Seraph on the Suwanee notes

Seraph on the Suwanee Collected Notes

We begin with the title. What’s a seraph? A seraph is like an angel, a celestial being of the highest order. So who is the angel in this story? Is it Arvay Henson, dejected, inhibited by her own imagination, always suffering from feelings of inferiority, but basically a good person? Or is it Jim Henson, her husband, a bit devilish in a harmless way, but always misogynistic, always domineering? My vote goes for Arvay as the angelic being, especially considering her spoken desire to become a missionary in her youth. Jim, her husband, may be the one most in need of her angelic powers, though his actions as a serial entrepreneur are certainly commendable. He is a good provider, it’s just that he never meets Arvay at her level, or even at a common level, contributing to her feelings of insecurity.

Early attempts at titles: Sang the Suwanee in the Spring, The Queen of the Golden Hand, Angel in the Bed, Lady angel With Her Man, Seraph with a Man on Hand, So Said the Sea, Good Morning Sun, Seraph on the Suwanee River

Hurston dedicates the novel to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, writer and novelist, and Mary Spessard Holland, wife of a Florida politician who served as governor (most of the novel is set in Florida) and later as US Senator. The opening chapter gives us the lay of the land, so to speak. We learn that Arvay’s home is poor and poverty stricken, religious but plagued by hookworm and malaria.  Arvay has a secret crush on her brother-in-law, which she refers to as mental adultery in her teenage years. Her older sister, Larraine, notices the attraction and moves in on the vulnerable young man, gets married to him, and starts a family, much to Arvay’s regret. It’s a tiny part of the evolving story that passes innocently enough, but the suppressed relationship becomes a much larger point of contention in their later lives.

There is a passing reference to songwriter Stephen Foster, whose songs included such hits as Suwannee River, Old Black Joe, My Old Kentucky Home and Beautiful Dreamer. We have a picture of the landscape: reddened river with roots exposed, scant flowers and vegetation, Hurston discusses the memories of the old South, the Civil War and reconstruction and there is a passing reference to Negroes in the town. Church-going seems to be the central activity of the community

Arvay has spasms, seizures that are not well explained. Such seizures may be caused by epilepsy, congenital birth defects, and central nervous system infections. In an environment such as the one described, these possibilities exist. Her mother gives her turpentine oil dissolved in a spoonful of sugar, a popular “remedy” in the deep south at the turn of the century. Later, when Arvay’s first born arrives with birth defects, we wonder how much the environment and her prior medical history may have influenced the situation.

Arvay, according to the narrator (p. 9), “was timid from feeling unsafe inside.” Also, the narrator informs us that years of showing a preference for her sister, Larraine, “had done something to Arvay’s soul across the years.” (p.11)

During their courtship, we learn that Arvay is descended from poor whites, but Jim is a few generations removed from plantation owners, slave owners whose fortunes had been wiped out by the Civil War and the end of slavery.

The church parade for dating couples (p. 23)

The lightning story (p. 27)

Arvay’s seizure (p. 31 – 32)

Marriage proposal (p. 39)

In-depth knowledge of turpentine business (p.42)

Rape invitation (p. 49, along with other chit-chat between Jim and Joe

The rape (p. 51)

Arvay is raped by her prospective husband, Jim, before their wedding. She ultimately acquiesces and finds an accommodation as she is informed by her mother that she will be raped again and again if she considers it as such, and won’t be in a position to tell her father each time it happens. It’s not the beginning of Arvay’s descent into insecurity, but it is certainly a critical contribution. Mind you this is a white family in the deep south, but the issues that confront them are more determined by class structure and family dynamics, and only racial as an afterthought. 

Arvay’s music talents, power of synesthesia (p. 59, p. 76)

Joe is Jim’s Pet Negro (p. 61)

Dessie first to notice Arvay’s pregnancy (p. 63)

Arvay develops a craving for red clay (p. 65)

Arvay and Jim discuss Cain and Abel (p. 65 – 66)

Arvay’s firstborn, Earl arrives in ch. 5. He has physical deformities and mental and emotional disabilities, and exhibits symptoms of muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy. Could his symptoms be related to Arvay’s seizures during her teenage years? Arvay dotes over him and is over protective of him because of his disabilities, and responds strongly to criticisms of him.

