“HOW MUCH SATISFACTION CAN I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?” So wrote Zora Neale Hurston from her coastal home in Eau Gallie, Florida, in 1955. Hurston was one of America’s most talented writers, a singular voice who had written a groundbreaking novel about black life in Florida called Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book on black folklore called Mules and Men, and a riveting memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road. Outgoing and vivacious, Hurston refused to see herself as a victim of segregation simply because she was black. To her mind, the Supreme Court’s Brown ruling was based on a false premise, that blacks were damaged by Jim Crow, a lie that masked the Court’s true interest, which was to expand federal power. “In the ruling on segregation,” noted Hurston, “the unsuspecting nation might have witnessed a trial-balloon,” a “relatively safe” move by the Court not to achieve racial justice but to set a “precedent” for government “by fiat,” not the “Constitution.” It was a conservative critique, that the federal government would use social policy as an excuse to expand its reach, one that resonated in odd ways with Agrarian fears that the federal leviathan was intent on stamping out southern culture.1
But Hurston was no Agrarian. Born in Alabama in 1891, she was raised in an all-black town in Florida named Eatonville, a fortuity that would shape her perceptions of race for the rest of her life, convincing her that integration was not a necessary prerequisite for black advancement. Undamaged by segregation, she left Eatonville while still a teenager, traveled, and eventually enrolled at Howard University, where she studied under Alain Locke. Impressed with Hurston’s stories about black folklife in Florida, Locke recommended her to Charles S. Johnson, who published two of her stories and a play in Opportunity. One of the stories, “Drenched in Light,” told of an exuberant young black girl temporarily adopted by a bereft white couple whose “soul[s]” desperately “need[ed]” light. The message Hurston conveyed was clear: African Americans—even in the repressive Jim Crow South—possessed something that whites did not. Not one to view African Americans as a damaged minority, Hurston won two prizes from Opportunity for portraying blacks as culturally gifted, prompting her to relocate to New York, where she entered Barnard College and enrolled in classes taught by Franz Boas.2
Just as Boas had encouraged Howard Odum to study black folklore, so too did he urge Hurston to do the same, to return to the South and document the black experience. In February 1927, Boas arranged for Hurston to spend six months researching folklore in Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana, a project that she would continue under the supervision of a wealthy white patron named Charlotte Mason. During her travels, Hurston met with average folks and collected a massive amount of fresh, unvarnished material, including folktales, songs, and jokes. Thanks in part to the salty, unrefined nature of many of her discoveries, Hurston rankled more traditional leaders of the Harlem Renaissance like her mentor, Alain Locke, who found Hurston’s subjects poor representatives of the race. Locke veered toward presenting black contributions in the guise of “high” culture, lauding the “New Negro Movement” for its “formal” contributions to American “literature and art.” Hurston preferred to extol the genius of average, often very poor people—a position that led her to join black poet Langston Hughes in imagining a more granular counterpoint to Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity. Together, Hurston and Hughes advanced the claim that high culture was compromised by white influence, and that black culture, by contrast, represented a more authentic representation of the people, or folk, and therefore was more valuable.3
Just as Hurston’s commitment to black folklore led her to criticize Locke, so too did she become openly critical of Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson, both of whom she came to view as inexpert. To her mind, they had made substantial “error[s]” in their efforts to capture black music, including a tendency to make “six or seven songs out of one song” or blending different pieces of music together into a single tune, a problem that ran through their highly acclaimed folk music anthology, Negro Workaday Songs. Part of their problem, hinted Hurston, was their color. As she put it in her ethnographic work Mules and Men, blacks were more likely to be “evasive” in their dealings with whites and less likely to reveal valuable information. “We smile,” she noted, “and tell him or her” whatever we think “satisfies” their “white” curiosity, whether it’s true or not.4
