On January 13, 1938, Zora Neale Hurston finished the essay she was writing for "The Negro in Florida," a volume that was prepared for the Federal Writers Project. The essay, "Art and Such," would not be published for more than four decades, but it provides rare and useful insights into Hurston's understanding of African American literary and artistic traditions and of herself as an artist.[1] Hurston judges African Americans' contribution to the arts harshly: "creation is in its stumbling infancy." She is not concerned here with the legacy of folklore and music, which confirm the existence of "many undreamed-of geniuses."[2] She concentrates instead on those who would call themselves artists and who, only three generations removed from slavery, continue to wrestle with its legacy of enforced silence. Crippling too are the ideological constraints under which they labor. Compelled to write as race leaders, they are unable to think as individuals or to draw a character as anything other than "a tragic unit of the Race."[3] The tradition that gives pride of place to unimaginative "Race Men" silences artists, clearly including Hurston herself, who do not adhere to its dictates. Hurston does not name these men, but when she refers to the misnaming of the spirituals as "Sorrow Songs," she identifies W. E. B. DuBois as one of her targets.[4]

As she highlights the handful of black artists born in Florida, Hurston identifies Brooks Thompson, a woodcarver whose work is a thing "of wondrous beauty." Asked how he achieved it, Thompson states, "The feeling just come and I did it."[5] Hurston wants to create a free space for writers who can do in words what this unheralded artist has done in his medium. When describing the interior of the house Thompson decorated with his carvings, Hurston notes that "without ever having known anything about African Art, he has achieved something very close to African concepts." Not surprisingly, Hurston posits a racial art that owes more to culture than to politics. Although she offers no explanation for the transmission of this artistic tradition, she had previously identified African survivals in the folklore and music she documented in a decade of fieldwork. The storytellers and singers whose words and music she transcribed knew no more of African traditions than Thompson.

In "Art and Such," Hurston insists that the pressure on blacks to conform to political dictates stymied creativity. The paucity of artists is proof. She cites one painter, one sculptor (Augusta Savage, whose subjects are racial, but whose work is free of propaganda), one musician, and two writers—James Weldon Johnson and Hurston herself. Hurston's argument with the tradition she inherits is that it has no room for an artist like her. Her critical intervention anticipates pronouncements by black women artists such as Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker, who similarly faced the need to create, revise, and extend a tradition in which to locate their art. Writing in the third person about her own work, Hurston cites as defining qualities its "objective point of view" and its language, which give "verisimilitude to the narrative by stewing the subject in its own juice."[6] "Objective" is Hurston's way of expressing her commitment to artistic freedom. It marks her refusal to advance the race leader's political agenda and asserts that her refusal has made her a better writer. The theme recurs in Hurston's essays, as do the reflections on language that are at the core of her aesthetic. Indeed, I will argue that to understand that aesthetic, we need to pay much closer attention to Hurston's essays than we have done.[7]

One finds in Hurston's essays some of the same characteristics, both formal and thematic, for which we admire her fiction and ethnography. These essays, published in general-interest magazines such as American Mercury and The World Tomorrow as well as in Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology, and those submitted to The Florida Negro, reflect the wealth of metaphor and simile, the angularity, asymmetry, and originality that Hurston defined as "Characteristics of Negro Expression." No less than her fiction, they are "stewed in the juice" of their subjects. We observe in them the discursive juxtapositions that create in prose the jagged harmonies Hurston heard in the spirituals, as well as the polyphonic effect. Through the consideration of the essay, we come at the question of Hurston's literary legacy "slant," as Emily Dickinson might say, as we consider Hurston's conceptions of beauty and art—her definition of a black aesthetic, if you will—which lie at the core of that legacy.

