Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays

The Sermon in the Valley (1931; with Rowena Woodham Jelliffe)

the sermon in the valley (1931) Oh, I love my religious material. Some of it is priceless. Know what I am attempting? To set an entire Bapt. service word for word and note for note. —zora neale hurston to langston hughes, april 20, 1929 The figure of the folk preacher stands tall in Hurston’s work. Her own father was an itinerant Baptist minister, and growing up in Eatonville, as we see in De Turkey and De Law, she was surrounded by churchgoers of both the Baptist and Methodist faiths. The language of the folk sermon, exhortatory, eloquent, and colloquial by turns, clearly captivated Hurston, and she not only included many preachers as characters in her work (most notably, John Pearson, based on her father, the central character in Jonah’s Gourd Vine), but incorporated the rhythms and rhetorical patterns of folk preaching throughout her writing. Deborah Plant writes that for Hurston and other African Americans, the folk preacher spoke in a “liberatory voice,” and “through the antiphonal dynamics of the folk sermon, preacher and congregation merged in a ritual of spiritual renewal and empowerment. . . transforming silenced objects into speaking subjects” (93). The structure of the sermon, as we see in this play, is as follows: the preacher announces the text, the biblical passage on which the sermon is to be based, provides a brief gloss on the passage, and then launches into the sermon itself. The two prefatory segments are rendered in prose; the sermon itself, in verse. Hurston’s decision to render the sermon in free verse indicates her indebtedness to James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), which contains Johnson’s best-known poem, “The Creation,” based on the Genesis creation story.1 In his preface to the volume, Johnson wrote, These poems would be better intoned than read. . . . The intoning practiced by the old-time preacher is a thing next to impossible to describe; it must be heard, and it is extremely difficult to imitate even when heard. . . . The tempos of the preacher I have endeavored to indicate by the line arrangement of the poems. . . . There is a decided syncopation of speech—the crowding in of many syllables or the lengthening out of a few to fill one metrical foot, the sensing of which must be left to the reader’s ear. The text included here is based on a transcription made by Hurston of a sermon given by the Reverend C. C. Lovelace to his congregation in Eau Gallie, Florida, on May 2, 1929. It was performed by Cleveland’s Gilpin Players as a Theatre of Nations entry on March 29, 1931, and was later revived on December 12, 1934, and on December 7, 1949, where it played in repertory for a month. While Hurston’s transcription makes up the vast majority of the work, it contains significant additions and revisions made by Rowena Jelliffe, the (white) co-founder, with husband Russell Jelliffe, of the Karamu settlement house in Cleveland, which hosted the Gilpin Players. 191 070 sermon (191-200) 4/9/08 11:07 AM Page 191 Although the theater at Karamu House played to white audiences, it was devoted to encouraging and producing plays by black playwrights, including Langston Hughes and Willis Richardson. And Jelliffe had played an editorial role with some of these productions , helping with revisions of Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps’s St. Louis Woman and Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti. A comparison between The Sermon in the Valley, Hurston’s transcription (published as “The Sermon” in Nancy Cunard’s 1934 Negro anthology ), and Jonah’s Gourd Vine indicates that Jelliffe created the characters of Brother Ezra and Caroline, as well as reframing the sermon itself into one that emphasizes redemption rather than betrayal. Whereas Sister Caroline, in Sermon in the Valley, declares that Brother Ezra’s sermon will “bring us strength and easement,” John Pearson, in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, stresses instead that his sermon will show that “it is not your enemies that harm you all the time. Watch that close friend.” The redirection of the sermon toward redemption is consistent with the integrationist aims of Karamu House. The script on which our edition is based was located at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio. 192 • the sermon in the valley 070 sermon (191-200) 4/9/08 11:07 AM Page 192 The Sermon in...