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. 1 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.” 2 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”). 3 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. 4 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.” 5 Some readers are even inclined to accept the heresy that “the beauty of the Old Testament does exceed that of a Negro prayer.” 6
