My wife and I loved Zora Neale Hurston's books so much that our daughter's middle name is Zora. We are just white middle-class teachers who are keenly aware of the struggles and injustices that have forever dogged, and may I sadly say continue to dog, our fellow African-American citizens.
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Zora Hurston's long-unpublished work, "Barracoon: The Story of the last 'Black Cargo'," about the long life of Cudjo Lewis, the last man captured in Africa, shipped across the Atlantic and sold into slavery. Based on her lengthy interviews with Lewis in Alabama, it was written in 1931 but not published until 2018. It tells a horrifying, inspiring, complex and vivid story of a remarkable man retaining his human dignity in the face of terrible circumstances. It also reveals some of the compelling personality that Hurston herself brought to the task. More than an interview, it is a masterful collaboration in storytelling by Lewis and Hurston together.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/books/zora-neale-hurston-new-book.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
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Although I Haven't read the book, I'm puzzled that the significant relationship between Zora, and Fannie Hurst is not mentioned in the review; citing instead the one with Mason. Hurst who was probably more of a financial patron than Mason--she paid Huston's way into Barnard, funded her legal bills, and lived with her from about 1925-1930 (?) and with Carl VanVetchen, Fannie's close friend. Fannie was a pivotal and influential woman in Zora's life. And their relationship seems to mirror the relationship with Hughes. Without Zora, there wouldn't have been an Imitation of Life and Hughes answering parody Limitation of Life. Bibographers continue to puzzle over the intimacy and the intensity of the relationship, parsing the meaning of the "me you" reference in one of Zora's letters to Hurst. Was Hughes jealous of Hurst's hold in Huston? Were they both viving for her attention and to be an influential and guiding force? At any rate, I don't believe a book can be complete without including Fannie and her collision with the Harlem Renaissance. Although absent from the review, I hope it's in the book.
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Wasn’t Langston Hughes gay?
This review does not deal with that question
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This is the topic of my doctoral dissertation, published in 2011. I did not get a book deal. It angers me that White writers can and do get book deals to write about what experienced Black writers have already written (I received my PhD at age 44, already having a 20+ year career as a professional writer). Sounds like Zora all over again (and more than a little Faith Berry, too). Sigh.
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@Sharon D Johnson, PhD
"You've taken my blues and gone --" -- Langston Hughes
You bring up an important issue. I self-published my novel on this exact story in 2012. I tried to find publishers, but none would take a chance on an unknown black author with no connections to the literary world.
This, despite the fact that this story had never been adequately told, and the dynamics of Zora and Langston's friendship had never been explored in depth. The quality of my book was not wanting -- the Publisher's Weekly review of my novel attests to that -- the only reason publishers wouldn't bite was because I apparently wasn't the "right" person to be telling this story -- a young African-American author whose aesthetic comes directly from the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movements! And while I do commend Taylor for bringing this story to light -- after all, barring a famous black author like Henry Gates writing about the subject, a black author probably wouldn't have been in a position to get this kind of story published anyway -- I also am disheartened by the structural racism that still obviously exists in the publishing world. I wonder how many other talented black authors we're missing out on!
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@Sharon D Johnson, PhD -- I agree in general with what you say. But the implication that Zinzi Clemmons is a one of those "white writers" who get the book deals is incorrect. A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that hers is a more complex heritage.
But your point is well taken.
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@Sharon D Johnson, PhD that is so frustrating and upsetting. I hope your book dissertation gets published. I’ll read it!
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I don't think anyone should doubt the part sexism played in the career of Ms. Hurston. Black women, no matter what era they lived in in America, have always had to deal with the dual debilitation of racism and sexism. Case in point the lack of credit given to black women for all their hard work and behind the scene assistance to the Civil Rights Movement. Black women, even during slavery, have always been a mighty force against racism and oppression. I was born in 1950 and Langston Hughes was one of my earliest heroes and role models who helped spark my interest in writing. Though a voracious and indiscriminate reader I was rarely exposed to Ms. Hurston's works. I'm sure it was because women writers weren't considered on the same level as black male writers. In hindsight I wish I'd had more exposure to her life and writings when I was growing up. I now have a new found respect and interest in her life and career.
