I found the concept of the friendship and the correspondence between Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings startling. I had no idea there was a correspondence between them, much less any social activity or friendship. Yet after reading this deeply informed book, their friendship makes sense, in terms of their personalities and of all the convergent trends of their time and place, as well as of their own literary convergences.
That said, I have to point out that the title is perfectly exact. Their friendship really was primarily in terms of their literary careers. They did share a correspondence, and Hurston did come to visit with Rawlings. Rawlings may even have been instrumental in procuring Hurston’s entry into Scribner’s famed authorial rolls in 1947, under Max Perkins, in the company of such luminaries as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe. But the two women did not even meet until ca. 1940–1942, and years would literally pass between letters, much less visits, until Rawlings’ death in December 1953.
The fascination folklorists should have with this book is contained in the insights offered into the mind and life of Hurston, as well as perhaps in introducing Rawlings into a folkloristic consideration. Anna Lillios is the director of the Zora Neale Hurston Electronic Archive as well as the executive director and a trustee of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society, serving as well as the coeditor of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature. With such a background, her knowledge of both authors is understandably deep and nuanced and often brings folk culture and folk studies into her analysis. While she focuses in this book on the authors’ literary productions, she quite adeptly covers Hurston’s anthropological years at Barnard under Boas and demonstrates how that background informed and shaped her literary pursuits. She also deftly contrasts Hurston’s wedding an academic with a personal understanding of folk culture with Rawlings’ acculturated sensibility to the white folk culture of rural Florida. Lillios provides interesting biographical information on Hurston, much of it to be found in other secondary works such as Robert Hemenway’s biography or in Alice Walker’s works, but in Lillios’ usage, this biographical information reveals the complexity of Hurston’s interests and her overt or covert strategies to achieve her goals through her relationship with Rawlings. For instance, as Lillios presents it, Hurston was foremost a literary author, even while pursuing her anthropology degree, but she saw a compatible spirit in Rawlings’ work that explored Florida’s folk culture, and so Hurston pursued the relationship. Likewise, Rawlings developed her sensitized views on racial politics at least partially through her respect for and social interaction with Hurston. The true strength of this book, as it is intended to be, is in showcasing how each author becomes more understandable through the relationship each had with the other.
Rawlings, an elite northerner who transplanted herself into the Cross Creek area of Florida and wrote about the rural white “Cracker” society there, provides a remarkable extension to Hurston’s coverage of the rural black, working-class society in the same area. Some authors, such as Stetson Kennedy and Annette Trefzer, have noted that the Cross Creek region in Florida during this time was a site for alterity, where borders became blurred, where societal standards could be challenged and explored, where black and white could intermingle more freely than in other parts of the United States, particularly because of its isolation. Accordingly, the two authors seem to have become imbued with this spirit, with the result that each of them seems to be a parallel, an extension, and an inverse of the other. Their literary topics and interests were parallel, but their social, professional, and economic lives were inverted. Together, they provided an extended landscape of rural white and black Floridian society. The obvious inversions were social and economic—whereas Rawlings was privileged in her social and economic standing as a wealthy white woman, Hurston was disadvantaged as an unpropertied Southern black woman with no inheritance, who had to work in servile positions in order to support her artistic endeavors. Yet even with these sociocultural differences, within the Cross Creek region they had the opportunity for meaningful interaction. The other significant inversion relates to their careers. Where Rawlings became well-known and valorized in her own day, winning the Pulitzer among other awards, her star has fallen in the decades since, while Hurston’s has risen dramatically.
The parallels between these two women, while less obvious initially, are almost eerie, and become striking as one reads through this book. Geographically, they are covering the same area. Socioeconomically, they are covering the same types of people. In literary terms, they write books that cover similar topics, characters, and actions. Even the development of their fiction followed almost the same trajectory: first, each wrote works that dealt with characters within their respective communities (Hurston’s “The Eatonville Anthology” and Rawlings’ “Cracker Chidlings,” which each used as a resource for their later works); then each wrote culturally based portraits of communities personally known to them (Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Rawlings’ South Moon Under). Each author’s acclaimed work (Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Rawlings’ The Yearling) came as the culmination of their interest in combining local culture with autobiographical information. They likewise each wrote fictionalized autobiographies, and they each suffered through legal challenges, Hurston a bogus criminal indictment and Rawlings a civil suit for invasion of privacy, based on her depiction of a neighbor in her autobiography/memoir, Cross Creek. Each author admired the other, each one invited the other to professional venues, and each one dealt with the inequities and angst of being a female author in the era of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Faulkner. While Rawlings primarily wrote about rural white culture, she did include African American figures; and while Hurston wrote primarily about black rural culture, her last book, Seraph on the Suwannee, focused directly on white rural culture. Finally, perhaps most surprising, both women struggled with racial politics. Hurston overtly contended with racial discrimination on a daily basis simply because of her status in this period as an African American woman, but also because of her unpopular views in the black community advocating the need to transcend racial categories. Rawlings, on a personal basis, fought (and then conquered) her own racist demons, eventually becoming an outspoken (and to some degree, shunned) social advocate of racial equality.
Well-written and informative, this book is a great read for folklorists. Even though the author repeats facts and incidents often, that did not bother me, since I am of an age where repetition is more of a help than an annoyance. Reading this book reminded me that no matter how much I may feel I am in command of a topic, new connections and information can always deepen my understanding and inspire me to revisit some prior readings as well as try to incorporate new ones.
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[Review length: 1146 words • Review posted on February 23, 2011]