Music on the instrument of life (p. 76)

Arvay discovers she is pregnant again (p. 77)

Jim purchases a home for Arvay and their growing family, (p. 77)

New baby coming. Arvay scraps to make things better but Arvay doesn’t really appreciate the value of Jim’s efforts. No real partnership. (p. 82-83)

Jim goes into the fruit business, selling his stake in the moonshine still. (p. 83)

Angeline is born. She is beautiful. Jim takes to her quickly., spoils her by favoring her over other children and even Arvay herself. (p. 85)

Jim drinks and gets into fights more. (p. 88-89)

Arvay gets pregnant a third time. JIm says he doesn’t want a girl, making Arvay upset (p. 97)

Upset, Arvay prays for a boy. (p.99)

Then Arvay prays the Lord will take the baby away, upset with Jim, and first entertains the idea of leaving Jim because of something silly he says. Doubts about the marriage.  (p. 103-104)

First mention of Arvay’s eye color change when she is aroused (p. 106)

Jim reveals his own insecurities to the narrator (p. 104-105)

Kenny (a boy) is born. Jim adds a Florida room to the house. (p. 106-107)

Kenny loves playing with Belinda, Joe and Dessie’s daughter. Belinda is acrobatic and can dance while standing on her head. (p. 111)

Joe invests his still money into real estate. (p. 117)

As Earl grows older, Arvay’s husband suggests he be “put away.” (p. 124)

Chat with students on the Zora Neale Hurston book, “Barracoon.”

First thank you for inviting me and it is always a pleasure to see my old friend, Ambassador Alex Laskaris, with whom I served in Angola.

For the past five years, I have led study groups on the plays of August Wilson, The American Century Cycle. This year we added Zora Neale Hurston and Ambassador Laskaris asked me to say a few words on Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, Hurston’s most recently released book. Barracoon retold the tale of Kossola Oluale, who came to be known as Cudjoe Lewis, a freed slave who arrived illegally some 50 years after the slave trade had been abolished. Barracoon refers to the small areas where captured Africans were “warehoused” prior to being transferred to larger ships for the 70 day trans-Atlantic voyage.

There were four “data points” for the actual content of the Barracoon story. Much more of the story is wrapped up in the telling of the story, its narration, than in the actual data points. So we will begin there. The points are: (1) the kidnapping of the Africans by other Africans to initiate the trade; (2) the transfer by the kidnapped Africans to holding/waiting cells on the African coast; (3) the transfer of the cargo by sea to the United States, by this time an illegal act due to the ban on African trade in 1808; and (4) slavery’s emancipation in the US, ordered in 1863 and effected at the end of the US Civil War in 1865.

While the congressional end to the slave trade itself in 1808 legally ended the slave trade, lots of smuggling occurred at varying levels of difficulty. In one such example, a slave trade by ship was illegally conducted as late as 1860. The ship was named the Clotilda and it was immediately scurried and burned to avoid detection. The account of the activity of the illegal slave ship became known as Barracoon.

Barracoon was published finally in 2018, though the typescript sat in various vaults and personal paper collections since the completion of its original draft in 1931. Hurston’s published letters only made a passing and obscure reference in an article Hurston submitted, “The Last Slave Ship.” The completed manuscript was ultimately found among Alain Locke’s personal files at Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Research Center – Manuscript Division in a folder labeled, simply, “Zora Neale Hurston.”

There were several reasons for the delay. Hurston’s American publisher, Viking Press did not at the time want to print a book with so much vernacular language, both the language spoken by the enslaved Africans as they were being captured and transported, and the language they later developed, a sort of hybrid of the English they learned combined with their original native tongue. Hurston, a trained anthropologist who conducted the interviews with Kossola, insisted on inserting and preserving all original language. (Side note: a close read of Barracoon will reveal that the slave-owning family, the Meahers, spoke with a peculiar accent that may have affected the language spoken by their enslaved employees).

Then the trail gets a bit murky. In a time when published work was assigning to African societies and kingdoms a rather passive role in the slave trade, Hurston identified the role the Africans played as essential to the completion of all slave trade transactions, even the illegal ones that occurred for some 50 years after the slave trade was legally abolished. That disclosure was not considered kosher at the time. Also, while many were engaged in the illegal slave trade, very few were found guilty of committing a crime and even fewer were punished.

There is additional murkiness in questions raised about Hurston’s use of pre-existing sources in cobbling together the retelling of Kossola’s story, though none questions that actual interviews were conducted by Hurston.

Hurston herself faded into obscurity after the publishing of several popular titles. Her position on WWII international affairs, I.e., that black soldiers should secure the four freedoms at home before defending them aboard, resulted in a fall from popularity for the author. And her vocal opposition to Brown v the Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that resulted in forced integration of all public education facilities resulted in even greater obscurity and seclusion for Hurston. She died in 1960 in a state of poverty, all but forgotten by her reading public, buried in an unmarked grave.

