Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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They had shiny hair, mostly brownish. One had a looping gold chain around her neck. The other one was dressed all over in black and white with a pretty finger ring on her left hand. But the thing that held my eyes were their fingers. They were long and thin, and very white, except up near the tips. There they were baby pink. I had never seen such hands. It was a fascinating discovery for me. (Dust Tracks 35)

From her legendary arrival into the world to her being favored by these visiting white women to her belief that the moon follows only her, Hurston makes it clear that there are black people—and then there is ZORA NEALE HURSTON. Again, individualism trumps community in the creation of the narrative, and there is no higher agenda that seems to underpin the story. Indeed, Hurston even refuses to write about what made her the success she became that warranted an autobiography. Of the more than 300 pages in the narrative, Hurston spends only six pages on her literary career. For this autobiographical venture, Hurston essentially said, “I will give you a semblance of form, but I won’t give you substance. I will give you a substantially incomplete life, and perhaps you will simply conclude that I was tired, at points, especially here at the end, or that I didn’t really know what I was doing.” I maintain that she was “putting something outside her mind”—as she asserts in Mules and Men (1935) that black people generally do when they feel challenged—for Lippincott and her white readers to play with and going on about her business. And that business did not include a nationalistic agenda. As far as Hurston was concerned, the community of black folks in which she grew up was second in value to the little colored girl named Zora who came out of that community.