Kevin Arnold
October 2, 2000 

Comparison/Contrast of Hurston and Baldwin

    Note - Sections in between asterisks are not part of the essay (but should be included anyway). This is a hypothetical conversation between Zora Neal Hurston and James Baldwin. There is included some background information below. A guide and ideas for further research follow this essay.
    Hurston is the effeminate italicized speaker. Baldwin is the more masculine bolded speaker. Everything except the guide at the end is spoken.
    Background information:
    While she was alive, Hurston was fun-loving and optimistic towards life. She was critizied by many other Harlem Renaissance minds for not denouncing harshly enough the race problem in America. In retaliation, she says of herself, 
    "I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it," (from the essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" by Hurston).
    Baldwin was aggressively active (and, Hurston might say, "hung up") on race issues and the civil rights movement. He eventually moved to Paris to escape what he thought was dismal racial justice in America. He returned to his homeland only briefly in 1957 to engage in civil rights protests, preferring Paris.*

You're not black enough.

WHAT?! How dare you! Get out of my sight!

No, I'm not leaving because there's too much at stake here. Too much for US. Can't you see that?

Of course I can see that you blundering bear. Don't you think I know it as well as you?

The way you act is making us all unsure. You're putting the whole movement, all of us, in jeopardy. And whyyyyyyyyy? So you can imagine you're all painted up on the dance floor? So you can support the white man's view of the colored man as primitive and instinctual?

Not at all! But I wouldn't expect you to know anything about endogenous passion. You! So big and flowery in your rebuttals and so far-cast from the source of your own fight. If our race was the ocean, wide strong and beautiful, then you have become a little shallow puddle splashed on bare rock. You may be somehow distantly related to the ocean, and you may be trying to return home, but for all the onlooker can see, you're just a reflection of surrounding rock.

I AM AS YOU ARE! Eternally black. Do not dare deny me of my identity as an American Negro! This, all of us - you and I - share equally because of the fortitude of our forefathers when they were pushed into the foreign sands of this continent. They cut a brand-new notch in pure stone with the founding of the American Negro culture - the very one you thank your opportunities for and the very one you seek to bleed to incapacity.

You are sadly mistaken if you thing I can make the ocean bleed.

You cannot understand the flow of our progress - even with today's American Negro's strong, pre-cut inlet gushing all about you. I'll just spare you the trouble then and tell you where it's headed - it's going straight for the center of the continent.

Again you are misguided. The strength of our people is in their collective souls, in the ocean. You and your few colleagues may be pioneering a course through the dirt, but look how thinner you have become once you left the ocean. And look how your people trickle down fewer and fewer the farther you go. Do you even know what you're looking for?

Equality. Plain and Simple. Too much for you though, eh?

No, too much for you, I fear. It seems you don't even know where to look.

The center of the continent.

"The center of the continent"! Don't you see you don't know where that is? It's just a pleasant abstract thought you have stuck in your head. Once you get so far deep inside, it's all the same. And if you stop and ask, "Where is the center of this place?" they're always going to tell you "Not here." The center is really a web of landlocked towns who say they have a capitol, but who actually don't. So maybe you'll reach some towns, and maybe you won't. And maybe you'll keep some rivers flowing and others will run dry. And I'm sorry you had to realize this, but darlin' please don't cry.



* Guide:
The ocean represents the majority of African-Americans - the common people Hurston prefers and collects folklore from.
Any water references represent blackness, or black people.
The continent represents the white American psyche and all of white America.
Baldwin's rivers represent most of the Harlem Renaissance (excepting Hurston), which argued for white/black equality by showing that blacks could be as intelligent as any white, and by accomplishing anything whites could (poetry, music, singing, classical dance)

Baldwin's dream of reaching the center of the (white) continent represents reaching complete equality.

For further study of each Harlem Renaissance author, investigate the book Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) and the short story "Stranger in the Village" (Baldwin).*