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

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Chuck Jackson

2. Earl

For all of Arvay's anxieties about marrying Jim, it is the birth of their first child, Earl, which lets loose a slew of insecurities about her white trash self--both her poor white ancestry and her interiorized feelings of sexual guilt and shame. Nicole Hahn Rafter reminds us that, for eugenicists, "each negative trait was interpreted as a sign of the family's degenerative tendency and evidence that the tendency was hereditary" ("Introduction" 8-9). Arvay tells herself that Earl, her deformed and "feeble-minded" boy, must represent" 'the punishment for the way I used to be'"(69). The delivery of the grotesque baby suggests that Arvay's inherited "degenerative tendencies" and her silent guilt (over Carl Middleton) have become flesh and have been purged from her body. Chapter 5 describes the birth of Earl:

"Dessie! Dessie! What is the matter with my child's hands?"

"Them don't look much like fingers. do they?"

"Good gracious! They look more like strings. And his hands, Dessie. Why they look too little for his body."

There was practically no forehead nor backhead on her child. The head narrowed like an egg on top.... The feet were long, and the toes were well formed, but they looked too long for a new-born baby to have. And there was no arch to the tiny feet. They were perfectly flat, with a little lump of flesh huddled under what should have been the instep.... He certainly did not favor Jim. Who did it remind her of? Finally she knew. He looked like her Uncle Chester, her mother's youngest brother. The one they seldom talked about. The one who was sort of queer in his head. (67-68)

The "way [Arvay] used to be" refers to both Arvay's personal past and economic/cultural heritage. Arvay connects Earl with her "former" (Cracker) self; Earl's resemblance to "queer" Uncle Chester connects him to a maternal line of bad blood. But Arvay also needs to read Earl as a sign, and oscillates between eugenics and psychology. Just as she wants to link Earl with a maternal uncle and rationalize a eugenic discourse of heredity, Arvay also wants to believe that Earl is punishment for shameful sexual desires for Carl Middleton. For Arvay, Earl stands for both sexual guilt and cacogenicity, an ontogenic and phylogenic signifier.

Although Arvay reacts in horror upon seeing Earl's body for the first time, she decides, quickly, that "the baby's defects only increased [her] love for it" (69). As Arvay oils and massages the mutated baby's body, molding his head and feet into whatever shape she can, she decides to name the child Earl:" 'I mean to get ahead of Jim and name the baby my ownself. It's natural for a man to want the first boy named after him, but I always loved the name Earl David...' " (70). Arvay's power to name Earl suggests Jim's hesitation to accept Earl as his own, clean, first-born son. The name Earl is a literal mutation of Carl, which differs only in the spelling or shaping of the first letter (E instead of C). Since Arvay's body processes her past in the experience of abjection, then it only makes sense that the disabled Earl is an uncanny double of Carl, a figure who Arvay must learn to love and, eventually, of whom Arvay must learn to let go. Earl, then, suggests 'early' and/or 'earn'; and his naming allows Arvay, f or once, to "get ahead of Jim." Earl, as a signifier, embodies that which Arvay must recognize as both terrible and important from her earlier life in the turpentine camps so that she may earn the privilege of something more healthy and complete. [18]