Zora Neale Hurston: And A History Of Southern Life

Epilogue

Epilogue THE TESTIMONIES recorded in Zora Neale Hurston’s writing take us beyond traditional sources and help us understand a particular place and time. Traditional sources allow us to know the external world that I have described in Chapter 3; Hurston’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, takes us beyond that world to the inner lives of the human beings that inhabited it. It has often been said that history repeats itself. When Hurston’s play Mule Bone was performed on Broadway in 1991, it met with the hostility of an audience unprepared for the “Negro farthest down.” Viewers of Mule Bone disliked its brand of humor, felt uneasy about the predicaments its characters faced, and were embarrassed by the earthy language in which these characters spoke. They might as well have been George Schuyler’s contemporaries , echoing Schuyler’s prescriptions for the proper sentiments , appearance, and language through which the “best-footforward Negroes” could present their most respectable selves. It is surprising, in a way, how little things have changed. But it is the central premise of every historian’s work that things do change, in spite of seeming likenesses between past and present. In Zora Neale Hurston’s day, the “Negro farthest down” was not considered a fit subject for literature. What has changed today is that this view, while it survives in some quarters, as the Mule Bone audience shows, is no longer at the core of a life-and-death political struggle against disenfranchisement, segregation, and violence. 183 Today black people in America enjoy a freedom that Hurston’s contemporaries did not—the freedom to engage with her characters without embarrassment. Subjects once considered unsuitable for literature were once also thought unsuitable for historical inquiry—not because racism continued to brand them as subhuman but because prevailing historical practices mistrusted the kind of sources that bring such subjects into view. This study has tested the ability of Zora Neale Hurston’s work to take historical understanding beyond the limits of conventionally accepted source material. One of the most stubborn difficulties in all historical inquiry is that of placing our own assumptions and biases to the side in order to see historical subjects in their own terms. The risk of anachronism is always present, despite our best efforts to ward it off. It is difficult for even the best of historians to avoid at all times the pitfall of viewing the past as prologue, of interpreting the past in light of the present. I have tried to avoid this pitfall by allowing Zora Neale Hurston and her characters to speak for themselves, in the hope that we can thereby catch a glimpse, at least, of what was to them the present. 184 Epilogue ...