Every Tongue Got to Confess

The estate of Zora Neale Hurston is deeply grateful for the contributions of John Edgar Wideman and Dr. Carla Kaplan to this publishing event.

We also thank our editor Julia Serebrinsky, our publisher Cathy Hemming, our agent Victoria Sanders, and our attorney Robert Youdelman who all work daily to support the literary legacy of Zora Neale Hurston.

Lastly, we thank those whose efforts past and present have been a part of Zora Neale Hurston’s resurgence. Among them are: Robert Hemenway, Alice Walker, the folks at the MLA, Virginia Stanley, Jennifer Hart, Diane Burrowes and Susan Weinberg at HarperCollins Publishers, special friends of the estate Imani Wilson and Kristy Anderson, and all the teachers and librarians everywhere who introduce new readers to Zora every day.

With the example of her vibrant, poetic style Zora Neale Hurston reminded me, instructed me that the language of fiction must never become inert, that the writer at his or her desk, page by page, line by line, word by word should animate the text, attempt to make it speak as the best storytellers speak. In her fiction, and collections of African-American narratives, Hurston provides models of good old-time tale-telling sessions. With the resources of written language, she seeks to recover, uncover, discover the techniques oral bards employed to enchant and teach their audiences. Like African-American instrumental jazz, Hurston’s writing imitates the human voice. At the bottom in the gut of jazz if you listen closely you can hear—no matter how complexly, obliquely, mysteriously stylized—somebody talking, crying, growling, singing, farting, praying, stomping, voicing in all those modes through which our bodies communicate some tale about how it feels to be here on earth or leaving, or about the sweet pain of hanging on between the coming and going.

In the spring of 1968 a group of African-American students arrived at my University of Pennsylvania Department of English office and asked if I would offer a class in Black Literature. I
responded in a predictable fashion, given my education, social conditioning, and status as the only tenure-track assistant professor of color in the entire College of Arts and Sciences. No, thank you, I said, citing various reasons for declining—my already crowded academic schedule, my need to keep time free for fiction writing, family obligations, and the clincher—African-American literature was not my “field.” The exchange lasted only five or ten minutes and I remember being vaguely satisfied with myself for smoothly, quickly marshaling reasonable arguments for refusing the students’ request, but before the office door closed behind them, I also sensed something awful had occurred. Something much more significant than wriggling out fairly gracefully from one more demand on my already stressed time, something slightly incriminating, perhaps even shameful.

I’d watched the students’ eyes watching me during my brisk, precise dismissal of their proposal. I’d seen the cloud, the almost instantaneous dulling and turning away and shrinking inward of the students’ eyes speaking a painful truth: I had not simply said no to a course, I’d said no to them, to who they were, who I was in my little cubicle in Bennett Hall, to the beleaguered island of us, our collective endeavor to make sense of the treacherous currents that had brought us to an Ivy League university and also threatened daily to wipe out the small footholds and handholds we fashioned to survive there.

To cut one part of a long story short, by the next day I’d changed my mind, and I did teach a Black Literature course the following semester.

No white people in my office on that spring day in 1968. On the other hand, visualizing the presence of some sweaty, ham-fisted, Caucasian version of John Henry, the steel-driving man, hammering iron wedges between the students and me, incarcerating us behind bars as invisible as he was, clarifies the encounter. Why weren’t novels and poems by Americans of African descent being taught at the university? Why were so
few of us attending and almost none of us teaching there? What rationales and agendas were served by dispensing knowledge through arbitrary, territorial “fields”? Why had the training I’d received in the so-called “best” schools alienated me from my particular cultural roots and brainwashed me into believing in some objective, universal, standard brand of culture and art—essentialist, hierarchical classifications of knowledge—that doomed people like me to marginality on the campus and worse, consigned the vast majority of us who never reach college to a stigmatized, surplus underclass.

Yes, unpacking the issues above would surely be a long story, one I’ve undertaken to tell in thirty years of fiction and essay. So, back to the shorter story. The class I initiated partly, I admit, to assuage my guilt, to pay dues, to erase the cloud of disappointment I’ve never forgotten in the students’ eyes. It pains me all these years later, since the conditions brewing the cloud’s ugly presence remain in place, and the scene may be replicating itself, different office, different university and victims today. But the class, let’s stick to my first African-American Literature class that turned out to be a gift from the students to me rather than my offering to them, the class that leads back to Zora Neale Hurston and this folklore collection.

