When I was a child, using the words ain’t, huh, and hey would reap an icy gaze from an elder or, worse, a pinch or slap, followed by the correction:
Bernice, the word is:
Isn’t. Yes. Hello.
Historically, so-called Bad English or improper grammar was attributed to poor and uneducated people. It was considered lazy English, created by “lazy” Blacks, those Africans who were enslaved in America and worked from can’t see to can’t see, bonded people who were quite literally worked to death.
My siblings and I were educated in private schools and spent summers in Barbados. We children were neither poor nor uneducated, so that sort of language was unacceptable in my household. We were expected to speak proper English if we aspired to be accepted and respected in the white world.
I grew up in a family that was Southern on my maternal side and Caribbean on my paternal side. These relatives had migrated and immigrated to New York, stubbornly clinging to the customs of their birth homes. So I was raised in a family full of interesting and complex dialects, all of which I adopted.
Truth is, Standard American English has never felt comfortable on my tongue. It is as unnatural to me as swimming fully clothed in the ocean. Today, even in middle age, I still speak in a dialect that I lovingly refer to as Yankee Bajan.
I discovered Zora Neale Hurston in the summer of 1987. I was twenty-one years old and an aspiring writer unsure of what or whom I wanted to write about.
When I opened Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was immediately struck by Hurston’s use of dialect, and a door in my mind creaked loudly ajar.
In 1934 Hurston published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. It was well received by readers and critics alike. Hurston was celebrated for her use of Negro dialect. “Jonah’s Gourd Vine can be called without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race,” wrote Margaret Wallace in The New York Times. “Miss Hurston, who is a graduate of Barnard College and student of anthropology, has made the study of Negro folklore her special province. This may very well account for the brilliantly authentic flavor of her novel and for her excellent rendition of Negro dialect.”
Perhaps Hurston’s well-worded and sophisticated prose, set in contrast to the dialogue, led Wallace to assume that Hurston’s education was what allowed her to expertly mimic the Southern Negro dialect. It probably never occurred to Wallace that this achievement was the result not of an education at a prominent academic institution but of Hurston’s bilinguality. After all, Zora had been born in Alabama and raised in Florida, in towns populated by Black people. The people and their ways of communicating weren’t foreign to her—she was writing about home.
Black language, now known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), was born in the American South during slavery when bonded people, separated from their familial tribes, mixed with Africans who spoke different languages. In an effort to communicate with their fellow men and women—and their captors—they stitched together scraps of several languages, including that of their enslavers, and created the melodic and nuanced dialect that Hurston used in her work, a dialect that still survives today.
In 1936 Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the folk religions of Jamaica and Haiti. While in Haiti, she wrote, in just seven weeks’ time, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a story that she said “had been dammed up in me.”
Published in the fall of 1937, during the Great Depression, Their Eyes Were Watching God centers on Janie Crawford, who finds herself married to the controlling Jody, a man who does not allow her to speak or communicate with friends. In contrast, when she meets Tea Cake, he is happy to hear what she has to say, encouraging her to share her thoughts and engage with others. This new relationship forges a feeling of empowerment and joy within Janie.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jody can be construed as a metaphor for white people eager to silence the thoughts and expressions of Black people.
But Zora Neale Hurston would not be muted.
The publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God was met with criticism. The harshest came from Richard Wright, who accused Hurston of writing into and not above the stereotypes and tropes that had plagued Black people from slavery into Jim Crow. It was his stance that if a Black person took up a pen to write, that pen should be used as a sword to wage war against the oppressive white racist regime. Anything less was a frivolous waste of ink and paper. “Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley,” Wright wrote.
Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes.
Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.
Their Eyes Were Watching God was taken out of print in 1938 and remained in obscurity for forty years, until writer Alice Walker brought it back into the national spotlight. It was reissued in 1973, and the classic remains in print to this day.
Had Hurston bent to the will of her critics, she might have received her flowers while she was still alive. Ever the nonconformist, the willful Hurston, in her next book, yet again put the politics of race aside in favor of presenting Black people in all their glorious authenticity.
By the time Hurston published Tell My Horse in 1938, she was struggling financially. Tell My Horse is a travelogue of sorts, outlining the customs, superstitions, folk traditions, and religions found in Haiti and Jamaica. Hurston defied genre assignment by mixing and melding anthropology, folklore, and personal experience. This infuriated her critics. “It is a pity, therefore, that her real talents produced a work so badly—even carelessly—performed! She pays practically no attention to grammar or sentence structure,” complained Reece Stuart, Jr.
One of Hurston’s biographers, Robert Hemenway, describes Tell My Horse as “Hurston’s poorest book, chiefly because of its form.” Later that year Hurston reviewed Richard Wright’s novel Uncle Tom’s Children and had no qualms about repaying his unkindness, saying that Wright’s writing was “so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live.” Too much, too little, too late, Hurston’s star had fallen and was slowly burning away in the cold, looming shadow of Richard Wright.
In 1939 Hurston returned to Florida and went to work for the Federal Writers’ Project. Working alongside folklorist Stetson Kennedy, she and others collected songs and folktales from the culturally rich communities that dotted the Sunshine State. Hurston respected and revered the many iterations of Black language found in America and abroad and charged herself to do her part in collecting and preserving it for future generations.
For this, I am grateful God sent Zora Neale Hurston into the world. She has been a steady guide on this literary journey of mine. It is because of her refusal to participate in the contempt and erasure of Black dialect that I am able to proudly embrace and celebrate my bilinguality on and off the page.
God don come, he send. —Barbadian saying