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Chapter 5 Zora Neale Hurston, the Power of Harlem, and the Promise of Florida Willa Cather and John Steinbeck were hardly the only authors to register environmental loss in the early twentieth century, but their canonically modulated methods of repressing environmental anxiety are largely representative. William Faulkner, for instance, was equally aware of widespread environmental destruction, and a range of scholars have recently shown that much of his work reflects a keen understanding of Mississippi’s environmental history. While Cather and Steinbeck tended to grant the natural world intrinsic or ecological value, Faulkner found nature important as a place where boys could become men and where the threatened masculinities of grown men could be rejuvenated. When he and his fictional characters confronted nature’s ultimate end, however, they depended on the same metonyms of environmental health we have tracked from Emerson to Cather and Steinbeck. As Ike McCaslin does in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner silences any potential environmental lamentation he could have offered and insists that the immortal essence of his privileged wilderness, Mississippi’s “Big Bottom,” will always remain virgin and indomitable even when reduced by sawmills and expanding cotton operations to a final, pubic, and metonymic “¢-shaped section of earth between hills and River” (GDM 327).1 As Faulkner watched the deterioration of Mississippi’s natural world and began adopting ways to remain disconnected from the increasingly unavoidable problem, Zora Neale Hurston was becoming frustrated with the politics and patronage of Harlem and preparing to carve out a new liberatory, regenerative, and utopian blackspace in the Southern United States. Hurston had arrived in Harlem in 1925 and experienced a short period of incredible success—her short stories were published in Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity and won prizes in the magazine’s literary contest , she founded and co-edited Fire!! with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, and she fashioned herself, for a short while, into the central spectacle of the Harlem Renaissance.2 As time passed, though, she found 103 104 Environmental Evasion herself caught between a manipulative white community that supported her financially and a group of powerful African American leaders that conspired to control her. Hurston’s ultimate response to this situation— which has been criticized since the early twentieth century as an escape into nostalgia and an abandonment of liberatory racial politics—was to create an alternate zone of black autonomy in the South, the very region that many African Americans had fled during the Great Migration. For Hurston, the South—and Florida in particular—was a space that could accommodate a vibrant black community outside of Harlem’s system of patronage and control. Although she had lived through some of the South’s most frightening racial violence, Hurston still believed the place to be a haven for African Americans in general and African American artists in particular, and her writings work to reclaim the hostile space for the use of African Americans. The white tradition of environmental thinking, which I have discussed throughout this book, is preoccupied with environmental purity, the perpetual availability of environmental resources, and fears of environmental destruction; it treats nature as a pure Other—as something that should be revered and protected but is still Other. But Hurston’s approach is fundamentally different. Instead of focusing on the issues of purity, availability, and durability, she offers a vision of enmeshment within an immanently physical natural world that is imbued with racial and cultural significance. Hurston, Harlem, and Power When Hurston arrived in Harlem in 1925, she found “a place where being black was not a burden but an act of beauty, not a liability but a state of grace” that “fully restored” the sense of community and the sense of “me-ness that Zora had felt so profoundly as a child in Eatonville” (Boyd 94). For all the joy that Hurston found in Harlem, however, the place came with its own set of peculiar difficulties. It was a place with high rents and low salaries where success as an artist was not necessarily enough to avoid being entangled in an economy of patronage and power. For Hurston, success and patronage were inextricably bound together from the beginning of her experience in Harlem. When she won a host of awards in the Opportunity’s literary contest shortly after coming to New York (she won more awards than anyone including second place awards in fiction and drama and two honorable mention awards in the same categories), the awards ceremony she attended...

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