A rich, if critically neglected, tradition of African American essays reaches back to the early nineteenth century. Many of the most influential works in African American literary tradition are books of essays; I think immediately of W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, and, of course, Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Many other writers, including Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Jessie Fauset, June Jordan, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright have written essays that are intrinsic to our sense of the tradition. As members of a group that has frequently defined itself politically as being "in crisis," black writers are attracted to the essay for its brevity and portablity. They respond to political exigency, whether during the antislavery struggle, the rise of segregation after Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, or contemporary attacks on affirmative action. Timeliness is a necessity, as is the desire to communicate with as large an audience as possible.

The dialogic form of the essay which strives to produce the effect of the spontaneous, the tentative, and the open-ended lends itself to exploring complex and contentious issues. The ability of black writers to invite black and white readers to understand their presuppositions and to share in their epiphanies enables them to affirm those who agree with them and sometimes persuade those who do not. The tentativeness of the form offers the assurance that both the reader and the writer might try again. Gerald Early, the editor of one of the few collections devoted to the African American essay, attributes the form's appeal to the fact that "the essay is the most exploitable mode of the confession and the polemic," the two variants of the essay that he asserts black writers have used the most.[8] The turn to autobiography is intimately tied to the genre's political purposes. To a significant degree, writers in the nineteenth century presented their lives as evidence for the cause. Increasingly, over the course of the twentieth century, authors risked sharing personal information that was not representative of the group; they wrote for the purpose of self-revelation as well as social progress. Hurston was one of the first black writers to employ the essay for this purpose. Moreover, since the late nineteenth century, with essays by Victoria Earle Mathews and Anna Julia Cooper, the essay has also been the vehicle for writers to reflect on their own artistic practice, the traditions out of which they write, and their relationship to their audience. Few have done this to greater effect than Hurston.

From the first essay she published, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," it was apparent that Hurston would leave her stamp on the genre. The humor, the colloquial tone, and the insistence on the personal, announced in the title and evident throughout, distinguish it from earlier essays in the African American tradition. DuBois, in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," the first essay in Souls, responded autobiographically to the question "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?" [9] Hurston, rather than answer the question, rejects its premise. She "feels" like herself. In the most often cited line from the essay, she insists: "But I am not tragically colored."[10] Instead, she proclaims herself too busy "sharpening [her] oyster knife" to weep. Other black essayists of the 1920s were adept at humor. George Schuyler's "The Negro-Art Hokum" and Rudolph Fisher's "The Causasian Storms Harlem" took up serious issues with a wit that suggested the influence of H. L. Mencken. But neither of them was able to leaven political and social satire with self revelation. Hurston did. The tone of "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" also differentiates it sharply from the pieces Alain Locke had included in The New Negro three years earlier. Hurston's meditation on racial identity was much less direct in its appeal to an audience of liberal-leaning white Americans, such as the readers of The World Tomorrow, the journal in which it was published.

Deflating the artifice that then attended most discourse on race, Hurston begins her essay with a joke: "I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief."[11] The joke is aimed both at those whites who would assume that blackness is a problem requiring a solution, or at least an explanation, and at those blacks, almost certainly including race-conscious New Negroes, who want it understood that they are not merely black. Hurston claims her color gladly. At the same time, she understands that racial identity is not grounded in biology; it is socially constructed. Consequently, she avers, "I remember the very day that I became colored." She states that in her all-black hometown of Eatonville she could be herself rather than the "colored girl" she became in the more hostile and racially mixed environment of Jacksonville, Florida. By its conclusion, the essay asserts that any incongruity between the "colored" and "me" of its title has been resolved.

Significantly, two sites of tension that the essay marks involve Hurston's participation in interracial cultural exchange, the project that was at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. Writ small, this exchange involves the "small silver" whites give the child Zora for "speaking pieces" at the gatepost in Eatonville. The offer of money is a gesture that strikes the child Zora as strange as well as generous, because performing made her so happy she needed "bribing to stop." But she is conscious that her black neighbors do not share her joy in performances that, in fact, partake of a communal cultural heritage. Writ large, the exchange transpires in Harlem City, in the allegorical space of the New World cabaret. Hurston's persona is now a spectator rather than a performer. African American music and dance have become commodities in the cultural marketplace of New York, where both the financial and psychic stakes are much higher. Hurston suggests that the identity she has forged in the free space of Eatonville allows her to negotiate these exchanges without being exploited. The historical Eatonville was not, of course, a free space; and Hurston's biography is replete with instances in which her work or her person was exploited. The self she claims here is her identity as an artist, the "cosmic Zora," who is at once individual and transcendent, both the singular talent and the conduit for the collective memory.

