The engine struck the car squarely and hurled it about like a toy. John was thrown out and lay perfectly still. Only his foot twitched a little.
“Damned, if I kin see how it happened,” the engineer declared. “He musta been sleep or drunk. God knows I blowed for him when I saw him entering on the track. He wasn’t drunk. Couldn’t smell no likker on him, so he musta been asleep. Hell, now I’m on the carpet for carelessness, but I got witnesses I blowed.”
Sally wept hard. “Naw, Ah don’t want de seben thousand dollars from de railroad. Ahm goin’ tuh give it tuh his chillun. Naw, Ah don’t want none of it. Ah loved ’im too much tuh rob his chillun. Jes’ lemme be buried right side uh him when Ah die. Us two off by ourselves. Dass how come Ah bought uh new burial lot. Ah can’t git over it, people. Jes’ ez he wuz gittin ready tuh live, he got tuh git taken uhway, but Ah got one consolation, he sho wuz true tuh me. Jes’ tuh think Ah had tuh live fifty years tuh git one sweet one and it throwed de light over all de other ones. Ah’ll never regret uh thing. He wuz true tuh me.” She said it over and over. It was a song for her heart and she kept singing it.
She sat shining darkly among the multitudes from all over the State who had come to do John Pearson homage. She sat among his children and made them love her, and when he was laid to rest she was invited to attend memorial services in twenty or more cities.
Sanford was draped in mourning on the second Sunday when Zion Hope held her memorial for John Pearson. The high-backed, throne-like chair was decorated. Tight little sweaty bouquets from the woods and yards were crowded beside ornate floral pieces. Hattie in deep mourning came back to town for the service.
She would have seated herself on the front seat before the flower-banked chair that represented the body of Rev. Pearson, but someone stopped her. “His wife is in de seat,” they whispered and showed her to a place among the crowd.
Hambo rolled his eyes at the black-veiled Hattie and gritted his teeth, and whispered to Watson:
“Uhhunh, Ad done heered she wuz comin’ back tuh ast us all tuh he’p her git his lodge insurances. Wisht Ah wuz God. Ah’d take and turn her intuh uh damn hawg and den Ah’d concrete de whole world over, so she couldn’t find uh durned place tuh root.”
And the preacher preached a barbaric requiem poem. On the pale white horse of Death. On the cold icy hands of Death. On the golden streets of glory. Of Amen Avenue. Of Halleluyah Street. On the delight of God when such as John appeared among the singers about His throne. On the weeping sun and moon. On Death who gives a cloak to the man who walked naked in the world. And the hearers wailed with a feeling of terrible loss. They beat upon the O-go-doe, the ancient drum. O-go-doe, O-go-doe, O-go-doe! Their hearts turned to fire and their shinbones leaped unknowing to the drum. Not Kata-Kumba, the drum of triumph, that speaks of great ancestors and glorious wars. Not the little drum of kid-skin, for that is to dance with joy and to call to mind birth and creation, but O-go-doe, the voice of Death—that promises nothing, that speaks with tears only, and of the past.
So at last the preacher wiped his mouth in the final way and said, “He wuz uh man, and nobody knowed ’im but God,” and it was ended in rhythm. With the drumming of the feet, and the mournful dance of the heads, in rhythm, it was ended.
GLOSSARY
Lidard knot, fat pine wood, generally used for kindling.
Chaps, children. Old English use.
Buckra, white people.
Patter roller, “Patrollers,” an organization of the late slavery days that continued through the Reconstruction period. Its main objective was the intimidation of Negroes. Similar to the KKK.
Hagar’s chillun, Negroes, as against Sarah’s children, the whites.
Apin’ down de road, running away.
Talkin’ at de big gate, boasting. Making pretence of bravery behind the back of a powerful person. The allusion comes from the old slavery-time story of the Negro who boasted to another that he had given Ole Massa a good cussin’ out. The other one believed him and actually cussed Ole Massa out the next time that he was provoked, and was consequently given a terrible beating. When he was able to be at work again he asked the first Negro how it was that he was not whipped for cussing Ole Massa. The first Negro asked the other if he had cussed Ole Massa to his face. “Sho Ah did. Ain’t dat whut you tole me you done?” “Aw naw, fool. Ah ain’t tole yuh nothin’ uh de kind. As said Ah give Ole Massa uh good cussin’ out and Ah did. But when Ah did dat, he wuz settin’ up on de verandah and Ah wuz down at de big gate. You sho is uh big fool. It’s uh wonder Ole Massa didn’t kill you dead.”
