In her own writing, and throughout her career, Hurston is probably the canniest theorist we have, of the uses and the usefulness of performative, rhetorical gestures and of writing which seems to reveal, even as it conceals.
Her articulation of this and of the way it creates and responds to conditions both of double voice and double audience, is one of the most interesting that we have. This is a passage of hers, in which she described what she called “featherbed resistance”:
The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see, we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here.” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person, because knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a featherbed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes up. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries. The theory behind our tactics? The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle; he can read my writing, but he sure can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.
So, her letters are not simply the truth—but they are also often a performative act. One that constructs the ideal audience, sometimes against the person to whom the letter is actually written. Inviting us often to read between the lines, to read her words for hidden meanings, to read her meanings for the multiple layers from which they are so often constructed.
The letters are sometimes wishful. They are often ironic. And they are always revealing in complicated ways. Her first letter, the first letter I was able to locate, is a letter written to the dean at Morgan College:
Dear Dean
I want to know you and Mrs. Pickens ever so much, for many reasons. The first of which is, you are interesting to others. Second, you are interesting to me. Third, I want to reverse the usual process and know the writings by the writer. Greatest of all, 30 or 40 years hence, the world will look for someone that has really known you, to write your biography. To see you as a husband and father, and have you as a friend and teacher, should mean that one would get beyond the obvious, the superficial. I want to do that.
I would like to know to what extent a woman of Mrs. Pickens’ character and accomplishments would influence your life.” Impertinent, isn’t it? “I want to get all that Morgan has to give. I feel that I would have done something equal to the course at Morgan, if I had really known you and Mrs. Pickens.
It’s wonderful, isn’t it? This is not just audaciousness. This is calculated audaciousness. Because remember, she is here with no money, no background. She is having to do domestic work to get her way through. She is not the age of the other students, although she is not letting them know that.
And she does this audacious act of writing the dean a letter—something, to this day, many of us don’t do. This calculated audaciousness was a persona that she created, and which would serve her well, and which she would use often. And it comes up again and again in her letters.
It was, on the one hand, a way for her to mask some of the loneliness and isolation she often felt, as someone who was both older than other members of the Harlem Renaissance, and from the South, not from the North. Almost completely without financial resources. New to many of the ideas and styles of her Harlem peers. But even more importantly, someone who was fiercely dedicated to an aesthetic program which was not in line with that which was most popular in her day. She was, to make it even more complicated, trying to make her mark as one of the first black folklorists of black culture. And problematically, indebted to a series of white patrons, who she felt had to constantly be placated, sometimes in the most extreme way.
This is a piece of her legal contract with her white patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. And what you can see about this is, in fact, she is designated as Mason’s employee. This relationship obtained during the five, in many ways, most productive years of her own writing career, which meant that she didn’t literally own a word of her own writing—and had to placate Mason and appeal to her [to] get permission to use her own work.
She frequently signed letters to other white patrons, including Annie Nathan Meyer, as “your devoted pickeninny.” She would need all of her audaciousness to get her through those kinds of relationships.
