A study of Zora Neale Hurston, writer, properly begins with Zora Neale Hurston, wanderer. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road—in her artful candor and coy reticence, her contradictions and silences, her irrationalities and extravagant boasts which plead for the world to recognize and respect her—one perceives the matrix of her fiction, the seeds that sprouted and the cankers that destroyed.

Contradictions in the autobiography reveal that the content was prepared with concern for its appeal to readers, especially white readers. By reporting her father's frequent warnings that her impudence would cause her to forget to remain in the docile, subservient position to which Southern society assigns Afro-Americans, Miss Hurston created a self-image as a fearless and defiant fighter for her rights. In actuality, however, even white acquaintances were astonished by her apparent indifference to her own dignity or that of other blacks. (pp. 90-1)

In contrast to her affable reactions to the white people in her book are her violent rivalries and antagonisms toward other blacks. Obviously envious of her father's attention to her sister, she unnecessarily reminded readers that the sister did not become famous. She insisted that her brother used her as his wife's slave. She wrote vituperatively about a jealous, "old, fat, black" servant who caused her to be fired and about another "jealous hussy" who tried to kill her. With obvious relish she reported the details of a fight with her stepmother, whom she hated…. [Years afterward] she searched for her stepmother, hoping to resume the battle; but, after finding her, Miss Hurston pitied the aged woman's infirmity. It is psychologically impossible that any human being who would want to kill so many members of her own race should never have resented members of another race. Such a dichotomy of blacks and whites cannot exist except to myopic vision.

Two causes for the myopia suggest themselves. One, the desire to sell her book caused Miss Hurston to conceal her resentment of white Americans. Two, she genuinely enjoyed the paternalism of her white friends.

If the first hypothesis is true, Miss Hurston was a hypocrite; if the second is true, she was immature and insecure. Either hypothesis dissuades one from expecting any perceptive appraisal of the interrelationships of the races in her autobiography, and none is to be found. (pp. 93-4)

The Zora Neale Hurston who takes shape from her autobiography and from the accounts of those who knew her is an imaginative, somewhat shallow, quick-tempered woman, desperate for recognition and reassurance to assuage her feelings of inferiority; a blind follower of that social code which approves arrogance toward one's assumed peers and inferiors but requires total psychological commitment to a subservient posture before one's supposed superiors. It is in reference to this image that one must examine her novels, her folklore, and her view of the Southern scene.

Despite the psychological limitations which color her works, her novels deserve more recognition than they have received. While publishing more books than any Afro-American woman before her—four novels, two collections of folklore, and an autobiography—she was one of the few Southern-born Afro-American writers who have consistently mined literary materials from Southern soil. Gifted with an ear for dialect, an appreciation of the folktale, a lively imagination, and an understanding of feminine psychology, she interwove these materials in deceptively simple stories which exhibit increasing artistic consciousness and her awareness of the shifting tastes in the American literary market.

Her relative anonymity may be blamed on two causes. First, during her most productive period—the 1930s—widespread poverty limited the sale of books. Second, her tales of common people form a seemingly quiet meadow overshadowed by commanding, storm-swept hills on either side. To the rear, in the twenties, stands the exoticism of the Harlem Renaissance—Claude McKay's lurid depictions of Harlem, Wallace Thurman's satirical invective, Langston Hughes's jazz rhythms, and Countee Cullen's melodious chauvinism. On the other side, in the forties, stands the lusty violence of Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, Ann Petry, and Willard Motley. Most of Zora Neale Hurston's stories, in contrast, seem to be quiet quests for self-realization.

Ironic, psychologically perceptive stories first brought her to the attention of Charles S. Johnson and various other editors. "Spunk" and "The Gilded Six-Bits" typify this early work. (pp. 98-9)

Miss Hurston revealed the same talents in her novels. The simply narrated tales, the credible, likable characters, and the colorful dialogue evoke tenderness and amusement. But in the greater length of the novels, she showed weaknesses. She caricatured less important figures, exaggerated the language, and sacrificed structure for the sake of folktales.

Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), her first novel, is based on the lives of her parents. Written after she had collected the folktales subsequently published in Mules and Men (1935), the novel exemplifies both her strengths and her weaknesses. (p. 100)

Although Miss Hurston delineated her protagonists credibly, she exaggerated minor figures. Because she hated her stepmother, Miss Hurston caricatured Hattie, John Buddy's second wife, as a vituperative, ignorant, immoral, vindictive monster. Miss Hurston designed a black girl, Mehaley, as a comic foil for Lucy. Whereas Lucy is intelligent, educated, affectionate, and relatively obedient to her mother's rigid morality, Mehaley is slothful, sensual, and amoral. The contrast reaches a farcical climax in the difference between Lucy's marriage and Mehaley's. Lucy marries John Buddy in a simple, decorous ritual performed with the reverence customary for a sacrament of the church. Mehaley's wedding is delayed first by the tardiness of the bridegroom. It is further delayed by her father, a self-appointed preacher, who refuses to permit an ordained minister to perform the ceremony. After the father prevails and after the bridegroom again imprisons his aching feet in his new shoes, the marriage vows are recited by the illiterate father, who pretends to read the words from a book which he believes to be the Bible but which is actually an almanac. That evening, the bride postpones consummating the marriage until she has satisfied her craving for snuff. (pp. 101-02)

Exploitation of the exotic weakens the dialogue, which constitutes both the major strength and the major weakness of the novel. Effectively, Miss Hurston created a dialect, or dialects, which, if not authentic, nevertheless suggest a particular level of speech without ridiculing the speaker. The language also exhibits the rural Southern blacks' imaginative, vivid use of metaphor, simile, and invective…. The verisimilitude of the language is intensified not merely by the dialect and idiom but even by words, such as "lies," "jook," "piney wood rooters," which require definition in the glossary.

But exploiting the appeal of this language, she piled up metaphorical invective to a height difficult for any mortal to attain…. (pp. 102-03)

In the novel, Miss Hurston experimented with symbols with varying degrees of success. The image of "Jonah's gourd vine" does not seem to represent John effectively because no Jonah exists. The fact that John Buddy is created by God and is smitten by God furnishes merely a strained analogy. Miss Hurston, however, used a railroad train more effectively. One of the first objects which John sees after he has crossed the creek, the railroad locomotive impresses him as the most powerful, potentially dangerous force he has ever known. More than a machine or even an agent for transportation, however, it symbolizes his sexual awareness. Coming into his consciousness when he first enters a world of heterosexual relationships, it dominates his thoughts and finally destroys him.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is artistically superior to Jonah's Gourd Vine, perhaps because it centers upon a protagonist with whom Miss Hurston could identify fully. (pp. 104-05)

Although Miss Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven months, she demonstrated considerable improvement in her skill as a novelist. Feeling no compulsion to compensate her protagonist for suffering, she developed the story logically. Unfortunately she weakened the story by the highly melodramatic conclusion alleviated only by the romantic sentiment that Teacake still lives in Janie's memory.

Although the death of the protagonist, John Buddy, ends Jonah's Gourd Vine and the grief of the protagonist, Janie, concludes Their Eyes Were Watching God, neither novel overwhelms a reader with a sense of tragedy. A lighter mood develops, not so much from Miss Hurston's emphasis upon a philosophic acceptance of grief as from her frequent admixtures of comedy and her tendency to report dramatic incidents rather than to involve the reader with the emotions of the characters.

In her second novel Miss Hurston improved her characterization by caricaturing less frequently and by delineating minor characters more carefully. In fact, Nanny Janie's grandmother, is one of Miss Hurston's most effectively drawn characters. Feeling that life cheated her by enslaving her, Nanny vows that her granddaughter will enjoy the happiness she herself has never known. But seeking to realize herself through her granddaughter, she fails to allow for Janie's personality and aspirations. (pp. 105-06)

Despite her general improvements, however, Miss Hurston continued to exhibit defects evidencing her inability to complete her transformation from a short-story writer into a novelist. She weakened the plot by a careless shift of point of view and by digressions. (p. 107)

Miss Hurston committed her most serious structural blunder in chapter six. In the first four chapters she developed the poignant relationship of Janie and Nanny, lyrically explored Janie's personality, and described the brief course of Janie's marriage. In chapter five Miss Hurston altered her tone by abandoning the serious, contemplative dialogue of the earlier chapters in order to imitate the impudent, jovial chatter of the Eatonville folk who spy upon the newcomers, Janie and Joe Starks. In chapter six, however, the longest in the book, Miss Hurston interrupted the narrative in order to include folktales and amusing sketches of local inhabitants. Digressive and unnecessary, the chapter merely suggests that Miss Hurston did not know how to integrate the folk material which she considered essential for local color. She weakly justified the inclusions as illustrations of the kinds of tales which Janie wishes to hear more often. Later in the story, Miss Hurston introduced similar materials more plausibly as a part of the banter between Teacake and Janie and as the evening or rainy day diversion of the workers with whom Janie and Teacake live.

