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.1 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.
- 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. [↩]
