1. Hurston, Zora Neale, The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writing of Zorn Neale Hurston (Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981), 61 Google Scholar. This essay was written with the assistance of several colleagues, especially, Julia Kasdorf and my research assistants, Julie Adams and Vic Sensenig, whose close reading and editing were invaluable. The responses of John Lowe and Amritjit Singh at the MELUS conference in New Orleans, March 2000, were also especially encouraging. The essay was completed with the assistance of an Arts Commentary Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in partnership with the Pennsylvania Humanities Council.

2. Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Signet, 1969), 45 Google Scholar.

3. Locke, Alain, “The New Negro,” in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. Lewis, David Levering (New York: Penguin, 1994), 46–51 Google Scholar.

4. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Volk, 211.

5. Hurston's individualism is regularly commented on, but see especially Plant, Deborah, Every Tut Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

6. Hemenway, Robert, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 14 Google Scholar.

7. I use the term “masculine” in quotations at this juncture to indicate the difficult and ambiguous terrain that this term invokes. Indeed, one consequence of my argument in this essay is that Hurston contributes to a project in which notions of masculinity are decomposed, a project that announces the end of the binary “masculine”/“feminine” opposition that has served patriarchy so well. Judith Halberstam, especially, has pointed out that women have contributed to the formation of masculinity in ways that demonstrate masculinity should not simply be equated with “male behavior.” I agree with Halberstam on this point and see Hurston participating in an effort to dislodge “masculinities” from their privileged male domain.

Nevertheless, it seems crucial to recognize that while “masculini-ties” may bear no essential relationship to maleness, they do bear a deeply imbedded historical relationship to maleness, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in small, rural, and deeply religious southern towns such as the one in which Hurston grew up. Indeed, even the examples of female masculinities that Halberstam analyzes all work through a complicated but historically in-evitable relationship to the “way men behave,” a relationship negotiated either through imitation, parody, appropriation, identification, or repudia-tion. Thus, in this essay, I remain critically interested in how masculine styles influence Hurston's understanding of herself as a thinker and an artist. While never shrinking from the chance to criticize the abusiveness of men, especially in their effort to secure masculinity as a privileged male preserve, Hurston finds certain “masculinities” crucial to her own developing aesthetic and religious vision, so much so that she champions women such as Janie and Big Sweet who break out of their assigned “feminine” roles to seize the “masculine” for themselves. Recognizing such gender-crossing in Hurston's work re-veals the human complexity of her male characters and also suggests that masculine cultures provided a crucial resource for Hurston's sense of herself as an artist. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), esp. 1-43.

8. Hurston, Zora Neale, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (New York: Lippincott, 1942; repr., with an introduction by Robert Hemenway, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 39 Google Scholar (page citations are to the reprint edition); all subsequent quotations from Dust Tracks are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

9. George Chauncey and Judith Halberstam have both suggested that the early decades of the twentieth century were a time of upheaval in which the rigid limits of conventional gender categories became increasingly permeable. Thus, by the time Hurston publishes her autobiography in 1942, she can be seen as participating in a tradition of literary assault on gender conventions, one that includes writers as different as Carson McCullers, John Radclyffe Hall, George Strand, and Gertrude Stein, or raucous musicians such as Bessie Smith. See Chauncey, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: HarperCollins, Basic Books, 1994), 1–130 Google Scholar. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 45-110.

10. Cronin, Gloria, “Going to the Far Horizon: Zora Neale Hurston and Christianity,” Literature and Belief 15 (1995): 48–71 Google Scholar.

11. Hurston's attack on Wright and others who accused her of being insufficiently oriented toward protest in her literature replicates the values of the playground in nearly every instance. “But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurkingbehind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” She refuses to waste time on emotional regret, she views life as a battle, and she believes respect is most due to those able not only to survive but also to attack in the great “skirmish” of life. See Hurston, Zora Neale, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing… and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, ed. Walker, Alice (New York: Feminist Press, 1979), 153 Google Scholar. Hurston used this essay to respond to critics such as Richard Wright, who accused her of putting on a minstrel show in her novels; Sterling Brown, who felt her work was not bitter enough; and Arna Bontemps, who accused her of dealing with racial questions by ignoring them. For descriptions of these criticisms, see Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 219, 240-41, 289. See also Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, in New Masses, October 5, 1937, 22-25; reprinted in Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Gloria Cronin (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), 75-76 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

12. Hurston's distaste for personal revelation and the difficulties it created for her in writing her autobiography are found in a letter to Hamilton Holt, February 1, 1943, Hamilton Holt Papers, quoted in Turner, Darwin, In a Minor Chord (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 89 Google Scholar.