In the early 70’s, Robert Hemenwey discovered Hurston’s unprocessed papers at the Rare Books Division of the University of Florida while researching for a literary biography. Meanwhile, a young writer named Alice Walker who came across some of Hurston’s out of print work in a course taught by Margaret Walker at Jackson State University. She took it upon herself to find Hurston’s unmarked grave in Ft Pierce, Fl and place a headstone on it. An article Walker wrote about her discoveries in a 1975 edition of MS Magazine went viral, many of Hurston’s works were republished and interest in all her work was revived throughout the 80’s and 90’s.

Research for a book on the slave ship Clotilda by enterprising scholars Sylviane Diouf and Natalie Robertson resulted in the discovery of the original Hurston typescript at Howard University where it had been since the early 1930’s. The current edition is edited by Deborah Plant.

Descendants of the original community of freed slaves, as well as descendants of the original Clotilda cargo, became convinced they would not be able to acquire resources to repatriate to Africa. So they rented land from the former slavemaster, Timothy Meahers, for a year after emancipation until they had accumulated sufficient funds to purchase tracts of land. They named these new tracts of land Africatown.

In 2018, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture joined forces with the Alabama Historical Commission and ultimately located the scuttled Clotilda through the Slave Wrecks Project.

The ‘Clotilda,’ the Last Known Slave Ship to Arrive in the U.S., Is Found – Smithsonian, May 22, 2019

Mapping AfricaTown – The Paris Review April 24, 2023

Local Legacies – Library of Congress Folklife Center

America’s last slave ship is more intact than anyone thought – National Geographic, December 21, 2021 (required free account set-up and log in)

Alabama Historical Commission – Clotilda (lots of additional links and press releases)

Zora Neale Hurston and Cudjo’s Own Story – National Park Service

Deborah G Plant. Editor of Barracoon

Family of financier of last US slave ship breaks silence

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Topics for discussion:

1. Dispensation of justice in African village

2. Initiation into manhood

3. Youth coming of age in African village

4. Societal order interruption by the African slave trade

5. The Meahers and the Fosters

6. Dahomean women warriors

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‘Barracoon” Timeline:

1808 Slave trade legitimately ended, federal law makes it illegal.

Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of the final Constitution read “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.” In March 1807, Congress passed an act to “prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States…from any foreign kingdom, place, or country” that took effect January 1, 1808.

http://www.stateoftheunionhistory.com/2017/08/1820-james-monroe-african-slave-trade.html

1821 Institution of the Navy African squadron to combat slave trafficking on the high seas https://www.usni.o/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2019/february/slavery-and-us-navys-africa-squadron

1850 The Portuguese Company set up headquarters in New York City. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-new-york-became-americas-last-slave-trading-port-cuban-spy-tried-stop-it-180977178/

1852 SecNav John Kennedy ordered ground reconnaissance to combat slave trafficking in West African areas.

1853. New SecNav, James Dobbin, replaced Kennedy, assigned Cdr William Lynch to continue reconnaissance efforts.

1858 Tim Meaher made a bet he could successfully smuggle a cargo of captured Africans in spite of the ban.

1859 Captain Foster of Nova Scotia agreed to man the ship, Clotilde.

1861 Commander William Lynch resigned his commission to join the Confederate Navy.

1861. Tim Meaher found guilty of piracy and fined.

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Some random facts:

Years of legitimate slave trade

US: 1508 – 1808 (1863 slavery abolished)

UK: 1640 – 1897 (1833 slavery abolished)

Brazil: 1516 – 1888 (1888 slavery abolished)

Years of resetlement movements

US to Liberia (12,000: 1821-1847

UK to Sierra Leone (85,000): 1821-1847

Brazil to Nigeria (3000-8000): 1830-1920

Total # of slaves exported:

US: 400,000

UK: 3.1 million (includes all colonial possessions)

Brazil: 5 million

Jonas Gourd Vine. pt. 1

First, who was Jonah and what’s this Gourd Vine business?

Well. Jonah was an old testament prophet.  God wanted Jonah to go to a place called Nineveh to tell the people they had been bad people and that God was mad at them. But, instead of doing what God wanted, Jonah tried to run away, as far from Nineveh as possible. it was a three day journey and Jonah just wasn’t into it. But Jonah ended up going any way. He called out to the people “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, ‘By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God.  Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.” It was a good thing, right?

Then, when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God changed his mind on the disaster and cut the folks a Ninevah a break. But by this time, Jonah was unhappy? Because he had been promised death and destruction.” Jonah knew that if he warned the people of Nineveh that God was mad at them, they might decide to ask God for forgiveness. And if they asked God to forgive them, Jonah knew God would forgive them because God is loving and full of mercy. So where is the love Jonah? OK, that’s Jonah. What up with the gourd vine?

