Jonah's Gourd Vine

The first sentence, and a God who fiddles with lightning

The novel opens on God grumbling his thunder and playing the zig-zag lightning through his fingers. Hurston is not being decorative. The sentence sets the register of the sermons that will carry the book, where God is a physical presence who handles weather. That register comes out of the Baptist preaching she had grown up inside and had been writing down in the field.

Notice what the sentence does not do. No character is introduced, no place is named, and no reader is oriented. Hurston starts with the voice, and the voice is a preacher's. A first novel that opens this way is announcing that the sermon is the form it will be measured against, not the drawing-room scene.

The high voice never becomes the only voice. John Pearson and everyone around him talk in Alabama and Florida speech, written as it sounds, and Hurston puts that talk beside the biblical narration without ranking them. Three years later Their Eyes Were Watching God would do the same thing more confidently. The technique arrives fully formed in 1934.

A preacher who is good at it

John Pearson's gift is real and the novel insists on it. He becomes the pastor of Zion Hope, and his sermons and prayers for cleansing rouse the congregation, which is the publisher's own account of the book. Hurston does not write a hypocrite whose eloquence is a trick. She writes a man whose eloquence and whose appetites come from the same place, which is far harder to dismiss.

The phrase the book gives him is a natchel man — a natural man, meaning a man of the body, the rest of the week. John says it about himself. He is not claiming an excuse and he is not repenting. He is stating a division in himself that he has no plan for, and the plot is what happens to a congregation, a wife and a career when nobody has a plan for it.

Church politics do the rest of the damage. A gifted preacher in a small town has enemies who want his pulpit, and his private life gives them their material. Hurston had grown up watching a Baptist congregation deal with exactly this, since her father was a preacher. The National Endowment for the Humanities account of her career describes the novel as loosely based on being the daughter of a troubled Southern preacher.

Lucy, and the four women around her

Lucy is the moral centre and she gets no reward for it. The publisher's summary calls her John's long-suffering wife and his true love, which are the two facts the novel keeps setting against each other. She is smaller, poorer and better educated than he is, she believes in his gift before anyone else does, and she spends the marriage absorbing the cost of it.

The other women are drawn briefly and sharply. Mehaley and Big 'Oman come before or beside the marriage. Hattie comes after, and she does not wait to be chosen — she buys hoodoo work to fix John's attention on her. Hurston lets the conjure be effective within the world of the novel, which is what a folklorist who had been initiated in New Orleans would do.

Hurston's own parents stand behind the pattern. Her mother was Lucy Ann Potts Hurston, who told her to aim past what was available, and her father was a Baptist preacher whose household came apart after Lucy died. A first novel that gives the wife her mother's first name and the husband her father's trade is not a coded autobiography, but it is not a coincidence either.

Read beside Their Eyes Were Watching God, the two novels look like one argument told twice from opposite sides. Jonah's Gourd Vine follows the man with the voice, and the wife is the person the voice is used on. Their Eyes Were Watching God follows the wife, and Joe Starks is the man with the voice. The 1934 book had to come first.

Written broke, published in the Depression

The circumstances of the sale are documented and worth stating plainly. Hurston borrowed a dollar and eighty-three cents to pay the postage on the manuscript. The telegram accepting it arrived on the same day she was served with an eviction notice. Bertram Lippincott was the editor who took it.

Reviewers liked the book. The National Endowment for the Humanities account describes it as well received, with unfortunate timing, because 1934 was a bad year to publish anything. Hurston's own income never recovered from that decade. The largest royalty any of her books ever earned was 943 dollars and 75 cents, and most of them were published during the Depression.

Publication order hides the working order. Jonah's Gourd Vine came out in 1934 and Mules and Men in 1935, so a reader meets the novel first. The folklore in it, though — the sermons, the conjure, the courtship talk — had been collected on the Florida and New Orleans expeditions of 1927 to 1930. The novel is the fieldwork spent before the fieldwork was published.

The book has kept good company since. The Library of America prints it first in Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, ahead of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee. Rita Dove, who would become United States Poet Laureate, wrote the foreword for the 1990 paperback.