Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Chuck Jackson

A great terror took hold of her. It softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it was a full minute before she could cry out or move. Then she saw it was the big bull whip her husband liked to carry when he drove. She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright. She screamed at him.

"Sykes, what you throw dat whip on me like dat? You know it would skeer me--looks just like a snake, an' you knows how skeered Ah is of snakes." (955)

The snake-like whip which Sykes uses to terrorize the laboring Delia takes on further racial/psychosexual meaning in relation to the next alarming scene:

He stepped roughly upon the whitest pile of things, kicking them helter-skelter as he crossed the room. His wife gave a little scream of dismay, and quickly gathered them together again. (956; emphasis added)

The story goes on to detail the difficult relationship between Delia and Sykes, incorporating a narrative of sexual infidelity (as in "The Gilded Six-Bits," only with a reversal of genders). In the mix of dirt, whiteness, snakes, whips, and, of course, sweat, an interesting gesture toward a racial/psychoanalytic paradigm is made. For even though racial whiteness does not exist in corporeal form in the story, its abstraction into metonymy (white folks' dirty laundry) complicates the meaning of whiteness and cleanliness, especially as they relate to the threatening whip. Sykes's whip, which Delia mistakes for a snake, carries with it the historical weight of slavery (corporeal, economic, and regional). Readers keep this in mind when they finally come across the actual snake which Sykes hides in a soap box near the story's close: The whip/snake cannot simply be reduced to a phallic symbol.

The brutal irony of the story lies in the twist at its close. The snake planted by Sykes to scare (and possible kill) Delia instead bites and kills Sykes. The end of Sykes is not merely the cleansing away of oppressive male violence, for what is Sykes but a clever troping off of the word psyche? Just as Hurston plays with the variable construction of both "psyches" and "Sykes," she also resists a traditional ("pure" or "white") psychoanalytic paradigm of sexuality and the body, insisting on the way in which differing constructions of race and gender change (or misspell?) the psychic meanings of each.

Ironically, a focus on the pure/impure binary when reading Hurston's work overlaps with the way in which critics and reviewers received her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee. As we shall see, related binaries emerge around Seraph: good/bad, useful/wasteful, valuable/trash. Annette Trefzer importantly notices a trend in Seraph criticism, one in which "racial and gender strategies refuse to be 'useful' for any explicitly ethnocentric canon which privileges certain 'major' works to represent its ideology" (51-52). Seraph's status as a "minor" or "unuseful" work of Hurston's thus marks it, in contemporary criticism, as the problematically "bad" text in the Hurston oeuvre. Such an evaluation, interestingly, not only relates to the text thematically (what I argue the text is about), but also recapitulates the historical events which surround its publication. In Hazel V. Carby's 1991 "Foreword" to the novel, the reader learns that, while the initial sales of the book "were good," a particular event "created contro versy around the novel and shattered Hurston's optimism.... On September 13[, 1948], Hurston had been arrested on charges rising from allegations of sexual misconduct with a ten-year-old boy." Carby informs us that the media misused Hurston's novel as "a tool in the publicity that was eventually generated against her." While Hurston was cleared of these charges, the text was marked by the media as evidence of "sexual aggressiveness in women" and used to show "evidence of the author's immorality" (xiii). [5] Seraph, therefore, moved from a "good" text which received "favorable if not overly enthusiastic" reviews to a "bad" text which incriminated its author by generating a narrative of culpability and "perversion" (xii-xiii).