Talk about the South: unspeakable things unspoken in Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee.

Talk about the South: unspeakable things unspoken in Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee. IN 1975 ALICE WALKER LAUNCHED ONE OF THE GREATEST REVIVALS INmodern American literary history with her Ms. magazine essay, "InSearch of Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. ." The extraordinary range ofHurston's achievements, which include ground-breaking novels,autobiography, short fiction, drama, political and cultural essays,reportage, folklore, and ethnography, has garnered her an audience, bothcritical and popular, that continues to grow unabated. Hurston'sstares as the great literary foremother fore��moth��er?n.A woman ancestor.Noun 1. foremother - a woman ancestorancestor, antecedent, ascendant, ascendent, root - someone from whom you are descended (but usually more remote than a grandparent) of contemporary African American African AmericanMulticulture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.See Race. women writers stems principally from her work in the twenties andthirties, and especially her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were WatchingGod(1937). Their Eyes's protofeminist sensibility, its sensitiveexploration of the intricacies of working-class Southern blackcommunity, and its brilliant demonstration of the expressive potentialof black vernacular Noun 1. Black Vernacular - a nonstandard form of American English characteristically spoken by African Americans in the United StatesAAVE, African American English, African American Vernacular English, Black English, Black English Vernacular, Black Vernacular speech in novelistic nov��el��is��tic?adj.Of, relating to, or characteristic of novels.novel��is discourse have made it both asignal text in the creation of an African American literary traditionand required reading in countless American Studies, Women Studies, andAmerican literature courses. (1) Seraph on the Suwanee (1948),Hurston's fourth and last published novel, has received a farchillier response and was until recently often condemned or dismissedout of hand. Although it initially garnered favorable reviews,particularly from the white press, Seraph has tended to baffle anddisturb even Hurston's most devoted readers. Critic Mary HelenWashington, for example, dismisses Seraph as "an awkward andcontrived novel, as vacuous as a soap opera soap operaBroadcast serial drama, characterized by a permanent cast of actors, a continuing story, tangled interpersonal situations, and a melodramatic or sentimental style. " (21) and Bernard Bell Bernard Bell is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Professor of Law and Herbert Hannoch Scholar at Rutgers School of Law-Newark. Bell received a B.A. cum laude from Harvard and a J.D. expels it from his influential study on the African American novelbecause "[it] is neither comic, nor folkloristic, nor aboutblacks" (128). Seraph's most damning critique, however, comesfrom Hurston's first great champion, Alice Walker, who describesHurston's later work as "reactionary, static, shockinglymisguided and timid" and adds that this is "especially true ofSeraph on the Suwanee, which is not even about black people, which is nocrime, but is about white people for whom it is impossible to care,which is" (xvi). Carla Kaplan, in her Life in Letters, admits that "it is hardto understand why Hurston would have written it": Why, for example, would she go from depicting the black community she knew so well, portrayed so lovingly, and criticized so handily to a story about southern crackers and their difficult rise to financial success? Why would she go from using rape as a central metaphor for exploitation in Their Eyes to a story in which rape is merely misunderstanding: a "pain remorseless sweet" and a "memory inexpressibly sweet"? Why does she paint a positive and comic image of the very "pet negro system"--"every Southern white man has his pet Negro"--which she decried elsewhere as a "residue of feudalism"? (443) These difficult questions deserve our attention, I believe, becausethey speak to issues that were very much on Hurston's mind late inher career and, more importantly, their answers yield valuable insightson her notoriously complex attitudes toward such issues as Southernrace-relations, gender, and literary protest. In recent years severalscholars have taken up this enigmatic work; the emerging consensus isthat Hurston is enacting an elaborate joke on the text's literarysubjects--poor white Southerners--and on her readers, especially aroundissues of race and gender. (2) After all, the final revelation of theprotagonist, Arvay Henson, is that "her job was mothering. Whatmore could any woman want and need?" (Seraph 351). GivenHurston's lifetime of stalwart independence, how could she not bejoking? But this critical focus on the joke as a narrative theme andrhetorical strategy tends to produce what I term a hermeneutics ofdisavowal--a mode of inquiry that downplays the frequently disturbingmanifest content man��i��fest contentn.The content of a dream, fantasy, or thought as it is remembered and reported in psychoanalysis.manifest contentof Seraph as a purely ironic and subversive performanceor "mask" that is then separated from the "true"meaning and investments of the text, which presumably pre��sum��a��ble?adj.That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. are to be foundsomewhere sub-rosa. Attention to masking, rhetorical indirection Not direct. Indirection provides a way of accessing instructions, routines and objects when their physical location is constantly changing. The initial routine points to some place, and, using hardware and/or software, that place points to some other place. , andwhat Henry Louis Gates refers to as "double-voiced discourse"and "Signifyin(g)" (xxv) are of course central tounderstanding Hurston's work. But this approach can also have theunfortunate effect of implying that Hurston's appropriation ofwhiteness in Seraph is wholly parodic and therefore bears littlerelation to her personal and political beliefs. I want to argue againsttoo stark a division of the text's meaning into two discretelevels: a largely ironic and therefore inconsequential surface over ameaningful depth. Instead, my reading focuses on the dynamic tensionbetween "surface" and "depth," paying particularattention to what this tension reveals about the function of race in thenovel's affective economy. As much as some critics might seem to prefer otherwise, Hurston wasin many respects very much in earnest when she wrote Seraph. Seraph wasto be a counter-narrative of the South, one aimed at a popular audience,and especially designed to rebut To defeat, dispute, or remove the effect of the other side's facts or arguments in a particular case or controversy.When a defendant in a lawsuit proves that the plaintiff's allegations are not true, the defendant has thereby rebutted them. TO REBUT. what she considered distorted images ofthe region offered by Southern conservatives and Northern liberals. (3)Hurston's attempt to render a fight, comedic, and romantic"song of the South" ultimately fails, however, for preciselythe reason given by Alice Walker--i.e., the narrative is populated bywhite characters about whom it is "impossible" to care. Moreto the point, it is populated by "crackers," Hurston'sterm, whom she represents with an unsettling un��set��tle?v. un��set��tled, un��set��tling, un��set��tlesv.tr.1. To displace from a settled condition; disrupt.2. To make uneasy; disturb.v.intr. contempt. Hurston'sattempt to produce a redemptive narrative of the New South isunintentionally thwarted by her brutal treatment of the crackers, whichobliquely vents a powerful and heretofore unrecognized rage that pulsesthrough the novel. The novel "fails" (in its efforts to bequaint, charming, and romantic) because it cannot mediate between twocompeting forms of affect--the first conveying a deep-seated longing forinterracial in��ter��ra��cial?adj.Relating to, involving, or representing different races: interracial fellowship; an interracial neighborhood. harmony and progress in the South and the other revealing anunacknowledged undercurrent of fury at the dim possibility of thisvision's ever being materialized. The incommensurability in��com��men��su��ra��ble?adj.1. a. Impossible to measure or compare.b. Lacking a common quality on which to make a comparison.2. Mathematicsa. of theseforms of affect is precisely what makes Seraph such a fascinating novel,one worthy of our attention not only because it has much to teach usabout the late phase of Hurston's career but also because of whatit reveals about the complex motivations and effects of the crucial yetunderstudied phenomenon of African American literary racialcross-dressing in mid-century America. I frame my inquiry into Hurston's text and its negotiation ofthe post-WWII color line color linen.A barrier, created by custom, law, or economic differences, separating nonwhite persons from whites. Also called color bar.Noun 1. with a set of questions posed by Toni Morrison Noun 1. Toni Morrison - United States writer whose novels describe the lives of African-Americans (born in 1931)Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison .In 1989 Morrison urged students of American literature to reexamine re��ex��am��inealso re-ex��am��ine ?tr.v. re��ex��am��ined, re��ex��am��in��ing, re��ex��am��ines1. To examine again or anew; review.2. Law To question (a witness) again after cross-examination. "the American canon ... for the 'unspeakable thingsunspoken'; for the ways in which the presence of Afro-Americans hasshaped the choices, the language, the structure--the meaning of so muchAmerican literature" ("Unspeakable" 23). For Morrison,the "spectacularly interesting question is, 'What intellectualfeats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from asociety seething with my presence, and what effect has that performancehad on the work?'" In this and her 1992 follow-up collectionof essays, Playing in the Dark, Morrison rereads white-authoredcanonical American texts with an eye toward the myriad ways in which theauthors fundamentally rely on an "Africanist" presence,however muted and repressed, as a ground of Otherness that produces aputatively coherent, though ultimately anxious, sense of whiteness.Morrison's primary concern in these essays is not withblack-authored texts, yet in an aside she poses a question that isparticularly germane for a reconsideration of Seraph: "what happensto the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some levelalways conscious of representing one's own race to, or in spite of,a race of readers that understands itself to be 'universal' orrace-free?" (xii). Given Seraph's focus on white characters,we can take Morrison's query one step further and ask what happensto the writerly imagination of a black author when she representswhiteness to a white reading audience that understands itself to be"universal" or race-free. What does whiteness open updiscursively in this work and what does it foreclose fore��close?v. fore��closed, fore��clos��ing, fore��clos��esv.tr.1. a. To deprive (a mortgagor) of the right to redeem mortgaged property, as when payments have not been made.b. ? How does thetext's Africanist presence, both the seen and the unseen, inform,stabilize, and disrupt Hurston's treatment of whiteness? What arethe unspeakable things unspoken? To account fully for Hurston's treatment of race (and identitymore generally) in this work, we must first locate the text within itsspecific social and historical context. Despite the axiomatic ax��i��o��mat��ic? also ax��i��o��mat��i��caladj.Of, relating to, or resembling an axiom; self-evident: "It's axiomatic in politics that voters won't throw out a presidential incumbent unless they think his challenger will quality ofthis approach to reading the function of identity within a literarytext, few critics of Seraph have properly situated the work and itstreatment of identity within the moment of its production. Thisde-historicization has contributed to the work's tendency to baffleits modern readers. The critical emphasis on Hurston's deploymentsof subtle masks and jokes has also obscured the degree to which the textis in many respects actively engaged in national debates raging aroundthe South immediately following the Second World War. (4) The South wasundergoing convulsive con��vul��siveadj.1. Characterized by or having the nature of convulsions.2. Having or producing convulsions.convulsivepertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of a convulsion. changes after the war as the rapid growth ofagribusiness, industrialism in��dus��tri��al��ism?n.An economic and social system based on the development of large-scale industries and marked by the production of large quantities of inexpensive manufactured goods and the concentration of employment in urban factories. , consumerism, and urbanization transformedevery level of Southern society. Easily the most threatening change,however, was the emergence of the civil rights movement, which was setin motion by war-time political gains. Galvanized by a series oflegislative victories, such as the defeat of the all-white primary andthe poll tax, by increasing political organization and activism, and bythe liberating experience of overseas military service, AfricanAmericans in the North and South intensified their struggle for freedom.Racist whites responded to these signs of black political insurgencywith the greatest outburst of mob violence and lynchings since the endof World War I. (5) These conflicts received both national andinternational coverage, and thus became an increasing source ofembarrassment and concern to the US as it vied for allies during theearly years of the Cold War. The South, once again, became thenation's great "problem" to be solved. (6) Thus, we mayneed to tweak Morrison's query one last time and ask what happensto the writerly imagination of a Southern black author when she isrepresenting the South to a nation in certain respects literally at warwith itself over the status of the "Africanist" presence inthe American body politic BODY POLITIC, government, corporations. When applied to the government this phrase signifies the state. 