Rootwork: Arthur Flowers, Zora Neale Hurston, and the "literary hoodoo" tradition

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Patricia R. Schroeder

Midway through Arthur Flowers' 1993 novel Another Good Loving Blues, Zora Neale Hurston appears in a Memphis drugstore where Beale Street intellectuals gather. The time is the 1920s, and Hurston the character is in town to collect local folklore. Her appearance in the novel is short, lasting only six pages, yet her presence is a powerful indicator of Flowers' novelistic intentions. Within the plot, Hurston is important as a model of female strength for Melvira Dupree, a conjure woman and one of Flowers' twin protagonists. In terms of setting and era, Hurston, who did visit Memphis during this period, adds a note of historical authenticity. So does W. C. Handy in his cameo appearance, in which he teaches Lucas Bodeen--a professional bluesman and the novel's other protagonist--how to read music. Most importantly, however, Hurston's presence signals that Flowers' text both pays homage to and revises Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By invoking Hurston's classic text and then amending its plot to inc lude a conjure woman (Melvira), a bluesman (Lucas), and a griot (the narrator, Flowers himself), Flowers reveals his central theme: that connections to African-derived cultural traditions are essential to the spiritual health of African Americans and the survival of the race.

When first published in 1993, Another Good Loving Blues garnered critical praise on a number of counts. The plot of the novel is straightforward, structured on a combination of romance and journey elements. It begins in Sweetwater, Arkansas, in 1918, where ramblin', good-timin' Lucas Bodeen falls in love with the community-spirited Melvira Dupree. Their love survives for several years, until Lucas breaks faith with Melvira in Memphis, spends several years apart from her as the characters pursue individual quests (he to become sober, she to find her mother), and is finally reunited with her in the late 1920s, rekindling their love while riding out a deadly Mississippi flood. This simple plot, however, is elevated to an almost mythic status by Flowers' lyrical prose, which often mimics the blues riffs and rhythms performed by the blues musicians about whom he writes. For many reviewers, Flowers' luminous prose is the key to the book's success. They note that Flowers "seamlessly blends the rich rhythms of the bl ues and a Deep South patois in a literary, lyrical style" (Handman), that his style "flows as smoothly as the music that forms [the novel's] core" (Kilpatrick), that the novel is "full of beauty and magic" (Ducato). Publishers' Weekly applauds its "sonorous voice."

The lyricism of the writing is, indeed, a source of "beauty and magic" in the book (Ducato), but balancing this tendency toward fabulation are the detailed depictions of daily life in the 1920s Delta. The mythic quest/romance story is set within a world of small-town gossip, Beale Street honky-tonks, revenge seekers, violence, lynching, and flood. Thomas L. Kilpatrick was just one of several reviewers to recognize that Flowers "captured the time and place to perfection. Readers interested in this culture will be fascinated." As we shall see, however, Flowers' text does more than simply recreate history; rather, his novel insists that it is vital for characters to understand their cultural heritage in order to form connections with their current community-with the time, the place, and the people who surround them. Historical context thus becomes not just a backdrop, but an imperative to meaningful action.

This attention to antecedents and to community is significant in terms of Flowers' narrative strategy, as well as within the plot. Identifying himself immediately as the narrator, Flowers begins the book by speaking directly to the reader, declaring his own African ancestry and his lineage as a storyteller: "I am Flowers of the Delta clan Flowers and the line of O'Killens-I am hoodoo, I am griot, I am a man of power" (1). A self-proclaimed member of what he has called the "literary hoodoo" school of writing, Flowers sees himself in a direct line of descent that started with the slave narratives, moved into imaginative literature with Charles Chesnutt and Hurs ton, and is continued by such contemporary writers as Gayl Jones and Ishmael Reed. Defining himself and such other "literary hoodoo" writers as spiritually inclined heirs to a double literary tradition of Western written forms and African American oral ones (Mojo 75), Flowers sees their transmission of stories as vital to "communal health and empowermen t." "Literary hoodoo" writers thus function as contemporary griots of the West, creating visions necessary for the survival of the race and telling stories that keep the culture alive (78). His opening invocation, then, establishes this heritage of cultural custodianship, prepares us for the intertextual connections between his novel and Hurston's, and emphasizes the importance of storytelling to cultural survival.

As Henry Louis Gates reminds us, however, this intertextuality or Signifyin(g) consists not simply of addressing a previous literary work, but also of revising it; it is "repetition, with a signal difference" (51). Flowers' introductory acknowledgment of his literary bloodlines thus suggests both his debt to Hurston and this "signal difference" between their texts, for unlike Hurston's doomed love story between Janie and Tea Cake, Flowers' novel bills itself from the start as a story of "True love. That once-in-a-lifetime love" between Lucas and Melvira (2). According to Flowers, "Eyes [was] a sweet work. But I had problems with a lovestory component in which all 3 men die, in which she kills 2.... I wanted to do a Delta love story that ended happily ever after" (Mojo 61). Flowers' revision of Hurs ton's text offers more than a revised love story, however; it suggests that both the success of the love plot and the prowess of the storyteller derive from African-based sources of spiritual power. By embracing t heir ancestors and other African elements of their Delta culture, Flowers' characters discover that "you take care of the tribal soul and everything benefits. We call that Rootwork" (Mojo 97). And in a metafictional parallel to his characters' relationships with their ancestors, Flowers the griot/novelist embraces his multiple literary heritages to perform his own "Rootwork" in telling the story.