cognate.
This assumption is even further from current linguistic thought
than the dialect controversy. Language is not usually an indication
of thought, that is, it is not often possible, in Standard English for
example, to tell what a person is thinking by what he has said. The
fundamental difference between Standard English and Black language, is
that an attempt is made to express more of that deep structure
competence within the speech performance than a Standard speaker
would expect to hear, or attempt to do. What Morse misunderstands is
that the dialect speaker is not attempting to render his thoughts into
the Standard, he is attempting to render his thoughts, period. Nikki
Giovanni has a poem titled "My House" that reflects "English isn't a
good language to express emotions with, Mostly I imagine, because
people try to speak English instead of trying to speak through it."71
Giovanni has captured the essence of the intent of the Black dialect.
It is an effort to express the soul through language, an attempt to
make what things lie on the level of consciousness, reach the levels
of performance.

What Morse should really say is that the Black dialect
speakers' thoughts are not unclear, but are unclear to those who do

not possess the same consciousness as these speakers. Mutual

145

intelligibility is one of the requirements of a language. If Morse
does not understand, he only adds flle1 to those who would claim that
the Black dialect is more than a regional or cultural variety in a

language, it is a cultural difference which leads towards its

 

definition as a language rather than a dialect.

Hurston's second rebuttal to such thinkers as Morse is that
clarity of thought has absolutely nothing to do with the adherence
of one syntactic structure to another. The proof of clarity lies
within the communication of the message. The proof of culture lies
within the culture of the receivers of this message. If the message
is not received, it is valid to suspect that the cultural difference
between speaker and hearer or reader and writer have inhibited its
reception, and that this cultural distinction indicates the
carrying-power of language.

It is a circular argument. But it is one which should not
have to be illustrated today, over and over again.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this dissertation, the
concerns of the academic community with the Black dialect have been
too often weighted with social, academic and political concerns for
any real linguistic and scientific information to emerge. That is
not the entire problem. The fact that a novelist and anthropologist
and folklorist such as Hurston could be lauded as a consumate artist

in her own time, featured on the cover of the Saturday ReView, and

 

gain critical acceptance and praise from the literary community of
her day by using the forms of language which scholars such as Morse

continue to label imprecise and incoherent says more about the

146

political and indeed racist limitations of that kind of scholarship
than they do about the inability of linguistic scientists to get the

message across. Racism is persistently the stronger undercurrent.

Much of what I have said in this dissertation may have indicated

that Hurston was an opportunist. I do not mean to suggest that this
is true in any negative sense whatsoever. Instead, her opportunities
to explain, explore and offer an educated view as to what the
situation of the Black man in America really_was required her to
accept the aid from Godmother with little quarrel, to accept the
direction of others, and finally, to experiment with untried forms

in the latter part of her life (her political era) as a sort of last
ditch effort to get her point of view across to her public. Before
anything else, Hurston's literature was an attempt to illustrate the
difference and the lack of deficiency in her "people."

With language theories and the education of Barnard behind her,
and the experience of Eatonville always with her, Hurston was on
safest grounds. Although she did not consciously set out to
illustrate the kinds of analyses this dissertation has offered, I
believe that they would have been the next step for someone so
interested in cultural nationalism that every indication of culture is
also an indication of competence.

In other words, I have attempted to do what Hurston would have
done. For me, that attempt means to illustrate how the deep structure
competence that each speaker has, is a feature of the Black dialect.

It means to indicate that this competence can give additional

validity to literature that is interested in outlining, documenting,

147

and supporting cultural relativism. It means that, as Julia Falk
points out, it is possible that dialect study will reveal what a person
knows, not just how he says what he knows. I believe that Hurston knew
this. My effort in this dissertation has been to indicate how this
knowledge was illustrated in her fiction.

Zora Neale Hurston's writing combines those areas of her study,
anthropology, folklore and sociology, into the kind of picture that one
could draw only if we were subject and object. Hurston was the
archetype. She was as adorned as she indicated her "people" were. She
was as full of the mythology of Eatonville as the storytellers on
Joe Clarke's porch steps. When she understood what her background
could accomplish, as far as helping others to participate in the
reality of her culture, she used those methods which were both
indigenous and acquired. She was a marvelous collage.