2. As to the persons who compose the body politic, they take collectively the name, of people, or nation; and individually they are citizens, when considered . Against this backdrop of racial violence and intense publicscrutiny Hurston dedicated herself to rendering what she described in aletter to her editor, Burroughs Mitchell, as a "true picture of theSouth" (561). She rightly recognized that the US, and especiallythe North, often unfairly and inaccurately laid the responsibility forthe "race problem" solely at the feet of the South.Accordingly, she intended Seraph to be a redemptive and revealingtreatment of the region in all its complexity; Hurston's "truepicture" included white Southerners like Jim Meserve, theprotagonist's husband, whom Hurston described as "a member ofthat liberal class which has always existed in the South in a minority,who believed in the benefits of the Union and advancement.""In truth," she continues, "the South presents a veryconfusing picture. Virginius Dabney and Bilbo bil��bo?1?n. pl. bil��boesAn iron bar to which sliding fetters are attached, formerly used to shackle the feet of prisoners.[Origin unknown.] side by side.High-mindedness and savagery side by side.... I want the book to looklike the people it is written about." (7) She also insisted onrepresentations of African Americans that did not reproduce what sheconsidered the usual "oversimplications": "[The Negro] iseither pictured by the conservatives as happy, picking his banjo banjo,stringed musical instrument, with a body resembling a tambourine. The banjo consists of a hoop over which a skin membrane is stretched; it has a long, often fretted neck and four to nine strings, which are plucked with a pick or the fingers. , or bythe so-called liberals as low, miserable and crying. The Negro'slife is neither of these. Rather, it is in-between and above and belowthese pictures. That is what I intend to put in my new book"(Hemenway 299). (8) It seems less than clear how far Hurston departedfrom the conservative stereotype of African Americans, a point I willtake up in more detail below, but there are certainly no "low,miserable and crying" African Americans in Seraph. Hurston's longstanding refusal to "protest" is bynow quite familiar, appearing most famously in her 1928 essay, "HowIt Feels To Be Colored Me," where she declared, "I am nottragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, norlurking behind my eyes.... I do not belong to the sobbing school ofNegrohood ..." (Folkore 827). Hurston was equally averse to leftistand liberal attacks on the South's oppressive social structure,believing that literary texts that focused on racial oppression amountedto another form of minstrelsy min��strel��sy?n. pl. min��strel��sies1. The art or profession of a minstrel.2. A troupe of minstrels.3. Ballads and lyrics sung by minstrels. and were little more than thinly veiledcommunist propaganda Communist propaganda refers to propaganda used by various communist regimes and communist parties. Specific examples include: Agitprop (Propaganda in Soviet Union) Propaganda in the People's Republic of China . (9) In her 1938 review of Richard Wright'sUncle Tom's Children, generally presumed to be at least partly anact of retaliation against Wright's critical review of Their Eyesthe year before, she wrote: the reader sees the picture of the South that the communists havebeen passing around of late. A dismal, hopeless section ruled by brutish brut��ish?adj.1. Of or characteristic of a brute.2. Crude in feeling or manner.3. Sensual; carnal.4. hatred and nothing else. Mr. Wright's author's solution, isthe solution of the PARTY--state responsibility for everything andindividual responsibility for nothing, not even feeding one's self.And march! ("Stories" 913) She adds that "his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp Dismal Swamp,SE Va. and NE N.C. With dense forests and tangled undergrowth, it is a favorite site for sportsmen and naturalists. It once may have covered nearly 2,200 sq mi (5,700 sq km) but has been reduced by drainage to less than 600 sq mi (1,550 sq km). of race hatred must be where they live. Not one act of understanding andsympathy comes to pass in the entire work" (912). Hurston's vision of the South in Seraph, by contrast, isreplete with interracial "understanding and sympathy." Unlikethe gothic vision of Southern racial terror and entrapment entrapment,in law, the instigation of a crime in the attempt to obtain cause for a criminal prosecution. Situations in which a government operative merely provides the occasion for the commission of a criminal act (e.g. depicted inWright's Uncle Tom "s Children, and then again in BlackBoy(1945), Hurston's narrative bears more than a passingresemblance to a plantation romance, though one updated for and set inthe New South. Her unlikely appropriation of the plantation romanceallows her, paradoxically, to imagine an alternative world ofinterracial possibility and thereby provides a fictive fic��tive?adj.1. Of, relating to, or able to engage in imaginative invention.2. Of, relating to, or being fiction; fictional.3. Not genuine; sham. reconciliation ofthe pervasive and intractable social conflicts of the postwar South. Thetext's connections to this historically racist literary traditionare not immediately apparent because of the narrative's setting inthe early twentieth-century New South and its attention to the lives ofpoor whites. Rather, Seraph bears a homologous homologous/ho��mol��o��gous/ (ho-mol��ah-gus)1. corresponding in structure, position, origin, etc.2. allogeneic.ho��mol��o��gousadj.1. relationship to theplantation romance, wherein Arvay's husband, Jim Meserve,represents the all-powerful Southern white man as head-of-household whoprotects and provides for his wife, children, and African American laborforce. The extended "interracial family" (an especially potentfantasy fueled by race conflict in the New South) lives on the Meserveestate and repays the father-husband-master's protection andgenerosity with undying loyalty and love. This unlikely racial pastoral speaks directly to the NewSouth's identity crisis during a time of radical social andpolitical change, a struggle that often crystallized in debates aboutthe South's relationship to tradition and modernity. Hurston breaksfrom the tendency of white Southern apologists, especially theAgrarians, to fetishize fet��ish��ize?tr.v. fet��ish��ized, fet��ish��iz��ing, fet��ish��iz��esTo make a fetish of: "The American public schools . . . the Old South and its traditions as a site ofanti-modernity, a place of psychic refuge from the loss and alienationembodied in the onslaught of industrialization industrializationProcess of converting to a socioeconomic order in which industry is dominant. The changes that took place in Britain during the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century led the way for the early industrializing nations of western Europe and and increasingurbanization. (10) Seraph, on the other hand, enthusiastically praisesthe positive changes that Hurston sees taking place in the region, the"progress" and "development" brought on by newindustry, commerce, and science. Yet her text also celebrates theSouth's difference from the rest of the nation in racialized termsthat are readily recognizable in Old South social structure. WhatHurston preserves from conservative narratives of the Old South is thefantasy of innocent black-white relations; these loving relationshipsare the positive source of the South's difference. Hurston's pastoral is fraught with conflict, though. The"crackers" in the novel, represented primarily by Array (theprotagonist) and her family, consistently stand in the way of the NewSouth's emergence as the Promised Land. The crackers are ignorant,primitive, bigoted, lazy, fearful of change, and occasionally savage.Thus far critics have overlooked how Hurston allegorizes her sense ofthe South's contemporary struggles through her representation ofJim and Arvay's relationship. Jim must struggle throughout thenovel to overcome Arvay's backwardness so that his family, whichstands in metonymically me��ton��y��my?n. pl. me��ton��y��miesA figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of for the region, will prosper. The poor whitesfunction in the narrative as scapegoats for the South's ills,thereby effectively creating an avenue for Hurston to voice a critiqueof the region's problems without alienating her mainstream whiteaudience and without "go[ing] to the mourners bench"("Countee Cullen Countee Cullen (May 30, 1903–January 9, 1946) was an African-American Romantic poet and an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance. BiographyCountee Cullen was born with the name Countee LeRoy Porter and was abandoned by his mother at birth. " 482)--in other words, without protesting.(11) Poor whites as a subject of fiction, social commentary, andhistorical inquiry, were in fact experiencing something of a vogueduring and after the Depression; best-selling Southern authors MarjorieKinnan Rawlings Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953)[1] was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. (a Floridian and personal friend of Hurston), ErskineCaldwell Noun 1. Erskine Caldwell - United States author remembered for novels about poverty and degeneration (1903-1987)Caldwell, Erskine Preston Caldwell , and historian W. J. Cash all took on poor whites during theseyears. (12) These and other writers of the period frequently depictedpoor whites through stereotypes usually assigned to African Americans,i.e., as either quaintly innocent or savagely primitive. Hurston drawson these familiar stereotypes of the poor white as a ready means tocommunicate with her postwar audience in much the same way that whitewriters after Reconstruction had achieved a symbolic national reunionthrough proliferating and demeaning images of African Americans. But scapegoating crackers is a double-edged sword for Hurston, forwhile the poor white allows her to render a critique of Southernbackwardness, her strategy of representational displacement--projectingnegative African American stereotypes and experiences onto poorwhites--actually stages, indirectly, what she most wanted Most Wanted may refer to: Lists used by law enforcement agencies to alert the public, such as the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and FBI Most Wanted Terrorists America's Most Wanted, a U.S. to disavow TO DISAVOW. To deny the authority by which an agent pretends to have acted as when he has exceeded the bounds of his authority. 