Jonah was still angry. He felt he had been betrayed. The nerve.

Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah’s head to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. 

But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” “It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?Jonah we should know that our God is a loving and forgiving God. He is so loving and forgiving that He died and the cross so that He could pay for all of our sins and forgive them.

***

Not to be confused with Jason of the Argonauts fame, a very interesting  and perhaps related text. “Taking the Argo to Nineveh: Jonah and Jason in a Mediterranean Context”

***

This explanation may be a bit oversimplified. It may not even be an explanation at all..

And we may have to add a slightly different analogy with which to entertain our minds.

Rev, John, father of Zora (Isis) and wife of Lucy, quite possibly beyond his natural husbandly capacity, managed to find decent series of jobs, establishing, in its turn a career work pattern as a preacher, builder, and entrepreneur that he had achieved the to-be-desired of respectability politics. He was a big man, he preached big sermons. He made a big impression on his fellow church men (though Lucy was never misled). And he got way with his seemingly ultimate trick-fate. What original title did Zora give to her first novel centered on the life of her morally inbecilic, philandering father?  Someone said it was “Big Nigger, ” a Book-of-the-Month Selection in 1934. It was the final vine gourd in life that, much like the Indecaying gourd vine, was finally made bitter in it chewing.

Jonah’s Gourd Vine, pt. 2

In widowerhood,, Our Reverend John lost much as much blame for his demise was associated with his new wife, Miss Hatie Tysonsm younger than his daughters, and his carrying on with her even while Lucy was facing her death bed.

Their relationship soon descended into chaos and endless bickering, Rev John losing much of his preaching and building wealth

More lter

And who was ISIS!

Three Toss-ups for Week 2 of Moses, Man of the Mountain

Toss-up #1: More depth into the writing style/personality of Zora, given indications in the text regarding Moses. (May be the hardest!)

Toss-up #2: Evolving character/disposition/behaviours of Zora’s Moses

Toss-up #3: (almost a toss-away) Collect samples of recordings from “Let My People Go.” Go deep, leaving no stone unturned.

• https://pages.stolaf.edu/americanmusic/2018/03/20/let-my-people-go-moses-in-african-american-spirituals/

Music 345: Race, Identity, and Representation in American Music

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAt9exbqo-o&list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXbocsrM3UY5NxXT_daa2N1T&index=1

Intro to Zora Neale Hurston Book Club March 2023

Greetings all. This is the spring version of the Zora Neale Hurston Book Club. Last fall, 2022. we did an Intro course which was mostly readings, essays, and short stories. Group members thought it might work better reading whole books. So we compromised. We picked four titles that were best representative of Hurston’s whole body of work, without including her two best known titles that were already being used in the Intro course. There were other issues with the intro course that we are still working on, but for the present, Dust Tracks On a Road, Hurston’s autobiographical work, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, both remain in the Intro course.

In the Book Club, we cover Moses Man of the Mountain, a monumental work featuring Hurston’s perspective on a slightly different Moses personality, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Seraph of the Sewanee, and Barracoon.

As as aside I led book groups in the study of August Wilson, The American Century Cycle. The explicit deliver Hurtson’s rich folklore makes throughout Wilson’s plays.

Spring Book Club – Moses, Man of the Mountain

February 26, 2023 / Leave a comment

One month away. 01292023.

My intro to this book came in the earlier study group, Intro to Zora Neale Hurston, and the synopsis of the first four chapters is here.

When we discussed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the Fall group, we followed the action chapter by chapter and discussed each in the first meeting, then, in the 2nd meeting, we discussed themes, overarching and connecting themes throughout the narrative.

We have these two dimensions for discussing Moses, Man of the Mountain, plus a couple others. We know that Hurston’s narrative is a “reworking” or a “reimagining” of the original Old Testament Biblical story, told from Hurston’s very unique perspective of southern folklore and her anthropological study of the African diaspora in the American South and the Caribbean. So that gives us additional data points, perhaps. There may also be places (spoiler alert!) where Hurston’s story emphasizes and/or departs from the original narrative and how those connections affect the overall story. There is also the division in both versions of the story between the Exodus out of Egypt and the time spent in the Wilderness that may warrant discussion.

So as we read through, we’ll ask ourselves the following questions: how does Zora’s narrative unwind? Do the two stories follow a similar sequence as we would expect or are there surprises along the way? Does the Hurston version enlighten us in ways we hadn’t anticipated? Or, does the Hurston version fall short? And if there is time left, we may want to examine present day analogies to this 1939 story and its Old Testament antecedents.

