Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zoal Neale Hurston.

Lynda Marion Hill. Washington: Howard UP, 1996. 269 pp. $29.00.

Reviewed by

Australia Tarver Texas Christian University 

In her 1995 study of the philosophy and politics of Zora Neale Hurston, Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom, Deborah Plant maintains that Hurston's intellectual independence and autonomy shaped her artistry, individuality, and politics. Plant argues that, as an artist, Hurston "understood cultural survival as a condition of liberation and cultural affirmation as an essential step in decolonizing the Black mind." Like Plant, Lynda M. Hill projects what she feels is a little-studied approach to examining the author in Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. While both Hill and Plant view Hurston's artistic autonomy as a driving force for her uniqueness and foresight, Hill emphasizes Hurston's ability to incorporate the skills of a social scientist, dramatist, and literary artist in one work. Hurston is thus able to be a dramatist in fieldwork reports, to be an ethnographer in her plays, and to be both in her short stories and novels. This interchange of disciplines makes Hurston an autonomous voice during the Harlem Renaissance and after. Hill theorizes that the fulcrum connecting Hurston's talents is her language as performance technique, or her ability to dramatize, pictorialize, and ritualize language. Hurston's inspiration throughout her career was the drama in the verbal artistry of the folk in her hometown, Eatonville, Florida, and of the folk who were the subjects of numerous anthropological studies in New Orleans, Alabama, Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas.

To support her theory of the dramatic underpinnings of Hurston's work, Hill concentrates on works which have received limited attention from Hurston's critics, such as the essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression," originally published in Nancy Cunard's anthology Negro (1934) and reprinted in The Sanctified Church (1983); Hurston's theatrical productions (unavailable in print, but illustrated as programs in the text) - The Great Day (1932), From Sun to Sun (1933), Singing Steel (1934) and All the Live Long Day (1934); the unstaged play The First One (1927); "Barracoon" (1931), her interview with Cudjo Lewis or Kossula, the African transported on the Clotilde, the last slave ship known to arrive in America; the essay "Folklore" (n.d.), developed from her participation in the Florida Writers Project during the thirties; an unpublished version of Hurston's story "Uncle Monday" (n.d.); the short story "Black Death"; the staging of Mule Bone, directed by Michael Schultz; the production of Zora Neale Hurston by Laurence Holder, Zora Is My Name by Ruby Dee, A Tea with Zora and Majorie by Barbara Speisman, and Spunk by George Wolfe; and the unpublished play Polk County, A Comedy of Negro Life on a Sawmill Camp (1944), written with Dorothy Waring and archived at Yale. With this blend of Hurston's ethnography, fiction, and drama, Social Rituals proposes to "use performance as a bridge between anthropology and art."

The introduction footnotes research on Hurston's date of birth and birthplace, emphasizes Hurston's early work as a playwright, and explains the approaches to analyzing the multi-genre technique in Hurston's work. Hill describes her effort in this book as "reading Hurston's texts as plays." This approach allows Hill to explore the techniques Hurston used to blend the languages characteristic of the social scientist, the fiction writer, and playwright. Hill points out, for example, that Their Eyes Were Watching God consists of sections from Mule Bone, which in turn is based on a story, "The Bone of Contention." Performance techniques were at the center of Hurston's fieldwork, as she became a "participant in the events being studied." Aspects of Hurston's works are ritualistic, Hill explains, because, in a dynamic way, they repeat events such as church services, ritual festivals, carnivals, or sporting events.

In the introduction Hill explains that in subsequent chapters she positions Hurston within the discourse on authenticity, imitation, and mimicry to demonstrate her relevance to historical and modern debates about African American expressive forms. Hill offers individual chapters on the relationship between Hurston's fieldwork and the question of how to present it as a dramatic medium; on Hurston's hieroglyphics - "words as signals for action" - which is central to understanding verbal formations such as the cross between folklore and fiction in Hurston's adoption of traditional religion and sympathetic magic in constructing conjure tales; and on Hurston's impact on the contemporary theater world and its relationship to the history of African American theater.

Hurston's essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression," referenced throughout this book and included in the appendix, is the focus of chapter one. Hill contextualizes it by showing that Hurston's essentialist views were different from the assimilationist views of fellow anthropologists like Franz Boaz, who maintained that blacks were fully acculturated. Hurston's essentialism, says Hill, is also a vital part of twentieth-century discourse on the Black Aesthetic. Hurston's essentialism is linked to her theories of mimicry and originality: Both imply that blacks modify and appropriate the dominant culture through the drama of "everyday life."

