Without Apology: Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was a blistering critic of collectivism and identity politics. Here I go taking liberties in another in a series of conversations with the dead.

Zora Neale Hurston blew through the Harlem Renaissance like a force of nature—an anthropologist, novelist, and folklorist who refused to let anyone else define the black experience for her. She was an individualist. Born in Alabama in 1891 and raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black incorporated towns in America, she brought that independent spirit to everything she did.

While her contemporaries wrote protest literature, Hurston celebrated Black Southern culture on its own terms, capturing the vernacular, the humor, and the humanity of her people with an anthropologist's precision and the soul of a storyteller. Her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), gave us Janie Crawford's journey toward self-discovery in prose so rich you can eat and drink it.

Despite her brilliance, Hurston spent her final years in obscurity, working as a maid and dying in a home in 1960. It took Alice Walker's 1973 pilgrimage to find her unmarked grave to begin to resurrect her legacy. Now Hurston is recognized as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, one who understood that joy and struggle, pain and beauty, could all be experienced in the same breath.

I’ll play an interviewer and let her reply with quotations. -MB

MB: These days, many young people have warmed to failed collectivist forms, such as socialism. Maybe it’s because, after the Berlin Wall fell, all the socialists retreated into the academy, where young people go to be educated. What do you think of socialism?

ZNH: “Another form of slavery—a plan to regiment the souls of men in order to serve an abstract cause invented by rulers.”

MB: Some of your fellows in the Harlem Renaissance were sympathetic to socialism, though. I’m thinking about W. E. B. Dubois and Langston Hughes.

ZNH: “The things our ‘leaders’ [were] fighting for [were] privileges for the intellectuals, not benefits for the humble.”

MB: Okay, but at least with neo-Marxism and critical theory, one replaces class struggle (Bourgeoisie and Proletariat) with race, sex, or other categories of Oppressor and Oppressed. It might even be strategically favorable for oppressed peoples to band together as a single bloc, which they call “intersectionality.”

ZNH: “All cliques, regardless of race, class, or nation, are weak-minded persons who band together because they are afraid to stand alone.”

MB: Well, it’s pretty natural for people to band together for security or a common mission, don’t you think?

ZNH: “I do not have much of a herd instinct. I can work with the crowd for a time, but let me be the shepherd my ownself.”

MB: Well, you have certainly done that in your work. You’re not just in the canon of black American literature; you’re right up there in the literary canon, full stop.

ZNH: “It seems to me that trying to live up to race is a very silly thing. The individual ought to live up to himself.”

MB: Amen, Ms. Hurston.

Now, I heard you were critical of the New Deal. Do you have similar thoughts about the Great Society and the subsequent expansion of the welfare state?

ZNH: It’s all “a money-laundering racket under the guise of relief” and is “encouraging dependency while discouraging thrift.”

“[T]he soft deceit of government handouts … drain[s] the spirit of initiative.

MB: But most people feel like assistance for black Americans is the least the government can do, given how poorly the world treated blacks in your day.

ZNH: “I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

MB: Didn’t most of your black colleagues disagree?

ZNH: Well, I never belonged to that “sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.”

MB: Some white folks, even supporters of the Civil Rights Movement, would treat black folks with pity or condescension. Many do to this day.

ZHH: To them I’d say, “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.”

MB: There are very few voices like yours. You frame identity on your own terms and refuse to define yourself by oppression. I suspect many will find your stance empowering, while others say you’ve taken your eyes off the prize.

ZNH: “It is thrilling to think—to know, rather—that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.”

MB: If people could listen to you speak today, they might not be pleased to hear you refuse the narrative of intergenerational victimhood. Did such a refusal ever get you in trouble with the black community in your day?

ZNH: “Negroes are supposed to conduct themselves according to the rulebook of their group. Nonsense. The individual Negro has the right to be himself without apology.”