Seers and seraphim: a journalistic explanation of Zora Neale Hurston’s final novel (original) (raw)

As a working musician, I appreciated Alice Walker's story about Bessie Smith calling on two famous white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. As Smith "entered, never having seen Carl or Fania Van Vechten before…, Fania…flung herself into Bessie's arms. Bessie knocked her flat, exclaiming over a glass of straight gin: 'I never heard of such shit!'" i Like Smith, Walker notes, Zora Neale Hurston undoubtedly "knew shit when she saw it…Yet she never knocked anyone flat for having the audacity to patronize her… The difference between Hurston and Smith? One's work-singing, to which one could dance or make lovesupported her. The other's work-writing down unwritten doings and sayings of a culture nobody else seemed to give a damn about, except to wish it would more speedily conform to white, middle-class standards-did not." ii In fact, one of Huston's most underrated protagonists-a desperately poor and uneducated white woman uneasily fitting into the middle classes-would certainly have never darkened the portals of the Van Vechten home. So even though Zora Neale Hurston might have knocked me flat for presuming to speak on behalf of her creation, I have come here today to make a case for reconsidering her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee. For support, I turn to Hurston's reporting on world events during the years leading up to her final novel and on local events afterwards. No one can doubt the need for making such a case. During her "later years," writes Walker, Hurston "became frightened of the life she had always dared bravely before. Her work, too, became reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid. This is especially true of her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, which is not even about black people, which is no crime, but is about white people who are bores, which is." iii Another critic, Mary Helen Washington, asks, "How did this celebrant of black folk culture become, in later years, a right-wing Republican, publicly supporting a staunch segregationist and opposing the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision?" (125). Hurston knew, however, that promises from the political left had little credibility in the African American community. Architects of the New Deal paid little more than lip service to integration. Moreover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt capped his presidency by sending segregated forces to fight Fascism and sending US citizens with Japanese surnames to concentration camps. By the final decades of Hurston's life, when integration finally became a matter of serious interest to Liberals, commentators such as Duke Ellington worried that African American institutions would