Here’s a hand-painted Christmas card. You can see the top and the drawing at the bottom. There is her yule log, hand painted. Sometimes the letters contain little snippets that are just golden. I don’t know if you can see the last line of this letter—”My idea of hell is that I would, all through eternity, be typing a book.”
It’s a letter to a friend named Katherine Tracy L’Engle.
She wrote to her collaborators to contest views she opposed, to work out ideas, to appeal for help in funding, to report on her activities, to stay connected to the various places that were important to her and which inspired her work.
Wherever she was, there was a community with which she needed to stay in touch. Her Florida community, if she was here in New York. Her New York community, if she was down in Florida—and so on.
Letters are well on their way to being a lost art. Few are more artful or more worth preserving than Hurston’s. When I first began to work on the book, I had hoped there were about 200 or so letters. And what I found were well over 600.
It’s amazing, given how may letters were out there, that it took as long as it did to get her letters out to the public—although many were indeed buried, unidentified, unknown to the archivists who had them.
But what’s even more amazing to me, is that this book is the first of its kind, which is to say—we have no other volumes of an African American woman artist’s or writer’s letters. Now, that’s particularly extraordinary, if you think of the larger context of the African American tradition.
We are talking, after all, about a literary tradition especially marked by coded, masked, double-voiced discourses designed to contend with the problem of double or triple or quadruple and divided audiences.
Consider for example, Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s famous poem, “We Wear the Mask:”
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile. . .
The problem of restricted audience expectations and the strategy of meeting them—or pretending to meet them—resonates throughout the African American traditions. In 1928, when Hurston was just fully launching her career, James Weldon Johnson, or, as she called him, Lord Jim, described the dilemma:
as a special problem which the plain American author knows nothing about. The moment a Negro writer takes up his pen or sits down to his typewriter, he is immediately called upon to solve, consciously or unconsciously, the problem of the double audience. To whom shall he address himself? To his own black group? Or to white America? It may be asked why he doesn’t just go ahead and write, and not bother himself about audiences. That is easier said than done.
Now, if this was true, as Johnson so wonderfully put it, for the men, consider how even more complicatedly it was true for the women. As Farah Jasmine Griffin has put it—”silences, loopholes, interstices, allegory, dissemblance, politics of respectability—these are but a few of the terms that black women scholars use to help make sense of the silence that surrounds black women’s lives and experiences.”
Many have kept the most personal aspects of their lives—as well as the full range of their thoughts—secret. Not surprisingly, then, scholars have avidly sought the more private, unedited writing of African American women writers to locate what Skip Gates in his recent edition of Hannah Crafts: A Bond Woman’s Narrative calls “an unadultered or authentic voice.”
Letters, you would expect, would be hunted most avidly of all. But letters, while they reveal so much, do not in fact give us an unadultered and necessarily authentic voice. Or rather, they don’t give it to us in a simple and straightforward way.
Letters do not always simply lift the veil, as DuBois and others put it. Which is to say that while we learn more about Hurston from her letters, than we do in any other way, there is so much that the letters cannot possibly tell us.
