Cheryl A. Wall, "Zora Neale Hurston's Essays: On Art and Such" (page 6 of
6)
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]
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