Zora Neale Hurston's Inconvenient Individualism

The author of their eyes were watching god defies easy political categorization.

- By Damon Root

IN 1937 THE left-wing magazine New Masses ran a negative review of Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. “Miss Hurston can write,” allowed Richard Wright, whose own landmark novel, Native Son, would appear three years later. But her writing, he said, wallowed “in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression.” Hurston’s novel “is not addressed to the Negro,” Wright asserted, “but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” In effect, Wright accused Hurston of selling out the race by pandering to whites.

Wright could not have been more wrong. Hurston, a former student of the famed Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, had conducted extensive fieldwork throughout the American South, carefully noting (and delighting in) the various black cultures and dialects she encountered. That real-world language permeates her remarkable novel, nestled alongside sundry elements drawn from her own compelling life story, including her Southern upbringing, failed marriages, and searing love affair with a younger man. By attacking Their Eyes Were Watching God, Wright had actually disparaged the authentic, individualistic black voices that Hurston worked so hard to amplify.

Some of Hurston’s critics are still missing the point. The novelist Maya Angelou once complained that Hurston’s 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road