Anyway, Richard Wright delivers this gut-punch on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. It appeared in The New Masses in October of 1937. (I don’t have a publicly accessible link, unfortunately). Here is the juiciest bit: Wright and Hurston had a pretty serious rivalry back in the day. She thought him uptight and self-important, and as you can see, he thought her pandering and unserious. Turns out, they were both wrong. Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forcedupon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.
