Hurston was fed by many springs. She possessed an exuberance about and for life that is reflected in her correspondence, her autobiography, and her other published prose. She brought to the writing task a multi-faceted approach, employing various branches of her intellectual studies, spiritual pursuits, and emotional entanglements. Writing exclusively in and committing to one genre would have been impossible for her, and whichever genre she happened to be in at the moment seemed to fill her creative energies for the time being.

Hurston's usual practice was to handwrite in pencil on unlined paper the manuscripts for her book-length works. Surprisingly, Hurston's original manuscripts indicate very little change of mind, as evidenced by few crossovers, rewritten sections, or erasures. She also wrote quickly for the most part—finishing Jonah's Gourd Vine in three months and Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks. The speed with which she produced the five books she started, completed, and published in the 1930s—May 1934, October 1935, September 1937, October 1938, and November 1939—her most productive decade, in the midst of the country's often desperate days of the Great Depression, is nothing short of astonishing. Hurston never had the luxury of leisure time, and she often somehow managed to sliver time from one activity and apply it in a concentrated effort to complete a writing project. Also, Hurston kept ideas in her head, working them out in her mind sometimes years before she set about the task of writing them down.

Techniques that often occur in Hurston's writing include her use of Florida geography, weather, and people; family stories; religious/biblical references; folklore-collecting activities in the form of tales, sermons, games, and rituals; the use of two voices, moving from an articulate and often lyrical narrator to the language of authentic black dialect; and figures of speech, particularly rich in metaphor, simile, and personification.

FLORIDA GEOGRAPHY

Three of Hurston's novels—Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Seraph on the Suwanee—and Mules and Men, her first collection of folktales, along with much of Dust Tracks on a Road, are all set in Florida, and, as her biographer Robert Hemenway describes her knowledge of the state, it is as though she has “the map of Florida on her tongue.”¹ Not only does she use the well-known larger cities—Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando, West Palm Beach, and Tallahassee—but smaller towns, occupying the smallest font size on any map, if, indeed, on a map at all—Eatonville, Belle Glade, Sanford, and Lake City, for example. Sawley and Citrabelle of her last novel appear to be the only fictional names she chooses for places, but she still remains true to authentic Florida descriptions.

Hurston knows her flora and fauna. She fills her pages with elderberries and mulberry trees. She goes at length into descriptions of the citrus industry, and fruit-picking in Seraph on the Suwanee and bean-growing on the muck in Their Eyes. She does for Florida geography what Willa Cather does for the Nebraska countryside. To see the muck after reading of Janie and Tea Cake's time there is to see it really for the second time; the traveler knows what to expect, and time has not changed the place or the spirit of its people. As pear blossoms wait to be pollinated by bees and the shade of mulberry trees become the place of sexual encounters, Hurston takes Florida's nature and uses it symbolically, matching her characters' development—in this case, Janie's and Arvay's—to the offering of the place. The smells produced by Florida's plant life become a way that Hurston shows characters settling in, finding home: “Lucy sniffed sweet air laden with night-blooming jasmine and wished that she had been born in this climate. She seemed to herself to be coming home. This was where she was meant to be. The warmth, the foliage, the fruits all seemed right and as God meant her to be surrounded. The smell of ripe guavas was new and alluring but somehow did not seem strange.”²

Snakes, lightning bugs, and alligators make their way into her language. For readers not familiar first-hand with characteristics instinctive to Hurston's animal choices, she offers ample explanation without overstatement: in a disagreement between Arvay and Jim in Seraph, Arvay's “resolutions against Jim Meserve were just like the lightning-bugs holding a convention. They met at night and made scorning speeches against the sun and swore to do away with it and light up the world themselves. But the sun came up the next morning and they all went under the leaves and owned up that the sun was boss-man in the world. Well, she would hold out until Jim came and carried her back across that hall by main force, which he did at midnight.”³

Hurston uses examples of Florida's weather as well—its heat, its light rain, its bug-filled, humid nights, and most noticeably its hurricanes. The hurricane that becomes a pivotal turning point in the plot of Their Eyes is described in its full fury. From the earliest hints of a brewing storm—“Morning came without motion. The winds, to the tiniest, lisping baby breath had left the earth. Even before the sun gave light, dead day was creeping from bush to bush watching man”⁴—to those things living and dead that appear in the collected raging waters of nature's power. No one lives in Florida without feeling the impact of the annual hurricane season and Hurston's detailed depiction of the tempest that wreaks havoc in the muck evokes powerfully the horrifying event itself.

FAMILY STORIES

In Hurston's early short stories, and most notably in Jonah's Gourd Vine, she tells the stories of her family. Names, places, occupations, personality traits, and physical descriptions are accurately recorded. Family serves not only as the inspiration for her characters but also as a means for Hurston to work out her own thoughts and feelings about her parents in this first novel. Though she clearly sides with Lucy Potts in Jonah's Gourd Vine, John Pearson is not without his redeeming qualities and talents. Hurston lost her father in a car collision with a train. She re-creates the event in her novel, causing her to think carefully about her own father's demise: “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.”⁵ In this line, Hurston has to be thinking not of a human being, least of all her father, but of an animal, perhaps the twitch of a frog she may have dismembered during childhood days at the lake, or the last flop of a fish out of water, as Hurston herself was an ardent fisher. The impact of the train's engine against the frail body of an automobile and the smaller human person it carried, she could imagine, would make his foot twitch.