For literature to be, in Aristotelian terms, "mimesis" -- for
it to recreate life, it must be as honest with the mirror as possible.
Character alone, as taken by the author through the complications of
plot and situated in particular environments and woven through various
themes, cannot be mimetic if it imitates some linguistic system which
is not its own. Character must reflect self. When an author creates
with the knowledge that language ability is rooted in consciousness,
then the ability to use both deep and surface structures of language in
his creation of character enables the author to give his reader an
understanding of motivation and plot and circumstance which are much
closer to internal characterization than literature traditionally

offers. When an author makes his own consciousness both subject and

148

object of his literature, then the distance between consciousness and
behavior is even further diminished. These are the things which

Hurston wanted to accomplish in her literature in order to give

a picture of her people. Because she was both mirror and the lamp,

Zora Neale Hurston was successful in ways she did not even anticipate.
By the application of current linguistic theory and structural approaches

to literature, her success is easily documented.

APPENDIX

A.

APPENDIX

LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES

Sample illustrations of AUX structures 1.2 through 1.5 in Jonah's

Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Mules and Men are

illustrated below.

 

Structure 1.1 is not included because it does not

differ significantly from the Standard syntax or morphology between

the Standard and dialectal forms (hereafter referred to as SE

(Standard English and BE (Black English)).

Structure 1.6 is not

included because it is equivalent to SE "simple past'I tense (SE "I

knew it" = BE "I knowed it.")

explanations of these syntactic and morphologic structures.

1.

1

1

2

.3

.4

Refer to Chapter 4 in the text for examples and further

Ah done took'im since he wuz three

A big ole booger done got after me

All he got he done made it offa . . . us
Ah know you done called me to preach

De time done come. . . .

Ah done lied on him

Done promised tuh plow Thompson's grove
He done forgot his weights

Ah done told you time and time again. .
Ah done dropped my hammer

Ah done brought her everything. . . .

Ah been knowing dat ole tale

Just lak she been doin wid you

Ah been keeping comp'ny wid you

He been hangin round here. . . .

How long you been 'lowin' Johnny. . . .

Our child is done come home. . . .

Skeered uh brute beast had done cotched yuh
We coulda dOne been gone

149

(JGV 23)
(MM 26)
(TEWWG 43)
(MM 38)
(JGV 185)
(MM 121)
(TEWWG 49)
(MM 68)
(TEWWG 62)
(MM 135)
(TEWWG 65)

(MM 49)
(TEWWG 201
(JGV 118)
(TEWWG 15)
(TEWWG 17)

(MM 62)
(JGV 107)
(MM 126)

150

A cat-fish had done jumped up. . . . (MM 130)
You all done been over in Pentecost (MM 179)
Robert's son had done been kilt (TEWWG 18)
1.5 He bes drunk when he keer on 1ak dat (JGV 80)
Ah'll be done et mine. . . . (MM 26)
Don't you let em . . . be coverin up de clock (JGV 207)
You'd be done woke me up. . . . (TEWWG 28)
Ah don't keer if he do be peepin' through his
likkers. . . . (JGV 80)
B. The following AUX markers illustrate the possible strings

generated from the DS AUX:
1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

é+final> +progressive <+intensive> BHntensive) 1 [(+past)]

+perfect +copula) +copula> +copula)"be"
+perfect) +progressiv ) +progressive

+perfect) _J -perfect>

 

 

 

L +final> (+habitual) .J
BE - done been knowin done been be knowin took
took knowing
SE - have have been 0 0 took
taken knowing
Note:
1. The addition of'<+intensive) marker generates strings not

compatible with anv SE forms.

2. The consistency of SE (+perfect) generating in both structures
1.2 and 1.3 "have" or "has" underscores the inconsistency of a
+perfect)marker for BE structures 1.3 and 1.4. This suggests
that "done" in BE is not equivalent to SE "has" or "have'I and
indicates that an additional lexical marker ((+final)) for this
word is viable.

3. The lack of consistency in the +perfect category for BE is not
unexpected when languages and/or dialects are in contact.

4. The feature (+copula}‘<+habitual) generates "be" - not
equivalent to SE progressive because of the addition of the
"habitual'marker.