One final set of questions for the first round. At the end of chapter 10, the narrator uses the term “crossed over” 13 times, leading us to believe it was a historical if not a climactic event. There is no such “crossing over” in the life of the Biblical Moses. So it might bear further discussion. Additionally, the same year (1939) that Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain (based loosely on her 1934 short story, The Fire and the Cloud), Sigmund Freud published his final and epic work, Moses and Monotheism (Full text available at Internet Archive, summary here). Moses and Monotheism suggests that Aton, a single god created by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton, was also the god of Moses via his connection to the Egyptian royal family. According to Freud, Akhenaton ushered in a “cross over” during his reign, from a plurality of gods to one god, Aton, that was ultimately unsuccessful, the people reverting back to polytheism upon Akhenaton’s death.

And who is Moses? The biblical Moses is himself Hebrew. Is Hurston’s Moses Hebrew or Egyptian? Or does it matter? Is Moses a man sent from God, or a master hoodoo man with a bag of unexplicable tricks through which he manages to astound Pharaoh and his court magicians? And does it matter? And how much is Moses a self-made man, how much a man with a spiritual destiny?

More later. I promise.

One week away. 02262023

Hurston began her project, Moses, Man of the Mountain (MMM), with the publishing, in Challenge, of The Fire and the Cloud, in September 1934. It was a short story and the precursor to MMM.

In a letter to Edwin Osgood Grover, dated December 1935, we find Hurston’s first mention of a new project, “Moses.” She completed the manuscript in December 1939 while in her first semester as a faculty member at North Carolina College in Durham, NC after several years working with the Florida Writers’ Project.

Initial reviews were enthusiastic over what appeared on the surface to be a flawed book attempting to retell the story of Moses and the Children of Israel from Hurston’s own black American perspective. Her publisher Lippincott called it “a great book.” Saturday Review of Literature said “It is not a logically projected work, but it has racial vitality, a dramatic intensity worthy of its gifted author.” The New York Times called the narrative “one of great power,” said it “pulsated with timely and profound eloquence and religious power”, and called it a “homespun book” that was “literature in every best sense of the word.” All very polite but lukewarm at best. The New York Herald referred to MMM as “a fine Negro novel,” praising Hurston’s “uncommon gifts as a novelist.”

Huston’s fellow black writers , on the other hand, had routinely hostile responses.

Alain Locke called it “caricature without portraiture.” Ralph Ellison said, “for Negro fiction it did nothing.” Richard Wright felt Hurston should abandon her anthropology angle and aim towards contemporary race issues. Like he did. In all three cases, the comments made reflected the shallow understanding Hurston’s epic work. While they merely considered MMM “folkloric fiction,” at deeper levels her work was exactly and precisely addressing the treatment of racial issues being called for. Their loss.

*
Suffice it to say there was always intense drama going on in Hurston’s life. She was between jobs, between marriages, and being accused of practicing the voodoo she had recently been initiated into during her travels to Haiti and New Orleans.
*
Many black writers and leaders before and after Hurston would tap into the theme of the Mosaic myth, comparing the enslavement of blacks to the biblical account of the enslavement and eventual exodus of Israelis from Egypt. Frances E. W. Harper published an epic poem, “Moses, the Story of the Nile,” in 1869. Paul Laurence Dunbar published his “Antebellum Sermon,” a retelling of the Moses and Pharaoh story in Negro dialect, in his Lyrics of the Lowly Life in 1895. Just two years before the completion of MMM, Sigmund Freud put out two essays that later were incorporated into a book, “Moses and Monotheism,” that suggested Moses was racially Egyptian and an adherent of the lost monotheistic cult of Ahkenation.

Since Hurston, we have re-telling of the Mosaic myth in poems and sermons by Robert Hayden (Runagate), Margaret Walker (Prophets for a New Day), and in the final speech by Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis the day before his assassination.
*
Hurston places a high burden on her readers, which you will see more of as we progress through her work. You don’t just take a casual walk in the park with Hurston. She calls on us to do deep reading. Reading, scientists have discovered, is not a part of the brain’s original equipment. There is no geography of the human brain where the reading function can be identified. Instead, reading requires building new networks among and across existing parts of the brain.

Maryanne Wolf talks about the affordances of the reading screen and the page. In reading we take inferences from what we know and feel and test those inferences (critical analysis). Then, when we are immersed in the thoughts of the writer, we leave our original perspective and reach a level of contemplation where we begin not only to achieve empathy but to discover a sanctuary of another way of thinking. I think this is what “cosmic” Zora expects of us to do – to enter that sanctuary of free and unrestricted thought.

Zora wrote in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” “There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.” Zora invites us to that place, that sanctuary. I’ll meet you there.

