How Zora Neale Hurston Helped Her Readers Understand the World

Yet if one surveys the body of black American writing from Reconstruction to the present, a remarkably consistent picture of black America, of America itself, springs to life. The mythology of that literature is a historical fact, the nation’s worst—slavery. Besides the moral damage that slavery did the nation, it also created a cultural framework at once so distorted and solid that we live within it still.

Its central distortion was that the enslaved man was not a man; he was the opposite of a man, whatever that might be. His very color was a sign of deviation, a sign to be carried by generations after him, like the mark of Cain. There are a dozen scenes in black American novels where a child is going along happily until someone (often a schoolteacher) points out the “difference” in his life, which is also the difference of his future. At that revelation the child flees in panic to a mirror in order to stare at himself, to see himself for the first time as the white world sees him, as something “other,” a vision of the negative.

From that point on, his life becomes a series of oppositions. A young black girl like Janie of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) may see that she is beautiful, but how can black be beautiful if the standard of beauty is to be white, blond, fair? How can black be good if cleanliness (whiteness) is next to godliness, if Satan is the Prince of Darkness, if there are blackguards and blackmail, black thoughts and black deeds? To be in the dark is one thing, but to see the light is quite another. Images of whiteness can be terrible too, of course (the white whale, whited sepulchers, death on a pale horse), but these are fairly concrete things compared with the general designation of black as the color of evil or chaos.