Jacobs and Rosenbaum's text English'Transformational Grammar

 

suggests an interesting way of viewing the DS AUX. They write:

151

What reason is there to believe that the
auxilary exists in the deep structure of such
sentences in the first place? As the existence
of "does" in these two sentences Does Joad

like philosophy? Joad does not like
philosophy. can be explained very nicely on

two assumptions. First, the deep structure of
"Joad likes philosophy" does contain

auxilary. Second. this auxilarv must be deleted
under certain special conditions:

1. The au ilary contains neither the feature
+modal (since I'can" in "John can go" cannot
be deleted), nor the feature +copula (since
"is" in John is eating" or "John is honest"
cannot be deleted), nor the feature

( +perfect ) (since "have" in "they have
eaten" cannot be deleted).

2. The auxilary immediatel precedes a verbal
segment, on one marked +VB ).

Consider the derivation of the sentences above
in terms of these assumptions. For the first
sentence, the interrogative transformation will
move the auxilary around the subject noun
phrase. The auxilary will ggt_be deleted
because it does not immediately precede a verbal.
What then happens to the auxilary? It is
replaced by the appr0priate form of ”do" in
this case "does" from the lexicon. For the
second sentence, the negative element is placed
between the auxilary and the verbal. Thus,
once again, the auxilary is not deleted and is
replaced bv "does." However. in the deep
structure of ”Joan likes philosophy," the
auxilary ends up immediately preceding the
verbal and, since the conditions stated under

1 above are met, the auxilary is deleted.

Thus, the existence of "does" in the sentences
above can be taken as evidence of the
existence of an auxilarv in all deep

structures (126-7).

With some modification, the theory of Jacobs and Rosenbaum can be
extended to cover the existence of the "do" feature in the Black
dialect. It is my analysis that this feature apnears on the AUX in

the categories mentioned above and that it does not appear on the AUX

152

in SE in these categories and therefore the rules of deletion do not
apply. In other words, "do" is a past tense feature or marker of the
AUX in BE and is deleted under the following circumstances:

1. (+copula) {-intensive)

2. (~fina11ty)

ABBREVIATIONS

153

ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used in the notes and text to

refer to frequently mentioned books, persons and collections.

 

CVV Carl Van Vechten
DT Dust Tracks On A Road, Zora Neale Hurston
EA "Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology"

Robert Hemenway in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered,
Arna Bontemps

 

 

 

HB 'Hemenway Biography' —- Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary
Biography, Robert E. Hemenway

JGV Jonah's Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston

JWJ James Weldon Johnson

JWJYale James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection,

Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven,

 

Connecticut
MM Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston
TEWWG Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

 

ZNH Zora Neale Hurston

FOOTNOTES

FOOTNOTES

1Zora Neale Hurston, "Hoodoo in America," Journal of American
Folklore, 44(Oct.-Dec., 1931), 317-418.

2C. Dell Hymes, Language in Culture and Society (New York:
Harper and Row, 1964), p. 115.

 

 

3Zora Neale Hurston, "The Chick With One Hen," (JWJYale).

4ZNH to cvv, Feb. 28, 1934 (JWJYale).

5Ruth Sheffey, "The Morgan Connection, Zora Neale Hurston,"
Multi-Ethnicity_in American Publishing, 3(Fall 1976), pp. 3-5.

6Ellease Southerland, "Zora Neale Hurston, The Novelist-
Anthropologist's Life/Works," Black World, 23(August, 1974), pp. 20-30.

 

 

7Mary Helen Washington, "Black Women Image Makers," Black World,
23(August, 1974), pp. 10-20.

8Darwin Turner, Black American Literature (Columbus: Charles
E. Merrill, 1970), p. 339.

 

 

9Arthur Davis and Saunders Redding, Cavalcade (Boston: Houghton—
Mifflin, 1971), p. 454. “""““

10June Jordan, ”0n Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston: Notes
Toward A Balancing of Love and Hatred," Black World, 23(August, 1974),
pp. 4-10.

HRobert Hemenway, "Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville
Anthropology," in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Arna Bontemps, ed.
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972).

12Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1964), pp. 126-133.

13Alice Walker, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," M§,, 3(March,
1975), pp. 74-89.

