In the midst of all their amorous activity, Zora and her Fire!! colleagues had a magazine to produce. Each of the seven founders agreed to contribute fifty dollars to finance the first issue, and they also planned to seek sponsors. Law school student John P. Davis was the magazine’s business manager, and the outgoing Nugent was selected to handle distribution. The others served as an editorial board, collecting material and contributing their own writing. Thurman, as editor, suggested the kind of work he wanted from each contributor, then they were all left to select their own pieces.
This process worked well: the collaborators experienced no content disagreements at all, according to Nugent. “For artists and writers,” Hughes confirmed, “we got along fine and there were no quarrels.” Nugent added: “It was really a very fine kind of communal effort in a way.” But the fall arrived before the editorial work was completed, and Hughes had to return to school in Pennsylvania, Davis to Harvard, Gwen Bennett to her job on the fine arts faculty at Howard, and Hurston to her studies at Barnard. Thurman made a change during this period, too; he left The Messenger for a job at a white magazine, The World Tomorrow. Still, he continued to work on Fire!!, planning the layout, finding a printer, and selecting the paper—a thick, cream-colored stock, as Hughes remembered, that was “worthy of the drawings of Aaron Douglas,” regarded then (and now) as the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance.
Two days before the magazine was to go to press, however, an actual fire at Zora’s apartment almost extinguished Fire!! As Nugent recalled, Zora’s youngest brother, Everett, was living with her at the time. Though he was not involved with the Niggerati, twenty-eight-year-old Everett was closer in age to most of its members than was Zora. (At thirty-five, she was several years older than the other Fire!! contributors, but her colleagues were unsuspecting: “We are all under thirty,” one wrote.) The short story Nugent had penned—the piece that was supposed to help get Fire!! banned in Boston—was at Zora’s place, along with many of Nugent’s other belongings. Innocently oblivious, Everett used the short story and some other papers as kindling for a fire. Nugent was devastated—and furious with Everett. Yet Zora somehow managed to defuse the tension, Nugent remembered. “She never made that boy feel bad about it; she never made me think she was minimizing the loss. … So I took a roll of toilet paper and several paper bags and got on the subway and wrote the thing over again.”
Fire!!—“devoted to younger Negro artists”—finally appeared in November 1926. It sported a dramatic red-and-black cover by Aaron Douglas that evoked ancient Africa as well as modern sensibilities. The foreword announced the magazine’s intention to burn “wooden opposition with a cackling chuckle of contempt.” And in his intentionally inflammatory editorial, “Fire Burns,” Thurman boldly defended persona non grata Carl Van Vechten, who was one of the nine patrons for Fire!! Rather than hang the Nigger Heaven author in effigy, Thurman suggested, Harlem Negroes should build a statue on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue to enshrine Van Vechten “for his pseudo-sophisticated, semi-serious, semi-ludicrous effusion about Harlem.”
Throughout its forty-eight pages, Fire!! broke ranks with the Talented Tenth propagandists by celebrating jazz, blues, uninhibited sexuality, and the natural black beauty of the folk. It was, as one historian has declared, “a flawed, folk-centered masterpiece.” Unlike Alain Locke’s The New Negro, Fire!! was not assembled by a single impresario, so it painted a more complex picture of the New Negro vanguard—many of whom were creating at their peak. In a personal letter to introduce Fire!!, one of its contributors effectively distilled the group’s ethos: “We have no get-rich-quick complexes. … We have no axes to grind. … We are primarily and intensely devoted to art. We believe that the Negro is fundamentally, essentially different from their Nordic neighbors. We are proud of that difference. We believe these differences to be greater spiritual endowment, greater sensitivity, greater power for artistic expression and appreciation. We believe Negro art should be trained and developed rather than capitalized and exploited. We believe finally that Negro art without Negro patronage is an impossibility.”
All the contributors may have shared these collective views, but the works they published in Fire!! were remarkably diverse: Helene Johnson’s searing poem, “A Southern Road,” was about a lynching, and Gwendolyn Bennett’s story, “Wedding Day,” was about a Negro in Paris. Hughes supplied the magazine with two fine poems (displaying “his usual ability to say nothing in many words,” one critic huffed); Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps each offered a poem; and Hurston contributed her play Color Struck and an exceptional short story, “Sweat.”