Hurston’s experiences collecting black folklore and her role in the Harlem Renaissance help to explain why she feared the negative impact that Brown might have on black life. “I regard the U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race,” she complained, balking at the presumption that African Americans wanted to rub shoulders with Caucasians. Blacks wanted opportunity and resources, she argued, not intimacy. “If there are not adequate Negro schools in Florida,” she asserted, “and there is some residual, some inherent and unchangeable quality in white schools, impossible to duplicate anywhere else, then I am the first to insist that Negro children of Florida be allowed to share this boon. But if there are adequate Negro schools and prepared instructors and instructions, then there is nothing different except the presence of white people.” Hurston termed the Court’s presumption that blacks desired to be with whites the “doctrine of the white mare,” an allusion to a popular myth that “any mule, if not restrained, will automatically follow a white mare.” “Dishonest mule-traders made money out of this knowledge in the old days,” she argued, positing that Chief Justice Earl Warren had invoked the tactic in Brown, perhaps to lure black supporters back to the Republican Party in the 1956 election, after many had abandoned it during the New Deal.5
It was a ruse that reminded her of communists. As she explained it, Reds had long played on the assumption that African Americans wanted to sleep with whites, even to the point of providing black converts with access to white partners. “It is to be recalled that Moscow, being made aware of this folk belief, made it the main plank in their campaign to win the American Negro from the 1920’s on,” noted Hurston. “It was the come on stuff,” she recalled; “join the party and get yourself a white wife or husband.” While never official communist policy, Hurston claimed to have witnessed such tactics while living in New York during the 1920s.6
Her anticommunism extended to the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign to lift the country out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. “That is what your blessed New Deal did for us,” Hurston wrote to a liberal friend in 1945. “Crime in Harlem is rampant, and the police are helpless because the New Deal–promoted Negro politicians immediately let out a scream that Negroes are being persecuted the minute a Negro thug is arrested.” Rather than look to structural causes of black crime, Hurston blamed New Deal administrators whose “dizzy theories” deemphasized personal responsibility, along with lax politicians eager for the black vote. Among these were Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his “New Deal gang,” who looked the other way when “communists” plotted a race riot in 1935, after a sixteen-year-old named Lino Rivera was beaten for allegedly shoplifting a pocketknife at a five-and-dime shop on 125th Street. “I happened to know that it was promoted by Communists,” wrote Hurston, “and nothing was said about it because they had all pledged to vote for Roosevelt in the 1936 election.” Although an investigation later found no communist influence, Hurston’s antipathy toward the left continued through the 1940s. In 1945, she accused white Georgia writer Lillian Smith of exaggerating instances of racial violence in the South in a polemical novel entitled Strange Fruit, a book that flew off the shelves for its provocative portrayal of interracial romance in Georgia. What “zealots” like Smith were “really doing,” argued Hurston, was “working for the Communist revolution.”7
Smith bore no ties to communism, yet Hurston’s concerns about Reds were not completely unfounded. In 1929, communist organizers traveled from New York to North Carolina to organize striking textile mill workers in Gastonia and—one year later—the Communist Party divided the South into two districts, numbered 16 and 17, with headquarters in Birmingham and Charlotte. Communist activity percolated through the region, occasionally grabbing headlines as when nine black men were arrested for allegedly raping two white women on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, only to receive legal representation from the Communist Party USA. One year later, a black communist named Angelo Herndon garnered more news after being arrested for soliciting black and white workers into joining an integrated Communist Party in Atlanta in 1932. Just as Hurston suspected, high-ranking communists as far away as the Soviet Union looked to the American South as a likely place for a proletarian uprising, a hope that set many of the region’s white elites on edge.8
Hurston’s politics echoed that of her white peers, as did her thoughts on integration. “Since the days of the never-to-be-sufficiently-deplored Reconstruction,” lamented Hurston, “there has been current the belief that there is no greater delight to Negroes than physical association with whites.” Not so, she maintained. The very idea was an insult to blacks. “No one seems to touch on what is most important,” she argued, namely that the “whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people.” Black self-respect precluded the notion that African Americans wanted anything to do with whites. Those who supported integration, she believed, should look to Native Americans, who fought “valiantly” for their “lands” and did not “seek forcible association with anyone.”9