2. It is the duty of the principal to fulfill the contracts which have been entered into by his authorized agent; and when an agent :black abjection. Hurston depicts the world of the crackers as marked bycrushing poverty, ignorance, rape, lynching, and an enduring plantationsocial structure; she even goes so far as to draw on eugenicist eu��gen��i��cist? also eu��gen��istn.An advocate of or a specialist in eugenics. ideasabout inferior, animal-like, and unsocializable "kinds" ofpeople. (13) In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , Hurston indirectly voices what she refusedto say about the oppression of African Americans, howeverunintentionally and, arguably, unconsciously: the crackers end up assurrogates, figures that simultaneously obscure and reveal the seethingracial conflicts of the postwar South. What is completely absent fromthe text--overtly racialized violence, Jim Crow Jim CrowNegro stereotype popularized by 19th-century minstrel shows. [Am. Hist.: Van Doren, 138]See : Bigotry , sharecropping sharecropping,system of farm tenancy once common in some parts of the United States. In the United States the institution arose at the end of the Civil War out of the plantation system. Many planters had ample land but little money for wages. , chaingangs, the KKK--reappears in altered form and in affect, an affect thatoverpowers the manifest discourse of the work. Hurston's"unspeakable" rage at the condition of African Americansbecomes legible in the narrative through her vicious treatment of thepoor white characters. It is this suppressed rage and contemptuousrendering of the poor whites that makes these characters, in the wordsof Alice Walker, "impossible" to care about. (14)Hurston's plantation romance, upon closer inspection, begins toevince e��vince?tr.v. e��vinced, e��vinc��ing, e��vinc��esTo show or demonstrate clearly; manifest: evince distaste by grimacing. surprising affective affinities with Wright's gothicnightmare. Finally, it is not only racial violence that is absent fromHurston's "true picture of the South"; also missing areambitious, educated, and accomplished African Americans--in other words,anyone remotely resembling Hurston herself. Hurston's sense thatshe had to erase herself from her Southern pastoral constitutes the mostpowerful and tragic illustration of the repressed Africanist presence inSeraph--Zora Neale Hurston is the unspeakable thing unspoken. Seraph on the Suwanee centers on the life of Arvay Henson, a poor,uneducated, and extremely insecure Florida "cracker"--a termthat Hurston uses throughout the text. The novel begins in rural Floridajust after the turn of the twentieth century, when Arvay, who hasdeclared her intent to become a missionary, is being courted by thehandsome newcomer Jim Meserve. Although Jim is poor, he is no ordinary"cracker" but rather charismatic and ambitious, and his"ancestors had held plantations upon the Alabama River before theWar" (7). Their courtship is difficult, mainly because Arvay'sfear of rejection leads her repeatedly to withdraw into aself-protective shell Jim then decides to take the situation in hand byraping her and then carrying her off to the courthouse to elope e��lope?intr.v. e��loped, e��lop��ing, e��lopes1. To run away with a lover, especially with the intention of getting married.2. To run away; abscond. . Hurstonstages this "rape-seduction" scene with comic overtones, forwhen Arvay objects mildly at having been raped, Jim replies, "Yousure was [raped], and the job was done up brown.... Sure you was raped,and that ain't all. You're going to keep on gettingraped" (56-57). Despite how offensive and disturbing this scenariois to contemporary readers, Hurston never leaves any doubt that Jimloves Arvay and their children; he devotes his life to caring for hisfamily, and providing for all their needs. Even so, Arvay'sinsecurity persists, and after twenty years TWENTY YEARS. The lapse of twenty years raises a presumption of certain facts, and after such a time, the party against whom the presumption has been raised, will be required to prove a negative to establish his rights. 2. of struggle, Jim leaves outof frustration, telling her to come to him once she has made up her mindto stop "loving like a coward" (262). Array decides to go backhome to her "kind," but finds her family has only grown morepoor and malevolent with time. Only then does she fully realize the fatethat Jim has saved her from. During her efforts to win Jim back, sherealizes that though Jim acts like an "overpowering general,"on the inside he is just like a little baby, hungering for her"hovering." In the novel's climax, Arvay realizes that"Her job was mothering. What more could any woman want and need?... Jim was hers and it was her privilege to serve him" (351). A New South Pastoral: Or, Paradise after the Fall. On one level, Seraph is the story of the Meserve family'sascent from poverty to prosperity. The family's progress is alsomirrored in the region's transformation from a stagnated backwaterto an affluent emblem of the New South. Hurston imbues Jim Meserve withthe attributes essential to the New South's success. He is smart,ambitious and interested in building the future, rather than glorifyingthe ideals of the past. (15) Jim declares that "While my old manwas sitting around reading and taking notes trying to trace up who didwhat in the Civil War, and my two brothers were posing around waitingfor the good old times that they had heard went on before the War tocome back again, I shucked out to get in touch with the New South"(203). Hurston's quick dismissal of Jim's backward-lookingfamily, who never appear in the text, allows her to marginalize mar��gin��al��ize?tr.v. mar��gin��al��ized, mar��gin��al��iz��ing, mar��gin��al��iz��esTo relegate or confine to a lower or outer limit or edge, as of social standing. representationally what was in fact the predominant white attitudetoward Southern identity and politics at this moment. The year of Seraph's publication, 1948, was also the year whenthe belligerently segregationist seg��re��ga��tion��ist?n.One that advocates or practices a policy of racial segregation.segre��ga "Dixiecrat" party emerged(with the late Strom Thurmond as its presidential candidate) to protestthe national Democratic party's consideration of a civil rightsplank in the party platform for the upcoming elections. All but the mostliberal Southerners of this moment were, like Jim's father andbrothers, looking to the past historically for their models of race andclass politics. Despite benefitting from forward-looking New Dealpolicies and pro-labor, pro-union activism from such organization as theCIO CIO:see American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. (Chief Information Officer) The executive officer in charge of information processing in an organization. , most Southern whites distrusted these organizations, beheving thatthey represented communist influence and portended additional Northernand federal domination (Daniel 13). If inclusive labor activismcultivated suspicion and resentment among most whites, civil rightsactivism incited murderous rage. White Southerners could not ignore thesporadic yet undeniable signs that the days of "separate butequal" were coming to an end. WWII WWIIabbr.World War IIWWIIWorld War Two precipitated a wide range ofdramatic social, economic, political, and technological changes. Inaddition to the mechanization mechanizationUse of machines, either wholly or in part, to replace human or animal labour. Unlike automation, which may not depend at all on a human operator, mechanization requires human participation to provide information or instruction. of agriculture and the massiveout-migration of black and white populations in search of betteremployment (as well as increased social opportunity for the blackpopulation), the war also increased black self-assertion and violentwhite reaction. In the South alone the war years witnessed "sixcivilian riots, more than twenty military riots and mutinies, andbetween forty and seventy-five lynchings" (Daniel 11). If whitesupremacists tended to "win" these battles, they were losingground, albeit unevenly, on numerous other key fronts. In the 1944 caseof Smith v. Allwright Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944), was an important decision of the United States Supreme Court with regard to voting rights and, by extension, racial desegregation.Lonnie E. , the Supreme Court struck down the allwhite-primary, while the NAACP NAACPin full National Association for the Advancement of Colored PeopleOldest and largest U.S. civil rights organization. It was founded in 1909 to secure political, educational, social, and economic equality for African Americans; W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. set about expanding its Southernmembership roils, branches, and African American voterregistration--from two hundred thousand registered black voters in 1940to six hundred thousand in 1946, a two hundred percent increase in justsix years (Sullivan 141). (16) Though what has come to be known as theCivil Rights Era would not fully emerge for several more years, blackand white Southerners alike sensed that a new day in race relations race relationsNoun, plthe relations between members of two or more races within a single communityrace relationsnpl → relaciones fpl raciales hadarrived. Of course Seraph is set in the first three decades of the century,not the years following WWII. Nevertheless, the particular historicalpressures of the postwar moment are everywhere evident in the text.Hurston engages contemporary struggles around the changing status of thecolor line most pointedly through her treatment of Jim and Arvay'srelationship to the black community. As other critics have noted, whenJim Meserve sets out to get in touch with the New South he ultimatelysucceeds by getting in touch with the knowledge, good will, and hardlabor HARD LABOR, punishment. In those states where the penitentiary system has been adopted, convicts who are to be imprisoned, as part of their punishment, are sentenced to perform hard labor. of African Americans. After Jim and Arvay marry they move toCitrabeile, an agricultural area dominated by citrus farming. Jim, whoknows nothing about this trade, decides to go to "the jooks andgathering places in Colored Town" for information--"since thecolored men did all the manual work, they were the ones who actuallyknew how things were done" (74). Jim establishes himself, andquickly repays his black laborers by making them "the highest paidmen in that part of the state" (75). After Jim buys a piece ofproperty from a "Cracker ... [who] was too damned lazy andtrifling" (78) to take care of it himself, he uses his connectionsto "the underground system in Colored Town that the Whites did notknow about" (82) to get his house built quickly and cheaply.Jim's crew felt that he was "a perfect gentleman, and theywere only too glad to oblige him" (82). The narrator NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. tells us thatArvay "had no understanding to what extent she was benefiting fromthe good will that Jim had been building up ever since he had come totown ... Jim was getting the benefit of every doubt [from local blacks],and the doubts were numerous" (83 emphasis added). Here andelsewhere in the text Hurston makes a point of describing theinterracial local economy's harmonious system of exchange, even asshe chooses to ignore the fact that based on knowledge, experience, andability, Jim should be working for a black foreman, rather than steppingright into the role of "boss man." Gone are any traces oflabor conflict in the narrative, much less any references to thecommonplace but less idyllic labor practices of sharecropping, tenantfarming tenant farmingAgricultural system in which landowners rent their land to farmers and receive either cash or a share of the product in return. Landowners may also contribute operating capital and management. , and peonage peonage(pē`ənĭj), system of involuntary servitude based on the indebtedness of the laborer (the peon) to his creditor. It was prevalent in Spanish America, especially in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. , as well as the wide-spread vagrancy vagrancy,in law, term applied to the offense of persons who are without visible means of support or domicile while able to work. State laws and municipal ordinances punishing vagrancy often also cover loitering, associating with reputed criminals, prostitution, and laws thatoften forced blacks into chain-gang labor (Ayers). Even Hurston's worker's paradise has its limits, however.Though Jim may be generous towards his black workers, there is never anyquestion that he and his labor force are social equals. Jim'srelationship to his workers is explicitly paternal, and Hurston drivesthis point home when she describes Joe Kelsey, Jim's favorite blackemployee, as his "Pet Negro." Hurston explains that Every Southern white man has his pet Negro. His Negro is always fine, honest, faithful to him unto death, and most remarkable.... He never lies, and in fact can do no wrong.... [Even if the pet commits a crime,] If the white patron has his way, the pet will never serve a day in jar for it. The utmost of his influence will be invoked to balk the law. Turn go his Negro from that jar! (61) Although this passage seems clearly intended to amuse,Hurston's language, nevertheless, clearly evokes a white man's"ownership" of a black man. This evocation of the "peculiar institution "(Our) peculiar institution" was a euphemism for slavery and the economic ramifications of it in the American South. The meaning of "peculiar" in this expression is "one's own", that is, referring to something distinctive to or characteristic of a particular place or people. " isreinforced when Joe Kelsey and his family move into a home that Jimbuilds on his estate. Joe's children work the groves, while Joeruns Jim's whiskey still, one of his many acts of loyalty:"Joe had been careful to protect Jim [from the law], capable, andever so honest and faithful. Joe had run the risk of the chain-gangbeing faithful to him" (117). Historian Grace Hale has demonstratedin Making Whiteness that this ideal of racial harmony and mutualdependence, a staple of the many forms of plantation pastorals producedin the decades following Reconstruction, was an essential characteristicof the plantation romance. With the rise of the New South, many Southernauthors (Thomas Dixon, Thomas Dixon, Thomas,1864–1946, American novelist, b. Shelby, N.C., grad. Wake Forest College. A militant Southerner, he is best known for his novel The Clansman (1905), on which the movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) was based. Nelson Page, and Margaret Mitchell Noun 1. Margaret Mitchell - United States writer noted for her novel about the South during the American Civil War (1900-1949)Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, Mitchell , toname only a few of the best-known novelists) justified the need forsegregation in the present by describing a prelapsarian pre��lap��sar��i��an?adj.Of or relating to the period before the fall of Adam and Eve.