Two ahead of their times
Bluestein, Gene
BOOKS Two ahead of their times Gene Bluestein ZORA NEALE HURSTON: A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY by Robert E. Hemenway University of Illinois Press. 371 pp. $15 hardcover. $8.95 paperback. CONSTANCE...
...She died in a welfare home where she lacked even the money to pay for medicines, but she refused to ask her family or friends for help...
...she had no birth certificate and used all those dates at one time or another...
...In the foreword to American Humor, she wrote, "This book has no quarrel with the American character...
...Her feud with Langston Hughes was characteristic of her turbulent career...
...She ended up doing housework for a woman "who sat in the living room reading the Saturday Evening Post— and discovering a story written by 'her girl.' " A mentally retarded child accused her of molesting him, and although the charges were eventually dropped, something seemed to go out of her...
...In addition to many reviews, she wrote brilliant studies of American culture, including Trumpets of Jubilee (1927), Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928), American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931), Davy Crockett (1934), Audubon (1936), Charles Sheeler (1938), and, posthumously published, The Roots of American Culture (1942), edited by Van Wyck Brooks...
...And, besides, Hurston had other things in mind...
...There is deep irony in the reports of Mrs...
...Her mother was a lifelong advocate of the arts in the elementary school curriculum, biographer Rubin notes...
...But they were both endowed with intellectual gifts and spiritual strength reminiscent of the American heiresses that Henry James portrayed so well: women who refused to be victimized by the rapacity and inhumaneness of society...
...Like Rourke, she saw the limits of academic life, and she wanted to write, direct,, collect folklore, and stage presentations of authentic black traditional culture...
...Nor can it be called a defense...
...Rourke saw more clearly than any of her contemporaries the characteristic tendency in the...
...Throughout, she suffered from the assaults on her as a black woman...
...Highbrow" critics mistakenly label these inventive minds "barbaric," overlooking the skills as well as the basic strategies which are being employed...
...For example, it is impossible to know whether Hurston was born in 1901 or 1898, 1899, 1900, or 1903...
...Rourke resigned from her position at Vassar, Rubin states, because she didn't enjoy teaching...
...His most recent recording is "The Bluestein Family Album: Sowin' on the Mountain...
...Rourke's "tyrannical behavior" and "inflexible will" which, however, seem to have had little effect on her daughter's remarkable pioneering accomplishments...
...Had there been an encounter, it is hard to predict the outcome because the two appear to be opposites...
...At a time when folklorists kept their distance safely from their "informants," Hurston lived with voodoo specialists in New Orleans, followed the trail of black lore to its Afro-Caribbean connections in Haiti, and staged a number of revues in which black song and dance were presented authentically rather than whitened up for commercial audiences...
...son I shall never marry...
...CONSTANCE ROURKE AND AMERICAN CULTURE by Joan Shelley Rubin University of North Carolina Press...
...And added to that there is something wild in me...
...She trained her daughter to use music, drawing, metal, and painting as vehicles of 'free expression.' (Religion, on the other hand, formed no part of Rourke's upbringing...
...Their interdisciplinary concerns reflected the restless quality of their minds, and it is sad to say that our educational and literary establishments are still a long way from acknowledging how right they were...
...Mules and Men (1935), is still acknowledged as perhaps the best study of a folk community ever published...
...Rubin quotes from an early letter in which Constance Rourke says, "There are times when I could have become a nun, I can understand that now...
...After a brief stint of teaching at Vassar, Rourke became a free-lance writer and critic...
...She also propagates the complaints of Rourke's academic critics, especially folklorists who found her approach to the field "imprecise...
...Boas and his disciple, Ruth Benedict, influenced Rourke profoundly...
...Robert Hemenway handles the complexity of her life and career brilliantly...
...One of her most remarkable books is Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), a novel in which she tried to show that black tradition represents the only full synthesis of Judaism and Christianity, a characteristic of black spirituals as well...
...Even among the "New Negroes" of the Harlem Renaissance she was viewed as extreme, and she scandalized her collaborators with such terms as "Nig-gerati" and "Negrotarians...
...Hurston, who was wilder on the surface, left almost no information about her two marriages, the second of which was only recently discovered...
...Despite some notable differences, Rourke and Hurston moved along similar lines in their attempts to comprehend the meanings of American civilization...
...By hook or crook she managed to write and publish four novels, an autobiography, sh,ort stories and essays, and two books of folklore...
...I think rather that she rejected the dogmatic approaches of the academic world and realized how inhospitable it would be to an imaginative mind like hers...
...What emerges most clearly from their work is that we need the greatest variety of approaches to understand the full range of our cultural achievements...
...Constance Mayfield Rourke (1885-1941) and Zora Neale Hurston (19017-1960) never met, although Rourke visited nightclubs in Harlem where Hurston had staged some productions during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, that first major attempt to define what it meant to be black in the United States...
...one might as well dispute with some established feature in the natural landscape...
...she was black and sassy and accepted no limits to her potential...
...Such typical American artists as Mark Twain and John James Audubon were often so close to folk tradition that they could re-create on a popular level what seemed essentially folk in its style...
...One of the latter...
...United States for folk and popular traditions to merge rather than to exist separately in isolated areas, as is often the case in Europe...
...She was buried in the segregated cemetery of Saint Lucie County, Florida, her name misspelled on the death certificate...
...Rourke's career, cut off by her untimely death, encompassed a range of pioneering studies that made her point impressively...
...There is little use to explain Rourke's decision to devote her life to caring for her mother...
...244 pp...
...Rourke herself is still subjected to the same kind of criticism...
...What this cost her, a woman essentially on her own, Constance Rourke characteristically kept to herself...
...The subjects of these critical biographies were so fiercely independent and protective of their personal lives that Rubin and Hemenway constantly drew blanks at crucial moments in their investigations...
...This study has grown from an enjoyment of American vagaries, and from the belief that these have woven together a tradition which is various, subtle, sinewy, scant at times but not poor...
...Hurston was clearly a premature black nationalist who realized that the key to survival of her people in a racist society depended on the preservation and recognition of their great cultural gifts of song, dance, and folk speech...
...i orn in a small town in Florida...
...Rubin expertly examines Rourke's critique of the attack critic Brooks made on the paucity of "culture" in the United States...
...She was vivacious, irresistible, and outrageous...
...Although he encouraged Hurston to study for a doctorate, there was never quite enough financial aid to make that possible...
...She was determined to find the sources, publish them, and use them as the basis for her own creative expression...
...The harassment began to take its toll only toward the end of her career...
...Rourke was most influenced by her mother and other ideologues of the Progressive era...
...Zora Neale Hurston worked her way through Barnard College and became the protege of Franz Boas, the most distinguished anthropologist of the time...
...That is the reaGene Bluestein teaches literature at California State University in Fresno and has specialized in folklore and folk music...
Vol. 45 • May 1981 • No. 5