Either personal insensitivity or an inability to recognize aesthetic inappropriatenesses caused Miss Hurston to besmirch Their Eyes Were Watching God with one of the crudest scenes which she ever wrote. While Joe Starks is dying, Janie deliberately provokes a quarrel so that, for the first time, she can tell him how he has destroyed her love. During the early years of their twenty-year relationship, Joe Starks jealously sheltered her excessively; during the later years he often abused her because he resented her remaining young and attractive while he aged rapidly. But in a quarrel or two Janie repaid him in good measure by puncturing his vanity before the fellow townsmen whose respect and envy he wished to command. Never was his conduct so cruel as to deserve the vindictive attack which Janie unleashes while he is dying. For Janie, the behavior seems grotesquely out of character. It is characteristic, however, of Miss Hurston's continual emphasis upon intraracial and intrafamilial hatred. Probably no other Afro-American fiction maker before Richard Wright so fully and frequently described violence within black families.

The thought of Their Eyes Were Watching God is more persuasive than that of Jonah's Gourd Vine. Through Nanny, Miss Hurston denounced slavery and the wives of slave owners; through Teacake she ridiculed the Southerners' habit of selecting certain blacks as their pets while abusing the others; and through Mrs. Turner she ridiculed Negroes who hate their race. She succeeded best, however, in delineating perceptively a woman whose simple desires mystify the men in her life. Janie merely wishes to live and to love, to laugh and to joke with people. But her husband and her first lover fail to understand that her happiness depends upon love. Because she does not love her first husband, she feels insulted because he wants her to prepare his breakfast, chop wood, and plow in the fields. As long as she loves Joe Starks, however, she is willing to clerk in his store. When she no longer loves him, she resents his wanting her to continue to work. Because she loves Teacake, she works beside him in the fields after he has confessed his loneliness without her. All Janie wants is to love, to be loved, and to share the life of her man. But, like the witch in [Geoffrey Chaucer's] Wife of Bath's tale, she first must find a man wise enough to let her be whatever kind of woman she wants to be.

Miss Hurston's most accomplished achievement in fiction is Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), which provided a format in which she could best utilize her talents for writing satire, irony, and dialect. (pp. 107-09)

If she had written nothing else, Miss Hurston would deserve recognition for this book. For once, her material and her talent fused perfectly. Her narrative deficiencies are insignificant, for the reader knows the story. Her ridicule, caricature, and farce are appropriate. The monstrous Hattie of Jonah's Gourd Vine and Mrs. Turner of Their Eyes Were Watching God reappear aptly in the jealous, accursed Miriam, who actually becomes a sympathetic figure after she has been cursed with leprosy. Finally, attuned to folk psychology, Miss Hurston gave the Hebrew slaves an authenticity that they lack in the solemn Biblical story. (pp. 109-10)

The chief art of the book is the abundant comedy. Humor emerges even from the mere contrast of the bombastic speech of the Egyptians, the realistic speech of the educated people, and the credible dialect of the slaves. But a good joke, at best, is merely a joke. Miss Hurston's joke entertains readers but does not comment significantly on life or people.

In her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Miss Hurston for the first time focused upon white protagonists, in a work so stylistically different from her earlier efforts that it reveals her conscious adjustment to the tastes of a new generation of readers. Although Seraph is Hurston's most ambitious novel and her most artistically competent, its prolonged somberness causes many readers to yearn for the alleviating farce and carefree gaiety of the earlier works. (p. 111)

Although Seraph is not a black story in white face, it significantly parallels the earlier novels in most respects. For instance, despite differences of dialect and ambition, the protagonists of Seraph have their prototypes in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Like Janie, Arvay Henson, a woman of the lower caste of Southern society, is searching for love. Like Teacake, Jim courts charmingly and boldly; like Joe Starks, he dedicates himself to providing comfort for his mate. Even the familiar vituperative caricatures recur—in Arvay's slovenly sister Larraine and her husband, Carl Middleton.

If the differences in race are ignored, Seraph is distinguished from the earlier novels chiefly by Miss Hurston's emphasis upon the protagonist's psychological dilemma, more specific and more realistic descriptions of locale, more lurid details in the accounts of sexual relationships, and the omission of farcical incidents and of folktales. Each of the first three heightens the dramatic or at least the melodramatic quality of the story, therefore, the absence of the exotic charm of the humor, the language, and the folklore seems the only possible basis for a complaint that this novel is less interesting than earlier ones.