14During this period she financed Natalie Curtis' collection, The.
Indian Book, 1907.
Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, A Liberary Biography
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 104. ‘7

 

 

 

 

 

154

155

15
p. 321.

16Ibid., p. 320.

17Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York: Macauley,
1925), pp. 229—230.

18Letters between ZNH and CVV in 1933 and 1934 suggest that she
and Lippincott were equally excited about each other. She wrote to CVV
that "Mn Lippincott likes my book a lot. He is making some move about
a movie. . . ." and that her book was "enthusiastically accepted" by
this publisher. Lippincott's contacted Van Vechten about publishing
this book, asking him to write a review for it after viewing galley
proofs for the work. ZNH wrote CVV later about her approval of Fannie
Hurst's introduction to the book but that she wished he could have done
it (JWJYale).

19Sterling Brown, The American Negro: His History_and His
Literature (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 132.

20
21

Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963),

 

 

 

 

ZNH to CVV, Dec. 10, 1934 (JWJYale).

ZNH to CVV, 1927 (JWJYale).
22

23

ZNH to CVV, 1927 (JWJYale).
Fannie Hurst to CVV (JWJYale).

 

24Fannie Hurst, "Zora Neale Hurston: A Personality Sketch,"
Yale University_Library Gazette, 35(1961), pp. 17-21.

251bid.

26

ZNH to Dr. Thomas E. Jones, TLS, Oct. 1934 (JWJYale).

27The information gathered on this incident is based primarily
on this file of letters between Langston Hughes and CVV and various
communications from CVV to Hughes and French at the JWJYale. Information
from Hughes' autobiography was also helpful in piecing together the
story concerning this play.

28Herschel Brickell, "A Woman Saved," Saturday Review of
Literature, November 6, 1948.

29"Boys 10 Accuse Zora,“ BaltimOre Afro-American, 11(0ct. 23,
1948). The news also received a headline "Noted Novelist Denies She
'Abused')10-Year-01d Boy" in the New York Age, Vol. 63, No. 23, (Oct.
23, 1948 .

30

 

 

 

 

Ibid., Baltimore Afro-American.

 

 

156

3(Fannie Hurst to CVV, ALS (JWJYale).

32ZNH to CVV. "I am working out something which I hope will be
classified as a play. I am using the material around the fall of
Jerusalem to Titus in 70 AD. It is a whale of a story, and its
greatness lies in the fact that it is universal matter. . . ." 1945?
(JWJYale).

33Alain Locke, "Retrospective Review (and Biography) of the
Literature of the Negro: 1937," Opportunity, (Jan., 1938), p. 10.

34

 

Zora Neale Hurston, "The Chick With One Hen" (JWJYale).
35ZNH to JWJ, April, 1934 (JWJYale).

36Zora Neale Hurston, "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African
Slaver," Journal of Negro History, 12(Oct., 1977), pp. 648-63.

 

37Ellease Southerland, "Zora Neale Hurston," Black World,
23(August, 1974).

38Paul L. Dunbar, "Ante Bellum Sermon," The Black Poets,
Dudley Randall, ed. (New York: Bantam, 1971), pp. 44-46.

39Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph On the Suwannee (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1948), p. 311.

40John Szwed, "An Anthropological Dilemma: The Politics of
Afro-American Culture," in Reinventing_Anthropology, Dell Hymes, ed.
(New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 158.

41

42Wayne Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 149-209.
Booth's discussion in this chapter, illustrates various

narrative points of view for narrators who function within the text
as either first person characters or third person commentators. I
have abstracted the 'definitions' for each category Booth addresses,
and formulated them into the structure in Chapter 3 of this dissertation
so that Hurston's narrative system may be compared to a more
traditional structure.

43Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippincott Company, 1939), p. 131.

44
45
46

 

 

 

 

Alaine Locke, Opportunity, (Jan., 1938), p. 10.

 

 

 

Zora Neale Hurston, Sergph 0n the Suwannee, p. 4.

 

ZNH to CVV, Feb. 28, 1934 (JWJYale).
ZNH to JWJ, April 16, 1934 (JWJYale).

157

47Zora Neale Hurston, MOSes, Man of the Mountain, p. 226.

 

48C.C. Lovelace, "The Sermon," as heard by Zora Neale Hurston
in Nancy Cunard, Negro (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company,
1934), pp. 35-9.