In essays written during the 1930s and 1940s, especially "Characteristics of Negro Expression," "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals," and "Folklore and Music," Hurston elaborates her concepts of art and beauty; she defines the art that was the object of exchange referenced in "How It Feels." Her ideas are in dialogue with the debate about definitions of Negro art initiated by DuBois, Fauset, Johnson, Locke, and Langston Hughes, but she declines to engage that debate directly. Under the rubric, "The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed," DuBois and Fauset had produced a symposium in the pages of The Crisis in 1926 that explored the duties of the black artist as well as the criteria by which art by and about black people should be judged. James Weldon Johnson set forth his own criteria as well as a literary history in his two prefaces to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922, 1931). In the essays he contributed to The New Negro (1925), Locke concurred with Johnson that art played a key role in the struggle for racial equality. In "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), Hughes had declared his independence to write whatever and however he chose.

While Hurston's views come closest to Hughes's, her essays differ from those of her peers in their premises, and more strikingly in their presentation. Retrospectively, critics have used these pieces, especially "Characteristics of Negro Expression," to provide a protocol for reading Hurston's novels. But we have paid inadequate attention to the formal qualities of the essays themselves. Although presented as field notes, "Characteristics" is suggestive formally as well as substantively. In the stories it recounts, "Characteristics" reflects the drama, to which Hurston gives priority among the elements of African American expression. The essay contains much evidence of the "will to adorn." Indeed, its profusion of metaphor and simile exist not only in the examples that are offered to support that observation, but throughout the essay itself.

Drama and language are necessarily linked, as Hurston finds drama in the very words that African Americans speak. They are, she asserts, "action words," words that paint concrete pictures rather than convey abstract ideas. By way of illustration, Hurston offers the first simile in an essay that spills over with figures: "Language is like money," she writes.[12] Black Americans are barterers, whose words embody their meaning. By contrast, white Americans' relationship to language is like the relationship of paper money to the items they purchase. On another level altogether, white literary artists use language like checks; their words stand in a purely abstract relation to their meaning. As she elaborates her argument, Hurston relies on the binary opposition of primitive and civilized, which substantially undermines it validity for readers today. However, as Lynda Hill notes, Hurston "displays essentialist ideas of her time while illustrating the contradictions implicit in racialist conceptions of culture."[13] In addition to its skillful deployment of the ironies that derive from those contradictions, "Characteristics" defers objections to its argument by the effectiveness of its address. Not only does it engage readers through its deployment of metaphor, it addresses them directly ("Who has not observed?") and indirectly ("Anyone watching Negro dancers").[14] In other words, the essay asks its readers to puzzle out its argument and to confirm the validity of its claims.

Early on the essay rejects the "conventional standards" of art that obscure black people's contributions. Once the blinders imposed by those standards are removed, art is visible everywhere one looks: in the improvised performances of daily life, in the language ("the American Negro has done wonders to the English language"), in music, dance, and storytelling.[15] The folktales create the effect of polyphony; typically in Hurston's essays, many voices speak. In addition, "Characteristics" offers multiple examples and several lists, which allow spaces for the reader to enter the text, to affirm his or her independent knowledge of the metaphors, or to provide his or her own examples, of say, double descriptives or verbal nouns. Many critics, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Karla Holloway, and Lynda Hill have remarked on the intellectual boldness and the insightful brilliance of this essay. In my judgment Hurston's ability to perceive beauty and complexity in the lives of ordinary black folk remains unrivaled. But few critics have acknowledged that the essay's form is as original as its argument. After readers have added their own evidence to Hurston's more modest claims, they are better inclined to accept her most challenging ones, for example, that the Negro dancer compared to the white is the better artist, because "his dancing is realistic suggestion, and that is about all a great artist can do."[16] Some readers are even inclined to accept the heresy that "the beauty of the Old Testament does exceed that of a Negro prayer."[17]

