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
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.
Zora Neale Hurston study group 