Zora Neale Hurston: And A History Of Southern Life

A Transient World of Labor

5 A Transient World of Labor We stole words from the grudging lips of the Lords of the Land, who did not want us to know too many of them or their meaning. And we charged this meager horde of stolen sounds with all the emotions and longings we had; we proceeded to build our language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls, by rolling our eyes, by flourishing our hands, by assigning to common, simple words new meanings, meanings which enabled us to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Land without their being aware! Our secret language extended our understanding of what slavery meant and gave us the freedom to speak to our brothers in captivity ; we polished our new words, caressed them, gave them new shape and color, a new order and tempo, until, though they were the words of the Lords of the Land, they became our words, our language. —Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices, 40 WHEN ZORA NEALE HURSTON arrived in Polk County, Florida, in 1928 to collect folklore in the turpentine and sawmill camps, the population was more than 90 percent black and composed of transient labor from all over the South. The phosphate mining camps were also heavily black. Records of the Everglades Cypress Company, which managed the turpentine and sawmill camps, are not available. The Peonage Files of the U.S. Department of Justice offer only partial clues. Other records are sketchy and provide only fleeting references to the life of the workers or labor 128 tensions in Polk County. For the rest of the state, records are also sparse. From debt peonage cases across the South, including Florida, however, we know that life was extremely violent.1 One way to reconstruct the history of people in this area is through oral history, Hurston’s method in her 1928 ethnographic study of Polk County, contained in Mules and Men and in the play she wrote in 1944, Polk County. To undertake an oral history project today is to travel down the road to the abandoned lands of the sawmill side of the camp.2 I made such a journey in 1999 to visit former residents of the camp named Harry and Mary Grant. Harry Grant dramatized for me the extreme violence of the place, which Hurston took for granted. Grant took me and my companion on a tour of a former camp in Loughman, Florida , owned by the Everglades Cypress Company. As we traveled down the road, we came to a spot with almost no vegetation in an otherwise lush and green locale. There was a large mound of chalk-white earth that was unlike any dirt I had seen before. Although the surrounding area has returned to forest, nothing grew in this barren clearing. Grant told us that many people believe that bodies are buried there. I ask the reader to keep the mound in mind. In 1928 the bodies were recently dead and the memories of their dying fresh, and undoubtedly commented on privately. Today the mound sits as a silent witness to the violence of the former Loughman camp, a place Hurston calls Lofton in Polk County. The passage from Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices quoted above highlights the irony of the conflict between Wright and Hurston discussed in Chapter 2. Wright’s passage, notes Farah Griffin, “marks one of the rare instances where Wright concedes that black Southerners were capable of creating culture .”3 The passage also registers the “dissident political culture” embodied in the language of rural workers and migrants in the South in the 1920s and 1930s. That language did indeed allow them “to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Land without their being aware.” These are the hidden transcripts that Robin D. G. Kelley has argued must be uncovered by A Transient World of Labor 129 historians, transcripts that lie “beneath the veil of consent” and constitute a “hidden history of unorganized everyday conflict waged by African-American working people.”4 A further irony of the conflict between Wright and Hurston is that it fell to her and not to him to document not only the language of rural dwellers but also the “consciousness of existence” of these rural people. When Hurston left Eatonville after months of collecting folklore , she...