Zora Neale Hurston: A Minority of One, the Individual

     

Any exposition of Zora Neale Hurston’s political opinions must begin with the caution that she was not a systematic thinker on politics and certainly not a joiner, per se, of any institution or philosophical school of thought. As she put it, “I do not have much of a herd instinct. . . . [L]et me be the shepherd my ownself.” (“Seeing the World As It Is,” Dust Tracks on a Road, 794) With this caveat in mind, what follows presents some gleanings of her regarding matters of race and politics drawn from the non-fiction prose of a literary artist.

In her most famous essay, “How It Feels to be Colored Me” (1928), Hurston observed, “Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong, regardless of a little pigmentation more or less” (827). What is typically described as a “realist” account of life, one devoid of high ideals and moral expectations, Hurston presents as an invitation to assert oneself regardless of the obstacles that one happens to face. Applied to the crucible of America’s racial divide, Hurston rejects “the sobbing school of Negro-hood” in favor of seeing the world as her proverbial oyster: “No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” Were the possibilities of her self-improvement and prosperity constrained by racial bigotry? To be sure, but she chose to seek those areas of the world and life in general where she could enjoy herself and the company of those who recognized her worth. “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company!” (829)

Hurston explains that her race was just one of those elements of her identity that at times actually heightened her enjoyment of life, like when she felt “so colored” at a jazz club in contrast with a white friend, “sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly,”  who could only hear what she felt: “I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way” (828). But at other times, “I have no race, I am me. . . . The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (829). To be fixated on the limitations of race, which she did not deny existed in America (see “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience,” 1944), would inhibit what she could explore and enjoy as a black woman both by virtue of her race and transcending far beyond it—a sentiment best expressed in her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

In the concluding chapter of Dust Tracks on a Road (“Looking Things Over”), a 1942 autobiography she wrote at age 51, Hurston championed self-reliance as the key to living. She learned early in life that there was no use in complaining if things did not go her way. The world owed her nothing, but she’d make it yield something before she was through with it. If Hurston was going to get or enjoy anything, it was up to her to make it happen. As she put it, “I am in the struggle with the sword in my hands” (765). She saw “bitterness” as a choice, not a natural feeling of disappointment over the world doing you wrong. This was the product of “wishful weakness” and “the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.” In a word, Hurston accepted life—all of it, the lows (“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots”) and the highs (“I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands”) and what she called “the challenge of responsibility,” going so far as to call prayer “a cry of weakness” (“Religion,” 764). To the extent that religion represented resignation in the face of an inscrutable universe, she held no truck with it. (Hurston did not understand the way that it reinforced the morality and self-control necessary for a free society to flourish.)

Her account of human history was that might had gotten the better of right for the better portion of it. Although she called herself “an idealist” (“Looking Things Over,” 766), the failure of practice to live up to profession made her a thoroughgoing realist when it came to expecting politics to enable selfish human beings to transcend “human self-bias” to secure the common good. “We all want the breaks,” she confesses, “and what seems just to us is something that favors our wishes” (765). Hurston admits that everyone claims to want justice, “but the application brings on the fight” (766). Hurston agrees with the classic adage of Lord Acton, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” when she says to those “who walk in humble places,” i.e., those without political power, “There has been no proof in the world so far that you would be less arrogant if you held the lever of power in your hands” (769). Politics, for Hurston is simply James Madison’s “faction” writ large: “Real slavery is couched in the desire and the efforts of any man or community to live and advance their interests at the expense of the lives and interests of others” (767). This made her a natural libertarian, favoring that form of government that governed least precisely because no form of government could act more justly than the people who composed it.

Perhaps her expressed cynicism towards the capacity of politics to achieve justice was simply a counsel of moderation in those seeking “for some disinterested party to pass on things!” (“Looking Things Over,” 766) Hurston decided that in the face of hypocrisy, humility and humor were more conducive of work and activity than “the uselessness of gloominess.” The human frailty she found in others only reminded her of her own tendency to prefer her interest to absolute justice among her peers: “My inner fineness is continually outraged at finding that the world is a whole family of Hurstons.” Given her impressions of history, she thought it was futile to preach justice and fair play. She contented herself with making the struggle a personal project—“trying to make the day at hand a positive thing”—rather than pursuing a collective, organized effort exemplified by the modern Civil Rights Movement. More important than leveling the playing field was applying one’s own talents to the game at hand—even a crooked one (see “Seeing the World As It Is,” 794).

