Before Hurston tackled her first book-length project, she thought that the kind of story she wanted to write was not acceptable—to white publishers, to black male authors, to the established literary patterns of the day, and in sum, to the American public as both readers and writers. She records in her autobiography these feelings: “What I wanted to tell was a story about a man, and from what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject. My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color. … I was afraid to tell a story the way I wanted, or rather the way the story told itself to me.”¹ So, she reports, she waited. When the invitation came from Lippincott to send them for consideration a book-length manuscript for publication, Hurston wasted no time getting to the task. She plunged ahead—under the pressure of limited time—writing the kind of book that had earlier made her hesitate. When Lippincott accepted the manuscript and offered the $200 advance, Hurston reports a full-blown jubilation moment. Besides the desperate need she had for the money, this was her first book acceptance, and she had written it her way, listening to the voices that must have been as real to her as the parents who reared her. Lippincott editors did not chide her about the absence of the “Race Problem”; they published the book too quickly to have done so. Hurston knew then that her accepted work had broken a mold. On a deeper, more philosophical level, Hurston could easily have felt hope based in the reality of acceptance that a reading public was ready to move beyond the Race Problem, that maybe the time had come to dismiss double consciousness—not being permitted, ever, to forget skin color.

When the Nation's review appeared within the month after Jonah's Gourd Vine was published, Hurston had to have been bolstered by this important comment that supported her approach to telling the story: “It is refreshing also in that it does not deal with the relations of Negroes and white, but merely of men and women—whose skins, incidentally, are black—with each other.”² But Hurston has to notice as well that the anonymous, obviously white reviewer still makes a comment about race, not in regards to the content of the book but about the writer of the book: “A book about Negroes by a young colored woman, it has a freshness and confidence impossible to a white person writing of the same milieu.”³ If asked, Hurston would most likely prefer she be acknowledged as a successful writer, a writer who happened to be Negro. The same Nation reviewer, however, concludes with color-blind praise, for Miss Hurston has “enviable gifts of vitality and the bright, swift word”⁴—phrasing that evokes the spirit of several of the most well-known poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The New York Times also applauded Hurston's fictional debut, calling the book “without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race.”⁵ Reviewers joined with Hurston on her side of the argument about the Race Problem; these characters were appealing because they were first human beings, “confronting a complex of human problems with whatever grace and humor, intelligence and steadfastness they can muster,” and the other strength was, of course, Hurston's language skills—“rich, expressive and lacking in self-conscious artifice.”⁶ The Times Literary Supplement complimented her ability to avoid “the violence of many novels of Negro life.”⁷

The white establishment was singing Hurston's praises; that alone could cause jealousy among the elite male Negro writers, who were putting their talents to use pushing the Race Problem. Their Negro characters often lived in small worlds, confined in space and opportunity by a dominant racist white society dictating limited lives for Negroes. Hurston would hear about their complaints, but meanwhile, positive reviews in the most prestigious white publications had to be making her publisher happy.

As a result of Jonah's Gourd Vine, Hurston, never doubting her own talent, turned her attentions to Mules and Men—not because she wanted to keep the originality of her work in the public's eye, but simply because the book had been completed before she wrote the novel. Reviewers once again rose to their feet, calling the book “remarkable” and “invaluable.” Hurston was doing what had not been done before. These critics were reacting to her work, not making suggestions about how she ought to do it better or differently. She was leading them and had no need to make critical adjustments. The Saturday Review of Literature directed attention to her way with words: “Only an ability to write, a rare conjunction of the sense of the ridiculous and the sense of the dramatic, could have produced this remarkable collection of Negro folk tales and folk customs.” This reviewer is not sure, though, how much to trust what Hurston has done; he is not sure if all of it is “true,” but that matters less to him because it is so well done. He decides ultimately that the book is “satisfying” and if it is not all “true,” it is “valuable to current entertainment.”⁸

H. I. Brock, the New York Times reviewer is less convinced, less impressed by the hoodoo information. Not sure how to react to it, Brock places it behind his primary enthusiasm for the tales: “At the end you have a very fair idea of how the other color enjoys life as well as an amazing round-up of that color's very best stories in its very best manner—which is a match for any story-telling there is in the two qualities of luxuriant imagination and vivid and expressive language.”⁹ The New Republic sums up the value of Mules and Men thus: “It is a valuable picture of the life of the unsophisticated Negro and the small towns and backwoods of Florida.”¹⁰

