BRIEF Review

barracoon by zora neale hurston

A Word From the Sold

For this month's #forgottenvoicesofliterature we are reading a work written by the incredible Zora Neale Hurston in 1931, but left unpublished until 2018. As an African-American anthropologist supported by a wealthy white patroness (discussed later), Hurston occupied a unique section of society emerging in the early 20th Century, known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Forgotten Voices project aims to find and interrogate voices that have been socially or systematically suppressed throughout history, and where better to start than Hurston's interviews with America's last-surviving African slave.

June 4, 2018

Image credit: @theopenbookshelf

Written by Abbey Heffer

All these words from the seller, and not one word from the sold.

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston (2018)

When Barracoon was being submitted for publishing, publishers requested that it be rewritten in "language rather than dialect". When Hurston refused, they were unwilling to take the risk on a subject, black lives, that was "no longer in vogue". In this way, both the voices of Hurston and Kossula, the last slave, were erased for the very same reason that (predominantly white owned and staffed) publishing houses refuse or agree to publish black voices today: black lives being once again "in vogue”.

The nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving.

Alice Walker in the Forward to Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston (2018)

Importantly, Barracoon is a black story told by a black woman. Even within this shared blackness, however, there are layers of privilege that needed to be carefully navigated in order to maintain the authenticity of both Kossula’s and Hurston’s story. In picking apart Barracoon, we are aware both of Kossula’s pain and loneliness, the magnitude of what he has suffered, but also of Hurston’s position as a scientist. Literate and educated, Hurston was in a position of power and could have manipulated Kossula’s story for her own economic or academic benefit. Her decision for Barracoon to remain unpublished rather than altered is a major tribute to both Kossula and other freed slaves who were either not given a voice or whose voice was manipulated by white narrators and editors.

This brings us to our final point: the wealthy white patroness, Charlotte Osgood Mason. The Harlem Renaissance was both revered and criticised for its ability to appeal to a specific, multiracial audience. Its writers could be found in the homes of the African-American middle classes and in white magazines. Some saw the movement as a mimicry of white American culture, as subconscious assimilation, which forced the writers to self-censor in order to appeal to white audiences. Hurston, too, was criticised for her use of dialect, which was seen to create a caricature of African-American culture. According to Langston Hughes, another African-American writer supported by Mason, she did not patronise these writers out of a desire to help African-Americans excel, but rather because she saw them as “America's great link with the primitive” (Hughes, 1993: 315). Mason exercised a controlling hand over Hurston’s ability to publish and when Hurston did not prove primitive enough for Mason’s tastes, she let her go. As Hurston says, Mason wanted her to “tell the tales, sing the songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings and doings of the Negro furthest down” (Hurston, 1995: 145).

Similarly, in today’s publishing world, writers of colour are expected to appeal to white conceptions of the exotic or they are expected to conform to a form of "blackness" "could be produced and consumed” by a white-dominated society (Long, 2009: 379). As John Young argues, we must understand “both the complex negotiations required to produce African American texts through a predominately white publishing industry and the material marks of those negotiations” when reading minority literature (2006: 5).

This raises the question: Should writers allow those in power to alter their voice in order to be heard, or should they remain true to their story even when it means not getting published?

Check out the post and comments @theopenbookshelf below or @sarah89reads and let us know your thoughts.

References:

Hughes, Langston. (1993). The Big Sea. New York: Hill and Wang. (Originally published: 1940).

Hurston, Zora Neale. (1995). Dust Tracks On A Road. New York: Harper Perennial. (Originally published: 1942).

Long, Lisa A. (2009). “Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (review)." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 55(2), 379-382.

Young, John K. (2006). Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature. University Press of Mississippi.

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