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Additional readings (not required)

Boyd, Valerie. 2003. Wrapped In Rainbows. Scribner: New York. pp. 329-336.

Hemenway, Robert. 1978. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. University of Illinois Press: Urbana. pp. 256-271.

Hurston, Zora Neale.1996. The Complete Stories: The Fire and the Cloud. Harper Collins: New York. pp. 227-121. Also found in West, Genevieve, editor. 2020. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. Harper Collins: London. pp. 229-232.

Plant, Deborah. 2007. Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. Praeger: Westport, CT. pp 125-131

Wolf, Maryanne. 2008. Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Harper Collins. New York.

Zeppenfeld, Julia. 2018. Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 45-62. Available online at JSTOR.

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Various Moses stories in antiquity

Various Moses stories in antiquity

1. The Biblical Moses who performed miracles and freed the Jewish slaves. According to the account in Exodus, Moses accomplished ten plagues to wear down the resistance of the Egyptians. Defeating the Egyptians, Moses led his people through a ten year wilderness, eventually reaching Cannan, the Promised Land. Moses died before reaching the promised land.

2. The Egyptian Story – Leper King and War Criminal.In his third century BC third century BC Aegyptiaca, Egyptian historian Manetho reported that Moses was born an  Egyptian Priest, named Osarseph. He tried to take over Egypt when the Pharaoh quarantined everybody who had been affected by leprosy. The lepers were banished to a city, Avaris. Osarseph used the quarantined population to stage a revolt, naming himself the ruler of all lepers and changing his name to Moses. Moses and his lepers created Jewish laws purely out of spite for the Egyptians. Moses built a staff of 200,000, conquering Egypt and Ethiopia. In the 13th year of his reign, a new army was formed and the leer army was banished to Syria.

3. Moses the philosopher. Greek philosopher and geographer Strabo (c. 64/63 BC—24 AD) in his valuable Geography 16.35-38 writes about Moses. Strabo was a Greek geographer, historian and philosopher who said Moses was merely a philosopher who believed that monotheism made the most sense. He became so convinced that he gave up his position as ruler of Lower Egypt to start a new community. He lead a successful community with few stringent rules that made him even more popular. Following Mose’s death, Jerusalem was taken over by superstitious people who introduced the kosher diet and circumcision.

4. Jewish and Alexandrian prilosopker Atrapanus introduces us to yet another Moses, Egyptian War Hero and Cult Leader. Chenepheres the father attempted to kill his son. Moses prevailed and conquered Ethiopia. As cult leader, he declared Ibis, a long-legged wading bird, as the sacred bird, Then started the cult of Apis the bull, as a sacred animal, which failed when his father tried to kill. He left Egypt, re-invaded, and freed the Jews.

5. Finally, Roman historian Tacitus tells us of Moses, The Exiled Atheist. Yet another leprosy story. MOses took his people to the wilderness to get rid of the leprosy. Once in the wilderness. Moses ordered his people to turn against god and man, both of whom had deserted them, and only trust their own judgment  When they arrived at Cannan, Moses introduced a new religion, thinking it would secure the allegiance of his people. He introduced the kosher diet, blaming pork for the leprosy. He also instituted the Sabbath

https://armstronginstitute.org/238-evidence-of-the-exodus

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/which-real-story-moses-was-he-criminal-philosopher-hero-or-atheist-008008

Comparisons between the Biblical Moses and Zora’s Moses Next week)

Spring Book Club – Moses, Man of the Mountain

One month away. 01292023.

My intro to this book came in the earlier study group, Intro to Zora Neale Hurston, and the synopsis of the first four chapters is here.

When we discussed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the Fall group, we followed the action chapter by chapter and discussed each in the first meeting, then, in the 2nd meeting, we discussed themes, overarching and connecting themes throughout the narrative.

We have these two dimensions for discussing Moses, Man of the Mountain, plus a couple others. We know that Hurston’s narrative is a “reworking” or a “reimagining” of the original Old Testament Biblical story, told from Hurston’s very unique perspective of southern folklore and her anthropological study of the African diaspora in the American South and the Caribbean. So that gives us additional data points, perhaps. There may also be places (spoiler alert!) where Hurston’s story emphasizes and/or departs from the original narrative and how those connections affect the overall story. There is also the division in both versions of the story between the Exodus out of Egypt and the time spent in the Wilderness that may warrant discussion.

So as we read through, we’ll ask ourselves the following questions: how does Zora’s narrative unwind? Do the two stories follow a similar sequence as we would expect or are there surprises along the way? Does the Hurston version enlighten us in ways we hadn’t anticipated? Or, does the Hurston version fall short? And if there is time left, we may want to examine present day analogies to this 1939 story and its Old Testament antecedents.