Hurston's insights into the form of African American religious expressive traditions are particularly compelling. "Spiritual and Neo-Spirituals," like "Characteristics," was published in Nancy Cunard's Negro. Hurston begins by drawing a controversial distinction between spirituals defined as the collective musical expression sung by believers in worship, and neo-spirituals, the written compositions based on spirituals that were performed by soloists and quartets in concert halls in the 1920s and subsequently. Hurston asserts that true spirituals have never been performed to any audience anywhere. Critics including Hazel Carby and Paul Gilroy have taken Hurston to task because of this apparent investment in authenticity. Her stance threatens to freeze folk expression in time.

From a twenty-first century perspective it seems unarguable that Hurston was wrong to devalue the "arranged" spirituals and right to value the anonymous musicians who kept other traditions of black sacred music alive in their communities rather than on stage or on record. Yet her stance is never simplistic. Although she does not introduce a third term, she seems aware that "spirituals" and "neo-spirituals" are not the sum of black sacred music. She opens the essay with a reference to a recent popular song that a congregation in New Orleans has retitled "He's A Mind Regulator." The title evokes a floating lyric in black sacred music, one that gives its name to a gospel song that enjoyed decades of popularity throughout the twentieth century. Far from a static form, gospel music, the genre that Hurston does not name, was created in churches in the 1920s and 1930s and continues to reinvent itself in the present.

Quite apart from the question of authenticity is the essay's reflection on the meaning of the prayer ritual in southern black churches; Hurston asserts that black people regard all religious expression as art, by which she seems to mean that they hold in high esteem those who are able to express their faith artfully. Although in "Characteristics" Hurston offered the tenet that for African Americans "there can never be enough of beauty, let enough too much," she placed the highest value on the beauty of religious expression: "Nothing outside of the Old Testament is as rich in figure as a Negro prayer. Some instances are unsurpassed anywhere in literature."[18] Having provided this point of comparison with which her all of her readers are familiar, she presents details of the practice to which those outside the community she depicts would not be privy. While, for example, the prayer may strike the outsider as extemporaneous, such a view is in error. Hurston insists that the prayer follows a formal pattern. As ritual, it is introduced by a hymn; the "prayer artist" is then compelled to create a dramatic setting, by calling attention to the physical situation he shares with his auditors; the interpolation of all or parts of the Lord's Prayer is required, as are the pauses in which the congregation is invited to interject a response. During what Hurston designates the accelerando passage, however, the audience takes no part. Lest the reader doubt the quality of the artistic performance, Hurston introduces another comparison that challenges any sense of artistic hierarchy the reader may harbor. A response from the audience during this passage "would be like applauding in the middle of a solo at the Metropolitan." As the performance reaches its climax, the artist "adorns" the prayer. Listeners sit in rapt attention: "nobody wants to miss a syllable."[19]

Rather than quoting examples here, as she does in Mules and Men, Hurston invents a figure of her own. It partakes of the tentativeness that I attribute to the essay and dares the knowledgeable reader to invent a better figure. It extends moreover the musical metaphors on which the essay has relied, and it offers in conclusion an inscription of the spirit of the worship/artistic experience as a whole. "The best figure that I can think of," Hurston writes, "is that the prayer is an obligato over and above the harmony of the assembly."[20] Her humility is misplaced. The figure not only illuminates the function of the prayer ritual; it theorizes Hurston's concept of the individual artist's relationship to the group. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, obligato is a musical figure essential to the completeness of a composition. It is an accompaniment that whether sung or played on an instrument has an independent value. Hurston's metaphor fuses the musical figure that alludes to the elements of performance she describes with the idea of religious duty or obligation. The prayer affirms the spirit of harmony, of one accord, that is the goal of religious worship. Assembly denotes a gathering of persons for religious worship or a congregation. As it rises above the assembly, the voice of the artist is distinct from, yet dependent on, the collective.