As much as the Supreme Court tried to argue that blacks were damaged by Jim Crow, in other words, Hurston argued that African Americans were fine on their own, and it was whites who suffered from shortcomings: not least a perverse penchant for repression. “The idea of human slavery is so deeply ground[ed]” in European history, she suggested in 1942, “that the pink-toes can’t get it out of their system.” To illustrate, she cited the British colonization of India. “If the English people were to quarter troops in France,” argued Hurston, they “would be Occidentally execrated.” However, “the British Government does just that in India, to the glory of the democratic way,” and “are hailed as not only great Empire builders” but “leaders of civilization.” Such pretensions bothered Hurston, who felt that southern whites dressed their cruelty and violence in the garb of cultural superiority. She made this clear in a graphic portrayal of a race riot in Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 during which black efforts to vote prompted whites to “set fire to whole rows of Negro houses,” shooting the inhabitants as they fled. Hurston pulled no punches in describing the savagery of the mob, including the murder of a young black woman “far advanced in pregnancy,” the castration of a black carpenter, and the lynching of July Perry, a black man bold enough to stand up to the crowd with a gun.10
Just as a penchant for cruelty characterized whites, according to Hurston, so too did a lack of spirituality. “The folk Negro do not crave [white] religion at all,” she noted, deriding its “solemn” formalism and stuffy reserve. African Americans “pity” white styles of worship for they “can’t do any better,” their sermons sounding more like “lectures” than inspired oratory. Hurston also indicated that whites lacked the ability to truly appreciate art, a point she made in a 1928 essay when she described a white companion who accompanied her to a jazz concert but remained unmoved by the compositions. “He has only heard what I felt,” observed Hurston. “He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.” Taking color to coincide with a depth of emotion that whites lacked, Hurston inverted white claims to cultural superiority, positing that African Americans surpassed whites in the cultural domain and were responsible for America’s most notable cultural contributions. “Musically speaking,” she wrote in 1934, “the Jook is the most important place in America. For in its smelly, shoddy confines has been born the secular music known as the blues, and on blues has been founded jazz.” The “jook,” as Hurston used the term, referred to black music venues in the Jim Crow South, places where African Americans gathered to listen and perform, free from white interference. Both blues and jazz were born in such venues, argued Hurston, evidence not only that blacks had contributed to American culture but that blacks were actually shaping it in ways that defied easy definition. “What we call civilization,” Hurston observed in 1938, was not simply machines or monuments but “an accumulation of recognitions and regulations of the commonplace.”11
That culture might stem from the grassroots was an increasingly popular notion in the 1920s and 1930s. Critics of mass industry and mass culture, like the Nashville Agrarians, had themselves argued that the highest expressions of the human spirit lay in common things, particularly in the South. For Robert Penn Warren and his Vanderbilt cohort, for example, that was precisely what made the South important and worth preserving: its ties to the land, its resistance to mass culture, and its tradition of creative self-expression. They even agreed with Hurston that African Americans occupied a special place in the region, exemplars of its commitment to creative leisure and “art.”12
Hurston was not as generous. She showcased her opinion of Confederate-loving “pink-toes” in a 1948 novel entitled Seraph on the Suwanee, which focuses entirely on a community of “piney-woods crackers” in Florida. As Hurston told it, white Floridians were no strangers to depravity, having “wore out the knees of [their] britches crawling to the Cross and wore out the seat of [their] pants back-sliding.” Returning to her view that blacks were more spiritually inclined than whites, Hurston posited that “religious fervor” was “uncommon” among Florida “crackers,” a point she underscored by telling the tale of a white girl with “gulf-blue eyes” and “plenty of long light yellow hair” named Arvay, who renounces all worldly pleasures, declaring that “she was through with the world and its sinful and deceitful ways.” A personification of white pretensions to moral superiority, Arvay finds herself pursued by a white suitor named James Meserve, a fallen aristocrat whose “ancestors had held plantations upon the Alabama River” but now owned nothing. “The fortunes of the War had wiped Jim’s grand-father clean,” wrote Hurston. “His own father had had no chance to even inherit.” Meserve, whose name invokes selfishness, recalls the penniless pretensions of the aristocratic South, what Hurston likened to a “hamstring” that was “not meat any longer” but still “smelled of what he had once been associated with.”13