Shickalacked, a sound-word to express noise of a locomotive.
Nable string, umbilical cord.
Boogers, head lice.
Make ’miration, pay flattering compliments.
Parched peanuts, roasted peanuts.
Cuffy, West African word meaning Negro.
Branch, colloquial for small stream.
Smell hisself, reaching puberty (girl or boy becoming conscious of).
Lies, stories, tales.
Tush hawg, wild boar, very vicious, hence a tough character. The tusks of the wild boar curve out and are dangerous weapons.
Seben years ain’t too long fuh uh coudar tuh wear uh ruffled bosom shirt, it’s never too late for me to get even with you.
Coudar, a striped, hard-shell fresh-water turtle.
Bucket flower, potted plant. Old buckets and tubs being used for flower pots. A delicate, well-cared-for person.
Lay-over, hen with a full drooping comb. Domestic animals and fowls often named for some striking characteristic.
Jook, the pleasure houses near industrial work. A combination of bawdy, gaming, and dance hall. Incidentally the cradle of the “blues.”
Strowin’, spreading abroad.
Sheep shadney, tea made from sheep droppings. It is sweetened and fed to very young babies.
Old Hannah, the sun.
Piney wood rooters, razor-back hogs. Wild hogs. They never get really fat. Inclined to toughness.
Justice been beggin’ righteous tuh do, this is your duty so clearly that it is not debatable.
He ain’t goin’ tuh let his shirt-tail touch ’im, he won’t sit down.
Ah’ll give mah case tuh Miss Bush and let Mother Green stand mah bond, I’ll hide in the woods. I won’t need a lawyer because I’ll be hidden and no one will have to stand my bond for I have put my person in care of the bushes.
Squat dat rabbit, let the matter drop, cease.
De caboose uh dat, the end; i.e., the caboose is the tail end of a freight train.
Loud talk me, making your side appear right by making more noise than the others.
Big Moose done come down from de mountain, “When the half-gods go, the gods arrive.” He will make all that has gone before seem trivial beside his works.
Porpoise, pauper.
Gopher, land tortoise, native of Florida which is locally known as a gopher.
Better say Joe, that is doubtful.
Big britches goin’ tuh fit li’l’ Willie, he who was small is now grown. The underdog is now in position to fight for topdog place.
Bitter bone, the all-power black-cat bone. Some hoodoo doctors select it by boiling the cat alive with appropriate ceremonies (see “Hoodoo in America,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. 44, No. 174, p. 387) and passing the bones thru the mouth until one arrives at the bitter bone.
Catbone, same as above, though some doctors do not seek a bone by taste (see “Hoodoo in America,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. 44, No. 174, p. 396).
God don’t eat okra, okra when cooked is slick and slimy, i.e., God does not like slickness, crooked ways.
When Ahm dying don’t you let ’em take de pillow from under mah head. The pillow is removed from beneath the head of the dying because it is said to prolong the death struggle if left in place. All mirrors, and often all glass surfaces, are covered because it is believed the departing spirit will pause to look in them and if
it does they will be forever clouded afterwards.
Doodly-squat, nothing more valuable than dung. Hence the person is in extreme poverty.
Cold preach, cold used as a superlative to mean unsurpassed. Very common usage.
Black Herald, Black Dispatch, Negro gossip.
In his cooler passages the colored preacher attempts to achieve what to him is grammatical correctness, but as he warms up he goes natural. The “ha” in the sermon marks a breath. The congregation likes to hear the preacher breathing or “straining.”
Sow-bosom, salt pork, a very important item in the diet of both Negroes and poor whites in the South.
AFTERWORD
ZORA NEALE HURSTON: “A NEGRO WAY OF SAYING”
I.
The Reverend Harry Middleton Hyatt, an Episcopal priest whose five-volume classic collection, Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork, more than amply returned an investment of forty years’ research, once asked me during an interview in 1977 what had become of another eccentric collector whom he admired. “I met her in the field in the thirties. I think,” he reflected for a few seconds, “that her first name was Zora.” It was an innocent question, made reasonable by the body of confused and often contradictory rumors that make Zora Neale Hurston’s own legend as richly curious and as dense as are the black myths she did so much to preserve in her classic anthropological works. Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and in her fiction.