[pre- + Latin l social orderthat existed "before the war." Plantation life was imagined interms of an idealized "interracial family"; this allegedlyharmonious and "racially innocent" world was destroyed foreverby the Yankees and later by the "New Negroes," with theirpolitical, social, and economic aspirations. Hurston conjures the lostinterracial family again, however, in her New South idyll idyllor idylIn literature, a simple descriptive work in poetry or prose that deals with rustic life or pastoral scenes or suggests a mood of peace and contentment. . WhenArvay's son Kenny moves to New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of to pursue a career as amusician, Joe is sent up to look after him. Hurston tells us that"Arvay was comforted to think that 'Uncle Joe' would bethere with Kenny" because Joe is "one in the family." Joeassures Arvay that "it'll be just like you was there.... WeMeserves'll look after one another" (252). Joe's son Jeffreiterates this familial sentiment later, when he comments, "usMeserves don't mistrust one another" (313). Jim cares for and relies on "his" pet Negroes, and theyin turn devote their lives to "doing" for him, his family, andhis property. There are no uppity New Negroes or angry "BadNiggers" to be vilified in favor of the faithful "olddarky dark��yalso dark��ie ?n. pl. dark��ies OffensiveUsed as a disparaging term for a Black person.Noun 1. ." (17) Hurston's romance suggests that we need not lookto "those old plantation days" for "racialinnocence"; rather, the past lives on in the present, which hasbeen improved by the New South's "progress." Relatedly,because of the "freedom" on the Meserve"plantation," Hurston can easily avoid addressing such topicsas the brutal enforcement of segregation and Klan terror. One way to understand Hurston's fantastically positive visionof the South is to see it as a kind of utopian aspiration. As RichardDyer has argued in reference to the utopian impulse of the musical,certain forms of entertainment offer the image of "something better" to escape into, or something we want deeply mat our day-to-day lives don't provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes--these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized. (222) Dyer explains that the utopianism u��to��pi��an��ismalso U��to��pi��an��ism ?n.The ideals or principles of a utopian; idealistic and impractical social theory.utopianism1. of popular forms of entertainmentshould be understood in terms of sensibility rather than in terms ofsocial structure, whereby a wish-fulfilling narrative offers ephemeral,imaginative solutions to very real lacks and needs. Hurston, similarly,preferred to dwell on to continue long on or in; to remain absorbed with; to stick to; to make much of; as, to dwell upon a subject; a singer dwells on a note s>.- Shak.See also: Dwell and accentuate the South'spossibilities--especially as evinced in individual, interpersonalrelations--rather than what was true more generally, particularly interms of race relations. Thus far I have argued that Hurston's New South racialpastoral reproduces many elements of white Southern segregationistideology, but it also has an illuminating antecedent ANTECEDENT. Something that goes before. In the construction of laws, agreements, and the like, reference is always to be made to the last antecedent; ad proximun antecedens fiat relatio. in a blacksegregationist. Booker T. Washington expressed his vision of the NewSouth most memorably in his (in)famous Atlanta Exposition Address, inwhich he implores white Southerners to "Cast down your bucket whereyou are": Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.... While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defence [sic] of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. (147-48) (emphasis added) Indeed, as we have just seen, when Jim was struggling to establishhimself in Citrabelle, he "cast down his bucket" among AfricanAmericans and prospered enormously. Both Washington and Hurston promisea white audience symbolic continuity with an earlier racial order byinvoking "the same Negroes who have proved [their] loyalty to youin the past" as key to the prosperity of the New South.Hurston's "old" Negroes are the same "patient,faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people" that populateWashington's narrative of racial harmony and reconciliation. (18) Houston Baker argues that Washington ascended to his status as"Master of Tuskegee Plantation" by working "within theframing mind of the South to produce not a utopia of black modernism atTuskegee, but a retrograde and imperialist plantation. This plantationwas brokerage ground for Booker T.'s own personal power, wealth,and influence over national 'Negro affairs'" (64). Heclaimed a "mission from God" to discipline (and, consequently,to immobilize im��mo��bi��lizev.1. To render immobile.2. To fix the position of a joint or fractured limb, as with a splint or cast.im��mo ) the "black-South body" (97). In Up FromSlavery--written, ostensibly os��ten��si��ble?adj.Represented or appearing as such; ostensive: His ostensible purpose was charity, but his real goal was popularity. , to raise money for the TuskegeeInstitute--Washington describes the "black country districts"he intends to uplift and civilize civ��i��lize?tr.v. civ��i��lized, civ��i��liz��ing, civ��i��liz��es1. To raise from barbarism to an enlightened stage of development; bring out of a primitive or savage state.2. with his vocational education.According to according toprep.1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians.2. In keeping with: according to instructions.3. Baker, Up From Slavery "articulates a picture ofabjection, misdirection MISDIRECTION, practice. An error made by a judge in charging the jury in a special case. 2. Such misdirection is either in relation to matters of law or matters of fact. 3.-1. , hygienic hy��gien��icadj.1. Of or relating to hygiene.2. Tending to promote or preserve health.3. Sanitary. incompetence, corrosive diet,spendthrift One who spends money profusely and improvidently, thereby wasting his or her estate.Under various statutes, a spendthrift is a person who wastes or reduces her estate through excessive drinking, gambling, idleness, or debauchery in a manner that exposes that individual or ignorance, sexual explicitness, inept manners, abhorrentone-room shanties" (78). The purpose of this damning representationof the black masses is to displace Washington's own"lack" as a figure of authority: "Washington scapegoatsand imperializes the black masses in order to wear the master'sweeds"--i.e., Washington symbolically incarcerates the black masseson a "modern" New South plantation as a way to achieve amodicum of his own "black public-sphere mobility" (66). Washington's rhetorical strategies in addressing aconservative white audience shed light on the peculiar racial and classinflections of value in Hurston's own project. Seraph begins justafter the turn of the century, when the vast majority of blacks werestill living in the South and doing the most degrading work for thelowest pay. (19) Many African Americans were--as share croppers, daylaborers, convict laborers--still in slavery-like conditions, stilleffectively working as field hands on plantations. As I willdemonstrate, Hurston displaces the "lack" that she sees amongAfrican Americans in the deep South by displacing the ignorance andabjection that Washington locates in the black masses onto the poorwhites; African Americans in Hurston's tale are the gainfully gain��ful?adj.Providing a gain; profitable: gainful employment.gainful��ly adv. employed, contented, and invaluable labor force of the Meserveplantation (though they remain static and immobilized--socially,politically, economically). (20) Jim succeeds not only by depending onhappy and loyal African Americans, but also by transcending the fear andignorance of the poor whites (represented primarily by Arvay and herfamily); Arvay and her "kind"--a term that Hurston employsrepeatedly--embody the "backwardness" that ostensibly preventsthe South from entering modernity. In other words, Hurston scapegoatsthe crackers as the cause of the South's intractable social ills, amove that allows her to address social problems in the South withoutovert recourse to the oppression of African Americans, what she wouldconsider "self-pity." Instead of the black masses, it is thepoor whites that need to be educated, uplifted, purified, civilized, andincorporated into the discourses of middle-class American modernity. Crackers in the Garden Whereas Jim represents Hurston's New South ideal--he isirreverent, strong, ambitious, smart, generous, and fearless--Arvay andher "kind" represent his antithesis--they are fearful, racist,selfish, treacherous, cruel, and, above all, ignorant. In the openingpages we learn that in addition to the "primitive forests" andthe beautiful Suwanee "there was ignorance and poverty, and theever-present hook worm.... Few were concerned with the past.... Few knewand nobody cared that the Hidalgos under De Sota had moved westwardalong this very route" (1-2). It is important to note that Hurstonwas far from alone in her condescending and frequently contemptuouspresentation of poor whites as the "dead weight" of the South.Historians W. J. Cash's and C. Vann Woodward's New Southnarratives essentially figured poor whites in the same terms, whileauthors Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner, to take only two of thebest-known examples, produced ultimately cruel and mocking portraits ofdepression-era poor whites, in which they represented not only the mostdegraded and depraved of the South's social classes, but in thoserare instances when they reached the middle class, as do certainbranches of the Snopes clan, they end up exhibiting the North'sworst excesses of philistinism and avarice av��a��rice?n.Immoderate desire for wealth; cupidity.[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin av . We can account for theincreased presence of poor whites in historical and literary discourseduring the middle decades of the century by considering that thousands,eventually millions, of erstwhile farmers flooded Southern cities andtowns in search of work after being displaced by technological andscientific advances in agriculture. Daniel points out that by WWII localnewspapers and commentators observed with distaste, condescension con��de��scen��sion?n.1. The act of condescending or an instance of it.2. Patronizingly superior behavior or attitude.[Late Latin cond , andeven horror the habits of the migrant workers who now began to jostlethe middle class on the streets and in businesses, and to encroach encroachv. to build a structure which is in whole or in part across the property line of another's real property. This may occur due to incorrect surveys, guesses or miscalculations by builders and/or owners when erecting a building. onneighborhoods where they formerly had little access (17). This perception of general Southern poor-white squalor andbenightedness is made manifest in Array and her family, whose ignoranceis frequently shocking, on occasion amusing, and at times appalling.Literally almost every thought Arvay has until the novel's end iswrong. The text is replete with phrases such as "Arvay had no ideaabout anything," or "Arvay had acted dumb" or Arvay"put the worst interpretation on it." At times Arvay'signorance is intended to be funny, as when she complains about thehigher standard of living in Citrabelle: Heaven wasn't going to be any refreshment to folks if they got along with no more trouble than this.... It was the duty of man to suffer in this world, and these people round down here in south Florida were plainly shirking their duty.... There just didn't seem to Arvay to be any kind of honest work that kept folks bowed down from can't-see-in-the-morning till can't-see-at-night. (73) Arvay clings to her warped and stunted worldview world��view?n. In both senses also called Weltanschauung.1. The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world.2. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group. as a kind ofself-defense, particularly when she wants to defend her impoverishedorigins. After one of Arvay and Jim's many arguments, Hurston tellsus that "Array scorned off learning as a source of evil knowledgeand thought fondly of ignorance as the foundation of good-heartednessand honesty. Peace, contentment and virtue hung like a rainbow overturpentine turpentine,yellow to brown semifluid oleoresin exuded from the sapwood of pines, firs, and other conifers. It is made up of two principal components, an essential oil and a type of resin that is called rosin. shacks and shanties" (272). Arvay's ignorance quickly loses its charm, however, and shesoon seems less quaintly strange than downright unlikable. One way thatHurston brings this about is by repeatedly drawing our attention to thefact that Arvay, constantly in a state of compensatory self-absorption,never inquires about or acknowledges the many sacrifices that Jim makesfor her and her family: "She knew nothing of his twisting andturning and conniving to make life pleasant for her sake.... She neverasked anything" (83). Jim seeks Arvay's approval by taking onever-larger projects, intended to provide for her comfort, but she acts"listless (programming) listless - In functional programming, a property of a function which allows it to be combined with other functions in a way that eliminates intermediate data structures, especially lists. " and "uninterested." Jim eventuallyaccuses her of being "unthankful and unknowing like a hog under aacorn tree ... never even looking up to see where the acorns are comingfrom" (262). Hurston takes special pains to remind the reader thatArvay never credits the extent to which her own escape from poverty isdirectly underwritten by the kindness and hard work of the AfricanAmericans whom Jim relies upon--from the development of Jim'scitrus farm, to the whiskey still run by Joe, to the materials and thelabor for the construction of the house she lives in. On the contrary,Jim's reliance on Joe exacerbates Arvay's insecurity: You come from some big high muck-de-mucks, and we ain't nothing but pineywoods Crackers and poor white trash. Even niggers is better than we is, according to your kind. Joe Kelsey's word stands higher than mine any old day. You can say it don't, but actions speak louder than words. You give him more credit for sense than you do me. (126) The reader has no choice but to agree with her assessment.Arvay's insecurity about Joe eventually leads to the only strife inthe Meserve "interracial family," in which Arvay treats Joe sorudely that he eventually moves away. Jim must repeatedly override Arvay's irrationality, especiallyher fear of change, if they are to make their way in life and avoidending up like Arvay's family and the other crackers inSawley--poor, ignorant, and mean. For example, when Jim proudly tellsArvay that he intends to buy a piece of swampland so that he can one daydevelop it, Arvay responds fearfully, "I don't want no partsof that awful place. It's dark and haunted-looking and too big andstrong to overcome. It's frightening! Like some big old varmint orsomething to eat you up" (79-80). Jim does buy the land, and hisson-in-law clears the land to make an upscale new residentialdevelopment. The narrator tells us, "As Jim had predicted, modernmachinery and methods had cleared that swamp in an amazingly shorttime.... The swamp monster Swamp monsters have been a staple of comics for years. From the 1940's to the present many murk-dwellers have made their muddy mark in comics. Hillman Publications' The Heap retreated before the magic of man" (195,emphasis added). Soon the engineers bring the "comforts ofcivihzation" to the area (e.g., sewers, watermains, electric lines,and a highway) and right away, "the right people bought sites inthe new development.... [It] exerted a tremendous effect on Citrabelleand the surrounding country. It came along and stratified stratified/strat��i��fied/ (strat��i-fid) formed or arranged in layers. strat��i��fiedadj.Arranged in the form of layers or strata. the town. Theoriginal line of the swamp gave accent like a railroad track. Those whobelonged moved west" (196-97). Jim's entrepreneurial vision literally transforms the localregion; it brings modernity to the area and a new (white!) middle andupper class (i.e., "the right people"). Jim and Arvay caneasily watch the "change" from their front porch because thehighway "began no more than a hundred feet from her frontgate" (196). (21) In most romanticized visions of Southern lifechange is to be resisted, especially the destruction of the agrarian wayof life. But as Jim observes, "This place is worth a whole lot morethan it used to be on account that development" (197). Thesignificance of the New South's arrival seems lost on Arvay,prompting Jim to remark, "You don't seem to realize how bigthis development is and what a change it has made in things aroundhere" (198). Of course Jim is right: the effect of this kind ofmodernizing "development" on the South was so profound that itcame to be known as "the bulldozer revolution." When Arvay returns to Sawley for a visit, she discovers that herhometown is being modernized as well, including a new highway, newgrocery stores and hotels, new forms of industry and new agriculturalmethods. A taxi driver tells Arvay that "Since the Old Gentlemandied and Young Brad Cary took hold of things, some good changes havebeen made, but a lot of these old fogies and dumb peckerwoods don'tlike it" (274). Arvay "took sides with the peckerwoods in atimid way" and points out wistfully that "in the good olddays, the folks in Sawley was good and kind and neighborly neigh��bor��ly?adj.Having or exhibiting the qualities of a friendly neighbor.neighbor��li��ness n.Adj. 1. ." Butthe Taxi driver rejects her nostalgia, "I ain't seen no moregoodness and kindheartedness kind��heart��ed?adj.Having or proceeding from a kind heart. See Synonyms at kind1.kind here than nowhere else. Such anotherback-biting and carrying on you never seen. They hate like sin to take aforward step. Just like they was took out of their cradles, they'llbe screwed down in their collins." (274, emphasis added). In otherwords, crackers are incapable of change, afraid of"development," and outside of the march of progress. (22) One of the most common ways that Arvay and the other"crackers" rationalize their inability to "take a forwardstep" is through a self-serving and misguided use of Christianity.When we first meet Arvay she has "turned her back on theworld" to become a missionary, and Hurston wryly points out thatneither Arvay nor any of the other crackers recognize the socialimplications of taking "the Word to the heathens." When Arvaydeclares her intent to become a missionary, There had been nothing about the heathens of China, India, and Africa wallowing around on the heavenly chairs, nor ankling up and down the golden streets. None of [the congregation] could have imagined such a thing.... It was too much, and nobody tried to imagine any such thing. [The heathen] ought to consider himself pretty lucky to get saved from Hell. What became of him after that was [just not] talked about. (5) Jim sees through her missionary fervor, and once Jim and Arvay"elope" (i.e., after he rapes her and then takes her to thecourthouse), Jim announces: "No more missionarying around for you.You done caught your heathen, baby" (57). Heathen though Jim maybe, Hurston makes it clear that it is Jim who has "caught"Arvay, and that he is doing the saving in this relationship. (23) This fact belatedly becomes clear to Arvay as well when she returnsto her now decaying and rat-infested childhood home; she asks herself,"would she have ever escaped from this ugly and lonesome lone��some?adj.1. a. Dejected because of a lack of companionship. See Synonyms at alone.b. Producing such dejection: a lonesome hour at the bar.2. place ifJim had not come along and just seized upon her and carried her off tothe light? She doubted it" (134-35, emphasis added). The violent,coercive nature of Arvay's redemption--both in the original rapescene and in the language of the preceding passage--warrants pausingover, especially given that Arvay elsewhere refers to feelingemotionally "enslaved" by Jim. Arvay complains, "I hopemy child don't fall such a slave to nobody that they can justhandle her anyway they will or may" (177). At one point Jimobserves that "a woman knows who her master is all right, and sheanswers to his commands" (33). Later, after he has rippedArvay's clothes off during a fight, Jim declares, "You'remy damn property" (216). Though the language is disturbing,according to the logic of the narrative Arvay's"enslavement en��slave?tr.v. en��slaved, en��slav��ing, en��slavesTo make into or as if into a slave.en��slavement n. " is in fact her good fortune. (24) Without Jimshe would have been doomed along with her family to a"primitive" and wretched life--one completely lacking in whatHurston earlier in the narrative calls "the comforts ofcivilization" (196). Here Hurston is inverting the typical Western logic and practice of"modern" Christian missionarism. The missionaries save the"primitive heathens" who would otherwise be damned to Hellbecause they live outside of Christianity--usually figured as thespiritual means to "enlightenment" and"civilization." In Hurston's narrative, Arvay and theother cracker Christians are the ones figured as "primitives":they are ignorant, backward, ruled by self-destructive"traditions," and outside of modern time. As the taxi driverfrom Sawley observes, "Just like they was took out of theircradles, they'll be screwed down in their coffins." They neverdevelop intellectually or materially and will be left behind by"progress." Jim is figured as a "heathen" missionarywho comes from afar, bursts into Arvay's benighted Christian world,"seizes" her and "carries her off" to the"light" of the New South. Hurston reverses the logicaltrajectory of the Atlantic slave trade The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the Transatlantic slave trade, was the trade of African persons supplied to the colonies of the "New World" that occurred in and around the Atlantic Ocean. It lasted from the 16th century to the 19th century. , in which the blond, blue-eyedArvay is forcibly taken from her primitive home, made a"slave," and brought to "civilization" for her owngood. (25) This figuring of the crackers as "slaves" ofignorance and backwardness, the "kind" of people who need tobe saved by New South progress, recalls clearly Booker T.Washington's desire to save the now symbolically enslaved blackmasses through the "gospel of Progress." But Hurston's provocative signification SIGNIFICATION, French law. The notice given of a decree, sentence or other judicial act. on the South'soppressive history is complicated by the logic of her racialcoding--i.e., crackers substituted for African Americans--which revealsmuch more of her sense of pain and outrage at the causes of AfricanAmerican abjection than she intends. For Hurston, "progress"is always the responsibility of the individual, though what's inthe individual is mysteriously enshrined in the "flesh." AfterArvay wins Jim back, she reflects that All that had happened to her, good and bad, was a part of her own self and had come out of her. Within her own flesh were many mysteries. She lifted her left hand before her eyes and studied it in every detail with wonder. With wonder and deep awe like Moses before his burning bush. What all, Arvay asked of herself, was buried and hidden in human flesh?... If you could just know, it would be all the religion that anybody needed. And what was in you was bound to come out and stand. (349-50) On the surface, this passage reinforces, in quasi-mysticallanguage, Hurston's greatest theme: individuals are solelyresponsible for their own fate and should neither ask God for assistancenor blame their own failures in life on racism or economic exploitation.Yet her repeated references to the flesh also connote con��note?tr.v. con��not��ed, con��not��ing, con��notes1. To suggest or imply in addition to literal meaning: "The term 'liberal arts' connotes a certain elevation above utilitarian concerns"other unspokenissues. Throughout Seraph, Hurston connects what "kind" ofperson someone is to his or her flesh. When Arvay returns to herchildhood home for a visit some years after she has moved away with Jim,she is appalled at the appearance of her sister Larraine's family: Common in the flesh and common in what they had on.... Array was not sure that she would have liked to own them in Citrabelle.... So common-cladded, and their poor looking skins, and unbred feet and legs, and the whole make of them. She was indeed glad that Jim was not standing beside her now and seeing her folks as she saw them. (133, emphasis added) In this scene we learn that the Henson family is in desperatestraits because Carl, Larraine's husband, is unemployed and refusesto look for work. Consequently, "rats, roaches, and flies weresimply taking the place" (132-33). The appearance of Arvay'sfamily, especially their "common flesh," reflects their lowlycharacter. Hurston repeats these impressions later in the narrative when Arvayreturns home again after she has been telegrammed that her mother isill. When walking up to the house, she observes that Larraine is a"ton of coarse-looking flesh sitting on the dilapidated old stepsin a faded cheap