Hurston never hesitated to use her own experiences—both as child and adult—in her writing. The inspiration for Tea Cake was a young lover in her own life, one she calls in her autobiography “the perfect man, … the real thing.”⁶ And the length of the relationship between Janie and Tea Cake—less than two years—would exceed the length of the man in her own life. Peaceful moments in all her books when the character is at one with nature and himself or herself correspond to Hurston's own sense of peace that she found—always in Florida, particularly in Eau Gallie, happily engaged in the planting of a garden, time for reading and reflecting, or writing, assigning to a character that center of peace, when the press of money troubles was not upon her, she was able to find in some quiet little spot.

RELIGIOUS/BIBLICAL REFERENCES

As the child of a Baptist preacher talented enough to make services hum, Hurston lived in a world where to dip into the Bible for allusions and role models to use as guides for everyday living must have been a common practice. Hurston's characters—major and minor—appear to have more than a passing acquaintance with their Bibles. For example, when Arvay does not know what to do about Jim, she “crept into the Bible and pulled down the lid. She made herself into parables and identified herself with Hannah before the conception of Samuel, and with Hagar, driven out into the desert by Abraham, and other sorrowful women.”⁷ Even wrong-headedly, local townsfolk in Their Eyes dip into the Bible to attempt to show they know more than they actually do. At the town meeting, Tony Taylor's speech is cut short because he does not know that to show love between a couple, it is necessary, according to another person in the listening group, to make a reference to “Isaac and Rebecca at de well,” because “it was sort of pitiful for Tony not to know he couldn't make a speech without saying that.”⁸

Biblical characters are also used to express something disconnected from the Bible, so that the expression comments indirectly on the importance or relevance of the events of Hurston's plots. In these cases Hurston assumes a reader's knowledge of the Bible. For example, when Hurston announces the hurricane, she says, “Gabriel was playing the deep tones in the center of the drum.”⁹ Gabriel is the one who announced the birth of John the Baptist to Zachariah and Elizabeth, and he is the one who announces to Mary that she will be the mother of Jesus. When Gabriel talks, Hurston assumes that people know to listen. He is no small messenger and this is going to be no small storm. Further, he is not beating on the edge of the drum, as the human Stew Beef, in an analogy of what the world sounded like on the previous evening. Hurston moves to Gabriel, one of the seven archangels of God. Gabriel's message, too, comes from the center, the very purest, deepest sound. And early in the relationship, after Janie and Tea Cake go fishing, have their meal together, and then try to figure each other out, Janie whirls “around and for the space of a thought she was lit up like a transfiguration.”¹⁰ Hurston expects her readers to know she is alluding to the change in the appearance of Jesus on the mountain, where those watching, according to Matthew, saw Jesus' face shine as the sun and his clothing become as white as the light. Thus, Janie's momentary glow is no ordinary brightness, and her deepening relationship with Tea Cake is clearly meant to be differentiated from those earlier relationships with Logan Killicks and Joe Starks.

The titles of all her novels have religious overtones, if not overt references to the Bible or its people. The gourd vine that offers shade to Jonah in Jonah's Gourd Vine is also cut down by a worm the first night. The title is ambiguous, with rich possibilities for interpreting either John or Lucy as the gourd vine. God appears in the title of Their Eyes Were Watching God, again with profoundly important reverberations about who has control of this world. Hurston's third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, retells and layers the biblical story of Moses. Knowing the biblical story well is the baseline for appreciating the multiplicity of interpretations that Hurston elucidates in the complex character of Moses. Finally, Seraph on the Suwanee suggests that the reader consider the angelic possibilities that will emerge in the female protagonist. Her research on Herod, which occupied Hurston's last years with a consuming passion, convinced her that Herod was no would-be Jesus-killer and that this depiction of him was mistaken and misdirected. She had so hoped to offer the world her position, and restore Herod to what she considered his rightful place. Hurston's use of the Bible—its people and its history—was paramount in her approach to writing.

FOLKLORE ACTIVITIES

Though Hurston published some short stories and a play before she entered Barnard, met Franz Boas, and changed her major to anthropology, her scientific training in folklore collecting helped her in her fiction writing. Her collecting trips began in the late 1920s and continued through the 1930s, when Hurston was producing the first three of her novels. While Hurston had grown up hearing the front-porch dwellers of Eatonville tell their stories, the systematic collecting and the objective distance she was able to apply to working with the material as she organized and categorized it for her purposes of turning her notes into academic articles, Mules and Men, and Tell My Horse enabled her to draw on a larger supply of material.