A graduate of Barnard, where she studied under Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books—four novels, two books of folklore, and an autobiography—and more than fifty shorter works between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean War, when she was the dominant black woman writer in the United States. The dark obscurity into which her career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent political stances rather than any deficiency of craft or vision. Virtually ignored after the early fifties, even by the Black Arts movement in the sixties, an otherwise noisy and intense spell of black image- and myth-making that rescued so many black writers from remaindered oblivion, Hurston embodied a more or less harmonious but nevertheless problematic unity of opposites. It is this complexity that refuses to lend itself to the glib categories of “radical” or “conservative,” “black” or “Negro,” “revolutionary” or “Uncle Tom”—categories of little use in literary criticism. It is this same complexity, embodied in her fiction, that, until Alice Walker published her important essay (“In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”) in Ms. magazine in 1975, had made Hurston’s place in black literary history an ambiguous one at best.
The rediscovery of Afro-American writers has usually turned on larger political criteria, of which the writer’s work is supposedly a mere reflection. The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry. Alice Walker’s moving essay recounts her attempts to find Hurston’s unmarked grave in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida. Hurston became a metaphor for the black woman writer’s search for tradition. The craft of Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara bears, in markedly different ways, strong affinities with Hurston’s. Their attention to Hurston signifies a novel sophistication in black literature: they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other black fiction. This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.
The charting of Janie Crawford’s fulfillment as an autonomous imagination, Their Eyes is a lyrical novel that correlates the need of her first two husbands for ownership of progressively larger physical space (and the gaudy accoutrements of upward mobility) with the suppression of self-awareness in their wife. Only with her third and last lover, a roustabout called Tea Cake whose unstructured frolics center around and about the Florida swamps, does Janie at last bloom, as does the large pear tree that stands beside her grandmother’s tiny log cabin.
She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!
To plot Janie’s journey from object to subject, the narrative of the novel shifts from third to a blend of first and third person (known as “free indirect discourse”), signifying this awareness of self in Janie. Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition. Yet in its concern with the project of finding a voice, with language as an instrument of injury and salvation, of selfhood and empowerment, it suggests many of the themes that inspirit Hurston’s oeuvre as a whole.
II.
One of the most moving passages in American literature is Zora Neale Hurston’s account of her last encounter with her dying mother, found in a chapter entitled “Wandering” in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942):
As I crowded in, they lifted up the bed and turned it around so that Mama’s eyes would face east. I thought that she looked to me as the head of the bed reversed. Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice.
We can begin to understand the rhetorical distance that separated Hurston from her contemporaries if we compare this passage with a similar scene published just three years later in Black Boy by Richard Wright, Hurston’s dominant black male contemporary and rival: “Once, in the night, my mother called me to her bed and told me that she could not endure the pain, and she wanted to die. I held her hand and begged her to be quiet. That night I ceased to react to my mother; my feelings were frozen.” If Hurston represents her final moments with her mother in terms of the search for voice, then Wright attributes to a similar experience a certain “somberness of spirit that I was never to lose,” which “grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself…the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness….” Few authors in the black tradition have less in common than Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. And whereas Wright would reign through the forties as our predominant author, Hurston’s fame reached its zenith in 1943 with a Saturday Review cover story honoring the success of Dust Tracks. Seven years later, she would be serving as a maid in Rivo Alto, Florida; ten years after that she would die in the County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida.
How could the recipient of two Guggenheims and the author of four novels, a dozen short stories, two musicals, two books on black mythology, dozens of essays, and a prizewinning autobiography virtually “disappear” from her readership for three full decades? There are no easy answers to this quandary, despite the concerted attempts of scholars to resolve it. It is clear, however, that the loving, diverse, and enthusiastic responses that Hurston’s work engenders today were not shared by several of her influential black male contemporaries. The reasons for this are complex and stem largely from what we might think of as their “racial ideologies.”
Part of Hurston’s received heritage—and perhaps the paramount received notion that links the novel of manners in the Harlem Renaissance, the social realism of the thirties, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement—was the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers, to beings who only react to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose culture is “deprived” where different, and whose psyches are in the main “pathological.” Albert Murray, the writer and social critic, calls this “the Social Science Fiction Monster.” Socialists, separ
atists, and civil rights advocates alike have been devoured by this beast.
Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by “the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal.” Unlike Hughes and Wright, Hurston chose deliberately to ignore this “false picture that distorted….” Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain, “was something internal…. The man himself must make his own emancipation.” And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the “arrogance” of whites assuming that “black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.” Her strategy was not calculated to please.
What we might think of as Hurston’s mythic realism, lush and dense within a lyrical black idiom, seemed politically retrograde to the proponents of a social or critical realism. If Wright, Ellison, Brown, and Hurston were engaged in a battle over ideal fictional modes with which to represent the Negro, clearly Hurston lost the battle.
But not the war.
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