To defend Seraph against the unwarranted objection, however, is not to imply that the novel is Miss Hurston's most successful. Even though Miss Hurston structured the novel more competently than any other, she betrayed her intention by her thought, and she betrayed her ability by her tone. A writer who proposes a psychological study must do more than describe a behavior pattern and report or dramatize neurosis; he must interpret the relationship of the two in such a way that a reader recognizes that the action is a manifestation or a result of the emotional state. In other words, the author must comprehend psychological complexity sufficiently that he not only supplies an objective correlative but also demonstrates that it actually is a correlative. Because Miss Hurston was herself impulsive rather than rational and because she approached people intuitively rather than analytically, she failed to control her materials. (pp. 113-15)

Furthermore, [Miss Hurston] betrayed her talent by adopting a new tone. To write a best seller for the forties, she added sex and sensation to her usual fare. In her earlier works, by restrained emotion and detachment, she had made the griefs pathetic but bearable; in Seraph, however, she plunged readers into the deep and bitter emotions of a sick world. Doubtlessly, she proved to be a competent guide to that world. But since many other writers can guide such tours, it is regrettable that Miss Hurston did not restrict her tours to the world of the healthy.

Although an examination of her novels is the chief focus of this study, no consideration of Zora Neale Hurston would be complete without an appraisal of her work as folklorist. Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), as well as her autobiography, clearly evidence Zora Neale Hurston's talents as a reporter and her weaknesses as a scholar. (pp. 115-16)

Although Mules and Men is interesting, it is disappointingly superficial for the reader who desires more than entertainment. Miss Hurston repeatedly identified herself as an anthropologist, but there is no evidence of the scholarly procedures which would be expected from a formally trained anthropologist or researcher in folklore. Instead of classifying or analyzing tales, she merely reported them in the chronological order and the manner in which they had been told to her. Furthermore, she failed to ask or to answer essential questions. For instance, her internship as a witch doctor required her to prescribe charms and cures. Although a reader eagerly wishes to learn some results of her treatments, Miss Hurston dropped the matter after reciting the details of the prescriptions.

It cannot be said in her defense that Miss Hurston regarded the folklore with the eye of a novelist rather than a scholar. Although interested in the personalities of the storytellers, the idiom spoken by Afro-Americans, and the banter and the flirtation which accompany and encompass the storytelling sessions, she did not attempt to transform the folktale into art, as Joel Chandler Harris did with the Uncle Remus materials or as Charles Waddell Chesnutt did in "The Goophered Grapevine." Perhaps Miss Hurston neglected these matters because she was overly concerned with her major topic—Zora Neale Hurston…. Nevertheless, despite the superficiality which limits its scholarly importance, Mules and Men is an enjoyable work of competent journalism, which offers valuable insight into a class of people and a way of life.

Tell My Horse (1938) reflects even more disastrously Miss Hurston's regrettable inability to distinguish the important from the unimportant, the significant from the trivial. Although she had proposed a study of the voodoo of Haiti and the West Indies, she produced instead a travelogue of her experience, her reactions to the people, and her descriptions of the country. Such travelogues attain significance only if they have been prepared by political scientists or sociologists capable of evaluating their experiences. Miss Hurston not only lacked such training, but she also proved herself to be irritatingly naïve. (pp. 117-18)

Tell My Horse has value only in Miss Hurston's account of Jamaican and Haitian folktales and voodoo customs, which are more fascinating than those of Mules and Men because they are less familiar to American readers. Especially intriguing are the descriptions of the witch doctors and of Zombies (the living dead). Miss Hurston even included a photograph purported to be that of a Zombie. Tell My Horse reveals Miss Hurston's usual talent for gathering material, her skill in reporting it, and her characteristic inability to interpret it.

Because of her simple style, humor, and folklore, Zora Neale Hurston deserves more recognition than she ever earned. But, superficial and shallow in her artistic and social judgments, she became neither an impeccable raconteur nor a scholar. Always, she remained a wandering minstrel. It was eccentric but perhaps appropriate for her to return to Florida to take a job as a cook and maid for a white family and to die in poverty. She had not ended her days as she once had hoped—a farmer among the growing things she loved. Instead she had returned to the level of life which she proposed for her people. (pp. 119-20)

Darwin T. Turner, "Zora Neale Hurston: The Wandering Minstrel," in his In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity, Southern Illinois University Press, 1971, pp. 89-120.