Required Reading: Zora Neale Hurston’s Use of Black Language and Why it Matters Today
Zora Neale Hurston created stories and characters that exuded the richness of Black culture and language, despite resistance from critics. We have her to thank for the space Black language takes up in literature and the world at large.
By Sasha Ashton
We live in a time where it is not uncommon to see AAVE (African American Vernacular, formerly Ebonics) handled indelicately. It’s nearly impossible to navigate the internet, or real life, for that matter, without seeing Black vernacular imitated, appropriated, memed, or mocked by non-Black people. Going to predominantly white schools, I frequently heard my white peers using whatever pieces of vernacular were trendy at the time (i.e., “chile,” the perpetual “be”). So in high school, when I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 Harlem Renaissance classic, I was struck first by the language.
In Hurston’s writing, AAVE is more than a way of speaking—more still than a feature of Blackness. It’s the medium through which she tells her beautiful stories. You cannot separate the stories she tells or the lives she portrays from Blackness. The rhythm that Shakespeare broke and rearranged words to insert in his work intentionally occurs organically in Hurston’s prose. I’ve always had a deep love for Black expression—I find deep comfort in the security of speaking to other Black people in a way only we truly understand—but before I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, it still felt like a love I had to keep private. Not because I was ashamed of it, but because the misuse I still witness daily made it abundantly clear that I was surrounded by people who didn’t understand, people who saw it as the building blocks of jokes and not the building blocks of poetry. More than anything, that may be why Hurston's writing affects me and so many others the way it does.
Zora did not feel bound to codeswitching as so many of us do, regardless of who read her work or of the criticism it drew. Even within the Black community and among Black artists and creators, there is resistance to Black language. In 1996, more than 30 years after Hurston’s death, now-disgraced comedian Bill Cosby wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal arguing against the standardization of AAVE in predominantly Black schools—claiming that “the consequences of a grammatical accident could be disastrous during a roadside encounter with a policeman.” Naturally, such critique began long before Cosby’s era of Black television. On Hurston’s dialogue specifically, Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Wright wrote that she “manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their simplicity but that’s as far as it goes.” Despite her undoubted skills as a writer and the fact that Hurston was authentically representing how her characters would speak in real life, the truth within her work managed to offend even other Black people.
Beyond her use of Blackness as a fixture of her narrative style, Hurston was a scholar of Black Speech. As organically as it reads, the fundamental reason Hurston’s work is so valuable is that her vernacular-driven texts are the proof of her life’s work, invaluable lessons in Black language and the ways it differs from standard English. In the same way, her work proved Black speech as more than grammatical distinctions and colloquialisms. Hurston was more than a novelist; she was an academic who studied Black speech and ways of life from the American south to Haiti. The ease with which she commands our attention in her literature is backed up by a lifetime of work and an unrivaled dedication to portraying Blackness as it genuinely is, unabridged and without concern for what others may think…
Sasha Ashton is a writer from Austin, Texas living and working in Philadelphia, PA. For more from Sasha, you can find her on Instagram @ashasashton or on Twitter @slashatrashton.