The metaphor sheds light on Hurston's impatience with the singers of "neo-spirituals." It is due less to their too-proper diction and formal attire or even the relative lack of improvisation in their performances than it is to the absence of the congregation that could affirm their value. Hurston's conception of the artist's role partakes of traditions of West African performance in which the performer is one with the audience. Yet the prayer artist retains a significant degree of individuality, which is heightened when his voice is heard against the sustained response of the congregation. In this regard the prayer artist is in a privileged position, far superior to that of the child Zora "speaking pieces" and alienated from her neighbors, or to that of the adult Zora in the New World cabaret, whose racial identity stands out against a white background but whose individual voice is muted in a pattern that evokes slavery's legacy. At the conclusion of "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals," Hurston sets forth an ideal that she as a writer did not achieve. Although she was both the conduit of collective memory and a singular talent, the assembly that was her audience too rarely affirmed her song.

Hurston did not waste time lamenting her situation. She continued to explore the meaning of the art of the "undreamed-of geniuses" and to create her own. Her essays, no less than her fiction and ethnography, anticipate concerns and innovations of recent African American writing. They formulate and enact an aesthetic that still seems contemporary.

"Folklore and Music," an essay that was also written for "The Florida Negro," opens with a vivid metaphor: "folklore is the boiled-down juice of human living." (Every time I read that I hear the voice of Gwendolyn Brooks intoning "poetry is life distilled.") Aphorisms and domestic metaphors contend with more abstract representations in this essay. If, on the one hand, "in folklore, as in everything else that people create, the world is a great, big, old serving-platter, and all the local places are like eating-plates," then art, on the other hand, no less than Newton's discovery of gravity, "is a discovery in itself."[21] The paragraph that begins with that sentence ends with a statement so often repeated that it has acquired the force of received wisdom: "Folklore is the arts of the people before they find out that there is any such thing as art, and they make it out of whatever they find at hand."[22] I have quoted that line often myself, so often that I am taken aback to realize what comes next in the text: "Way back there when Hell wasn't no bigger than Maitland, man found out something about the laws of sound."[23] To my ear this is one of those odd discursive juxtapositions that echoes the jagged harmonies of the spirituals. Of course, the lyrics of the spirituals can shift instantly from the humorous to the transcendent and back again. "Scandalize My Name" and "Sit Down, Sister" come to mind. But the tonal shifts here come close to music.

Appropriating the voice of the storyteller, Hurston goes on to theorize about sound. Even before man could stand erect, she tells us, "he found out that sounds could be assembled and manipulated and that such a collection of sound forms could become as definite and concrete as a war-axe or a food tool."[24] Here is as powerful an image of the necessity of art as one is likely to find. Language and song become as central to human experience as war (Hurston is not sentimental about the human condition) and as essential as food. Music and literature derive from the same root. In Hurston's distillation, "somewhere songs for sound-singing branched off from songs for storytelling until we arrive at prose."[25] The first musical form she analyzes is the blues. She strives to transcribe the sound of the music on the page, using italics to represent the stress and variation of the lyric; observing that "the whole thing walks with rhythm." As she surveys the forms of sung poetry, she concludes unsurprisingly that the ballad is the closest to poetry. Yet, in the 13 folktales that follow, the speakers continue to devise their own combinations of the "sound and sense" that Hurston perceives as the elements of literature.

