Dust and Tribe just wrapped up our reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and we were not impressed. In fact, some of us (me) were disappointed to the point of suspicion. This led to asking a lot of questions, and the learning that came out of that more than justified the exposure to what can only be described as a predictable and uninspiring story.
There was some good. Hurston is an able writer. Her descriptive passages have a poetic flow and exuberance that don’t always tell you what’s going on so much as make you feel it. The book largely turns on her use of southern Black dialect and this helped to bring the characters to life.
But all that pretty prose and down-homey dialogue can’t save a lame story which I will summarize now:
A woman moves through three different romantic relationships, each with ups and downs.
That’s really it, with much of the book’s buzz being about how she moved through those relationships, making choices that were, for the time, unconventional.
Fans of Hurston celebrate her as an early feminist, her story a tale of self-determination in an era where women were seen and not heard. She bristled against traditional notions of “settling.” She wanted passion and domestic parity, and the more interesting story would have been about how she found those things in a context that did not suggest their availability. But Hurston took a more breathless path, and led protagonist Janie from man to man and from place to place, whatever she was looking for always either just out of reach or slipping away.
Not appreciating her work, it seems, is an attempt to keep women down. In her liner notes, Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd states, “Given these protofeminist themes, the book was not well received by some male critics. Richard Wright . . . categorically dismissed Hurston’s book: ‘The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought,’ he wrote.”
I’m with Wright on this one. And I’ll take it further.
The narrative celebrates breaking with communal values in the pursuit of personal passion. Domestic abuse is normalized, and the larger Black community is often ridiculed by the protagonist and her enlightened associates. It feels like a white person’s projection of Black progress.
There may be a reason for that.
Sellout?
Eyes was not well received by the Black American literary community. Ralph Ellison said the book contained a “blight of calculated burlesque.” Alain Locke wrote in a review: “when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story convincingly—which is Miss Hurston’s cradle gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?” Otis Ferguson wrote: “it isn’t that this novel is bad, but that it deserves to be better.” Admittedly they were all men, but men with an abiding interest in the preservation and advancement of Black American history and culture.
Meanwhile, reviews of Hurston’s book in the mainstream white press were largely positive, and this is where the story (finally) gets interesting.
Any conversation about Hurston must involve the so-called “Harlem Renaissance,” an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem and spanning the 1920s and 1930s. But for some, this was more of a marketing campaign than a cultural revival.
The Black American intellectual Hubert Harrison challenged the notion of the Renaissance. Harrison biographer, Jeffrey Perry says that, “he questioned the “Renaissance” concept on grounds of its willingness to take “standards of value ready-made from white society” and on its claim to being a significant new re-birth. He maintained that “there had been an uninterrupted,” though ignored, “stream of literary and artistic products” flowing “from Negro writers from 1850” into the 1920s.”
The Harlem Renaissance linked Black writers with white publishers and they needed stories that would sell. Whereas Hurston may have had bills to pay, Harrison was a staunch anti-capitalist and he saw through the branding.
Boyd’s suggestion that men were threatened by Hurston’s bold vision of liberated women misses the mark. Black American literary and intellectual giants recognized in Eyes a mimicry of white-middle class aspiration with a background cast of caricatured Black country folk.
Mole?
A good marketing plan and a handful of white women writing positive reviews in mainstream press will only get you so far. The book has to be good, and it isn’t. So why is it still around?
Trying to understand how such a mediocre work, ignored or dismissed by Black literary contemporaries, became a staple on American high-school reading lists led me to a book by William Maxwell called F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature.
Going all the way back to 1919, the very outset of the Harlem Renaissance, “secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.”
And they kept a dossier on a lot of those writers, among them Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and the aforementioned Richard Wright. Remember him from above, ” . . . no theme, no message, no thought.”
Guess who didn’t have a dossier?
Hurston.
The darling of contemporary high-school level Black American studies didn’t warrant a single drop of ink from Hoover’s FBI, an organization absolutely obsessed with infiltrating and undermining Black American literature. She was either thought inconsequential or else the direction of her work was in alignment with the FBIs attempts to influence Black American culture.
Often described as “at the center” of the Harlem Renaissance, it’s hard to imagine that she was simply overlooked.
I’ll stop short of making any accusations, but Hurston’s work is not meant to call people together or to build them up. It is not meant to inspire a critical analysis of entrenched power. It upsets nothing.
And for that, the FBI left her alone.
You should too.
Leave a comment below for posterity or join us in the D&T Chautaqua Discord to discuss this post with other adventurous spirits from around the world.