The pieces that got the most attention from reviewers, however, were the two that had been calculated to rile: Thurman’s “Cordelia the Crude” and Nugent’s lovely, stream-of-consciousness homosexual riff, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bruce, in consideration for his mother. A black critic in Baltimore, labeling the magazine “Effeminate Tommyrot,” began his review by snorting: “I have just tossed the first issue of Fire!! into the fire.” White critics barely noticed the magazine’s existence, but those who did were enthusiastic: One white reviewer called Fire!! “original in all its aspects.” Yet many black people seemed to think it was too original. At Craig’s restaurant on 135th Street, where the founders of Fire!! had sometimes held editorial meetings, they were given the cold shoulder by staff and patrons. And, Hughes reported, “none of the older Negro intellectuals would have anything to do with Fire!!” A friend told Cullen that merely mentioning Fire!! to Du Bois hurt the redoubtable editor’s feelings so much that he fell into a sullen silence. Publicly, Du Bois refrained from commenting on Fire!!, but another pillar of the black establishment, literary critic Benjamin Brawley, fumed: “If Uncle Sam ever finds out about it, it will be debarred from the mails.”
Though the magazine was never banned from mailboxes (not even in Boston), it did not sell well. The $1 cover price was too hefty for many Harlem readers, who preferred to pass a single copy from hand to hand rather than invest in their own. The proletariat’s inability to afford Fire!! was not its only problem. “We had no way of getting it distributed to book-stands or news stands,” Hughes recalled. “Bruce Nugent took it around New York on foot and some of the Greenwich Village bookshops put it on display, and sold it for us. But then Bruce, who had no job, would collect the money and … eat it up before he got back to Harlem.”
In the end, Fire!! cost nearly $1,000 to produce, close to $10,000 in today’s currency. Because only three of the founders could actually afford to contribute their fifty dollars (Zora was not among them), Thurman had to sign a promissory note to get the printer to release all the magazines for distribution. But then hundreds of unsold copies—stored in the basement of a Harlem apartment house—burned in an all-too-ironic fire.
Fire!! was finished after only one issue. And Thurman became personally responsible for the printer’s debt. To help defray the bill, Hurston, Hughes, and others sent him money when they could. (An optimistic Zora still was soliciting subscribers in the spring of 1927.) But for the next three or four years, Thurman’s paychecks were periodically garnisheed to pay the debt. “Fire!! is certainly burning me,” he complained.
Still, the inauspicious extinction of Fire!! did not break its founders’ radical spirits. In less than a year, Thurman would try again with another magazine, Harlem. And a headstrong Hurston would write: “I suppose that Fire!! has gone to ashes quite, but I still think the idea is good.”
Hurston’s refusal to give up so easily on Fire!! bespeaks her intention to do more than just make “a big, black splash” with the magazine—something Nugent believed several of the other contributors were satisfied to do. “I think that only two, maybe three, of that Niggerati group felt anything more than this surface business of ‘how can I make a splash,’” he judged, counting himself among the superficial majority. The exceptions, he said, were Hughes, Thurman, and Hurston. “And I think more than any other people, Zora and Langston were the ones who gave Fire!! any of the artistic solidity that it had.”
Even if all the magazine’s founders did not recognize its historic importance, Fire!! was an inspired idea, and much of its content had enduring literary value. The two pieces Hurston contributed to the magazine, in fact, represented the zenith of her literary output during the Harlem Renaissance.
Her play Color Struck, which she’d used as her woof ticket at the 1925 Opportunity dinner, is ostensibly about a group of Jacksonville Negroes on their way to a statewide cakewalk—a dance contest in which the best dancers, or walkers, literally take the cake, supposedly the biggest one ever baked in Florida. On the surface, the play is a light, folk-centered romp. But Color Struck is really about a dark-skinned woman who, as one character puts it, “so despises her own skin that she can’t believe any one else could love it.” Though it is clearly an apprentice work, Color Struck was, for the 1920s, “an idea of searing, complex irony,” as one critic has noted.