At the end of the first trial run of the class an appreciative student handed me
The Bluest Eye
and said, Thank you for the course, Professor Wideman. Isabel Stewart, since she was a sweet, polite, subtle young woman and didn’t wish to undercut an expression of gratitude by mixing it with other, more complicated motives, didn’t add, You really must teach this wonderful novel, especially since you saw fit to include only one work by a female writer in your syllabus.

The one work was
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. I had discovered it when I began teaching myself what my formal education had neglected. At the time African-American writing was dominated by males and framed intellectually by a reductive, apologetic, separate-but-equal mentality whose major critical
project seemed to be asserting the point: we too have written and do write and some of our stuff deserves inclusion in the mainstream.

By coincidence the two female writers who in separate ways—one by her presence, the other by her absence—were part of my first course would help transform African-American literary studies. Toni Morrison—as writer-editor and Nobel laureate—became point person of a band of awesomely talented women who would precipitate a flip-flop in African-American letters so that women today, for better or worse, dominate the field as much as men did thirty years ago. Zora Neale Hurston’s representation of the folk voice in her anthropological work, autobiography and fiction expanded the idea of what counts as literature, reframing the relationship between spoken and written verbal art, high versus low culture, affirming folk voices, female voices. Hurston foregrounds creolized language and culture in her fiction and nonfiction, dramatizing vernacular ways of speaking that are so independent, dynamic, self-assertive and expressive they cross over, challenge and transform mainstream dialects. Creole languages refuse to remain standing, hat in hand at the back door as segregated, second-class, passive aspirants for marginal inclusion within the framework of somebody else’s literary aesthetic.

Though Africanized vernaculars of the rural American South are not separate languages like the Creole of Haiti or Martinique, they are distinctively different speech varieties marked by systematic linguistic structures common to Creoles. The
difference
of these Africanized vernaculars is complicated by what could be called their “unwritability,” their active resistance to being captured in print.

All spoken language of course resists exact phonetic inscription. But Creole’s stubborn survivalist orality, its self-preserving instinct to never stand still, to stay a step ahead, a step away, the political challenge inherent in its form and function, increases the difficulty of rendering it on the page.

The difference of vernacular speech has been represented at one extreme by blackface minstrelsy and Hollywood’s perpetuation of that fiction in the porn of race showcasing for the viewer’s gaze deviant clowns and outlaws whose comic, obscene, violent speech (often the embodied fantasies of white scriptwriters) stands as a barely intelligible mangling of the master tongue. At the opposite end of the spectrum of imitation is a self-aware, vital, independent, creative community that speaks in Hurston’s stories and the African-American narratives she gathered for this collection: “I seen it so dry the fish came swimming up the road in dust.”

How speech is represented in writing raises more than questions of aesthetics. An ongoing struggle for authority and domination is present in any speech situation interfacing former slaves with former masters, minority with majority culture, spoken with written. Such interfaces bristle with extralinguistic tensions that condition and usually diminish mutual intelligibility. Put in another way, any written form of creolized language exposes the site, evidence and necessity of struggle, mirrors America’s deeply seated refusal to acknowledge its Creole identity.

Traceable in court transcriptions of African testimony (see the Salem witch trials) and eighteenth-century comic drama, then refined and conventionalized by a Plantation school of highly popular nineteenth-century white writers (Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler Harris, George Washington Cable), the so-called “eye dialects’ ” organized graphic signs such as italics, apostrophes, underlining, quotation marks, misspellings
tuh, gwine, dere, dem
along with tortured syntax, malapropisms, elisions, comic orthography, signifying, Joycean portmanteau words to
show
the sound of Black vernacular. Whatever else the mediating visualized scrim of eye dialect accomplished by its alleged rendering of Africanized speech, inevitably, given the means employed, it also suggested ignorant, illiterate southern darkies, a consequence bemoaned by African-American novelist Charles Waddell Chestnut. Ironically, because he used a conventional version of eye dialect (very similar to the look Hurston chooses for the voices of these Gulf narratives), his book
The Marrow of Tradition
was rejected out of hand by African-American students in my first Black Literature class. They found Chestnut’s picturing of Black speech both embarrassing and taxing to decipher. Whether or not readers can see through the veil of eye dialects’ incriminating constructions and ignore or resist the prejudice they embody remains an open question. Even here in these narratives.

