"No Tomorrow in the Man": Uncovering the Great Depression in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill: they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the negro live: between laughter and tears.

Richard Wright on Their Eyes Were Watching God

Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.

Ishmael Reed

If he has no memory of yesterday, nor no concept of tomorrow, then he is My People. There is no tomorrow in the man. He mentions the word plentiful and often. But there is no real belief in a day that is not here and present.

Zora Neale Hurston

If history has disabled human potential, then assertion . . . must come outside of history

Karla F. C. Holloway

The portrayal of working-class black Americans in Their Eyes Were Watching God has provided the impetus for a striking preponderance of its criticism and accounted for its most significant critical moments—from Henry Louis Gates' designation of the speakerly text to black feminist mappings of the blues vs. club women's divide in early twentieth-century African American culture.¹ However, despite the diversity that has characterized approaches to this novel from its publication to the present,² there has been little disagreement about describing Hurston's "folk" as existing somehow outside of history. Indeed, much critical evaluation of the novel has rested on decisions about how and/or whether to value this seemingly ahistorical portrayal, which has been called stereotypical, minstrel, idealized, utopian, pastoral, and romantic by a list of writers that reads like a who's who of twentieth-century black literary criticism: from Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, and Richard Wright in the first half of the century, to Robert Stepto, Hortense Spillers, and Hazel Carby in the last.³

Interestingly, and in stark contrast to criticism hinging on the political value (or lack thereof) of the vernacular poetic articulated by Hurston's "folk," a survey of the recent literary histories of the Depression era turns up little more than a footnote here and a paragraph there on this prominent novel written in the mid-1930s.⁴ Since the early 1980s, significant studies of proletarian fiction, the culture of the Popular Front, working-class women's writing, and the works of "New Red Negro" writers have revealed the richness of the literary landscape during the Depression—simultaneously expanding the canon of American Modernism and, along with it, our understandings of the relation between political engagement and literary form. Despite this body of work, however, Their Eyes Were Watching God is rarely examined by those interested in the relation between literature and the class politics of the 1930s.⁵ No critic yet has discussed the degree to which Hurston's apparently "timeless" or "mythological" story of Southern black "folk" is embedded in the cultural politics of the Depression.

In order to uncover this aspect of the novel, I begin with Janet Galligani Casey, who points out that the significant revisionary literary histories of the Depression era have "generally been undertaken within the context of specialized discussions of left-wing cultural politics." This specialization, Casey argues, is limiting. Instead she advocates "deliberately leav[ing] open the notion of what can or should constitute 'Left.'" In so doing, she argues, literary criticism can begin to "demonstrate the many (contradictory) strands of left-liberal reformism in the period" and "forc[e] further reconsideration of not only the Left, but also a host of categories by which critics and historians attempt to regularize a complexly variegated terrain of political-aesthetic expression" (xiii). Hurston's often stated antipathy to "protest writing," then, should not preclude a consideration of her work in this context. In what follows, I argue that Hurston's engagement with the hardships of the Depression has been, thus far, invisible because criticism of the novel has sought to uncover it through a primarily Marxist hermeneutic. Viewing the novel instead through the distinctive historicity of the African American literary tradition illuminates both a historically sound portrayal of exploitative labor...