Hurston’s other piece in Fire!!, “Sweat,” is a story of enormous tension, nuance, and complexity—arguably her finest fiction from the decade. At the story’s core is Delia, an Eatonville washerwoman whose fifteen-year marriage to the abusive Sykes has been, as she puts it, an endless cycle of “work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat.” Sykes has begrudged Delia every moment of her work, even while refusing to contribute to the household coffers. Instead, Sykes—apparently feeling emasculated by Delia’s financial independence—berates her for the service-oriented nature of her work: “Ah done tole you time and again to keep them white folks’ clothes outa dis house,” he rages.
Over the years, Sykes has beaten Delia “enough tuh kill three women, let ’lone change they looks,” as one of the men in the community observes. Disgusted now by Delia’s thin body and haggard appearance—as much a result of his beatings as the physically demanding work his indolence has forced her to do—Sykes casts Delia aside for a more robust mistress, whom he flaunts before Delia and all of Eatonville. Sykes’s behavior is so odious that the village men, gathering on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store, briefly consider killing him as a community service. Porch philosopher Clarke eloquently sums up the trouble with men like Sykes: “Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it ain’t in ’im. There’s plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It’s round, juicy an’ sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an’ grind, squeeze an’ grind an’ wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat’s in ’em out. When dey’s satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats ’em just lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey thows ’em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin’ while dey is at it, an’ hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin’ after huh tell she’s empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein’ a cane-chew an’ in de way.”
Rather than simply leave Delia, however, Sykes tries to run her off so that he and his new woman can have the house that Delia’s sweat has bought. Delia refuses to be beaten in this way, however, so she and Sykes end up in a bitter standoff. Preying on Delia’s obsessive fear of snakes, Sykes one day brings home a six-foot rattler and leaves it in a pen outside the kitchen. Delia pleads with him to take the snake away, but he refuses. This is when Delia, a woman who takes her Christian commitment seriously, first tastes hate: “Ah hates you, Sykes. … Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah useter love you. … Ah hates yuh lak uh suck-egg dog.”
Sykes is so shocked by the venom of Delia’s pronouncement that he is unable to respond with his fists. Instead, a few days later, he secretly lets the snake loose in Delia’s laundry basket, hoping that either the fear or the snake itself will kill her. When confronted by “ol’ satan,” as she calls the snake, Delia, despite her blinding terror, manages to escape into the hay barn, where she spends the night. Hurston’s minimalist peek into Delia’s mind during this long dark night is masterful: “There for an hour or more she lay sprawled upon the hay a gibbering wreck. Finally she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold, bloody rage. Hours of this. A period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both. Out of this an awful calm.”
Full of gin and spite, Sykes comes home early the next morning in search of Delia’s body. But before he can strike a match against the darkness, the rattlesnake strikes him. Delia, lying in her flowerbed beneath the window, is a witness to it all. Yet she never warns Sykes or responds to his moans once he’s been attacked. Finally, Delia does move toward the door and, even in the midst of her justifiable rage, she is overcome with compassion for Sykes. Then, with a mixture of remorse and relief, she realizes it’s too late. Hurston brilliantly brings together all the themes of “Sweat”—the jobless black man’s resentment of his working woman, the triumph of good over evil, the hate that hate produces—in the story’s final, gripping paragraph: “She saw him on his hands and knees as soon as she reached the door. He crept an inch or two toward her—all that he was able, and she saw his horribly swollen neck and his one open eye shining with hope. A surge of pity too strong to support bore her away from the eye that must, could not, fail to see the tubs. … Orlando with its doctors was too far. She could scarcely reach the Chinaberry tree, where she waited in the growing heat while inside she knew the cold river was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that she knew.”
Like Hurston’s other early fiction, “Sweat” is true to its Eatonville milieu, with the porch sitters witnessing the main story and offering a backdrop of communal wisdom and commentary. Yet “Sweat” is not dependent on the Eatonville scene, and there is no real folklore in the story. Rather than create a showcase for folklore, superstition, and porch humor, as she’d done in some of her earlier fiction, Hurston mined the language and sensibilities of Eatonville to tell a compelling, original story about two damaged human beings. At the same time, “Sweat” is a shrewd variation on the biblical tale of Adam and Eve and the serpent. Ultimately, it is a penetrating exploration of a good woman’s struggle against evil, both within and without. And that struggle, though particular to Delia in the story, is familiar to everyone who breathes.