Oddly enough, the flip side of Hurston’s pessimism toward improvement of the human condition as the precursor to improvement of political institutions was her optimism about the capacity of individuals to make something of themselves. Like Frederick Douglass, Hurston saw the chief obstacle to improving oneself was internal, not external: “No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it!” (“My People! My People!” 733)

But for self-reliance to be effectual on the widest scale, especially for those outnumbered in a self-governing society, Douglass pleaded for government to provide equal protection of the laws and security for the fruit of one’s labors, what free market proponents tout as the protection of private property. Hurston’s emphasis on self-reliance seems to give short shrift to the protection that a government can and ought to offer. That said, while she does not explicitly call for these protections, they are implicit in her confidence that her efforts to make her way in the world depend chiefly on her initiative rather than external aid from the political community.

Hurston expressed her most explicit political opinion in a letter to the editor (“Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix,” Orlando Sentinel [August 11, 1955]) criticizing the Supreme Court rulings in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954 and 1955). These unanimous opinions by the Supreme Court desegregated K-12 public schools by rejecting the longstanding doctrine of “separate but equal” of Plessy v. Ferguson. Speaking of black children educated in segregated schools, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas 347 U.S. 483, 494) While many lauded the decision as a step towards the eventual integration of schools, Hurston took offense at its suggestion that black students could not learn without the help of white students, as if black people were incapable of improving themselves without the presence of white people. She rejected this white supremacist notion, and declared, “I take the Indian position” (956), which scorned any need to adopt the ways of white America. Hurston deplored the “woe is me” school of black improvement and identified with the defiant self-confidence of the American Indian.

She went on to warn that the Court’s decision might be a “trial-balloon” for “Govt by administrative decree” (958, 957), which she believed was not consistent with individual liberty under the Constitution. In sum, “Govt by fiat can replace the Constitution.” At minimum, Hurston thought self-government under the Constitution entailed government by consent of the governed, which in the United States meant “the two-party system” (957). Without a voting process informed by a competitive two-party system, the citizenry would find themselves under a government with “[n]o questions allowed and no information given out from the administrative dept.” In the case of desegregation of schools, Hurston saw the Brown decision as a Trojan horse for “more rulings on the same subject and more far-reaching any day.” This proved to be prescient, for the following decades saw the Court acting as an unelected legislature in its efforts to produce racial outcomes by decree rather than by a fair application of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause (see, e.g., Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education [1971]).

Her contempt for any public policy or political movement that condescended to black Americans was made most clear in her 1951 essay, “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism.” Hurston lambasted the collectivism of Russian socialism, with its propaganda “about there being no more frontiers, no more chances at all for free enterprise, not a prayer for a lone individual to rise by his own efforts.” (American Legion Magazine [June 1951], 56) She attributed the failure of communist infiltration of black America “because the Negro, the intended mud-sill, refused to hold still so that he could be built upon.” Simply put, black Americans, along with the rest of America, thought to themselves, “Why kill the boss? He might be the big boss himself next year.” Most rejected the Marxist notion of a global conflict of oppressors and oppressed. Hurston believed blacks would continue to take their chances with “the American tradition,” a political and economic system that afforded greater opportunity for advancement than what the press had reported about Joseph Stalin’s Russia.

In the end, Hurston rejects any view of humanity that would prescribe arbitrary limits on the aspirations of any individual person. With Douglass, she trusted blacks in America to rise or fall on their own merits, and found “Race Pride and Race Consciousness . . . a thing to be abhorred” (“Seeing the World As It Is,” 784). In proclaiming, “I do not wish to close the frontiers of life upon my own self,” Hurston emphasized that taking comfort in “race pride and race solidarity” in the face of oppressive circumstances would achieve little (786, 787). One infers that the greater crime was not a society that imposed its will on any person or group of persons, but the decision of any person not to venture out until all was made right in the world. With little faith in political reform, Hurston focused on prodding her readers to have faith in themselves, come what may.