cotton dress and dirty white cotton stockings"(274). Arvay also thinks to herself that Larraine's children are"mule-faced and ugly enough.... Even in a croker-sack, Angeline[Arvay's daughter] would look like their mistress" (276). Inthis episode, Arvay discovers that her mother, Maria Henson, terminallyill Terminally IllWhen a person is not expected to live more than 12 months.Notes:Any gifts given out by the afflicted person at this time may be considered as a dispersion of the estate rather than a gift. , has been holding out for a month to see Arvay once more before shedies. Larraine and Carl purposefully have not told Arvay about hermother's illness because they want to take over the house and itsmeager possessions after she dies. They wait until it is too late forMaria to recover before they send for Arvay, knowing that she would tryto get Maria medical attention. After Maria dies, effectively because ofCarl and Larraine's neglect, Carl refuses (without being asked) tohelp pay for Maria's funeral expenses, and when Arvay is in townbuying groceries for Larraine's family, she comes home to find thehouse, which Mafia willed to Arvay, stripped literally to itsfoundation. The point of this episode, as with Arvay's first visithome, is to enlighten Arvay and the reader to the fact that Jim hassaved her from being just like Larraine and her family--not merely poorand stupid, but lazy and immoral. (26) Hurston connects individual fate and the flesh in an even morepronounced way with Arvay's first son, Earl, who is both mentallyhandicapped and physically deformed. Not surprisingly, he looks nothinglike Jim, and clearly takes after one of Arvay's relatives"who was sort of queer in his head" (68). Earl, when upset,makes "inhuman screams" and "animal howls ... [which had]nothing human in them" (100). When a Portuguese family with twodaughters moves onto the Meserve estate, Earl becomes even more bestial bes��tial?adj.1. Beastly.2. Marked by brutality or depravity.3. Lacking in intelligence or reason; subhuman. ,"whining and whimpering and making growly noises in histhroat" (123); when Array tries to restrain him he bites her. Arraytries to blame Earl's actions on the "furriners'"scent, but Jim replies, "Something about one or the other of thosegirls has woke up something in the boy.... It's been there allalong. You see the boy can't control himself" (125, emphasisadded). Jim wants to have Earl put away--both for his own safety and thesafety of those around him--but yields to Arvay's wishes to let himstay. Before long, Earl sexually assaults one of the Portuguesegirls--the girl is found with her skirt pulled up to her waist and abite mark on her thigh. Earl flees into the swamp; a lynch-mob quicklygathers but then relents out of respect for Jim. The "posse"tries unsuccessfully to recapture Earl safely, and Jim is forced to killEarl in self-defense. At the end of the novel, Arvay reflects on Earl as a biologicalemblem of her destiny: Earl was in her and had to come out some way or another.... Yes, Earl had been bred in her before she was even born, bur his birth had purged her flesh. He was born first. It was meant to be that way. Somebody had to pay off the debt so that the rest of the pages could be clean.... She had been purged out, and the way was cleared for better things. Then it was like the Resurrection. The good that was in her flesh had taken form. Angeline, female beauty, had come out of her, and Kenny, as handsome a boy as you would find anywhere. (350, emphasis added) The language of this passage carries unmistakable eugenicistovertones. As Chuck Jackson has observed, Earl is clearly what earlytwentieth-century eugenicists would have described as a"cacogenic" child (642, 647). Unlike the "good andbeautiful" Angeline and Kenny, who are consistently associated withJim, over and against Arvay, Earl literally embodies the degeneracy thatwas "bred" into Arvay's flesh, a "weak-strain"passed on from Arvay's "kind" that was destined toexpress itself. Despite the care and attention that Jim and Arvay offerEarl, he is unsocializable, animal-like, and a sexual threat to"white" women. (27) Hence Hurston deploys not only widelyknown eugenicist discourse but also, intentionally or otherwise, theracialized myth of the black rapist and the racialized ritual oflynching, an act intended theoretically to counteract the black threatagainst white women. But as Hurston was well aware, lynching as Southernracial ritual had little to do with protecting white women and much todo with immobilizing African Americans, socially, politically, andeconomically. The effect of her curious reiteration of the meaning of the fleshis that the reader becomes aware of what Hurston has desperatelydisavowed and repressed throughout the narrative. It is athrice-told-tale that the South was founded on a social hierarchy basedon the flesh, what Houston Baker calls an epidermalization of oppression. Skin color--in combination with facial features and hair texture--became southern grounds for maintenance of the ideological and economic project of White Supremacy.... It was more literal than metaphorical ... therefore, to agree with scholars and writers who assert that "slavery" indeed continued "after the war." And the mark of Reconstruction's innovative mechanisms of White Supremacy remained skin color, blackness. (43) In other words, despite (and to some degree, because of)Hurston's recalcitrant insistence on absolute individualresponsibility, Seraph is nevertheless replete with images andexpressions that remind us that, yes, one's flesh has a profoundinfluence on one's fate. Hurston's emphasis on the meaning ofthe flesh casts her impish imp��ish?adj.Of or befitting an imp; mischievous.impish��ly adv.imp reproduction of an idealized New Southplantation into a new fight. Claudia Tate's keen analysis of the"discourses of unconscious desire" in African American novelsis helpful here. These discourses allow the author to express unacknowledged and socially censored wishes by inscribing them in the novel's rhetorical features.... We can ... understand unconscious discourses as compromise formations "between the wish to communicate and the wish to conceal, whereas the wish to conceal, not to know, is the more conscious" (Hook, Psychoanalysis 121). The language of the text performs this paradoxical mediation of speaking and muting, disclosing and masking, in much the same way that hysterical symptoms conspicuously stage the hidden obsession of the neurotic subject. (179) Hurston's life experiences and knowledge of Southern racerelations most certainly impressed upon her the reality ofslavery's persistence in the New South--at least in terms of socialorganization, attitudes, and ritualized behaviors. Virtually all of herpublic remarks on Southern race relations in the last decades of herlife, including Seraph, seemed to express a "wish to conceal"these facts. (28) Hurston attempts to "master" this legacy by"restaging" it in Seraph, as though she could, throughidealized fantasy, contain and control (even profit on) its far-reachingeffects on her life, the life of all African Americans, and the life ofthe nation. As I have suggested, Hurston reconciles, consciously orotherwise, all that she knows about the South's oppression ofAfrican Americans by displacing it onto the backs, or more precisely, inthe flesh of the crackers. But as we have seen, Hurston's racialidyll, her Southern romance, is poisoned by what she unconsciously"wishes to communicate"--rage and contempt. In a 1943 letterto African American journalist Claude Barnett, Hurston divulged a rareglimpse of the outrage that I believe both structures and destabilizesSeraph: the iron has entered my soul. Since my god of tolerance hasforsaken for��sake?tr.v. for��sook , for��sak��en , for��sak��ing, for��sakes1. To give up (something formerly held dear); renounce: forsook liquor.2. me, I am ready for anything to overthrow Anglo-Saxon supremacy,however desperate. I have become what I never wished to be, a goodhater. I no longer even value my life if by losing it, I can dosomething to destroy this Anglo-Saxon monstrosity monstrosity1. great congenital deformity.2. a monster or teratism. . (Life in Letters 14) It is precisely this deep fund of emotion that sabotages herefforts to work within and control the (white) mind of the South. I have argued that the desire to understand Hurston's Seraphas an entirely tongue-in-cheek racial masquerade or subversive critiqueprevents us from detecting what this work reveals about Hurston'sdeeply conflicted attitudes toward the region, toward Southem whites,and especially toward the condition of African Americans in the South.Seraph holds a special place in Hurston's oeuvre because itcomplicates in productive ways the already complex narratives aboutHurston's contribution to American, African American, and Southernliterary history, and especially her attitude toward literary protestand leftist critique. I've suggested that Hurston's "truepicture of the New South" attempts to evade protest by celebratingthe region's "progress" and"development"--catch-phrases for a range of technological,commercial, and economic transformations that somehow manage to allowfor the persistence of idealized Old South race relations. And here isthe crux of the problem, a problem which in many ways is classicallySouthern. For all the hope invested in "development," theSouth wanted to avoid being wholly assimilated into the North'sconsumerist, capitalist system; in other words, the South wanted toretain some sense of regional "difference." This differencecoalesced principally around an idealization idealization/ide��al��iza��tion/ (i-de?il-i-za��shun) a conscious or unconscious mental mechanism in which the individual overestimates an admired aspect or attribute of another person. of the past and, inremaining in certain respects precisely anti-modern, in a contradictoryrhetorical posture which makes it impossible to talk about"progress" in a straight way. "Crackers," here andelsewhere, have carried the blame for the South's failure tomodernize and the burden of this rhetorical contradiction. In Seraph,Hurston symbolically resolves these contradictions through Arvay's"uplift." Along the way, however, the rage and sorrow thatHurston disavowed her entire career come flooding out. The conflicted quality of this text is even more readily legiblewith reference to the tragic conditions of Hurston's final years.No matter how many times Hurston rejected social factors as determiningforces in the lives of individuals, we are left with the fact that shecould not earn a living from her writing, despite her extraordinarylearning and talent. Because of her "flesh," her final yearsare destitute. In the end, Hurston could not give up the one thing thatshe had left--her fierce pride. Even to her dying days, when she wassick, without family, rejected by the literary establishment, andpenniless, Hurston considered self-pity the greatest sin. In a letter toa friend A Letter to a Friend (written 1656; published posthumously in 1690) , by the 17th century philosopher and physician Sir Thomas Browne is a medical treatise full of case-histories and witty speculations upon the human condition. she declares, "I say to hell with it! My back is broad.Let me, personally and privately, be responsible for my survival orfailure to survive in this man's world.... I want nodouble-standard of measurement.... I am a conscious being, all theplaints and pleas of the pressure groups inside and outside the race, tothe contrary" ("To Burton Rascoe" 503-04). For Hurston tohave consciously and directly attacked racial and economic oppression inthe South would have constituted the loss of her ego's onlyremaining shield. Nevertheless, her last novel is so laced with"unspeakable" venom and fury that it thwarts its ownobjectives. Seraph on the Suwanee ultimately fails in its efforts tosustain its own utopian vision and sensibility. But given the elementalconflict between Hurston's lived experience and her belligerentidea of self-reliance, how could it have turned out any other way?Seraph's failure seems inevitable, given that Hurston reproduces amind--the mind of the South--that tries desperately to repress re��pressv.1. To hold back by an act of volition.2. To exclude something from the conscious mind. not onlywhat Hurston knows, but even her very existence. Works Cited Ayers, Edward. The Promise of the New South: Life AfterReconstruction. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Baker, Houston. Turning South Again: Re-ThinkingModernism/Re-Reading Booker T. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst:U of Massachusetts P, 1987. Carby, Hazel. Foreword. Seraph on the Suwanee. By Zora NealeHurston. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. vii-xviii. --. "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: ZoraNeale Hurston." New Essays on Their Eyes Watching God. Ed. MichaelAwkward. