Taking the Axe to Babylon: Zora Neale Hurston’s “Lost” Caroline Stories, Gender, Place, and Power

JILL C. JONES Rollins College Taking the Axe to Babylon: Zora Neale Hurston’s “Lost” Caroline Stories, Gender, Place, and Power IN 1973, ALICE WALKER SET OUT TO DISCOVER AND MARK THE GRAVE OF the African American writer and anthropologist who had inspired her, Zora Neale Hurston. In 1975, she published an essay called “Looking for Zora,” concerned that without such attention, Hurston “would slip back intoobscurity”(“AliceWalker”).IntheprocessofresurrectingHurston’s works and reputation, Walker found Hurston’s approximate burial place and bought a marker. By inscribing the following words on the marker (and writing them again in her essay), Walker began the process of inscribing them in the public imagination: Zora Neale Hurston “A Genius of the South” 1901–1960 Novelist Folklorist Anthropologist Since this famous rescue from near obscurity, a small number of Hurston texts have become canonical, particularly the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which is frequently taught in high schools and colleges. As sometimes the only African American-authored text on a syllabus, the novel often bears the weight of its genre and, perhaps as a result, frequently falls victim to stereotypes of representation and interpretation. On one hand, for example, many who teach the text want to portray Hurston as a forthright race champion and feminist. In this context, Their Eyes Were Watching God is described as a “beloved classic,” and the plot is codified as one woman’s coming to selfhood, or gaining a voice. Hurston’s messier political views and works are either avoided or made to fit into this larger thesis. It’s not surprising, therefore, that photographs of a happy, well-dressed Hurston have become iconic while pictures of a tougher, smoking, exhausted Zora are much less widely published. Indeed, we appear to prefer this mythologized version of Hurston so much that a picture of a young, attractive, smiling African 482 Jill C. Jones American woman from the same time period has been repeatedly mislabeled and deployed as Zora Neale Hurston.1 On the other hand, a quite different school of thought that has prevailed from her first days as a Harlem Renaissance writer paints Hurston as a “peddler of nostalgia for the Jim Crow South, where happy darkies putatively sang and danced on the farm” (Delbanco 105). In 1935, Sterling Brown critiqued what he saw as Hurston’s lack of righteous anger; in 1937, Richard Wright criticized Hurston for pandering to white tastes, and in 1999, Hazel Carby acerbically asked if Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a solidly canonical black novel because “it acts as a mode of assurance that, really, the black folk are happy and healthy?” (90). However, critics of Hurston’s “minstrelry” (like those who believe Hurston a feminist), rarely examine her essay on “The ‘Pet Negro’ System,” her critique of Jim Crow, or the raw scenes of dumping black bodies at the end of Their Eyes were Watching God. Either of these points of view—Hurston as an accommodationist who lacks a radical racial agenda or Hurston as a kind of glorified and straightforward black feminist—oversimplifies Hurston and her work.2 One doesn’t need to dig too far to discover that Hurston was a complicated writer who lived in complicated times. The recent republication of several ofHurston’slesser-knownshortstories confirms the complexity of her work and worldview as well as its resistance to easy categorization. It also opens up the opportunity to craft a more nuancednarrativeofHurston’slifeandliterarylegacy.Specifically,these newly reprinted stories, when added to those already in print and circulation, give us some new information about Hurston, while reinforcing her complicated stance towards the Harlem Renaissance. Two of the newly rediscovered tales tell the story of Caroline, adding to two already-known versions and giving us a total of four Caroline stories. Taken as a group, these four stories, and the revisions and recrafting of the Caroline figure at their center, help us to see Hurston 1 Although this young woman was found not to be Hurston, she still appears regularly on Hurston websites, showing up in the first five images of a Google images search for Hurston, and on a web page titled “Photos Of Zora Neale Hurston Show...