The tale of Jim’s and Arvay’s relationship projected a white South riddled with intellectual failings, moral blemishes, and physical defects; a comic farce garbed in Confederate rags. In describing Arvay’s house, for example, Hurston described a portrait over the mantelpiece of Robert E. Lee sitting on a “fat-rumped” horse “pointing at the blue-clad Union soldiers and looking furious.” Hurston mocked Lee’s pose, joking that such “battle scenes were in high favor” in white homes, and “though the enemy was always right up under the feet of the general’s horse,” the generals always “assumed that the men . . . could not see them.” Hopelessly dimwitted, white southerners were also savage, a point that Hurston demonstrated by having Meserve court Arvay as a gentleman, only to then rape her beneath a mulberry tree. “Sure you was raped,” declares Meserve monstrously, “and that ain’t all. You’re going to keep on getting raped.” Despondent, Arvay leaves her ripped “drawers” hanging from a low branch, “waving in the wind,” a white flag connoting her surrender to the lingering violence and sexual depravity of the Old South.14
Hurston did not stop there. Just as Meserve confounded pretensions to sexual virtue, personal honor, and moral purity, so too did he defy white claims to genetic superiority, as he and Arvay produce a child with “defects,” including fingers that looked like “strings,” “practically no forehead nor backhead,” and a cranium that “narrowed like an egg on top.” The child’s deformities lead to disturbing behavioral problems, as Jim and Arvay witness when the boy, named Earl, violently attacks the daughter of a Portuguese immigrant hired to work the Meserves’ orchard. While Jim asks that the boy be committed to a mental institution, Arvay protests, identifying him with her line of the family, an extended network of “piney-woods crackers and poor white trash” who, to her mind, deserved to be treated with respect. Shocked that her husband would consider committing their defective son to a “crazy house,” Arvay blames the boy’s pathological behavior on the immigrant family, who she finds to be nonwhite. “No foreigners were ever quite white to Arvay,” notes Hurston, for “real white people talked English and without any funny sounds to it,” a clear jab at white southern colloquial speech.15
The story proved a darkly satirical allegory, a tale of poor whites (Arvay) brokering a deal with fallen elites (Jim Meserve), only to reproduce the worst traits in both (the violent, bestial Earl). Seraph underscored the worst of the white South, its violence, its moral degeneracy, and its absurd pretensions to aristocracy. Meanwhile, blacks played a positive, humanizing role in the novel, both more spiritual and lighthearted than their white peers. For example, Joe, the Meserves’ lone black employee, keeps the Meserve property maintained; teaches Meserve’s non-defective son, Kenny, to play the guitar; and even shows Jim how to enjoy life, exclaiming that “if you ever was to be a Negro just one Saturday night, you’d never want to be white no more.”16
Hurston’s juxtaposition of positive black traits onto white failings in Seraph on the Suwanee prefigured her rejection of Brown, especially her contempt for the Myrdalian notion that blacks suffered from cultural bankruptcy because they had not been assimilated into white society, a society that, as she saw it, was itself riddled with violence, pathology, and lies. More important than integration to her was that African Americans be given resources and opportunities sufficient to preserve that which was valuable about their own communities, their own traditions, and their own culture. That observers failed to understand this angered her. She confessed to being “astonished” that her 1955 letter decrying Brown, published in the Orlando Sentinel, “caused such a sensation,” which it did, particularly within civil rights circles. She also showed disdain for the “intense and bitter contention among some Negroes,” that is, the NAACP, that blacks wanted integration, or what she framed as “physical contact with Whites,” while expressing contempt for white liberals who supported the decision as a means of helping blacks. “I actually do feel insulted,” wrote Hurston, “when a certain type of white person hastens to effuse to me how noble they are to grant me their presence.”17
The letter from Hurston to the Sentinel underscored the unsettling fact that liberal social scientists like Gunnar Myrdal actually did harbor a dismissive view of black people. This was clear in American Dilemma, which concluded that black culture was pathological and that the solution to America’s race problem was to fully assimilate African Americans into mainstream white society. That the Court accepted this view uncritically became apparent in the Brown decision, which held that public schools were “a principal instrument in awakening [black children] to cultural values,” that is, white values, for which it cited Myrdal.18