Although it is not clear how all the segments of chapter two fit under Hurston's theory of imitation, Hill discusses Hurston's theatrical productions; the political, social, and economic issues of her role as a folklorist; her "playing" with the textual and dramatic boundaries of folklore and fiction; her foregrounding of mimicry in black culture as action; and action as the "basis for African American verbal art." The focus of this chapter is troublesome; one wonders if the inclusion of a variety of issues is due to the difficulty of knowing where some of these issues should be placed. While it is not immediately apparent in chapter two, Hill demonstrates Hurston's theory of imitation by using both her early stage productions, Singing Steel and All the Live Long Day, and "Characteristics of Negro Expression." She suggests that, like Aristotle's view of imitation, Hurston's idea of mimicry in black expressive forms is a result of observing nature or any human experience. What makes black mimicry distinct is its "individual style," best demonstrated, Hurston felt, in authentic folklife. Therefore, when staging the above-named plays, Hurston did not use a script or seasoned actors. Believing that "everyday," untrained African Americans had the talent necessary to display folklife on stage, Hurston chose, for example, "dramatic arts and sewing students at the YWCA." Hurston thus engaged in a kind of dramatic mimicry, Hill observes, as she attempted to reproduce from fieldwork the "visual concept of how people engaged in ... activities" such as playing cards or dancing.

Hill maintains in chapter three that the motivation for Hurston's interview with Cudjo Lewis was to demonstrate how her views on black authenticity departed from those of other enthographers who believed in black acculturation. Hill also discusses the interview with Lewis as evidence of the convergence of Hurston's personal and professional interests. Hill's inference from Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston, A Literary Biography (1977), Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), and Hurston's manuscript of the interview "Barracoon," is that Hurston's plagiarism of her first published article for The Journal of Negro History, "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver" (1927), was due to more than just the problems of interviewing her subject or of field research that Hemenway points out. Rather, Hurston chose to plagiarize because she was emotionally affected by the intraracial strife uncovered by Lewis's experience. Hurston's "subjective response" may have overshadowed the scientific one, Hill suggests, leaving Hurston to mask her feelings with a borrowed text. Whether the reader accepts Hill's explanation or not, it seems to explore more possibilities than those offered by Hemenway. One of the more provocative presentations of Hurston's melding the personal and professional or the fictional and scientific is Hill's dramatization of Hurston's encounter with Lewis. Hill delves behind the words of "Barracoon" to the action which helped to produce them. She interprets the language used in "Barracoon" as Hurston's "license" in "writing an holistic life history rather than a strict, factual account."

Chapter four of Social Rituals is somewhat more cohesive than chapter two because one can see the progression of Hill's positioning of Hurston within the argument about black identity and authenticity from Jean de Crevecoeur to Henry Louis Gates. Hill complicates the authenticity debate by showing how African Americans have presented expressive forms which influenced each other and served as countertexts to issues of what was considered the authentic black character. The "relative absence of comedy in black drama" after Shuffle Along (1921) may be due to the black dramatist's creative distancing from the minstrel tradition. But Hurston operated within the "tight spaces" of both the comedic and dramatic traditions, as Hill demonstrates, with the use of ironic stereotyping in the unstaged play The First One. Hurston's view of the "real" is reflected in her elevation of black folk life over the black middle class and in her preference for darker skinned blacks in her staged productions. This preference, says Hill, was connected to a desire to revise the image of the fair-skinned actors playing in musical revues to mainstream audiences.

Hurston's hieroglyphics, the subject of chapter five, are evident in her use of magic and Hoodoo, which cuts across her fieldwork, short stories, autobiography, and her sense of herself as a participant/interpreter of spiritual aspects of black folk life. Although Hill has referred to hieroglyphics earlier, here she offers several spiritual contexts for this concept of the pictorial quality of Hurston's language, which is imbued with ritual signs and symbols. In a kind of continuous, interweaving context, Hill demonstrates the interrelationships among Hurston's ethnographic, fictional, and autobiographical writings. Both "Black Death" and the short stories in "Herbs and Herb Doctors" are Hoodoo stories. Hill distinguishes Hoodoo "as an African-American folk religion" of which "magic is one of the ritualized forms of expression." In "Hoodoo in America," Hurston's essay on fieldwork in the Bahamas, Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama, Hill points out that one Hoodoo practice resembles that in "Black Death." Parts of the "Black Death" story also appear in "Hoodoo in America" as "The Case of John Wesley Roberts." "Uncle Monday," an example of Hurston's fieldwork about a conjurer (from The Sanctified Church), includes a version of "Black Death" and is also included in Dust Tracks on a Road.

With illustrations from the 1991 stage production of Mule Bone, Hill concludes her book with the unresolved debate among Henry Louis Gates, Arnold Rampersad, the late George Houston Bass, and others about whether to make creative adjustments to the unfinished play or to produce it as written. The debate reflects one of the core issues of Hill's book: Where does the artist, critic, or reader situate a dramatic text? What are the qualities which govern its classification as a text or a "performance text" or a "potential performance of a text"? As Hill presents other productions which stage Hurston's life, she brings the reader back to her field of African American literature, drama, and culture and to the inspiration for writing the book: to use Hurston as a perceptive source for the challenges of teaching black theater.

The book has problems with focus, structure, and mechanics, and it has a few undetected errors, such as the title of Garland Anderson's play The Appearance, the designation of Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias as white, and the incomplete bibliographic citation on Daryl Dance. However, despite the textual problems, Hill makes a laudable attempt to challenge her readers and to offer refreshing perspectives on Hurston, whose boundary-crossing work offers performative guidelines for those in African American literature, drama, and culture.