13. Hurston, The Sanctified Church, 56-57.

14. As already noted, Gloria Cronin emphasizes the feminocentric aspects of Hurston's worldview, and Meisenhelder emphasizes the ways in which voodoo is egalitarian. Both seem to base their notions in part on Hurston's positive representation of voodoo, and, in Meisenhelder's case, of the voodoo goddess Erzulie, whom Hurston calls the goddess of “the love bed.” However, it seems important to say that, while Hurston clearly values the fact that voodoo is less sexually repressed than Christianity for both men and women, she recognizes that voodoo hasn't resulted in the emancipation of women as evidenced by life in Haiti and Jamaica. Indeed, Erzulie seems to function primarily in relationship to men and leaves women sad and bereft. For Hurston's evaluation of Haitian voodoo, see Hurston, Zora Neale, Teil My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1990), esp. 57–62, 113ffGoogle Scholar. See also Cronin, Critical Essays, and Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 8–9, 161-66Google Scholar.

15. Hurston, The Sanctified Church, 60-61.

16. Meisenhelder, Hitting a Straight Lick, 41; Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 190.

17. Cronin, Critical Essays, 54; Brown, Alan, “‘De Beast’ Within: The Role of Nature in Jonah's Gourd Vine,” in Zora in Florida, ed. Glassman, Steven and Seidel, Kathryn Lee (Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991), 76–85 Google Scholar.

18. Zora Neale Hurston to James Weldon Johnson, May 8, 1934, James Weldon Johnson Papers, Yale University library; quoted in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 193-94.

19. Lowe, John, Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 93 Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., 95-97.

21. Brown, “‘De Beast,’” 84.

22. Hurston, Zora Neale, Jonah's Gourd Vine (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938; repr., New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 199–200 Google Scholar (page citations are to the reprint edition).

23. Hurston, Zora Neale, Mules and Men (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935; repr., New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 152Google Scholar (page citations are to the reprint edition).

24. In her exaltation of the goddess Erzulie, one of the few female gods Hurston discusses in Teil My Horse, Hurston pointedly disputes the tendency to equate Erzulie with the Virgin Mary of Catholicism: “Erzulie is not the passive queen of heaven and mother of anybody. She is the ideal of the love bed. She is so perfect that all other women are a distortion as compared to her. The Virgin Mary and all of the female saints of the Church have been elevated, and celebrated for their abstinence. Erzulie is worshiped for her perfection in giving herself to mortal man” (Teil My Horse, 121). Here Hurston critiques the Virgin and exalts Erzulie's eroticism for the same reasons she elsewhere has dismissed Jesus and embraced David. For Hurston, the gods of Christianity are spiritual and passive in comparison to goddesses like Erzulie who have meat on their bones. Like the male gods of the pantheon, Erzulie feels free to exploit and achieve her desires ruthlessly. Unlike the passive Christians idealized in the Virgin Mary, Erzulie vigorously seeks out her own will and desires.

25. Again, John Lowe is an important exception here. While his work is primarily on Hurston's comedy, he shows how comedic impulse in Their Eyes depends upon Janie's ability to emulate and learn from the men around her. See Lowe, Jump at the Sun, 156-204.

26. This link between physicality and opposition to organized religion often issued in a vicious anti-Semitism that characterized the work of many modernist writers and intellectuals, the political consequences of which were most horrifically evident in the developments of German nationalism after World War I. By the evidence of her work, Hurston seems to have avoided this violent extreme, if anything tending toward the opposite extreme of philo-Semitism evident in her evaluation of the God and heroes of the Hebrew Bible. Segel, Harold, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

27. For further discussion of these issues, see my essay on Cullen, Countee, “The Singing Man Who Must Be Reckoned With: Private Desire and Public Responsibility in the Poetry of Countee Cullen,” African American Review 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 661-78Google Scholar. Hughes, Langston, “Goodbye Christ,” in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Huggins, Nathan (New York: Oxford University Press), 419-20Google Scholar.

28. Early, Gerald, “Introduction,” in My Souls High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Early, Gerald (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 29 Google Scholar.