Hurston, by contrast, blasted southern white society in Seraph on the Suwannee while extolling the cultural contributions of embattled minorities by comparing the plight of African Americans in the South to another maligned ethnic group, one that had suffered discrimination for much of European history, Jews. Just as she was penning her critique of Brown, for example, Hurston immersed herself in a book project that aimed to rehabilitate the reputation of Herod, ruler of Judea from 40 to 4 B.C.E. Arguably one of the most notorious characters in the Bible for his alleged order to kill male infants for fear that one might usurp him, Herod provided Hurston with an opportunity to drive home themes that she had explicated in her letter to the Orlando Sentinel and her white “piney-wood cracker” romance, Seraph on the Suwanee. As she put it in a letter on December 3, 1955, her book Herod the Great tells the story of “a great and influential character of his time,” a king who struggled to free the Jewish people from the clutches of the Pharisees, “a priesthood bent on maintaining their ancient rule over the nation.” Hurston told of how Herod backed a less powerful sect known as the Essenes, to whom Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist both belonged, and in so doing, “lent his aid to the movement out of which Christianity evolved.” Christ’s revelations did not come directly from God, argued Hurston, but stemmed from Essene lore. Jesus, to her, was a storyteller, a purveyor of Jewish folklore who brought that lore to gentiles. “It was a movement totally within the Jewish people,” argued Hurston of Christianity, “not a sudden and miraculous happening as is told in the New Testament.”19
Hurston’s thesis hewed closely to her own theory of cultural evolution, namely that the most valuable cultural legacies came from the ground up and not from on high, not elites but the folk, not Pharisees but Essenes. Herod warranted praise because he had protected the “genius” of the Jews, a discrete and vilified minority. He also never ordered the execution of infants. “I have consulted every possible source,” wrote Hurston in August 1955, “and there is NO historical background for the story in Matthew 2, that Herod butchered those children.” According to Hurston, Herod was a “Jew of the Jews,” a leader who converted to the religion but, “like many of immigrant stock in the USA,” bore a more ardent “patriotism” than those born with Jewish “blood.”20
No dry historical study, Hurston’s book reads like a novel, replete with rousing battles and palace intrigue as Herod repeatedly outsmarts a band of angry Pharisees desperate to quell his rising influence. Hurston even added romance, portraying Herod as a young, strapping hero who found himself the target of recurring female affections, including a young midwife named Cleote, who propositions him in his father’s palace; an older woman named Alexandra, who longs to steal him from his wife; and a teenager named Marianne, who fantasizes about him in secret. Part harlequin romance, part cultural theory, Herod the Great tells a big story with a subtle theme.21
Publishers balked, as did critics, one of whom later deemed the book a “talent in ruins.” Accustomed to reading Hurston’s stories about black life in Florida, few understood her turn to the Holy Land. Yet Herod the Great fell into line with Hurston’s theory that minorities often harbored cultural gifts, a notion that combined what today would be called “cultural pluralism” with what Hurston termed ethnic “genius,” the idea that an oppressed minority might contribute something valuable and unique to society generally. Set in Galilee, the “melting-pot of Palestine,” Herod recounts a pluralist world where “Jews were in the minority” and different cultural groups interacted regularly but also preserved their unique cultural identities. Unlike Seraph on the Suwanee, her other book about whites, Herod the Great sharpened Hurston’s theories about the transformative role that particular minorities had played in Western civilization, without reverting to biological racism. Because Herod was not born a Jew, he did not invite an argument that cultural traits were inherited. Rather, he emerged as a custodian of cultural innovation who chose to embrace and preserve the unique “genius” of the Jewish people.22
Although African Americans had long identified with Old Testament figures like Moses, Hurston’s emphasis on Herod provided a new frame through which to view the black/Jewish analogy—not just an acknowledgment of a shared history of slavery but a declaration of a shared destiny as bearers of culture and enlightenment. This dovetailed with Hurston’s critique of Brown, which placed assimilation over innovation and ignored the basic fact that if a minority was to effectively fulfill its cultural destiny, then it must be allowed to preserve itself.23