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.71-93. Carr, Duane. A Question of Class: The Redneck Stereotype inSouthern Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P,1996. Cook, Sylvia Jenkins. From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The SouthernPoor White in Fiction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina North Carolina,state in the SE United States. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean (E), South Carolina and Georgia (S), Tennessee (W), and Virginia (N).Facts and FiguresArea, 52,586 sq mi (136,198 sq km). Pop. P, 1976. Daniel, Pete. Lost Revolutions." The South in the 1950s.Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition inBlack Women's Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Dyer, Richard. "Entertainment and Utopia." Movies andMethods: An Anthology. Vol 2. Ed. B. Nichols. Berkeley: U of CaliforniaP, 1994. 220-32. Gates, Henry Louis Gates, Henry Louis (Jr.)(born Sept. 16, 1950, Keyser, W.Va., U.S.) U.S. critic and scholar. Gates attended Yale University and the University of Cambridge. He has chaired Harvard University's department of Afro-American Studies for many years. , Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Hale, Grace. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in theSouth, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon, 1998. Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana:U of Illinois P, 1980. Hill, Mozell C., and Bevode C. McCall. "'CrackerCulture': A Preliminary Definition." Phylon 11.3 (1950):223-31. Hook, R. H. "Psychoanalysis, Unconscious Phantasy andInterpretation." Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: An Encounterthrough Culture. Ed. Suzette Heald n. 1. A heddle. and Ariane Deluz. New York:Routledge, 1994. 114-30. "Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston, Zora Neale,1891?–60, African-American writer, b. Notasulga, Ala. She grew up in the pleasant all-black town of Eatonville, Fla. and, moving north, graduated from Barnard College, where she studied with Franz Boas. ." Twentieth Century Authors: ABiographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. Ed. Stanley J. Kunitz andHoward Haycraft. New York: Wilson, 1942. 694-95. Hurston, Zora Neale. "Art and Such." Folklore, Memoirs,and Other Writings. New York: Library of America The Library of America (LoA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Overview and historyFounded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published more than 150 volumes by a wide range , 1995:905-11. --. "How It Feels To Be Colored Me." Folklore, Memoirs,and Other Writings, 826-29. --. Seraph on the Suwanee. 1948. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. --. "Stories of Conflict." Folklore, Memoirs, and OtherWritings, 912-13. --. "To Burroughs Mitchell." 2 October 1947. Zora NealeHurston: A Life in Letters, 557-61. --. "To Burton Rascoe." 8 September 1944. Zora NealeHurston: A Life in Letters, 502-04. --. "To Countee Cullen." 5 March 1943. Zora NealeHurston: A Life in Letters, 480-82. --. "To Edwin Osgood Grover." 7 November 1943. Zora NealeHurston: A Life in Letters, 495-97. __. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Ed. Carla Kaplan. NewYork: Doubleday, 2002. --. "What White Publishers Won't Print." 1950. TheNorton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch. New York:Norton, 2001.1159-62. Jackson, Chuck. "Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston andthe Politics of Eugenics." African American Review The African American Review is a quarterly journal and the official publication of the Division on Black American Literature and Culture of the Modern Language Association. 34.4 (2000):639-60. Jones, Anne Goodwyn. "Houston Baker and the South: More TightSpots." The Southern Literary Journal 36.2 (Spring 2004): 145-170. Kreyling, Michael. Inventing Southern literature. Jackson: UP ofMississippi, 1998. Logan, Rayford. The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayesto Woodrow Wilson. New York: Da Capo, 1997. Lowe, John. lump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's CosmicComedy. Urbana-Champagne: U of Illinois, 1994. Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards. Hitting a Straight Lick with a CrookedStick; Race and Gender in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston. Tuscaloosa: Uof Alabama P, 1999. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the LiteraryImagination. New York: Random House, 1992. --. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presencein American Literature." Criticism and The Color Line:Desegregating Literary Studies. Ed. Henry Wonham. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers UP, 1996. Ortiz, Paul. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of BlackOrganizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to theBloody Election of 1920. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Rieger, Christopher. "The Working-Class Pastoral of Zora NealHurston's Seraph on the Suwanee." Mississippi Quarterly 56.1(20022003): 105-24. Singh, Nikhil Pal. "Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age ofDemocracy." American Quarterly 50.3 (1998): 471-522. Sullivan, Patricia. Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the NewDeal Era. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and theProtocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Walker, Alice. Foreword. "Zora Neale Hurston--A CautionaryTale and Partisan View." Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography.Robert Hemenway. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Three Negro Classics. NewYork: Avon Books, 1965. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives." Narratives of BlackWomen, 1860-1960. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987. Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries ofWhiteness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. JOHN C. CHARLES North Carolina State University HistoryMain article: History of North Carolina State University The North Carolina General Assembly founded NC State on March 7, 1887 as a land-grant college under the name North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. (1) Hazel Carby provides a notable challenge to the rationales andmotives behind Hurston's celebrated status ("Politics"). (2) Claudia Tate illuminates the degree to which aspects ofHurston's own personal insecurities and familial conflicts areinscribed in Array. John Lowe demonstrates how Jim's capacity tojoke renders him a quite sympathetic figure, despite his domineering dom��i��neer��ing?adj.Tending to domineer; overbearing.domi��neer behavior. He also does a good job detailing how Seraph "constitutesHurston's love song to Florida" (261). I agree with thisassessment, but locate her "love song" and her treatment ofthe "crackers" in larger political debates. Christopher Riegerprovides a fine elaboration of Hurston's treatment of labor andnature in Seraph. Rieger, however, like most critics of the novel,underplays Hurston's contemptuous treatment of the"crackers." See also duCille and Meisenhelder. (3) The best evidence that Hurston intended to reach a mainstreamaudience was her effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to interest aHollywood studio in her novel (Carby "Forward" x). (4) Lowe connects many of Seraph's details to informationHurston gathered while working for the Florida Federal Writers'Project Federal Writers' Project:see Work Projects Administration. , for which she contributed to The Florida Negro and The FloridaGuide (works not published in her lifetime). He does not, however,consider Seraph in light of contemporary national and regional socialconflict. (5) Pete Daniel provides a cultural history of these dramaticregional transformations; Patricia Sullivan recounts the era'spolitical history. Paul Ortiz examines civil rights activism in Floridaduring the time of the novel's setting. (6) Nikhil Pal Singh offers a provocative discussion of the CivilRights struggle, its relationship to the Cold War, and its legacy forthe contemporary "culture wars." (7) Dabney was a relatively liberal journalist and historian at theUniversity of Virginia; Theodore Bilbo was a notoriously racist,pro-segregationist, and anti-New Deal senator from Mississippi. (8) In the previous letter to Burroughs Mitchell, Hurston writes"Nor is that trite picture of the noble and freedom-loving Negrotrue. There were thousands and thousands of free Negroes in the Southbefore the War, and many of them held slaves, and fought like tigers inthe Confederate armies to maintain slavery. Some didnt [sic] own any,but fought for the South anyway. I am not one of those sentimentalist sen��ti��men��tal��ism?n.1. A predilection for the sentimental.2. An idea or expression marked by excessive sentiment.sen [sic] who love to take sides whether my stand is valid or not"(561). (9) See, for example, Hurston's well-known 1950 essay,"What White Publishers Won't Print." In this essay sheargues that liberals and conservatives alike consign consignv. 1) to deliver goods to a merchant to sell on behalf of the party delivering the items, as distinguished from transferring to a retailer at a wholesale price for re-sale. Example: leaving one's auto at a dealer to sell and split the profit. black folk, alongwith other minorities, to what she calls the "American Museum ofUnnatural History." African Americans are represented by twofigures in the exhibit: "One is seated on a stump picking away onhis banjo and singing and laughing. The other is a most amoral a��mor��al?adj.1. Not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral.2. Lacking moral sensibility; not caring about right and wrong. characterbefore a sharecropper's shack mumbling about injustice. Doing thismakes him out to be a Negro 'intellectual.' It is as simple asall that" (1160). Liberals and conservatives both insist that"Involved in western culture, the [black] hero or heroine, or bothmust appear frustrated and go down to defeat, somehow." Even ifunconscious, the liberal desire for black failure reproduces theconservative's theory of "reversion to type," whichinsists that "No matter how high we may seem to climb, put us understrain and we revert to type, that is, to the bush. Under a superficiallayer of western culture, the jungle drums throb throbv.To beat rapidly or perceptibly, such as occurs in the heart or a constricted blood vessel.n.A strong or rapid beat; a pulsation.throba pulsating movement or sensation. in our veins"(1161). Hurston wrote to Edwin Osgood Grover on November 7, 1943, thatBucklin Moon's Darker Brother "gives a falsely morbid pictureof Negro life. If his picture is true, how does he account for thethousands on thousands of wealthy, educated Negroes? ... that awfulpicture does Negroes in general more harm than good. One might reason,'if the body of Negrodom is that weak and shiftless and criminal,no need to bother one's head about them'" (496). (10) The first chapter of Michael Kreyling's InventingSouthern Literature provides a good overview of the Fugitives and theirreactionary agrarian philosophy. (11) Hurston elaborates her refusal to participate in literaryprotest in a 1943 letter to poet Countee Cullen: Why don't I put something about lynchings in my books? As if all the world did not know about Negroes being lynched! My stand is this: either we must do something about it that the white man will understand and respect, or shut up. No whiner ever got any respect or relief. If some of us must die for human justice, then let us die. For my own part, this poor body of mine is not so precious that I would not be willing to give it up for a good cause. But my own self-respect refuses to let me go to the mourners bench. Our position is like a man sitting on a tack and crying that it hurts, when all he needs to do is to get up off it. (482) (12) Rawlings published The Yearling in 1938 and Cross-Creek in1942; Caldwell produced his infamous Tobacco Road in 1932, which wasthen reprinted in paperback in 1947; and W. I. Cash published The Mindof the South in 1941. These authors, of course, represent only a smallselection of the most famous examples. Moreover, a 1950 article inPhylon entitled, "Cracker Culture': A PreliminaryDefinition" reveals that not only had several authors written"cracker" novels around this time, but that two of them evenused "Suwanee" in their titles: Cecile Marie Matschat, SuwaneeRiver, a Strange Green Land(1938) and B.F. Borchardt and E. Sears,Suwanee Valley(1940). (Hill and McCall, '"CrackerCulture'"). It should be noted that there were also well-knownworks that tried to produce dignified portraits of poor whiteSoutherners, such as James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men(1941) and John Steinbeck's classic Grapes of Wrath (1939). (13) Chuck Jackson offers a provocative reading of Hurston'suse of eugenicist discourse in Seraph. (14) Hurston's deeply ambivalent representation of poor whiteSoutherners has a long history. Duane Cart and Sylvia Jenkins Cook offerdetailed overviews of poor whites in Southern literature. Matt Wrayanalyzes the history of "white trash" in America from theeighteenth century to the eugenics movements of the early twentiethcentury. One of his central concerns is to