Before reviewers could forget Jonah's Gourd Vine, Hurston was ready with Mules and Men. Two years later, Lippincott brought out her second novel, assuring the public that Hurston's writing strengths are many and that she does not repeat herself. Their Eyes Were Watching God received positive reviews from the white establishment, but the Negro male writers step forth to point out what they see as Hurston's problems. The often-quoted negative review from Richard Wright in New Masses takes Hurston to task for her novel that “carries no theme, no message, no thought.” Wright wants Hurston to stop seeing Negro life as “quaint,” which he thinks opens the door for whites to respond with a “piteous smile.” He does not feel that the novel is directed to “the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.”¹¹ Along with the sting of Wright comes what had to be an even more painful chiding from Alain Locke, her former mentor, who directs a personal question to Hurston in Opportunity: “When will the Negro novelist of maturity who knows how to tell a story convincingly,—which is Miss Hurston's cradle-gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?”¹² Locke joins Wright in the reminder that if one has the talent, then the duty is to the political agenda—never forget the Race Problem. When Wright wrote his review, he had yet to write the books that would secure his place in American literature—Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) and give him the title of leading Negro novelist of the 1940s.

Though Hurston was enraged by their comments, she did nothing to adjust her agenda. She had finished writing Their Eyes Were Watching God while she was collecting and studying voodoo in Haiti. It is logical, then, that her next work, for which Mules and Men had opened the door, would be the organization of her field notes into Tell My Horse. The New Republic, though brief, is positive—in exactly the way that would be offensive to the black male establishment: “Seeing African ceremonies with a sympathy that comes close to belief, Miss Hurston ferrets out what is reasonable in them without losing sight of either their drama or their esoteric beauty; mumbojumbo translated for Americans, but still accompanied by the beat of the tom-toms.”¹³ Harold Courlander writing for the Saturday Review of Literature gets to the heart of his concern: “Miss Hurston has an immense ability for catching the idiom of dialogue, of seeing the funniness of exaggeration, of recognizing the essence of a story. And yet, though these qualities do carry through at all times, there is a constant conflict between anthropological truth and tale-telling, between the obligation she feels to give the facts honestly and the attraction of … the ‘big old lies we tell when we're jus' sittin' around here on the store porch doin' nothin'.’”¹⁴ This conflict “between anthropological truth and tale-telling” was one of the concerns about Mules and Men. This had to be a problem that Hurston struggled with and could also be why she alternated between fiction and nonfiction. The slide had to be an easy one among hearing a story, recording the story, and writing up the story without the slightest bit of fabrication to alter the hearing for the sake of a better story. Hurston's nonfiction books both come with visuals—illustrations in Mules and Men and photographs in Tell My Horse. These photographs contribute to the authenticity of her work—though some were available to general tourists, according to Courlander, the ones Hurston took herself, Courlander sees as “more honest.”¹⁵ Being able to see a zombie, a person in a trance, a ceremonial dance gives credibility to Hurston's words.

The subject of Moses, Man of the Mountain, written on the cusp of her work in Haiti, is, once again, a logical undertaking for her next book. She returns to fiction, writing the book while waiting for Tell My Horse to appear. In Haiti she learned that “the highest god in the Haitian pantheon is Damballa Ouedo Ouedo Tocan Freda Dahomey and he is identified as Moses, the serpent god.”¹⁶ Hurston's interest in voodoo worship, magic, and the popularity of the Moses figure among the children of the African diaspora as “the fountain of mystic powers”¹⁷ makes Moses an intriguing subject for a new interpretation. Published in 1939, Hurston's book joined a number of other contemporary books on the subject of Moses, among them Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, biographies of Moses by Louis Untermeyer and Edmond Fleg, Werner Jansen's The Light of Egypt, and Louis Golding's two travel books, In the Steps of Moses the Conqueror and In the Steps of Moses the Lawgiver. Writing for Christian Century, Philip Slomovitz looks at Hurston's novel in the company of these other titles and is quick to point out what is distinctive about her contribution: “her brilliant study of the problem of emancipation, done as perhaps only a Negro could do it.” Hurston's Moses, he claims, knows the wisdom of keeping them in the wilderness until the slaves had all died and a new generation of free people had taken their places. Under adverse circumstances, it may have been too easy for the slaves to return to Pharaoh. This is not the story of the Jewish Moses, the lawgiver, but the story of the Negro Moses, the voodoo man¹⁸.

