Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel

Chapter 5. Talk about the South: Unspeakable Things Unspoken in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee

5 / Talk about the South: Unspeakable Things Unspoken in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee In 1975, Alice Walker launched one of the greatest revivals in modern American literary history with her Ms. magazine essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” The extraordinary range of Hurston’s achievements, which include groundbreaking novels, autobiography, short fiction, drama, political and cultural essays, reportage, folklore, and ethnography , has garnered her an audience, both critical and popular, that continues to grow unabated. Hurston’s status as the great literary foremother of contemporary African American women writers stems principally from her work in the 1920s and 1930s, and especially her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Their Eyes’ protofeminist sensibility, its sensitive exploration of the intricacies of working-class, southern black community, and its brilliant demonstration of the expressive potential of black vernacular speech in novelistic discourse have made it a signal text in the creation of an African American literary tradition, as well as required reading in countless American studies, women’s studies, and American literature courses.1 Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Hurston’s fourth and last published novel, has received a far chillier response, and was until recently often condemned or dismissed out of hand. Although it initially garnered favorable reviews, particularly from the white press, SeraphhastendedtobaffleanddisturbevenHurston’smostdevotedreaders . The critic Mary Helen Washington, for example, dismisses Seraph as “an awkward and contrived novel, as vacuous as a soap opera” (Invented Lives 21), and Bernard Bell expels it from his influential study on the African American novel because “[it] is neither comic, nor folkloristic, talk about the south / 159 nor about blacks” (128). Seraph’s most damning critique, however, comes from Hurston’s first great champion, Alice Walker. She describes Hurston ’s later work as “reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid” and adds that this is “especially true of Seraph on the Suwanee, which is not even about black people, which is no crime, but is about white people for whom it is impossible to care, which is” (xvi). The critic Carla Kaplan admits that “it is hard to understand why Hurston would have written it”: Why, for example, would she go from depicting the black community she knew so well, portrayed so lovingly, and criticized so handily to a story about Southern crackers and their difficult rise to financial success? Why would she go from using rape as a central metaphor for exploitation in Their Eyes to a story in which rape is merely misunderstanding: a “pain remorseless sweet” and a “memory inexpressibly sweet”? Why does she paint a positive and comic image of the very “pet negro system”—“every Southern white man has his pet Negro”—which she decried elsewhere as a “residue of feudalism”? (443) These difficult questions deserve our attention, I believe, because they speak to issues that were very much on Hurston’s mind late in her career, and, more importantly, their answers yield valuable insights on her notoriously complex attitudes toward such issues as southern race relations, gender, and literary protest. In recent years, several scholars have taken up this enigmatic work, and the emerging consensus is that Hurston is enacting an elaborate joke on the text’s literary subjects—poor white southerners—and on her readers, especially around issues of race and gender.2 After all, the final revelation of the protagonist, Arvay Henson, is that “her job was mothering. What more could any woman want and need?” (Seraph 351). Given Hurston’s lifetime of stalwart independence, how could she not be joking? But this critical focus on the joke as a narrative theme and rhetorical strategy tends to produce what I term a hermeneutics of disavowal—a mode of inquiry that downplays the frequently disturbing manifest content of Seraph as a purely ironic and subversive performance or “mask” that is then separated from the “true” meaning and investments of the text, which presumably are to be found somewhere sub rosa. Attention to masking, rhetorical indirection, and what Henry Louis Gates refers to as “double-voiced discourse”3 are of course central to understanding Hurston’s work, but this approach can also have the unfortunate effect of implying that Hurston’s appropriation of 160 / talk about the south whiteness in Seraph is wholly parodic and therefore bears little relation to her personal and political beliefs. Close attention to the way race operates in the novel’s affective economy belies the tidiness...