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@John Valentine;
Currently we are assumed to be gay; lesbian by some ignorant sense of anti-social, ignorant behaviors if wearing locks. The sexism that black women go through is pretty ugly stuff.
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Her solitary odyssey around the American South by car, as a lone black woman during the heyday of the Klan and the brutal reality of Jim Crow, to record the folkways, chants, and culture of the turpentine camps and cotton plantations was a existential American profile in courage.
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"Each was to the other an affirming example of what black people could be like: wild, crazy, creative, spontaneous, at ease with who they are, and funny."
Sounds like a template for what many, maybe most, of us would wish to be. White, black, yellow, brown, whatever gender identification, whatever.
And then there was the backstabbing, the betrayals. Okay, what' s my takeaway here? Is this a racial issue? A gender issue? All of the above? None of the above?
Interesting review, I'll read the book. None/all of the above is my best guess.
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I can’t quantity the love and connection I have for HARLEM , all , after I read; Jesse b “SEMPLE” by Langston Hughes . Gentrification is a normal course of things , you can’t be against it, still anytime walking on those Harlem’street nowadays and the number of times I read that book.I feel pain
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"A lot of attention has been given to their breakup … but very little to the pleasure Zora and Langston must have felt in each other’s company.”
I was fascinated when I saw Taylor's book would be coming out, because I had the same feeling when I published my novel, "Harlem Mosaics" which fictionalizes this very story:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4792-1302-3
I wrote to Taylor when I first heard about his book, and his publisher was kind enough to send me an advance copy. Taylor's book is wonderfully informative, and he does a great job of laying out all the facts that led up to this famous literary "break-up."
The Hughes/Hurston relationship is certainly one of the most compelling literary relationships in American modernism, and I applaud Taylor for bringing this story to a larger audience. Clemmons is right to bring up the sexism that Hurston faced -- Hurston, who was expected to be folklorist, writer par excellence and scientific anthropologist all at the same time, was still not treated with the same seriousness as Hughes, who was much younger and in some ways much more footloose during the years of their friendship.
Also, Hurston put her life, body and psychic wellbeing on the line for her work; if Hughes was interested in lifting people up, Hurston was interested in waking people up, and this leads to what might be considered her troubling politics later on. Ultimately the difference between Hughes and Hurston was that of the political and the spiritual.
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“Zora is My Name” depicts in first person mode the strained relationship between Charlotte Osgood Mason and Zora Neale Hurston. That Zora became penniless and died in obscurity, buried in an unmarked grave until Alice Walker found it while Langston Hughes’ ashes were interred in an auditorium named after him in the Center for Research of Black Culture in Harlem speaks volumes about the treatment of women writers in a man’s world.
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@Ichabod Aikem
Sexism is not the reason. The dialect in Zora’s novels made them unpopular with readers. Even her Renaissance peers criticized The “primitive” speech of the characters in these novels. Alice Walker turned all of this around of course and she had a very receptive audience of blacks who embraced their culture in the 1970s.
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"...a more probing critique of the sexism inherent in Hurston's reception during her lifetime."
Did black women experience sexism during Jim Crow? I don't think so. Sexism implies the men of the group have power and the ability to exercise control over their lives and the lives of the women in the group. Black men had no such power or control. Black people regardless of gender faced extreme racial terror at the time. As an example, the lynching of the Newberry Six in Alachua County (Florida) included two black women, one pregnant at the time of her death. This treatment of blacks extended to the north where men and women faced racial discrimination that could be as raw as Southern discrimination or more refined. Perhaps people should evaluate history as it truly was instead of creating a revisionist view that complies with MeToo narratives.
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@Lynn in DC
I am amazed to read the questioning possibility of women experiencing sexism during the era of Jim Crow Of course, it is referred to commonly as Jane Crow.
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@Lynn in DC These factors don't simply reduce to absolutes in the way your post implies, as if all that anyone needs to know about someone is a single status characteristic that identifies them as either oppressed or privileged. Multiple characteristics interact to construct the social status of individuals, and they're much more accurately viewed intersectionally, like like the subsets found in Venn diagrams.