So what does all the above tell us about reading this collection?

“Oral literature” is an oxymoron. Creole speech is approximated, at best, by any form of written transcription. In this context it is useful to read these folk-tales from the Gulf States as you would foreign poetry translated into English, grateful for a window into another culture, yet always keeping in mind that what you’re consuming is vastly distanced from the original. Translation destroys and displaces as much as it restores and renders available. In the case of these oral narratives, some
major missing dimensions are the immediacy and sensuousness of face-to-face encounter, the spontaneous improvisation of call and response, choral repetition and echo, the voice played as a musical instrument, the kinesics of the speaker.

Translations ask us to forget as well as imagine an original. The nature of this forgetting varies depending on the theory of translation. The inevitable awkwardness of a literal rendering, emphasizing ideas and meaning, asks the reader to forget the evocative sonorities of rhythm and rhyme or rather recall their presence in the original as a kind of ennobling excuse for what often appears on the page as a fairly bare-bones, skimpy transmission of thought. Freer translations posit themselves as admirable objects of consideration within the literary tradition of the language into which they have been kidnapped, and to that extent ask readers to forget the original, except for acknowledging the original’s status as a distant relative or celebrated ancestor.

So as your eyes read these folk narratives remember and forget selectively, judiciously, in order to enhance your enjoyment, your understanding of the particular species of verbal art they manifest. Imagine the situations in which these speech acts occur, the participants’ multicolored voices and faces, the eloquence of nonverbal special effects employed to elaborate and transmit the text. Recall a front stoop, juke joint, funeral, wedding, barbershop, kitchen: the music, noise, communal energy and release. Forget for a while our learned habit of privileging the written over the oral, the mainstream language’s hegemony over its competitors when we think “literature.” Listen as well as read. Dream. Participate the way you do when you allow a song to transport you, all kinds of songs from hip-hop rap to Bach to Monk, each bearing its different history of sounds and silences.

What’s offered in this volume is finally a way of viewing the world, a version of reality constructed by language that validates a worldview, and vice versa, a view that legitimizes a language.
Hurston is not curating a museum of odd, humorous negroisms. She’s updating by looking backward, forward, all around, the continuous presence in America of an Africanized language that’s still spoken, still going strong today. A language articulating an Africanized vision of reality: unsentimental, humorous, pantheistic, robustly visceral, syncretic, blending tradition and innovation, rooted in the body’s immediate experience of pleasure and pain yet also cognizant of a long view, the slow, possibly just arc of time, the tribal as well as individual destiny.

Because Hurston is a product of that world, its language describes her and
is
her. As folklore collector she’s not merely an outsider looking in, taking data away. She’s both writer and subject, an insider, a cultural informant engaging in self-interrogation.

The doubleness of Hurston’s stance as self-conscious subject of her writing requires the reader also to realign herself or himself. Any writer who chooses to break away, to cross over and occupy liminal turf between radically different linguistic modes, between two antagonistic ways of perceiving and naming the world, takes a great risk of betraying the integrity of his first cultural community and language. Breaking away can lead to assuming the role of guide and reporter (panderer) objectifying, introducing the exotic, erotic other to a reader’s gaze. When she positions herself firmly, insistently within the language of her Africanized culture and her goal is self-knowledge, self-gratification as she recalls, reconstitutes, the pleasures of speaking and acting within the culture, Hurston accomplishes crossover with minimal damage to integrity. Her crossings are expressed through language and customs she shares with the people she interviews and invents. Hurston displays otherness to a perceptive reader not by packaging and delivering it as a commodity C.O.D. to the reader, but by remembering who she was, who she is, by listening, respecting, by staring clear-eyed at her self, her many selves past, future and present in the primal language, the language of feeling they speak.