One final set of questions for the first round. At the end of chapter 10, the narrator uses the term “crossed over” 13 times, leading us to believe it was a historical if not a climactic event. There is no such “crossing over” in the life of the Biblical Moses. So it might bear further discussion. Additionally, the same year (1939) that Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain (based loosely on her 1934 short story, The Fire and the Cloud), Sigmund Freud published his final and epic work, Moses and Monotheism (Full text available at Internet Archive, summary here). Moses and Monotheism suggests that Aton, a single god created by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton, was also the god of Moses via his connection to the Egyptian royal family. According to Freud, Akhenaton ushered in a “cross over” during his reign, from a plurality of gods to one god, Aton, that was ultimately unsuccessful, the people reverting back to polytheism upon Akhenaton’s death.

And who is Moses? The biblical Moses is himself Hebrew. Is Hurston’s Moses Hebrew or Egyptian? Or does it matter? Is Moses a man sent from God, or a master hoodoo man with a bag of unexplicable tricks through which he manages to astound Pharaoh and his court magicians? And does it matter? And how much is Moses a self-made man, how much a man with a spiritual destiny?

More later. I promise.

One week away. 02262023

Hurston began her project, Moses, Man of the Mountain (MMM), with the publishing, in Challenge, of The Fire and the Cloud, in September 1934. It was a short story and the precursor to MMM.

In a letter to Edwin Osgood Grover, dated December 1935, we find Hurston’s first mention of a new project, “Moses.” She completed the manuscript in December 1939 while in her first semester as a faculty member at North Carolina College in Durham, NC after several years working with the Florida Writers’ Project.

Initial reviews were enthusiastic over what appeared on the surface to be a flawed book attempting to retell the story of Moses and the Children of Israel from Hurston’s own black American perspective. Her publisher Lippincott called it “a great book.” Saturday Review of Literature said “It is not a logically projected work, but it has racial vitality, a dramatic intensity worthy of its gifted author.” The New York Times called the narrative “one of great power,” said it “pulsated with timely and profound eloquence and religious power”, and called it a “homespun book” that was “literature in every best sense of the word.” All very polite but lukewarm at best. The New York Herald referred to MMM as “a fine Negro novel,” praising Hurston’s “uncommon gifts as a novelist.”

Huston’s fellow black writers , on the other hand, had routinely hostile responses.

Alain Locke called it “caricature without portraiture.” Ralph Ellison said, “for Negro fiction it did nothing.” Richard Wright felt Hurston should abandon her anthropology angle and aim towards contemporary race issues. Like he did. In all three cases, the comments made reflected the shallow understanding Hurston’s epic work. While they merely considered MMM “folkloric fiction,” at deeper levels her work was exactly and precisely addressing the treatment of racial issues being called for. Their loss.

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Suffice it to say there was always intense drama going on in Hurston’s life. She was between jobs, between marriages, and being accused of practicing the voodoo she had recently been initiated into during her travels to Haiti and New Orleans.
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Many black writers and leaders before and after Hurston would tap into the theme of the Mosaic myth, comparing the enslavement of blacks to the biblical account of the enslavement and eventual exodus of Israelis from Egypt. Frances E. W. Harper published an epic poem, “Moses, the Story of the Nile,” in 1869. Paul Laurence Dunbar published his “Antebellum Sermon,” a retelling of the Moses and Pharaoh story in Negro dialect, in his Lyrics of the Lowly Life in 1895. Just two years before the completion of MMM, Sigmund Freud put out two essays that later were incorporated into a book, “Moses and Monotheism,” that suggested Moses was racially Egyptian and an adherent of the lost monotheistic cult of Ahkenation.

Since Hurston, we have re-telling of the Mosaic myth in poems and sermons by Robert Hayden (Runagate), Margaret Walker (Prophets for a New Day), and in the final speech by Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis the day before his assassination.
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Hurston places a high burden on her readers, which you will see more of as we progress through her work. You don’t just take a casual walk in the park with Hurston. She calls on us to do deep reading. Reading, scientists have discovered, is not a part of the brain’s original equipment. There is no geography of the human brain where the reading function can be identified. Instead, reading requires building new networks among and across existing parts of the brain.

Maryanne Wolf talks about the affordances of the reading screen and the page. In reading we take inferences from what we know and feel and test those inferences (critical analysis). Then, when we are immersed in the thoughts of the writer, we leave our original perspective and reach a level of contemplation where we begin not only to achieve empathy but to discover a sanctuary of another way of thinking. I think this is what “cosmic” Zora expects of us to do – to enter that sanctuary of free and unrestricted thought.

