Zora Neale Hurston: The "Real" Race Writer

Zora Neale Hurston, born on January 7^th, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama was a popular Harlem Renaissance writer and folklorist. She was the daughter of a sharecropper and former schoolteacher, and was the fifth out of her parent’s eight children. When she was three years old, Hurston and her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. Hurston’s mother had past away when she was fourteen and was then forced to live with her older brother and his family. At the age of sixteen, Hurston joined a travelling theatre group. After finding work cooking and cleaning for a white family, Hurston’s boss enrolled her as a high school student into what is now know as Morgan State University. Hurston then attended Howard University, where she wrote most of her time there. After graduating, Hurston moved to New York City in 1925, where she finally began her literary career.

Later that year, Zora Neale Hurston published her first work; a play entitled Color Struck, in Opportunity Magazine, while taking anthropology classes at Barnard University. Hurston moved back to Florida after graduating to help gather inspiration for her writing. Between 1926 and 1950 Hurston published 13 written works; these include Sweat, a popular short story and Hurston’s best-known work, the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

In April of 1950, Zora Neale Hurston wrote an article entitled What White Publisher’s Won’t Print in the Negro Digest that explained Hurston’s critical opinion on the lack of literature about African Americans that were above the servant and slave race. Within this piece, Hurston criticizes the fact that upper class and educated blacks exposed in novels are seen as a problem, rather than regular human beings. She states:

“The fact that there is no demand for incisive and full-dress stories around Negroes above the servant class is indicative of something of vast importance to this nation. This blank is NOT filled by the fiction built around upper- class Negroes exploiting the race problem. Rather, it tends to point it up. A college-bred Negro still is not a person like other folks, but an interesting problem, more or less.”

Hurston goes on to explain how this slight injustice reminds her of a story about a slave master who educates one of his servants to prove that negroes are just as intelligent as the white man.

The following excerpt is from the neighbor of the slave master telling the slave owner that he doesn’t believe the slave can comprehend what he is doing:

“Yes, he certainly knows his higher mathematics, and he can read Latin better than many white men I know, but I cannot bring myself to believe that he understands a thing that he is doing. It is all an aping of our culture. All on the outside. You are crazy if you think that it has changed him inside in the least.”

Hurston understands that race literature has progressed a lot since slave times, but she is still upset about the fact that white society, literary publishers in particular, fail to believe that blacks can educated and better themselves as whites can:

“…we have come a long, long way [since] then, but the troubling thing is that there are still too many who refuse to believe in the ingestion and digestion of western culture as yet. Hence the lack of literature about the higher emotions and love life of upper-class
Negroes and the minorities in general.”

She believes that publishers are focused on profit, and that they cannot make profit on stories about uplift, unless that is what the public is willing and ready to pay for it:

“Now, do not leap to the conclusion that editors and producers constitute a special class of un-believers. That is far from true. Publishing houses and theatrical promoters are in business to make money. They will sponsor anything that they believe will sell. They shy away from romantic stories about Negroes and Jews because they feel that they know the public indifference to such works, unless the story or play involves racial tension. It can then be offered as a study in Sociology, with the romantic side subdued. They know the skepticism in general about the complicated emotions in the minorities. The average American just cannot conceive of it, and would be apt to reject the notion, and publishers and producers take the stand that they are not in business to educate, but to make money. Sympathetic as they might be, they cannot afford to be crusaders.

In proof of this, you can note various publishers and producers edging forward a little, and ready to go even further when the trial balloons show that the public is ready for it. This public lack of interest is the nut of the matter.”

Finally, Hurston states that the removal of novels that depict the suffering of minorities, and the installation of the successful Negro can help create a more realistic vision of blacks for white society:

“The realistic story around a Negro insurance official, dentist, general practitioner, undertaker and the like would be most revealing. Thinly disguised fiction around the well known Negro names is not the answer, either. The “exceptional” as well as the Ol’ Man Rivers has been exploited all out of context already. Everybody is already resigned to the “exceptional” Negro, and willing to be entertained by the “quaint.” To grasp the penetration of western civilization in a minority, it is necessary to know how the average behaves and lives. Books that deal with people like in Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street is the necessary métier. For various reasons, the average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America. His revelation to the public is the thing needed to do away with that feeling of difference which inspires fear, and which ever expresses itself in dislike.

It is inevitable that this knowledge will destroy many illusions and romantic traditions which America probably likes to have around. But then, we have no record of anybody sinking into a lingering death on finding out that there was no Santa Claus. The old world will take it in its stride. The realization that Negroes are no better nor no worse, and at times just as bonny as everybody else, will hardly kill off the population of the nation.”

Works Cited

http://www.gradesaver.com/author/zora-neale-hurston/

http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/hurs-zor.htm

http://mahoganybooks.com/blog/2010/06/what-white-publishers-wont-print-by-zora-neale-hurston/