In her first three novels, she uses her knowledge of hoodoo and spells. After Lucy Potts dies, John Pearson finds himself married to Hattie Tyson; it is years before he wakes one day to understand that he has been living under a spell, and he needs someone else to tell him: “Dat damn 'oman you got b'lieves in all kinds uh roots and conjure. She been feedin' you outa her body fuh years. Go home now whilst she's off syndicatin' wid her gang—and rip open de mattress on yo' bed, de pillow ticks, de bolsters, dig 'round de door-steps in front de gate and look and see ain't some uh yo' draws and shirt-tails got pieces cut offa 'em.”¹¹ John does as he is told, and he finds the proof. Hurston's account of where to look and the contents of hidden bags in the yard are accurately depicted because of her own studies. She, herself, was initiated into the practice of hoodoo in New Orleans, where she reports that for three days her body was silent and “fasting while [her] spirit went wherever spirits must go that seek answers never given to men as men.”¹² Hattie pays visits to An' Dangie Dewoe to get help in wooing John, and Hurston describes carefully the altar, the candles, the war water, the coffin, right down to the final immersion of An' Dangie herself into the experience: “When all was done at the altar she rubbed her hands and forehead with war powder, put the catbone in her mouth, and laid herself down in the red coffin facing the altar and went into the spirit.”¹³ Hurston explains the significance of the catbone in Mules and Men.¹⁴

Late in his relationship with Janie, Joe Starks takes to visiting root-doctors, in hopes of making his body appear as it once was, but Janie is the voice of reason: “She was sorry about the root-doctor because she feared that Joe was depending on the scoundrel to make him well when what he needed was a doctor, a good one.”¹⁵ No apologies are offered, however, in Hurston's third novel, in which she takes on Moses and develops his character as the “finest hoodoo man in the world.”¹⁶ She completed this novel after she spent extended time in Haiti, compiled her work there into Tell My Horse, and had a clear sense of Damballah, the chief hoodoo god of Rada, the “good” gods which originated in Dahomey. As Hurston points out in Tell My Horse, “all over Haiti it is well established that Damballah is identified as Moses, whose symbol was the serpent.”¹⁷

In addition to hoodoo and its rituals, Hurston also plays with the lighter side of tale-telling, and especially so in Their Eyes. The townspeople carry on with such activities as courting games, mule baiting, services for a dead mule, and an assortment of children's games. Hurston used her folklore knowledge to bring both mystery and light-hearted laughter to her fiction.

TWO VOICES AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

One of Hurston's greatest talents is her ability to move comfortably from the articulate, lyrical music of her narrators to the authentic sounds of the black voice, ranging from knee-slapping humor to deep wisdom about how one ought to live life. In the final chapter of Their Eyes, the narrator delivers fragments that are steeped in figures of speech, remaining haunting and beautiful, yet stopping short of being excessive: “The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing.”¹⁸ In less than fifty words, Hurston's fragments appear to sum up the story in prose poetry. She begins with a synecdoche, letting the “gun” and the “bloody body” stand for that “meanest moment of eternity,” when Janie pulled the trigger and killed Tea Cake¹⁹ Hurston uses a series of alliterative couplings—“bloody body,” courthouse came … commenced,” “sob … sigh … singing … sobbing”—and doubles their function by employing personification in “courthouse came,” and using paradox in drawing together and repeating the singing and sobbing, which move from the short monosyllabic “sob” and “sigh,” as though because of this “meanest moment of eternity,” all Janie could possibly manage is the truncated “sob” that is in time likely to move on to the progressive, longer lasting “singing and sobbing.” Janie's life, the text promises, will not move beyond some kind of presence of Tea Cake, with her always.

In her own black voice, several paragraphs ahead of the triumphant lyrical burst, Janie reports to Pheoby, with deep wisdom, what she has learned: “Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.”²⁰ Just before this, Hurston shows how Pheoby herself is capable of tossing in to her response the humorous, hyperbolic remark: “Lawd! … Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie.”²¹ Within the course of a few paragraphs in the close of this novel, Hurston travels from voice to voice, situated in two characters—Pheoby with no interior thoughts, and Janie represented by both an outside voice and an inside series of thoughts. The examples on these pages represent Hurston's language prowess as she moves the reader from the literally ridiculous to the sublime. The reader laughs with Pheoby's height expansion and sobers up with Janie's lyrical thinking about life in the aftermath of Tea Cake's corporeal presence.

Notes

1. Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 90.

2. Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), p. 109.

3. Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (New York: HarperPerennial Classics, 1991).

4. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998), p. 155.

5. Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine, p. 200.

6. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writing, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 751.

7. Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee, p. 99.

8. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 42.

9. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 158.

10. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

11. Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Wine.

12. Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine, p. 126.

13. Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine.

14. Hurston, Mules and Men, pp. 207-8.

15. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 82.

16. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), p. 114.

17. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writing, p. 378.

18. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 192.

19. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 184.

20. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 192.

21. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, p. 192.