49Julie Falk, Linguistics and Language (Lexington: Xerox
Publishing Company, 1973), p. 217.

50George Miller, "Some Preliminaries to Psycholinguistics," in
Psycholinguistics and Readigg, Frank Smith (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1973), pp. 16- 17.

51

 

Julie Falk, Linguistics and Language, p. 217.

52Neither Transformational Grammar nor this study assumes the
structures of such analyses illustrate actual models, but illustrate
only a concept of construction within which we assume these
operations occur.

53John Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge:
University Printing House, 1958), pp. 81-93.
The theoretical approach of this section is based on Lyons'
discussion in the above text.

54Ibid., pp. 70-71.

55

 

ZNH to Langston Hughes, (JWJYaleL

" . . some laws in dialect. The same form is not always
used. Some syllables and words are long before or after certain words
and short in the same position. Example. "you" as subject gets full
value but is shortened to "Yuh" as object. "him" in certain positions
and "'im" in others depending on consonant preceding. Several laws of
aspiriate "H". .

56Nancy Cunard, Negro p. 31.

57Ibid., p. 24.

581bid., p. 25.

591616.

60ZNH, "Sweat,“ FireII, 1(November, 1926), pp. 40-45.
6'ZNH to JWJ, April 16, 1934 (JWJYale).
62Benjamin Lee Whorf, "An American Indian Model of the

Universe," Language Thought and Reality (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press,
1956), pp. 57- 64.

158

63Research by these linguists concerning Black Language
includes William Stewart's "Sociolinguistic Factors in the History of
American Negro Dialects" in the Florida Foreign Language Reporter,
(Spring, 1961): J.L. Dillard's Black English (New York: Random
House, 1972): Arthur Smith's Langgage, Communications and Rhetoric in
Black America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972): and the "Logic of
NonStandard English" by William Labov in Frederick William's text,
Language and Poverty. The text by Williams is itself an excellent
reference for information on the Black dialect.

64Roderick Jacobs and Peter Rosenbaum, English Transformational

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grammar (Lexington: Xerox Publishing Co., 1968), p. 59.

65Franz Boas, "Linguistics and Ethnology," in Language and
Culture in Society, C. Dell Hymes, ed., pp. 15-22.

66Ibid.

67Ibid.

 

 

68Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact (The Hague: Mouton and
Co., 1963), pp. 5-6.

693. Mitchell Morse, "The Shufflin Speech of Slavery: Black
English," College English, 34(March, 1973), pp. 834-43.

70

 

 

June Jordan, Black World,23(August, 1974).

 

71Nikki Giovanni, My House (New York: William Morrow, 1972).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Afro-American, Baltimore, October 23, 1948.

 

Black World, 25(August, 1974).

 

Brickel, Hershell. "A Woman Saved," The Saturdanyeview of Literature,
(November 6, 1948).

Brown, Sterling. The American Negro: His History and His Literature.
New York: Arno, 1969.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel In America. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1965.

 

Bontemps, Arna. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1972.

 

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961.

 

Cunard, Nancy. Negro. New York: Ungar, 1934.

Davis, Arthur and Redding, J. Saunders. Cavalcade. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1971.

Dillard, J.L. Black English. New York: Random House, 1972.

 

Falk, Julia. Linguistics and Language. Lexington: Xerox Publishing,
1973.

 

Fireli, 1(November, 1926).

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963.

 

Hurst, Fannie. "Zora Neale Hurston: A Personality Sketch," Yale
University Library Gazette, 35(1961).

Hymes, Dell. Language in Culture and Society. New York: Harper and
Row, 1964.

 

Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Vintage, 1974.

 

 

159

160

Jacobs, Roderick and Rosenbaum, Peter. English Transformational
Grammar. Lexington: Xerox Publishing, 1968.

Locke, Alain. The New Negro. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

 

. "A Retrospective Review (and Biography) of the
Literature of the Negro: 1937," Opportunity, (January, 1938).

 

 

Lyons, John. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge:
University Printing House, 1958.

Morse, J. Mitchell. "The Shuffling Speech of Slavery: Black English,"
College English, 34(March 1973).

 

New York Age, 63(Oct., 23, 1948).

