482 Making It New: 1900–1945maneuverings of speech and ceremony. She discloses how one remarkable woman
fulfills the promise of her life by insisting on her own right to participate in the
speaking and the ceremonials. And she opens up the chance to the reader as well, of
finding ground and definition, by inviting us into the process of debate. In a review
of Their Eyes Were Watching God when it was first published, Richard Wright
dismissed the book because, he said, “it carries no theme, no message, no thought,”
just a “minstrel technique” to make white folks laugh. That was profoundly wrong,
however. The vocal medium of the narrative has nothing to do with minstrelsy. It is
expressive of a self, and a society, in full, rightful possession of themselves. As a result,
that medium is the message.
In the years immediately following Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston
published another novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), exploring the story of
Moses as recorded in the Bible and African oral traditions. She also produced
another collection of folklore, Te l l M y H o r s e (1938). But the quality and quantity of
her work began to wane. A novel about white life in Florida published in 1948,
Seraph on the Sewanee, did nothing to prevent her sinking from public notice. What
little attention she did receive, in the last decade or so of her life, was mostly
unwelcome. In 1954, for instance, she earned some notoriety for attacking the
Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation. She had long been a critic of civil
rights organizations; she argued that the struggle for integration was founded on a
belief in black inferiority and would threaten the historic black institutions of
learning. But her arguments brought her only opprobrium among the African-
American community. By the time Hurston died in poverty in a Florida welfare
home, all her books were out of print. Her rediscovery came at the hands of a later
generation of African-American women writers. Notably, Alice Walker, going “in
search of our mother’s gardens,” found in Hurston a literary foremother. So did Toni
Morrison and Sherley Anne Williams. She is now appropriately seen, not only as a
crucial figure in the literature of the “the New Negro,” but also as a vital link in the
chain of African-American writing – especially African-American writing by
women – that emphasizes the power of continuity and community, locality and
vocal intimacy, the simple sense of a shared dignity and common ground.
With some justification, Nella Larsen has been called the mystery woman of the
Harlem Renaissance. Part of the mystery was of her own making because Larsen
was inclined to create a personal myth about herself, claiming, for instance, that she
was born in the Virgin Islands whereas, in fact, her birthplace was Chicago. Born
Nellie Walker and reared in a visibly white, Danish immigrant family, she was a
lonely child whose dark skin separated her from her parents and a sibling. Leaving
Fisk University Normal High School, a black institution, without a diploma, she
trained as a nurse, entered the African-American middle class when she married a
black research physicist, then found a job at the New York Public Library. It was this
job that introduced her to the coterie of writers emerging in Harlem. And, within a
few years, she had produced her only two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing
(1929). Quicksand was hailed by W. E. B. Du Bois as “the best piece of fiction” by an
African-American since Charles Chesnutt. With Passing, Larsen became one of theGGray_c04.indd 482ray_c 04 .indd 482 8 8/1/2011 7:54:03 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 03 AM