Revista de Letras - Utad

298 Orquídea Moreira Ribeiro
The contract lasted from December 1927 to March 1931, but Mason
continued to support Hurston until the Fall of 1932.
“Tired” of the race problem, but aware that black writers, who wanted to
publish in mass-circulation magazines controlled by whites had to produce
material “dealing” with the “race problem”, Hurston wrote what the editors and
white audience expected to read, but she rarely addressed race issues in ways
that could offend her white readers. In the Introduction to the Harper Perennial
edition of The Complete Stories, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke
refer that Hurston’s “anthropologically based narratives” and her character
sketches like “Mother Catherine” show Hurston as more interested in “human
motivation” than in the “struggle for civil rights” (Gates and Lemke 1995: xixii).
Throughout her career she revealed a disregard for race labels and
maintained a clear demarcation between black concerns and her literary work.
Hurston responded to the pressure of the social context in which she was
writing and the difficult position of the black writer during the Harlem
Renaissance. The problems Negro writers had to face to get into the publishing
world was an issue discussed by various writers in essays published in black
magazines and newspapers. James Weldon Johnson in “The Dilemma of the
Negro Author” states that the Negro writer has to face a special problem that “of
the double audience […] an audience made up of two elements with differing
and often opposite and antagonistic points of view”. He concludes that “the
sincerity and soundness of the Negro writer’s work are vitiated whether he poses
for white or black” and the solution to the problem is the making of a common
audience out of white and black America (Johnson 1996: 247, 251).
In her personal life, Hurston was criticized by some of her contemporaries
for assuming on the role of “the colorful darky” so as to be accepted into the
publishing world and to raise funds for her research. Nathan Irvin Huggins in his
volume entitled Harlem Renaissance (1971) clearly states that Hurston
deliberately played the role of the simple childlike primitive. Richard Wright,
Hurston’s contemporary and fellow author, criticizes Hurston in his Review of
Their Eyes Were Watching God for writing a novel that “is not addressed to the
Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to
satisfy” and for using a “minstrel technique that makes the white folks’ laugh”
(Wright 1993: 17).
Wright’s work contrasted with Hurston’s: instead of suffering black
characters who were victims of violence and racism, psychologically oppressed
and lacking joy and hope, Hurston gives us black people living in a world apart
from racism and injustice who enjoy laughing, “lying”, celebrating and living.
She does not focus exclusively on the tensions resulting from the Jim Crow
Laws in the South.