Intersectionality is a useful concept that is currently trending in academia. Unfortunately, its most vocal proponents have apparently forgotten a few of the basics about it:
1) everybody has some. everybody has a lot of it, in fact.
2) intersectionality isn't to be reduced to factors of ethnicity and gender.
I note that recently, "fatness"/obesity has been added to the list of factors to be weighed for their social status impacts.
That's a step in the right direction, but it doesn't go nearly far enough- the full array of intersectional factors include parental generational wealth/social capital (i.e., social class); physical attributes that impact social status, such as body morphology (not just obesity), height, disease conditions, disabilities, etc.; physical geography- region/locality; and so on.
3) The accurate use of intersectionality doesn't just examine negative status coordinates, but also positive ones: it's possible to be black and have wealthy parents; it's possible to be white and inherit a medical condition with adverse social impacts. Etc.
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@Lynn in DC
The brilliant Pauli Murray coined the term and concept "Jane Crow" to characterize the sexism women, including black women, experienced. Her autobiography SONG IN A WEARY THROAT makes the sexism black women experienced during Jim Crow abundantly clear.
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It's so interesting to think about the way benefactors and producers have shaped the image we have of African Americans today. Although Charlotte Osgood Mason should receive credit for her championing of Hughes and Hurston, there are questions about how much her own notions of the "primitive" influenced their writing. White supremacy was taken for granted at that time. It's amazing that a novel like Passing, with its setting in the world of black middle class life, was even published. If we think about later works, Hansberry's family did experience great racism and resistance by whites when they moved into Hyde Park. Raisin in The Sun is a great play, but we know nothing of the world of Lorraine Hansberry's otherwise elegant Hyde Park life, the literary salon her parents had there. Mama Younger and family reside in a flat with a shared bathroom. Basically, who wants to read about blacks being anything like whites. It's more fun to create "the other." How many important movies made during Hollywood's Golden Age only show the black maid or shoeshine guy, Those images, those books, those plays, no matter how beautifully written, fueled white supremacy and perpetuated images that are still with us today.
--
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I am in the middle of teaching an AP Language (high school) class Their Eyes Were Watching God; earlier in the year we studied Hughes' Harlem poem. This article just got added to this Friday's lesson plan - thank you! I hope the students are as fascinated by it as I am.
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Zora was quite correct to question Brown vs. Topeka.
Written for Liberals by Liberals who knew very little
of the schools involved, it had led to an even more segregated
school system - even in hyper New York City and Washington, D.C.
It should have mandated the equal funding of all public schools in any and all States. The right of a student to go
to their nearest school or any school in the State if there
was an open desk.
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@John Brown I clicked on the Comments section to say the same thing about Hurston' intuitive response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education. And I will be reading the book to see if attention is paid to some of Hughes' efforts to limit Hurston's publishing opportunities among the NY publishing world, after their rift developed.
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@John Brown
Hurston's letter to the editor explaining her position on Brown v. Bd. of Ed. (and more) is here:
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-the-orlando-sentinel/
It strikes me that the prickly individualism of the letter is characteristic of someone who has had a falling out with her former community of friends.
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@John Brown
You are forgetting redlining and housing segregation that would prevent children of color to go to equal schools close to home.
At no time would I think that equal funds would be given to all schools.
Having worked for the federally mandated parental group overseeing school desegregation in the Boston Public Schools, I can tell you that schools in black communities were substandard in their facilities and supplies.
At least liberals tried to do something to solve the problem and didn't hide under a potato plant in Idaho.
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I'm struck by that sentence about the need for a more thorough critique of the inherent sexism facing Hurston. What books get into this angle in more detail? Is there a book about the sexism facing Black female authors during the Harlem Renaissance?
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@Julie
There could be one about Zora herself facing sexism throughout her life.
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Barbara Smith's "The Truth that Never Hurts" touches on this from the Black, queer feminist/critical race theory lens. An awesome read
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@Julie
Valerie Boyd's wonderful, detailed, super-fun-to-read biography of Hurston, "Wrapped in Rainbows," deals with some of this.
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