Crossing the Creek: The Literary Friendship of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

2. “Thinking in heirogliphics”: Mastering the Craft of Writing

Mastering the Craft of Writing Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote books that celebrated small central Florida villages that were about eighty miles apart. Eatonville is located in Orlando, next door to the mainly upscale, small towns of Maitland and Winter Park, and is noted for being the first incorporated all-black community, founded in 1887. Cross Creek, further north, near the Ocala National Forest, in Rawlings’s day was a small collection of Cracker and black families struggling to make ends meet. Rawlings also ranges a little further afield in her stories, describing the nearby scrub country around Salt Springs and its Cracker inhabitants. Both authors’ works are strongly associated with these rural communities; yet neither woman was born into the communities about which she writes. Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on 15 January 1891; Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., on 8 August 1896. They chose to write about their adopted communities —rather than their birthplaces—for remarkably similar reasons. On the one hand, it is easy to enumerate all the obvious differences between the two women, that is, race, social standing, economic means, domes2 “Thinking in heirogliphics” Mastering the Craft of Writing 43 tic arrangements, and so forth; on the other hand, it is fascinating how they converge. Hurston explains what she has in common with Rawlings in a 16 May 1943 letter. After mentioning that both of them “look at plants and animals and people” in the same way, Hurston praises Rawlings: “You catch the thing as it is. You note the ‘picture-talk’ that is something of a linguistic heirogliphics [sic]. I am tickled to death with you, Sugar. . . . You were thinking in heirogliphics your ownself” (Hurston: A Life in Letters 486). Hurston’s use of the term “heirogliphics” is not surprising, because she used it earlier in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” in order to define the way the “Negro . . . add[s] action” to a word “to make it do.” She gives as an example using the word “chop-axe”: “the speaker has in his mind the picture of the object in use. Action. Everything illustrated. So we can say the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics” (830–31). As a trained anthropologist, Hurston was used to thinking of hidden meanings to words behind cultural practices. In this case, she is referring not only to Rawlings’s ability to capture the exact cadences of Cracker speech but also to her ability to present the reader with deeper symbolic meanings. Hurston, too, was also a genius at accurately recording the language of metaphors and similes—conveying deeper meanings—that were commonly used in her community. Hurston’s Works through Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston became a writer once she reconnected with the African American communities of central Florida in early 1928 and learned how to make her characters “move in reality.” She did not have a high-class editor at a major publishing house to give her constant support and advice, as Rawlings had in Maxwell Perkins for sixteen years. Instead, Hurston was forced to rely on her wits and personal charm in order to survive. As early as 17 October 1925, she confides to one of her white patrons, Annie Nathan Meyer, a novelist and founder of Barnard College, how difficult her struggle has been: “I have been my sole support since I was 13 years old. You will appreciate the tremendous struggle necessary for me to merely live to say nothing of educating myself. . . . I’ve taken some Crossing the Creek 44 tremendous losses and survived terrific shocks. . . . being pounded so often on the anvil of life I am growing less resilient. physical [sic] suffering unnerves me now” (Hurston: A Life in Letters 67). Hurston also had to endure racial prejudice, though she seemingly made light of it. When she writes to Meyer that her white classmates are urging her to attend the junior prom at the Ritz-Carlton and plan on exchanging dances with her if she brings “a man as light” as herself (Hurston: A Life in Letters 71), Meyer discourages her on the “grounds that it would be racially inappropriate to do so,” according to Carla Kaplan (71 n. 3). Hurston dons her mask and responds with a lighthearted pun: “No doubt you are right about the Prom. But even if things were different, I could not...