Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
Collected and edited by Carla Kaplan - Reviewed by Eisa Davis

Zora Neale Hurston may have once been forgotten, but she has never ceased to be contagious. When you see her turn her phrases, you are infected with laughter and awe, trampled in a riot of language that could only have been started by someone whose life depended on it. With Carla Kaplan's hefty collection of over 600 of Hurston's letters, both the desperation and swagger that split her life down the seam are revealed with a vulnerability mostly absent from her published works. Whether Hurston is begging her patron for shoes, sneering at a friend's "sly opportunism", or offering a detailed report on her cat's intelligence, her joy, fury, and craft are entirely transparent. For Langston Hughes, she was a "perfect book of entertainment in herself", but from her letters emerges an equally articulate but qualitatively different voice, or better yet, chorus of voices, compounding the contradictions of an undeniably courageous life.

These letters, spanning from Hurston's enrollment at Baltimore's Morgan Academy in 1917 to a final plea to publishers in 1959, are still performances. Tactics and content change radically as she addresses each audience of one. But no matter where in the Americas she is writing from, no matter how broke or sick or suspicious, she can't help but find such lip-smacking pleasure in her words that even biographer Robert Hemenway must use an exclamation point in his foreword to the book. Hurston's letters prove that the "will to adorn" she once deemed an essential characteristic of all black expression more accurately describes her own compulsive genius, which danced its way through her in a time when people weren't sure if black genius existed at all.

Many of these letters have been available to scholars for years, but Kaplan's project is to let Hurston finally have her say, as she said it, without any of the substantial meddling she endured with works published in her lifetime. With this volume of letters and last year's publication of Every Tongue Got To Confess (the balance of folk tales excised from the manuscript that became Mules and Men), Kaplan is taking over where Henry Louis Gates, Jr. left off, publicly archiving and deepening our understanding of Hurston and her time. This book may be even longer than Hurston's unfinished yet colossal biography of Herod, but if you open to any page, even if Hurston is outlining her expenses, you will always catch an original phrase.

Kaplan's commentary and footnotes fill in the blanks between the letters and are also a welcome addition to the biographies we have so far. She is balanced and sharp in her insights, extremely thorough in her research, and explicit in her openness to learn more. The book is beautifully laid out, with revelatory pictures of Hurston smoking on a porch in a turpentine camp or imitating a crow, as well as a simple charcoal sketch that seems to look more like her than the faces she wore.

In Hurston's correspondence, the private, subterranean plasma of her thoughts explains the earthquakes and jagged terrain of her public persona. Her time in Harlem in the 20s and early 30s is most well known, when she begins corresponding with such Renaissance icons as Alain Locke, Dorothy West, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. She makes elaborate pleas for funds, writes saccharine paeans to Mason, and turns her experiences with segregation into wisecracks. A postcard to Carl Van Vechten shows a Florida swimming pool with white bathers. Hurston's caption? "In which I did not take a dip." Even her signoffs can be poetic gems: "My most pure and uprushing love, darling flower," Hurston closes a letter to Mason. Hurston splashed her correspondents with such purple praise so routinely they must have often wondered if it was meant for them or for her own delight. The considerable length of her letters, the sudden curves in her lines of argument, and the frequent codas she adds after she has read the letter over are evidence of how seriously she took her own opinion of her writing, and how exciting the act of writing itself was for her.

It is clear that she had a soul mate in Langston Hughes. Her letters to him are more exposed, filled with more humanity and pleasure than any others she ever wrote. But he definitely wasn't one of the three "strong, big wrassly men" she married briefly, then divorced. Hughes and Hurston were so close precisely because their most longstanding romance was not with another single person, but with black people as a whole. Both sought a non-biological family they could create through devotion to language; both sought approval and denied its importance.

This collection is particularly significant in how it cracks open the 40s and 50s, her less well-loved years, when the black and white press portrayed Hurston as both spokesperson and freak show. Whether working as a Hollywood story editor, underpaid reporter, or maid, Hurston is a master polemicist, unleashing political diatribes that entirely engulf her letters. The war set off something fierce in her, and she is truly a preacher's daughter when she writes. Some of her most powerful statements on race and politics and unexpectedly radical departures from the reactionary positions she is known for-can be found here.

In 1946, she calls Truman "THE BUTCHER OF ASIA" and stretches her race pride into internationalism: "Do we not see that we [Negroes are] being morally lynched with every one of those able Japanese?" She builds her case for the controversial stance she would take years later against desegregation in one of her finest letters. To Countee Cullen in 1943 she declares, "I know that the Anglo-Saxon mentality is one of violence. Violence is his religion.... If some of us must die for human justice, then let us die... But I shall never join the cry-babies." She has the "nerve to walk [her] own way", which she felt communism threatened. "[I]f I ever meet a Communist with a sense of humor, and a sentence he or she thought up him or herself, I will take the matter under serious consideration," she quips to Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation. Taken all together, her politics still seem shaped by her mood swings. But, as Hurston writes to a critic, she hopes "we forgive a great artist much that would never be forgiven the mediocre."

After Hurston is falsely accused of molesting a boy in 1948, the tone of her letters eventually cedes to one of resignation. Her spirit seems to grow pallid, and the will to adorn subsides. She signs her letters "with faithful feelings" regularly, and has mostly abandoned humans for her animals and flowers. She obsessively researches the life of Herod, finding in him a metaphor for justice and democracy, and hoping to exonerate him of his historical reputation as a murderer of innocents in the same way she wished to exonerate herself. She even rekindles her correspondence with her first husband, Herbert Sheen-writing tenderly to ask for a loan and later to advise him on his love life.

But this is what makes these letters so important-we can finally see her unparalleled life served up raw. It is as fruitful to read her paranoid invective as it is to see her first sketch of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Like her characters, Hurston's letters reveal what June Jordan called "Black possibilities of ourselves...as people." Hurston is a complete person passing through time; she loves you, she reams you, she needs you. What she criticizes in others, she does herself; what she fictionalizes, she has somehow lived.

Hurston never did write the second volume of her autobiography urged by her publishers. But now we have her letters to "put us on the wonder." She suffered poverty, chronic ailments, untold humiliations, rejections from husbands, publishers, and perhaps most painfully, from black folk-but wrote and wrote brashly because her guiding view of herself was ultimately healthy. "I am glad that you liked the book," she writes to Eslanda Robeson, Paul Robeson's wife, after sending her first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine. "I tried to be natural and not pander to the folks who expect a clown and a villain in every Negro. Neither did I want to pander to those 'Race' people among us who see nothing but perfection in all of us." By cleaving to independence with her very life, Hurston was both celebrated and condemned by the people she strove to love.

First published in Africana.com

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