Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

Introduction: Zora Neale Hurston, Seven Weeks in Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

3 Introduction Zora Neale Hurston, Seven Weeks in Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God La Vinia Delois Jennings Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)—the story of Janie Mae Crawford , an African American woman who finds an independent voice and a conscious selfhood during her quest for a fulfilling love—quickly became for a latter-twentieth-century readership, which was largely female and in the midst of a burgeoning women’s movement, Zora Neale Hurston’s most celebrated work. A graduate of Barnard College and a student of the cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and more than fifty shorter works “between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean war, when she was the dominant black woman writer in the United States”(Gates,“Zora Neale Hurston,”289–90). In the Fort Pierce, Florida, county welfare home where she died in obscurity on January 28, 1960, the manuscript of yet another book was among her personal effects.1 Literary critic Cyrena N. Pondrom states that before Hurston’s death Their Eyes Were Watching God “was often skirted or misjudged by the black male critics who provided the preponderance of comment on black literature” (“Role of Myth,” 181). Alain Locke and Richard Wright, luminaries of and beyond the Harlem Renaissance, panned the novel, whose plot spanned the turn of the twentieth century, because it neither met the black aesthetic prescriptive of racial uplift nor centered its primary action on protesting interracial inequality. After Hurston’s death the novel drew readers who by and large hailed it as a “bold feminist” work,“the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition.” Critics of the revived work proclaimed Janie Mae Crawford the premier African 4 La Vinia Delois Jennings American feminist subject and asserted that the novel, set in central and south Florida, contained “many of the themes that inspirit Hurston’s oeuvre as a whole” (Gates, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 291). Alice Walker’s 1975 Ms. magazine essay recounting her search for Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave in a Fort Pierce cemetery accelerated the popular revival of Hurston’s fiction and folklore that was already in progress. Adele S. Newson, who annotated most of the writings about the Florida writer published between 1931 and 1986, states that Hurston ’s literary revival “began, ironically, with a sympathetic obituary,” published nine months after her death. Its writer, folklorist Alan Lomax,2 “described Hurston as being ‘far ahead of her time.’” She points out that the following year, novelist Theodore Pratt, in the Florida Historical Quarterly, “lamented the fact that Hurston ‘suffered literary obscurity’ while pleading for the recognition that she deserved” (Newson, xxvii). The first of Hurston’s works to be recalled from obscurity was Their Eyes Were Watching God. Fawcett Publications issued a reprint in 1965 that, in a brief comment it contained on the writer’s life, cited the work as her “‘more important novel.’ . . . Critics who later reevaluated Hurston’s works,” states Newson, “presumably had in their undergraduate work this reprint to whet their appetites . . . [and] began to consider Hurston in a new light” (xxvii–xxviii). Between Fawcett’s reprinting of Their Eyes and Walker’s publication of “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” Richard Barksdale, Keneth Kinnamon , James O. Young, June Jordan, and Roger Rosenblatt, among others, praised the feminist and folk elements in the novel. Mary Helen Washington, in her introduction to Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women, posited that Hurston’s story of Janie “is probably the most beautiful love story of a black man and woman in literature ” (xi). After 1975, Robert Hemenway’s definitive Zora Neale Hurston : A Biography (1977), which had taken him eight years to research and write; a second reprinting of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1978) by the University of Illinois Press containing an introduction by Sherley Anne Williams; and Alice Walker’s editing of the Hurston reader, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (1979), made information about Hurston’s life and work readily available for her rapidly increasing popular and academic readership. While criticism that emerged during the first two decades of its revival praises Their Eyes’s strong feminist stance, its serious portrayal of black love, and its realistic treatment of southern, rural, black folk culture, a 1979 essay by Ellease Southerland in Sturdy Black Bridges: [3.144.93.73...