“Sweat” revealed Hurston to be a writer of stunning capabilities when she committed herself to the craft. It also divulged a bit about Zora’s views on some of her life’s most pressing questions. “Sweat” makes it clear, for instance, that Hurston placed great value on a woman’s ability to work and to become financially independent, something she’d been struggling to do for more than half her life by 1926. The story also shows that Zora (still doing a long-distance dance with Herbert Sheen) harbored, at best, an ambivalent attitude toward marriage. She seemed to view it as oppressive, particularly for women, and potentially deadly. These were ideas that Hurston would revisit in later literary efforts.
“Sweat” was the best of several short stories Hurston wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, pieces that charted her steady growth as a literary artist. In the December 1925 issue of The X-Ray: The Official Publication of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Hurston had published a short story called “Under the Bridge” that was similar to “Sweat” in its focus on the passions and pains of a particular Florida household. Though Eatonville goes unnamed in this story, Hurston’s hometown memories are unmistakably present in the narrative, which brims with the language and lore of the folk. Luke Mimms is a fifty-eight-year-old newlywed torn by love for his nineteen-year-old bride and for his twenty-two-year-old son. The two “young’uns,” as he calls them, clearly love each other. But they must refrain from expressing their love because they also both love Luke, a vulnerable and kind man whom Hurston renders tenderly. Theirs is a complicated love triangle, and once Luke consults the local conjure doctor, it cannot help but end tragically.
In contrast, Hurston’s short story “Muttsy,” which won second place in the 1926 Opportunity contest, is an amusing comedy. Published in the August Opportunity, it is the tale of Pinkie, a wide-eyed young woman who moves to Harlem from Eatonville and finds herself trapped in the lowdown life of Ma Turner’s back parlor, where men and women dance, sing, drink, fight, and live “hotly their intense lives.” Interestingly, the language these Harlemites use is just as colorful and country as the language of Eatonville: You can take the Negroes out of the country, Hurston seems to say with a wink, but you can’t take the country out of the Negroes. The best gambler and womanizer in the bunch, Muttsy is smitten with Pinkie, the innocent country girl, and vows to get a regular job and give up gambling if she’ll marry him. She eventually does, but, in the end, Muttsy—confident that he can keep both his wife and his gambling habit—returns to his back-parlor ways.
The other pieces Hurston published in 1926 were more folklore than fiction. In September, Forum published a folktale under her byline called “’Possum or Pig.” It is a classic tale, about John and the Master, that was well known to black storytellers in southern rural communities. Hurston’s decision to publish it in the Forum suggests that she was engaging in a rather conscious effort to expose black southern folklore to a wider audience—not just through telling the stories at parties, but through publishing them as well, particularly during the Renaissance years, when magazines were eager to showcase Negro material.
To that end, Hurston published a series called “The Eatonville Anthology” in the September, October, and November 1926 issues of The Messenger. The anthology is an engaging amalgam of folklore, fiction, and Eatonville history. It gives readers the sense that they are sitting on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store listening to a “lying session” unfold—or, better yet, sitting in a Harlem brownstone listening to Zora Hurston pass all of Eatonville through her mouth, and through her memory.
“The Eatonville Anthology” consists of fourteen short tales, connected only by their locale and their language. Snatches of retrospection and reverie from the rural South of Zora’s childhood, the stories paint a rather interesting and complex portrait of Eatonville. In several of the tales, for example, women are routinely beaten by their husbands with no comment from the community (or from Hurston). In one story, a wronged wife forces the town vamp to move to Orlando, where, “in a wider sphere, perhaps, her talents as a vamp were appreciated.” In another, various Eatonville residents try to poison an annoying, meat-stealing dog, Tippy. When he survives every attempt on his life, Eatonville accepts “the plague of Tippy, reflecting that it has erred in certain matters and is being chastened.” In Hurston’s portrayal, the people of Eatonville accepted misfortune of all types—bad dogs, town vamps, spousal abuse, poverty—as karmic debts they were bound to pay. Like black folks anywhere of a certain temperament and experience, Hurston seems to say, they made a place for evil in their lives with little grumbling, just as they did for good.
