Zora Neale Hurston: And A History Of Southern Life

Patronage: Anatomy of a Predicament

6 Patronage Anatomy of a Predicament Why was it that the Renaissance of literature, which began among Negroes ten years ago, has never taken real and lasting root? It was because it was a transplanted and exotic thing. It was literature written for the benefit of white people and at the behest of white readers , and started out privately from the white point of view. It never had a real Negro constituency, and it did not grow out of the inmost heart and frank experiences of Negroes; on such an artificial basis no real literature can grow. —W.E.B. DuBois W.E.B. DUBOIS posed the classic question about the Harlem Renaissance, why it did not last. He also gave the classic answer, that the black American literary artist could not be supported by the black American public of the time. The audience for the art and its producers were both different from and socially distant from each other. African American artists thus depended on white patrons rather than on “a real Negro constituency.” Those patrons guided the art according to their own ideals, and they dropped it when their interests changed. White support for the work also distorted it, by cultivating it “privately from the white point of view.” DuBois summed up the predicament of the Harlem Renaissance: White patronage enabled African American artists to produce their work, but it guaranteed that they could 159 not produce that work authentically. Without patrons, there would have been no Harlem Renaissance; with patrons, there was a short-lived uptown Renaissance, brilliant and beautiful, but more or less on order from New York’s white downtown. One approach to studying the Harlem Renaissance is to examine the network of white people whose wealth and interest brought talented black people into print. But there is more to the story than that. If we want to know why African American literary art was so dependent on the largesse of a privileged group of northern white women and men, we must go beyond the elites, both black and white, who created the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston wrote about patronage with the same style and sharpness she brought to her writing on the life of ordinary black people of the South in the 1920s and 1930s. Her writing on the Harlem Renaissance and its white patrons is the exceptionally rich firsthand view of an articulate insider, and it situates the institution of patronage both within and beyond the Harlem Renaissance. BEFORE THE READER has finished the first chapter of Dust Tracks on a Road, he or she has been reminded that white patronage of black American writers and artists did not begin with the Harlem Renaissance, for Hurston reveals its unsettling kinship with a feature of slavery’s successor regimes in the South. Indeed, if what we mean by “patronage” is a settled relationship of unequal exchange between a patron and a client, or protégé, in which the very acts of giving and receiving mark the participants as superior and subordinate, then this kinship extends to slavery itself, and to another word that shares the same Latin root as “patronage”: paternalism. The ideology of mutual obligation and protection softened for the masters the contradictions of a system that brutally exploited slaves but that at the same time (the theory of the slave as an instrumentum vocale notwithstanding) could not reduce slaves to the same category as nonhuman property. It promoted the image of slaves as “acquiescent human beings” carrying out their obligations and receiving benefits.1 160 Chapter Six Inherent in this system was the notion of a protector, a kind of patron who cleared the way for deserving subordinates. Patronclient relationships were as southern as grits and blackstrap molasses, but also as American as apple pie. Hurston named the post-slavery variation on this theme “the pet Negro system.” In her autobiography Hurston presents herself as one of the handpicked few to whom the benefits of patronage flowed. As she tells the story, a white patron assisted with her very entrance into the world. When her mother went into labor, there were no adults around to help her, and she was too weak to help herself. The baby Zora “rushed out,” and her mother lay there, exhausted, unable to cut the umbilical cord. To the rescue came “a white man of many acres,” a friend of...