Louis Untermeyer, himself the author of a biography of Moses, reviewed the book for the Saturday Review of Literature. While he gives reference to his own work, he sees Hurston's approach as “arresting as it is fresh.” Though the Bible was obviously her “springboard,” Untermeyer realizes that Hurston's work reaches beyond that solitary text, to rabbinical literature, Josephus's apocryphal accounts, and others to “present the militant liberator from the point of view of the American Negro.” Hurston's publicity from Lippincott suggested a similarity of her novel with the popular Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures, which Untermeyer feels is unfair to both works, for Hurston's Moses “has a genre quality of its own. It is not a logically projected work, but it has a racial vitality, a dramatic intensity worthy of its gifted author.”¹⁹ The New York Times also had high praise for a book that its reviewer does not know exactly how to track or trace, suggesting that it might be “impossible to say to what extent Miss Hurston has woven many legends and interpretations into one and how often she is given, but presumably, only orally extant, tradition.” Nevertheless, he is convinced in the mix she has presented a narrative of “great power,” and the end product is “an exceptionally fine piece of work far off the beaten tracks of literature.”²⁰

In Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston entered yet another realm of little-traveled territory. White reviewers appeared to drown in her wake; they were often outside their comfort level, but truly original work often creates confusion, and sometimes doubt. When Hurston accepted the invitation to write her autobiography, reviewers found the territory more familiar. White reviewers launched a common effort to convince readers to give this book a chance—no matter that it was the life story of a Negro woman, it would still be worth their while. About the question of her race, Phil Stone, writing for the Saturday Review of Literature, believes Hurston “might have taken either of two attitudes from [her life] experiences; either an arrogant, self-made Negro attitude, or the conventional bitter and down-trodden one. She takes neither because she does not see that she was under any special disadvantage, and in the end she has no reason for bitterness. … The race-consciousness that spoils so much Negro literature is completely absent here.” Since Hurston does not spend time wishing she were someone other than who she is, Stone believes readers have something to learn from her story: “It is a fine, rich autobiography, and heartening to anyone, white, black, or tan.”²¹ A small Schreiber drawing of Hurston accompanies this review; it is the same drawing that will appear on the cover of the Saturday Review of Literature in February 1943, after the announcement that Hurston has won the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award for best book on race relations. The sketch does not particularly favor Hurston, who would have been over fifty years old when her autobiography was published

“Here is a thumping story” begins the review in the New York Times Book Review. Beatrice Sherman exhausts herself praising Hurston's forthright honesty and plucky stands. She, like Stone, seems amazed that Hurston does not appear to be disappointed she was born Negro, and is convinced that anyone could profit from Hurston's story: “Her story is an encouraging and enjoyable one for any member of the human race. Any race might well be proud to have more members of the caliber and stamina of Zora Neale Hurston.”²² In the brief mention afforded the book by the New Yorker, this reviewer dispenses with pleas to read and suggests subtly that Hurston knows more than a good many people: “Warm, witty, imaginative, and down-to-earth by turns, this is a rich and winning book by one of our few genuine, Grade A folk writers. Seems naïve here and there, but it probably isn't.”²³

