Baptist pastor on Sundays and a troubled man who
sins greatly during the week. The indiscretions of
the minister who also writes poetry include adul-
tery. He refuses to atone for his misdeeds even
when confronted by his parishioners. His wife Lucy
dies, and he promptly marries Hattie, his mistress.
He uses powerful preaching to sustain himself in
the face of negative campaigns against him but
eventually steps down as minister. It is in his third
marriage that he begins to gain some sense of ac-
countability, but he is killed before he achieves true
enlightenment. Hurston wrote to JAMESWELDON
JOHNSONabout what she had tried to accomplish
in the novel. She regarded Johnson as a kindred
spirit, writing “[we] seem to be the only ones even
among Negroes who recognize the barbaric poetry
in... sermons” by African-American preachers.
Hurston offered the following explanation of her
novel in an April 1934 letter to Johnson: “I have
tried to present a Negro, preacher who is neither
funny nor an imitation Puritan ram-rod in pants.
Just the human being and poet that he must be to
succeed in a Negro pulpit. I do not speak of those
among us who have been tampered with and con-
sequently have gone Presbyterian or Episcopal... I
see a preacher as a man outside of the pulpit and so
far as I am concerned he should be free to follow
his bent as other men. He becomes the voice of the
spirit when he ascends the rostrum” (Kaplan, 298).
Her outspoken defense of Jonah’s Gourd Vinecon-
tinued in the weeks following its publication. She
wrote forthright letters to the reviewers of her
work, including Lewis Gannett of the New York
Herald-Tribune. She assured Lewis, whom she
thanked for his “understanding kindness,” that
“The preacher must satisfy [the] beauty-hunger” of
the masses whom he served. “He mustbe a poet
and an actor and possess a body and a voice. It is
good if at the same time he is of high moral charac-
ter” (Kaplan, 304).
Hurston was frustrated by the reviews, which,
despite being highly complimentary, tended to
overlook her overarching agenda. She protested the
way in which reviewers cast doubt on the real po-
etry of African-American culture and the rich cre-
ative tradition in African-American religion. As
Hurston biographer Robert Hemenway notes,
Hurston’s original dedication was telling. She of-
fered the book to “the first and only Negro poets in
America—the preachers, who bring barbaric splen-
dor of word and song into the very camp of the
mockers” (Hemenway, 195).
The novel is the first in a powerful series of
Hurston’s insightful and sophisticated tributes to
African-American folk culture and creativity.Bibliography
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biog-
raphy.Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977.
Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.New
York: Doubleday, 2002.Jones, Eugene Kinckle(1885–1954)
The cofounder of the NATIONALURBANLEAGUE
and one of the African-American intellectual
elite who comprised the “Black Cabinet,” a group
formed to advise President Roosevelt on race-
relatedmatters.
He was born to Joseph Endom and Rosa Daniel
Kinckle Jones in Richmond, Virginia. His mother
was a graduate of HOWARDUNIVERSITYand the
New England Conservatory of Music. His father be-
came one of the first African Americans in Virginia
to earn a college degree when he graduated from
Colgate (then Madison) University in Hamilton,
New York, in 1876. Jones’s parents were respected
educators; his father was on the faculty at Richmond
Theological Seminary, and his mother enjoyed a 40-
year career at Hartshorn Memorial College.
Jones followed in the impressive intellectual
example of his parents. He graduated from Virginia
Union University with a B.A. in sociology and
went on to study civil engineering at Cornell Uni-
versity. He transferred into the Department of So-
ciology when he realized the limited opportunities
available to African-American engineers. At Cor-
nell, he was the first man inducted into Alpha Phi
Alpha and the fraternity’s first president. He grad-
uated in 1908 and married Blanche Ruby Watson
one year later. He and his wife had two children,
Eugene Jr., an attorney, and Adele, a social worker.
In 1911 he began his lifelong association with
the National Urban League. He began working with
George Haynes for the Committee on Urban Condi-
tions among Negroes, the organization that was re-
named the National Urban League in 1920. He
became its first executive secretary and was activelyJones, Eugene Kinckle 293