Week 10, entry two

From Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Emporer Jones, and Birthright

Jonah’s Gourd Vine by Zora Neal Hurston repeats the same authenticity that has made her work so praised. Compared to Emporer Jones, the play by Eugene O’Neill that played off the idea of the innocent primitive black person, Jonah’s Gourd Vine setting takes on a different attitude and mentality, despite being very similar to the jungle Jones stumbles through in the play. Hurston’s opening line frames the setting while describing the physical environment: “God was grumbling his thunder and playing the zig-zag lightning thru his fingers” (719). A channeling of the blues is evident, and this blues-y mentality colors the physical description to make the experiences of the Crittendens all the more vivid and ultimately sorrowful. The items within the setting, such as the drinking gourd, ring with an overt symbolism of slavery. The jungle in Emporer Jones makes Jones more primitive and therefore ultimately more free. Primitivism is given a Romantic pardon—although Jones is a bad guy, his adventure through the jungle, and the larger metaphysical journey of reverting his soul to that primtive nature, makes the reader feel sympathetic, and in the end that primitivism grants Jones his freedom. John in Hurston’s work also strips in the jungle to wade through the creek. But unlike Jones, the freedom of John is not truly attained. While he escaped the despotic Ned, the larger picture remains gloomy. Unfair sharecropping, bounding practices, and a host of other subtle discriminatory economic systems trap the Crittendens in a slave existence. In the end, John resolves to make enough money so that he can return and save his mother, which sounds exactly like a slave saving enough money to buy his or her own freedom.

In Birthright, Peter Siner returns to the South to teach, but ultimately he hopes to open an institute like Tuskegee. The implication in his plan seems to be an argument that racial uplift can occur from blacks learning trades, being succesful, and ultimately moving up classes by virtue of their increased pay from learning more desirable skills. Hurston’s work gives context to Stribling’s musings as a white man writing about black life. The master of the Crittenden shack, Ned Crittenden, seems trapped in the days of the 1800s because of an internalized inferiority from serving as a slave. He cannot think outside his own terms and even evaluates others in what Peter Siner might consider archaic terms, such as judging John based off the cotton he can harvest, the food he consumes. Amy says with a tinge of uplift yearning: “[D]ese heah chillun is diffunt from us... Ah doan know, mebbe hit’ll take some of us generations, but us got tuh ‘gin tuh practise on trasurin’ our younguns. Ah loves dese heah already uh whole heap. Ah don’t want ‘em knocked and ‘buked” (Hurston 722-723). Treasuring youths involves giving them chances, which Ned does not, consciously or not. Existence for the Crittendens means living in practical slavery. Jonah’s Gourd Vine seems open to being read as what systems block racial uplift that earlier Renaissance artists, such as T.S. Stribling, described.