Some of the stories Hurston included in “The Eatonville Anthology” were common folktales, known not just to her, but to many black southerners of her time. Others were specific memories recounted from her youth. All were told economically (one is only a paragraph long) and colorfully. And several of the tales’ characters—including Sykes Jones, Jim Merchant, and Joe Clarke—were destined to reappear elsewhere in Hurston’s oeuvre. The story of Joe Clarke’s meanness toward his wife, for instance, would later find its way into Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, where she would rename Clarke (Joe Starkes) and place the focus on his wife, whom she would call Janie.
“The Eatonville Anthology” is the literary equivalent of Hurston’s animated storytelling sessions at Harlem parties—spontaneous performances that spurred Langston Hughes to declare her the most amusing member of the Niggerati. “Only to reach a wider audience, need she ever write books,” he said, “because she is a perfect book of entertainment in herself.”
As Hughes’s remark suggests, Hurston was considered more raconteur than writer during the Harlem Renaissance. In Nugent’s short story in Fire!!, for instance, Zora makes an appearance not as a writer, but as a storyteller of glittering gifts: “Zora had shone again … her stories … she always shone … every one was glad when Zora shone.”
Well, perhaps not everyone. Some of Zora’s friends—particularly Hughes, Thurman, and Bontemps—occasionally grew frustrated with her because they believed she was more interested in entertaining at parties than in creating literature. She dissipated her material, they felt, by telling it, rather than writing it down. In his novel Infants of the Spring, the intensely cynical Thurman expressed his exasperation with Zora by creating a dubious character clearly based on her. Sweetie May Carr, the Zora stand-in, “is a short story writer, more noted for her ribald wit and personal effervescence than for any actual literary work,” Thurman jeered. “Sweetie May was a master of southern dialect, and an able raconteur, but she was too indifferent to literary creation to transfer to paper that which she told so well.”
Even if some of her friends believed she was squandering her talent by sharing her stories freely at parties, Zora felt differently. In Eatonville, she had been steeped in an oral tradition where stories were meant to be enjoyed in a communal setting, not hoarded for one’s own gain. She also was confident that she had plenty of stored material to work with, not to mention a fertile imagination. Telling a few stories at a party would not drain her so dry as to wreck her literary career, she contended, waving off her friends’ concerns.
Although “Zora showed at any party,” as one friend recalled, she also was legitimately busy—with the schoolwork she’d resumed at Barnard, with her effort to earn a living (she still occasionally worked as a waitress for private dinners), and with her new love: anthropology.
As Zora flirted more and more with the science of anthropology, she frequently was too busy to apply herself to the art of literature. Literature, she found, required discipline, or perhaps something more like concentration. Certainly, Zora could find the time and the wherewithal to write down the stories she told at parties as she seems to have done with “The Eatonville Anthology.” But true literature required something else, something more. When Hurston pulled Eatonville’s folklore from her top hat of memory and transferred it directly and respectfully to the page, she proved herself to be a fine folklorist-in-the-making. Yet when she adapted the lore, the language, the landscape, and the personalities of Eatonville for her own uses—and overlaid this raw material with her own ample inventiveness—she proved herself to be a literary artist of superior talent, as a story like “Sweat” shows. And this, of course, took time, concentration and, well, sweat. As Zora worked to finish her studies at Barnard—and as she succumbed more and more to the allure of anthropology—she was not always up for the effort that literature required.
Though Hurston is often thought of today as a Harlem Renaissance writer, she actually did not produce very much literature during the Renaissance, which began to crumble, most historians agree, when the stock market crashed in October 1929. The truth is, she published no books and only a few short stories and plays during the Roaring Twenties. In fact, after “Sweat” and Color Struck appeared in Fire!! in 1926, Hurston would not publish any more fiction until the 1930s, and only one play—The First One, in Charles S. Johnson’s 1927 collection Ebony and Topaz.
For the remainder of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was rarely even in Harlem. Mostly, she was on the road.