Zora Neale Hurston
(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro.
All Rights Reserved.
I envy another reader who comes fresh and new to my favorite authors. Every two years or so, I chuckle my way through all of Barbara Pym’s novels, and my familiarity with them only deepens my delight—yet, what fun it would be to read Pym again for the first time! I feel that way as well about Zora Neale Hurston’s novels. A stunning original, Hurston could boast of engaging charm and enormous appeal. I simply like her—very, very much.
Her distinctive voice mesmerizes me as I read Jonah’s Gourd Vine or Their Eyes Were Watching God. Besides her gift for narrative, her diction possesses an extraordinary verve. Witness this description of a bereaved husband: “He sought Lucy thru all struggles of sleep, mewing and crying like a lost child, but she was not. He was really searching for a lost self and crying like the old witch with her shed skin shrunken by red pepper and salt, ‘Ole skin, doncher know me?’ But the skin was never to fit her again.” Or note this description of a wife’s disillusionment: “So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. . . . She wasn’t petal-open anymore with him.”
Besides enjoying Hurston’s style, I find her choice and treatment of subject matter very interesting. While she portrayed her parents’ marriage in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston depicted in Their Eyes Were Watching God the growth of a woman’s self-awareness and of her determination to realize fully her own dreams and destiny. An appendage of the first two men in her life, Janie Starks dares to break away from safety and to love passionately. Her daring leads to the gratification of self-fulfillment and to the knowledge of her own inner strength: “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 shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
Both
Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God dwell on African
American characters interacting almost entirely with one another—a notable
focus on African American society.
Hurston herself grew up in Eatonville, Florida, which in 1886 became the
first incorporated community run by black people for black people. Her father, a Baptist pastor, served three
terms as Eatonville’s Mayor, and she returned to Eatonville many times in her
adulthood. An anthropologist trained by
Franz Boas at Barnard College, Hurston sought out and preserved African
American and West Indian folklore. Her
anthropological knowledge enriched her novels.
Reading her overpowering work is like touching a live wire.
The two Library of America volumes devoted to Hurston include four novels, short stories, anthropological studies, her autobiography, and nonfiction.