 

Smith, Arthur L. Language, Communication and Rhetoric in Black
America. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

 

Smith, Frank. Psycholinguistics and Reading. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1973.

 

Thurman, Wallace. Infants of the Spring. New York: Macauley, 1925.

 

Turner, Darwin. Black American Literature. Columbus: Charles Merrill,
1970.

 

Walker, Alice. "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," Mgg, 3(March, 1975).

Weinreich, Uriel. Languages in Contact. The Hague: Mouton and
Company, 1963.

 

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought and Reality. Cambridge: M.I.T.
Press, 1956.

 

Williams, Frederick. Language and Poverty. Chicago: Markham
Publishing, 1971.

 

HURSTON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Below is a chronological list of the sources consulted in the
preparation of this dissertation which were written by Hurston. The
list includes both her fiction and her non-fiction. For a complete
bibliography of this author, refer to the (HB 355-359).

NOVELS AND NONFICTION:
Jonah's Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1934. Reprinted,

with an introduction by Larry Neal, Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott, 1971.

 

Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1935. Reprinted, with an
introduction by Darwin Turner, New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

 

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1937.
Reprinted, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

 

Tell My Horse: Voodoo GodsgyAn Inquiry. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott,
1938.

 

Moses, Man of the Mountain. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1942.

 

Dust Tracks On A Road. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1942.

 

Seraph On the Suwannee. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948.

 

OTHER PUBLICATIONS:
"Drenched in Light." Opportunity, 2(Oec., 1924), 371-74.

 

"Spunk." Opportunity, 3(June, 1925), 171-73.

 

"The Hue and Cry About Howard University." Messenger, 7(Sept., 1925),
315-19, 338.

"Muttsy.'l Opportunity, 4(Aug., 1926), 246-50.

 

"Possum or Pig." Forum, 76(Sept., 1926), 465.

"The Eatonville Anthology." Messenger, 8(Sept., Oct., Nov., 1926),
261—62, 297, 319, 332. ,

Color Struck: A Play. In Ebony and Topaz, edited by Charles S.
Johnson, 53-57. New York: National Urban League, 1927.

 

 

161

162

"Cudjo's Own Story About the Last African Slaver." Journal of Negro
History, 12(Oct.,l927), 648-64.

 

"How It Feels to be Colored Me." World Tomorrow, 11(May, 1928), 215-
216.

 

"Dance Songs and Tales From the Bahamas." Journal of American Folklore,
43(Ju1y-Sept., 1930), 294—312.

 

"Hoodoo In America." Journal of American Folklore, 44(Oct., Dec.,
1931), 317-418.

 

I'The Gilded Six-Bits." Story, 3(Aug., 1933), 60-70.
"Story in Harlem Slang." American Mercury, 55(Ju1y, 1942), 84-86.

 

"High John de Conqueror." American Mercury, 57(Oct., 1943), 450-58.

 

”The Last Slave Ship." American Mercury, 58(Mar., 1944), 351-53-

 

"Crazy for this Democracy." Negro Digest, 4(Dec., 1945), 45-48.

 

"Conscience of the Court." Saturday Evening Post, Mar. 18, 1950, 22-23,
112-22.

 

"I Saw Negro Votes Peddled." American Legion Magazine, 49(Nov., 1950),
12, 13, 54-57, 59-60.

 

"What White Publishers Won't Print." Negro Digest, 8(Apr., 1950),
85-89.

 

"A Negro Voter Sizes Up Taft." Saturday Evening Post, Dec., 8, 1951,
29, 150.

 

UNPUBLISHED MATERIALS:

"Book of Harlem." Short Story, 7pp. JWJYale.

"The Chick With One Hen." Character Sketch, 2pp. JWJYale.

"The Emperor Effaces Himself." Character Sketch, 7 pp. JWJYale.

"Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life." Play in three acts written with
Langston Hughes. Only portions of it available for viewing at
JWJYale because it is in litigation with the Hughes' estate.

CORRESPONDENCE:

Portions of letters referenced and directly quoted in the text of this

163

dissertation which either concern Zora Neale Hurston or were
written by or to her, are a part of the JWJ Collection of Yale
University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, New Haven, Connecticut.

1'1 ICHIGRN STRTE UN

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