Besides Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel for which she is certainly best known, Zora Neale Hurston made a tremendous contribution to the ethnography of the American South and the Caribbean. Her 1935 collection, Mules and Men, written in the problematic but captivating genre of literary anthropology, recounts the folktales she heard during her extensive fieldwork in the South.
Her insights are astounding, and her willingness to throw herself into the game of participant-observation is both courageous and, at times, morally dubious. I was horrified by her account of throwing a screeching black cat into a boiling cauldron as part of her initiation into the practice of hoodoo. She was made by the high priest to shut the lid, wait until the cat had been boiled down to mere bones, and then to pass each of the bones through her mouth; the one that had a bitter taste was to be carried as a talisman. I found myself hoping this was the literary-embellishment part.
Her teacher back at Barnard was Franz Boas, and while he did not have her killing cats he did encourage her Southern expeditions, and had this to say, in a short preface to Mules and Men, about her particular talent for portraying a cultural world from the inside: "She has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in his true inner life." If this sounds essentializing, and thus, on today's reasoning, oppressive, it is partly because it supposes that the African-American has a particular sort of inner life, one that truly belongs to him, and that any one may stand in for any other as an embodiment of this form of life. This is both a presumption to which Hurston herself would likely not object, as well as a presumption that places Boas in a long tradition of thinking about culture that has not always been, or not always only been, oppressive.
I was struck by one small fragment of one of the many stories, the "big ole lies," that Hurston relates:
Jim Allen commented: "Well, you know what they say-- a man can cackerlate his life till he git mixed up wid a woman or git straddle of a cow."
Big Sweet turned visiously upon the old man. "Who you callin' a cow, fool? Ah know you ain't namin' my mama's daughter no cow."
"Now y'all heard what Ah said. Ah ain't called nobody no cow," Jim defended himself. "Dat's just an old time by-word 'bout no man kin tell what's gointer happen when he gits mixed up wid a woman or set straddle of a cow."
"I done heard my gran'paw say dem very words many and many a time," chimed in Larkins. "They's a whole heap of them kinda by-words. Like for instance: 'Ole coon for cunnin', young coon for runnin',' and 'Ah can't dance, but Ah know good moves.' They all got a hidden meanin', jus' like de Bible (124-5).
This reminded me not only of certain brilliant stand-up comedy routines that marked my childhood, but also of a passage from Leibniz's Nouveaux essais of 1704, where he, like Larkins, suggests that it is language that is the true repository of human knowledge, and thus that it stands equal to the sacred texts of antiquity:
And if there were no longer an ancient book to examine, languages would take the place of books, and they are the most ancient monuments of mankind. In all the languages of the world will be recorded and and placed in dictionaries and grammars, and compared together (Nouveaux Essais, Bk. III, ch. 9. G V 318).
Lest we suppose that Leibniz is not interested here in the sort of dialectal, everyday, popular language that Hurston sought to record, it's worth considering one of his many more particular ethnographic sketches (or better, perhaps, research proposals). In a 1697 letter "On the Origins of the Nations of Transylvania," Leibniz devotes particular attention to the ethnic German minority of that region, whose exact origins in the region were unknown and who spoke a dialect of German that was very different from any of the standard variants spoken in what are today Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Leibniz writes:
We understand the German language [of the Transylvanian Germans] poorly; ... many French, Italian, Spanish, English, Turkish, and Tartar words have been noted in their speech. [Thus] it would be most desirable to have a little dictionary of the language of the common people of German Transylvania, and to request that other examples as well be added, which would be genuine, rather than made to fit our own way of speaking (Dutens, Opera omnia, Tom. IV, Pars II, 206-8).
I take it that it is this pair of insights --that language is as valuable as texts as a bearer and mirror of culture, and that the way to understand a culture's language is to get inside it, rather than to make it fit our own-- would be two of the central commitments of Herder's 'soft' or 'organic' nationalism, which in large part may be traced back to Leibniz. And it was surely the Herderian tradition, through intermediaries such as Leopold von Ranke, that guided Boas's own anthropological method.
Hurston's unapologetic use of dialect, and the ambiguity of her stance towards the traditions and beliefs that could not but come across as irrational and backwards to educated Northerners, made her an embarrassment to other African-American writers such as Richard Wright. Her insistence on drudging up all the swampy stuff of culture appears to have been the principal cause of her eventual marginalization at the dawn of the Civil Rights era. She spent the last years of her life working as a maid.
I take Hurston to be a Herderian, while the values of the writers associated with the Civil Rights movement were squarely those of the Enlightenment with which Herder could not be at ease. I think it is this Herderianism that caused Hurston to denounce the desegregation of schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and shortly before her death. John McWhorter calls her a 'Black conservative' (thus claiming her as a forebear), but I don't think that properly captures the spirit of Herderian counter-Enlightenment.
I also think she is a deeply compelling writer, disclosing a world I wasn't supposed to see, whereas I could never get through more than a few pages of Native Son, which only reminds me of a world I already know is supposed to be.
*
Note: I am writing this not at an airport, but in an actual airplane, 36,000 feet over Utah. I had intended to spend the whole journey reading Mules and Men, but instead found myself on my first-ever wireless-equipped plane. This is both good news and terrible news, for reasons I probably don't have to spell out.