In her effort to render the sound of African American life on the page, Hurston is near the head of a long line of writers: behind Douglass and DuBois, alongside Hughes and Sterling Brown, ahead of Ellison and his explorations of "Sound and the Mainstream" and of Larry Neal, who theorized "sound as racial memory."[26] The list is long. I think, lastly, of Toni Morrison's description of her goal in The Black Book. She wanted that scrapbook of black history to have "a sound, a very special sound. A sound made up of all the elements that distinguished black life . . . as well as those qualities that identified it with all of mankind . . . . And it must concentrate on life as lived—not as imagined—by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak in conventional histories only through their leaders."[27] Zora Neale Hurston wrote that sound. In her essays, as well as her ethnography, she gave voice to those anonymous men and women, honoring their lives, and especially their art and such. Her own voice rises like an obligato over an inspired assembly.

Endnotes

1. The essay was finally published as the lead essay in Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (New York: Meridian Books, 1990), 21–26. Ironically, when The Florida Negro: A Federal Writer's Project Legacy, edited by Gary W. McDonogh (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993) was published, Hurston's essays were excluded. According to Pamela Bordelon, the stance Hurston took in "Art and Such" was one reason the original project editors omitted her work. Bordelon restores this aspect of Hurston's legacy in Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston for the Federal Writers Project (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993). [Return to text]

2. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, edited by Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 905. All quotations from Hurston's essays are from this edition. [Return to text]

3. Ibid., 908. [Return to text]

4. Hurston misstates DuBois's title as "Our Sorrow Songs," an error that she might have corrected had this essay been published in her lifetime. [Return to text]

5. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 909. [Return to text]

6. Ibid., 910. [Return to text]

7. Difficult as it is to estimate, given the steady recovery of works that once were lost, we know that Hurston wrote at least 50 works of nonfiction that were less than book length. Of course, as soon as we try to count the number of essays, we confront the ever-present problem of generic definition. It is much easier to say what is not an essay, rather than what is. What I do not mean here are the scholarly articles, such as "Hoodoo in America" and "Dance Songs and Tales from the Bahamas," both published in the Journal of American Folklore, that were clearly directed toward an audience of social scientists. Neither do I mean newspaper articles, including the remarkable series of reports on the Ruby McCollom case on which Thulani Davis based her memorable play Everybody's Ruby: The Story of a Murder in Florida. Nor am I going to consider the articles that Hurston wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and the American Legion Magazine. My reason for excluding all of these disparate modes of writing is that the writing form was constrained by the venues in which these writings appeared. While Hurston always battled editorial interference, she was able to write with comparatively greater freedom when she slipped the bonds imposed by categories of social science and journalism. [Return to text]

8. Gerald Early, "Gnostic of Gnomic?", introduction to Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Content from Polemics to Pulpit, vol. 1 (New York: Ecco Press, 1992), x. Now out of print, this two-volume compilation is the most comprehensive collection of essays by black writers. [Return to text]

9. The version published in Souls is revised from "Strivings of the Negro People," Atlantic Monthly (August 1897): 194–98. [Return to text]

10. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 827. [Return to text]

11. Ibid., 826. [Return to text]

12. Ibid., 830. [Return to text]

13. Lynda Marion Hill, Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996), 2. [Return to text]

14. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 831, 834. [Return to text]

15. Ibid., 831. [Return to text]

16. Ibid., 836. [Return to text]

17. Ibid., 834. [Return to text]

18. Ibid., 873. [Return to text]

19. Ibid. [Return to text]

20. Ibid. [Return to text]

21. Ibid., 875–76. [Return to text]

22. Ibid., 876. [Return to text]

23. Ibid. [Return to text]

24. Ibid. [Return to text]

25. Ibid., 876–77. [Return to text]

26. Ralph Ellison titles a section of his first collection of essays, Shadow and Act, "Sound and the Mainstream." Larry Neal, "Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic," in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (New York: Anchor Books, 1972). Gayle's anthology, the manifesto of the Black Arts Movement, reprinted essays by DuBois, Hughes, Locke, J. A. Rogers, and Richard Wright. Sarah Webster Fabio is the only contributor to cite Hurston's theories on language. See "Tripping with Black Writing," in The Black Aesthetic, 177. [Return to text]

27. Toni Morrison, "Rediscovering Black History," New York Times Magazine, 11 August 1974, 16. [Return to text]