Zora wrote in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” “There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.” Zora invites us to that place, that sanctuary. I’ll meet you there.

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Additional readings (not required)

Boyd, Valerie. 2003. Wrapped In Rainbows. Scribner: New York. pp. 329-336.

Hemenway, Robert. 1978. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. University of Illinois Press: Urbana. pp. 256-271.

Hurston, Zora Neale.1996. The Complete Stories: The Fire and the Cloud. Harper Collins: New York. pp. 227-121. Also found in West, Genevieve, editor. 2020. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. Harper Collins: London. pp. 229-232.

Plant, Deborah. 2007. Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. Praeger: Westport, CT. pp 125-131

Wolf, Maryanne. 2008. Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Harper Collins. New York.

Zeppenfeld, Julia. 2018. Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 45-62. Available online at JSTOR.

Spring 2023 book club/study group

Starting the first week of March, 2023.

Here are the books we will be reading and discussing each week:

Weeks 1-2: Moses, Man of the Mountain

Weeks 3-4: Jonah’s Gourd Vine

Weeks 5-6: Seraph of the Suwanee

Weeks 7-8: Barracoon

Synopsis of Week #8 – review of all prior session weekly readings

Week #7: https://repurposeandrepackageyourlife.wordpress.com/2022/12/25/synopsis-of-week-7-various-readings/

Week #6: https://repurposeandrepackageyourlife.wordpress.com/2022/12/24/synopsis-of-week-6-their-eyes-were-watching-god/

Week #5: https://repurposeandrepackageyourlife.wordpress.com/2022/12/04/synopsis-of-week-5-various-readings/

Week #4: https://repurposeandrepackageyourlife.wordpress.com/2022/11/26/synopsis-of-week-4-zora-neale-hurston-a-life-in-letters-carla-kaplan/

Week #3: https://repurposeandrepackageyourlife.wordpress.com/2022/11/12/synopsis-of-week-3-hurston-dust-tracks-on-a-road/

Week #2: https://repurposeandrepackageyourlife.wordpress.com/2022/11/08/week-8-into-to-zora-neale-hurston-review-end-of-course-synopses-week-two-11072022/

Week #1: https://repurposeandrepackageyourlife.wordpress.com/2022/11/07/week-8-into-to-zora-neale-hurston-review-end-of-course-synopses-week-one-11072022/

Miscellaneous pre-class links: https://repurposeandrepackageyourlife.wordpress.com/2022/05/22/magazine-and-journal-articles-libguides-and-a-playlist-of-videos/

Synopsis of Week #7 – various readings

In this final week of assigned readings, we covered three chapters of Hurston’s Tell My Horse, an account of her anthropological research in the Caribbean, and one chapter from Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows.

Week #7

Hurston. Tell My Horse. Ch. 1-3.

Boyd. Wrapped in Rainbows. Ch. 27. Deep South

Tell My Horse is an ethnographic account of Hurston’s research work and travels in the Caribbean in the 1930’s. The section we read focuses on the Jamaica portions of her travels. An interesting aspect Hurston highlighted was the colorline separation between dark-skinned blacks and lighter-skinned mulattoes in Jamaican society. There is a subtle implication a relationship between Jamaican blacks and American blacks with regard to societal implications of skin color discrimination in the 1930’s.

In the section entitled “Curry Goat,” Hurston takes us on a short voyage examining cuisine as an important aspect of culture. The discussion spills over into accounts of misogynistic attitudes among the ruling class, and ultimately, an inside view on the preparation of women for the marriage ceremony.

In the third section we read, Hunting the Wild Hog, Hurston examines “Maroon” cultures, i.e., geographic areas and sections of the Jamaican landscape and culture where pre-colonial African cultures were preserved and maintained. We talked briefly about “maroon” cultures in other Latin American countries and in the deep south of the US.

In Chapter 27 of Wrapped in Rainbows, Boyd chronicles the criticisms Hurston faced from big names, at the time, in Black Literature. She lists Alain Locke, who, in his annual review of black writing, criticized Hurston for overlooking “social document fiction,” Richard Wright, who in his “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” urged a closer adherence to Marxist “social realism” standards, and even criticism, along the same lines, from Howard professor Sterling Brown. Boyd follows as Hurston makes her case for ignoring such reactionary standards and avoiding the Communist Party-influenced portrayal of the South which Wright espoused and which even Wright himself, as many other literary stalwarts, would at some point in the future, disavow.

Boyd details Hurston’s work with the Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930’s, James Weldon Johnson’s death and funeral in 1938, and her return to Florida where she worked on Tell My Horse and The Sanctified Church, and her short-lived romance and marriage which inspired Their Eyes Were Watching God.