discuss the kind of"boundary work" being done by various groups over time intheir depictions of and interventions in the lives of "whitetrash." My essay considers the kind of boundary work"crackers" perform in Hurston's mid-century plantationpastoral. Her vision of interracial harmony requires that she alsoidentify difference within whiteness. (15) duCille and Meisenhelder have argued that we should takeHurston's highly favorable treatment of Jim as purely ironic. Thisunderstanding of Jim is the key to understanding Seraph as, inMeisenhelder's reading, Hurston's most subversive attack on the values of what she called 'Anglo-Saxon' civilization. In Seraph on the Suwanee, she exposes the foundation of that culture as one resting on oppression of white women, exploitation of people of color, and domination of Nature. To make this critique (and still get the book published), she presents it from behind the trickster's mask of praise, subtly developing her themes through a complex set of symbols developed in other works. (95-96) Meisenhelder elaborates her argument primarily by comparing Seraphwith Their Eyes. In particular, she argues that we can best appreciateHurston's critique by noting that Arvay's relationship withJim bears striking similarities to Janie's oppressive relationshipwith Jody, and striking dissimilarities to "the vigor andequality" (96) of her relationship with Teacake. The main problemwith this reading is that Jim is less like Jody and more like Teacakethan this comparison implies. If Hurston intends the work to be whollysubversive, how do we account for the fact that Jim embodies a range ofqualities that Hurston repeatedly extols in other contexts? In herbiographical entry for Twentieth Century Authors, she declares, "Ilove courage in every form. I worship strength. I dislike insincerity in��sin��cere?adj.Not sincere; hypocritical.insin��cerely adv. ,and most particularly when it vaunts itself to cover up cowardice"(695). Jim represents, in general terms, a rugged Southern type offrontier individualism that Hurston admired. In particular, I believeJim constitutes a fond tribute to the "one person who pleased mealways. That was the robust, grey-haired, white man who had helped meget into the world." This man, whom we learn about in herautobiography, is never given a proper name (see pages 585-88 inFolklore). According to Hurston, he happened to be passing by whenZora's mother was giving birth, and then "grannied her intoexistence." He took an active interest in her well-being until hedied, when she was ten. The hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-cussing, but very successful man was thrown from his horse and died.... He was an accumulating man, a good provider, paid his debts and told the truth.... He was supposed to be so tough, it was said that once he was struck by lightning and was not even knocked off his feet, but that lightning went off through the woods limping. Nobody found any fault with a man like that in a country where personal strength and courage were the highest virtues. People were supposed to take care of themselves without whining" (587-88) This could easily serve as a description of Jim. In fact, Jim evenuses the lightning tale when courting Array. He tells the incredulousArvay that "it's a habit of mine ... when I catch a streak oflightning aiming at me, to stand in my tracks and slap it right backwhere it come from." When one bolt manages to strike him, however,he says "I wasn't hurt at all, but that sneaking bolt oflightning was done up pretty bad. Yes, Ma'am! Last I seen of it, itwas going off through the woods a'limping" (27). My morefundamental disagreement with Meisenhelder's use of Their Eyes as akey to Seraph derives from the fact that Array does not come across as avictim of oppression the way Janie does because she is fundamentallyunlike Janie (aside from having a spiritual connection to a fruitbearing tree) and, for that matter, most middle-class white women, whoconstituted the majority of Hurston's audience. Arvay isextraordinarily unsympathetic (in ways that I detail below) which is whyJim's aggressive, dominating behavior towards her lacks the pathosof Jody's cruelty toward Janie, Janie's vision of herself andthe world elicits our sympathy and admiration; Arvay's perspectiveis consistently bigoted, ignorant, and self-defeating, which thwarts thereader's capacity to easily identify with her struggles. (16) The NAACP expanded its branches in South Carolina South Carolina,state of the SE United States. It is bordered by North Carolina (N), the Atlantic Ocean (SE), and Georgia (SW).Facts and FiguresArea, 31,055 sq mi (80,432 sq km). Pop. (2000) 4,012,012, a 15. , forexample, from eight in 1939, with eight hundred members, to forty in1945, with ten thousand, six hundred thirty-nine members (Sullivan 141). (17) The Negroes are not "spoiled" when they pick up abit of money either. Jim rewards Joe amply for running the still, and welearn that "Under Jim's pressure, Joe had put some of hislikker money into two lots in Colored Town." After Joe moves awayfrom the Meserve estate, he immediately begins "cutting thetom-fool": "He had the shell of a six-room house thrown up onhis lots and moved into the unfinished structure. That was as far as thehouse ever got. Joe bought himself a car and announced that he had gotto be people in Citrabelle. Doing things on a high-toned scale.Heavy-set Daddy. If a woman asked him for a nickel, he gave her aten-dollar bill" (117 emphasis added). Joe later tells an elaborateyarn about how he has lost all of his money because he has no businesssense. In other words, as soon as Joe gets out from under the watchfuleye of Jim (the beneficent be��nef��i��cent?adj.1. Characterized by or performing acts of kindness or charity.2. Producing benefit; beneficial.[Probably from beneficenceon the model of such pairs as white father-master), he squanders his moneylike an irresponsible child. Joe's personality and behavior echoall too clearly the bigoted Reconstruction myth that blacks were notonly happy but better off on the plantation, where they could be lookedafter. (18) Another key parallel between these visions, which I willaddress in detail below, is a celebration of and faith in"progress." Here Hurston's text breaks from Old Southmythology; in lieu of fantasies about an imagined edenic past, oneoutside of modern progress and time, Hurston's racial pastoral islocated firmly in time, and it moves steadily forward with the march ofprogress. (19) In 1900, over ninety percent of blacks resided in the South:"The failure of the tremendous expansion of American industry tochange materially the essentially peasant and domestic status of mostNegroes is evident from the fact that in 1890, 88% and in 1900, 86.7% ofall Negroes were still employed in the least remunerative and leastdignified occupations (Logan 155). (20) In an extensive and avowedly psychoanalytic review ofBaker's Turning South Again and Public Spheres, African AmericanWriting, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (2001) Anne Goodwyn Joneshas argued that Baker's effort to turn South again in a revisionist re��vi��sion��ism?n.1. Advocacy of the revision of an accepted, usually long-standing view, theory, or doctrine, especially a revision of historical events and movements.2. mode "seems to mean, intellectually as well as personally, areversion to the past" that "continue[s] to silence blackwomen," despite a significant body of well known black feministcritique of his work's masculinist tendencies (144, 168). While Icertainly do not endorse the erasure ERASURE, contracts, evidence. The obliteration of a writing; it will render it void or not under the same circumstances as an interlineation. (q.v.) Vide 5 Pet. S. C. R. 560; 11 Co. 88; 4 Cruise, Dig. 368; 13 Vin. Ab. 41; Fitzg. 207; 5 Bing. R. 183; 3 C. & P. 65; 2 Wend. R. 555; 11 Conn. of black feminist critique, I dofind Baker's analysis of Washington's rhetorical strategiesuseful, in large part because it helps to illuminate preciselyHurston's own self-erasure, at least in terms of representation, inSeraph. (21) Roads are often figured as symbols of personal growth andpossibility in Hurston's work. See, for example, "Drenched inLight," "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," and Their EyesWere Watching God, where Isis, Hurston, and Janie, respectively, standat the roadside, dreaming of new worlds and awaiting opportunity. (22) Arvay's desire to return to the "good old days"would certainly have been rare among poor whites, as the shift fromfarms to cities often brought about improved living conditions andquality of life, including "hourly wages, decent housing, betterschools, [and] adequate medical care" (Daniel 20). (23) When Jim tells Array that he intends to marry her, she thinksto herself that "this was like coming through religion.... Put yourwhole faith in the mercy of God and believe. Eternal life, Heaven, andits immortal glory were yours if you only would believe. The hold-backwas that it was not all that easy to believe.... Now was she to believethat this very pretty man clothed in all the joys of Heaven and earthwas for her?" (26). The preceding passage contains the first ofmany instances in which Jim is compared with God; Arvay believes thatJim has "everything in the world at his command" (26). Laterin the novel the narrator tells us Arvay's belief that "WhatGod neglected, Jim Meserve took care of. Between the two, God and Jim,all things came to pass" (152). "Yes, Jim Meserve in his fleshwas really there at the table with her. This was a miracle right out ofthe Bible. For some reason, still and as yet not revealed to Array, thismiracle of a man had married her" (168). Jim is the Word madeflesh Word Made Flesh was started in 1991, as a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization that exists to serve and advocate for the poorest of the poor in urban centers of the majority world. The organization focuses most of its work on the most vulnerable of the poor – women and children. . (24) Jim believes that he "serves" Arvay as well. Heclaims that when you are in love, "You just got to go on serving'em all your born days" (176); Array admits that Jim "hadtold her time and again that she owned him through and through"(177, emphasis added). But the feeling of mutual bondage, mutualdependence--of the master being "owned" by the slave--is, inaddition to being a familiar notion from Hegel's description of themaster/slave dialectic, a commonplace conceit of the Southern"interracial family" that sentimentalizes and masks grosspower inequity. (25) In terms of Christian typology typology/ty��pol��o��gy/ (ti-pol��ah-je) the study of types; the science of classifying, as bacteria according to type. typologythe study of types; the science of classifying, as bacteria according to type. , Sawley (standing in for theOld South) represents Canaan, unredeemed under bondage to the law of sinand death. But Jim Meserve carries Arvay into the New Dispensation DISPENSATION. A relaxation of law for the benefit or advantage of an individual. In the United States, no power exists, except in the legislature, to dispense with law, and then it is not so much a dispensation as a change of the law. . TheMeserve plantation is the New Canaan, the updated and purified PromisedLand. (26) The supposition that crackers are "bad" people--inthis case, morally--is also a longstanding stereotype. Wray found that"In every period I examined, in every stereotypical representationI analyzed, and in virtually every historical document I read, strongclaims were made about the moral unworthiness of poor whites" (19). (27) Interestingly, Hurston acknowledges that the Portuguese werenewcomers to whiteness, but seems to imply that to deny them thatstatus, as Arvay does, is backward: Jim had said they were white folks, but the man turned out to be a Portuguese, and his name was Corregio. That made them foreigners, and no foreigners were ever quite white to Arvay. Real white people talked English and without any funny sounds to it. The fact that his wife was a Georgia-born girl that he had married up around Savannah did not help the case one bit, so far as Arvay could see. The woman had gone back on her kind and fallen from grace. (120) (28) Consider the following diatribe di��a��tribe?n.A bitter, abusive denunciation.[Latin diatriba, learned discourse, from Greek diatrib against black-protest writingthat Hurston wrote in 1938 for the Florida Federal Writer'sProject. She argues that when a Negro writer wants to "sing a songto the morning," he doesn't because his background thrusts itself between his lips and the star and hemutters, "Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what isexpected of me and I shall be considered forgetful of our past andpresent. If I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subjectfor a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of themorning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead."So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again to thedetriment of art. ("Art and Such" 908, emphasis added)