Hurston's last published book, Seraph on the Suwanee, did not appear until 1948, and by this time Lippincott was not the publisher. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings introduced her to the people at Charles Scribner's, who ultimately published Seraph on the Suwanee. True to form, Hurston went from nonfiction back to fiction, but this time, the novel's central characters are white Florida crackers, poor whites who knew the physical labor of western Florida's turpentine camps, central Florida's citrus picking industry, and life on the Atlantic coast's shrimp boats. Depending on the reviewer, the “seraph” of the title could be Jim Meserve who saves his wife Arvay, or it could be Arvay who saves herself, while also making a significant contribution to the town of her childhood, Sawley, one of Hurston's few uses of a fictional geographic name. Because earlier reviewers of Hurston's other books had made much ado about how white readers would enjoy her work, even though the characters are Negro, one might expect to find attention placed on a Negro writer using white characters as the focus of her book. But such is not the case. Race is not mentioned at all. The substance of the reviews is the action of the text itself. When it comes time to sum up the rest of Hurston's work, the Saturday Review does it this way: “All of Hurston's fiction has had warmth of feeling, a happy combination of lustiness and tenderness, that gives it an appeal too often missing from much of the day's bloodless writing, which is sexless in spite of its frequently overpowering sexiness.”²⁴ At long last, this reviewer appears to be color blind, though black characters, who have strong supporting roles in helping the young Meserve couple, are not mentioned. When the characters are white, white reviewers focus on their actions and development as characters. The stuff of the book is the subject of the review; whereas in the earlier six books, the stuff of the review is also the race of the writer and the race of the characters.

Two years after Seraph on the Suwanee was published, Hurston wrote “What White Publishers Won't Print.” In this essay, she revisits old territory, old concerns, and asks intriguing questions: Why is there a public lack of interest in romantic stories about upper class non-Anglo-Saxons? In her comments, she claims it is because Anglo-Saxons see people different from themselves as “uncomplicated stereotypes”; therefore, it is difficult for them to imagine these “others” have feelings and reactions similar to their own. Racial tension is understandable for the Anglo-Saxons, but not the inner life of Negroes, who struggle daily with human problems. By the time Hurston published this piece, she knew that her glorious run with Lippincott had ended and that her books were already out of print and hard to find. She believed that “the average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America.” If literature is to hold a mirror up to nature, then, she posits, clearly something huge is missing in the reflection of the country: “With only the fractional “exceptional” and the “quaint” portrayed, a true picture of Negro life in America cannot be. A great principle of national art has been violated. Hurston calls for light, but she does so in the pages of a 1950 Negro Digest.

Notes

1. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 713.

2. Review of Jonah's Gourd Vine, Nation 138 (13 June 1934): 683.

3. Review of Jonah's Gourd Vine, Nation 138 (13 June 1934): 683.

4. Review of Jonah's Gourd Vine, Nation 138 (13 June 1934): 684.

5. Margaret Wallace, “Real Negro People,” New York Times Book Review (6 May 1934): 6.

6. Wallace, pp. 6, 7.

7. Review of Jonah's Gourd Vine, Times Literary Supplement (18 October 1934): 717.

8. Jonathan Daniels, “Black Magic and Dark Laughter,” Saturday Review of Literature 12 (19 October 1935): 12.

9. H. I. Brock, “The Full, True Flavor of Life in a Negro Community,” New York Times Book Review (10 November 1935): 4.

10. Henry Lee Moon, “Big Old Lies,” New Republic 85 (11 December 1935): 142.

11. Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” New Masses 25 (5 October 1937): 22, 25.

12. Alain Locke, review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Opportunity 16 (January 1938): 10.

13. Harold Courlander, “Witchcraft in the Caribbean Islands,” Saturday Review of Literature 18 (15 October 1938): 7.

14. Courlander, p. 7.

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

16. Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, p. xxiv.

17. Philip Slomovitz, “The Negro's Moses,” Christian Century 56 (6 December 1939): 1504.

18. Louis Untermeyer, “Old Testament Voodoo,” Saturday Review of Literature 21 (11 November 1939): 11.

19. Percy Hutchison, “Led His People Free,” New York Times Book Review (9 November 1939): 21.

20. Phil Stone, “Zora Hurston Sums Up,” Saturday Review of Literature 25 (28 November 1942): 7.

21. Beatrice Sherman, “Zora Hurston's Story,” New York Times Book Review (29 November 1942): 44.

22. Review of Dust Tracks on a Road, New Yorker 18 (14 November 1942): 79.

23. Herschel Brickell, “A Woman Saved,” Saturday Review of Literature 31 (6 November 1948): 19.

24. Zora Neale Hurston, “What White Publishers Won't Print,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, pp. 950-5.