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Revisiting Slave Narratives I

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Judith Misrahi-Barak

Thresholds

Africa Has Her Mouth On Moses: Zora Neale Hurston Rewrites The Exodus Narrative

Ronnie Scharfman

Résumé

Zora Neale Hurston’s “historical” novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, first published in 1939, rewrites the ur-narrative of slavery in the Judeo-Christian West, The Book of Exodus from the Hebrew Bible. What might have been at stake for her, on the eve of WW II, with anti-Semitism rampant in Europe, and racism rampant in America, in choosing to write this hybrid narrative, using diction from biblical rhetoric mixed with black dialect, but not in any schematic, formulaic way? What does she do with the paradigms of the biblical story? This paper will explore Hurston’s choices, interrogating her satirical and subversive prose in the light of the contemporary African-American literary and political scene, as well as her insights into the problems of (patriarchal) power, the complexities of leadership, the hesitancies of freedom. What structures does this novel share with more conventional 18th and 19th century slave narratives which are usually autobiographical, such as the drama of escape, and what is changed in the move from the individual to the collective? The function of poetic closure, so effectively utilized in the Exodus story, of Moses leading his people just up to the promised land before dying, is often lacking in traditional slave narratives because “others are still enslaved”. How does Hurston reinscribe poetic closure? What social and political critiques of her contemporaries might be embedded in Hurston’s revisiting this story of collective liberation and the doubts and rivalries produced in its aftermath?

Texte intégral

For Alicia Ostriker
“I thought about the tales I had heard as a child. How even the Bible was made to suit our vivid imagination”
Z. N. Hurston, Mules and Men
“Aw, woman, quit tryin’ to signify.
“Ah kin signify all I please... so long as Ah know what Ah’m talkin’ about.”
Z. N. Hurston, Mules and Men

1Critics have avoided Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, like the ten plagues of Egypt. Ever since the revival of interest in her work launched by Alice Walker’s now famous 1975 essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” scholars have focused for the most part on her anthropological writings, such as Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, on her autobiography, Dust Tracks On A Road, or on her masterpiece of fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God. What is it then, about Hurston’s Moses novel, that it has so been ignored by the critical community, and how might we read it now, especially within the problematics of this colloquium, as a “revisiting” of a slave narrative?

2By turns exhilarating, plodding, didactic, hilarious, clumsy, satirical, lyrical, Hurston’s rewriting of the Moses story from the Hebrew Bible is certainly a hodge-podge of a flawed novel. It is sprawling and ambitious, and its flaws are, of course, revelatory. Her shifts between dialect and standard English, for example, in her portrayals of Israelite and Egyptian characters, open a ludic imaginary space of hybridization. Within this space, Hurston’s Moses opens onto several possible readings simultaneously. First, as a revisiting of the biblical narrative of Exodus, with its compellingly dramatic scenario of the Hebrews’ bondage in Israel, the sufferings of their enslavement, the events leading up to the climax of their emancipation from Pharaoh’s oppression, their wanderings and difficulties in the desert before the moment of divine election, the receiving of the law, their growing consciousness of their peoplehood, and their ambivalent relationship with their charismatic leader, Moses. Next, as an allegory of the on-going oppression of and within the black community in America in the 1930’s - Negroes as Hebrews - a community that had yet to achieve its individual freedom, despite the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War. Hurston uses a specific form of African-American pastiche, “signifyin (g),” to critique the petty ambitions, delusions, jealousies, mystifications within her own culture that keep the community from advancing to real freedom, the internal kind. And lastly, one might read her focus on the Israelite plight as an allegory of the growing oppression and persecution of Jews in fascist Europe.

  • 1 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, The Signifying Monkey (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

3My first way into this novel comes from a hermeneutic tradition directly related to the Hebrew Bible, a reading practice known as midrash. My second framework for approaching Hurston’s heterogeneous text is the theory of interpretation and revision elaborated from within the black vernacular cultural tradition itself by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his work The Signifying Monkey.1 My purpose here is to attempt to put these two reading practices into dialogue to demonstrate how they might yield up an understanding of the notion of “crossing over.” To the extent that Hurston herself reads the Mosaic tradition of thaumaturgy as a form of conjuring in order to inscribe her protagonist’s road to freedom through the acquisition of knowledge and power, one could say that she is both doing midrash and signifying.

4As the saga of the deliverance of an entire people from slavery and oppression, and as a text of sacred scripture, the story of the exodus from Egypt as it is recounted in the Books of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible, takes us temporally, geographically and generically, far from the classic autobiographical slaves narratives of the 19th Century in the Americas. Yet I will suggest that it has its place here not only as one of the foundational texts of liberation from slavery in the West, lending itself to endless appropriations and reformulations in historical, literary, mythical, political and creative narratives, but also that the interpretive processes closer to its cultural origins which seek to elucidate it, have something to teach us about Hurston’s Moses, Man of The Mountain.

  • 2 Bruns, Gerald L., “Midrash and Allegory,” in The Literary Guide to The Bible, Robert Alter and Fran (...)
  • 3 For good introductory discussions of midrash, see, among others, Barry W. Holtz’s essay, “Midrash”, (...)

5So I will take a detour here, briefer, I hope than that of the children of Israel in the desert, to explore the ancient rabbinic textual practice known as midrash, to point to its revival in contemporary literary theory, and then to relate it to what I see as Hurston’s project in Moses. For her fictional text is not only a work of the literary imagination. It is also a work of interpretation. The term “midrash” derives from the Hebrew verb to explore, to enquire, to seek out (the same etymology as the Arab word, “medersa”). It designates both an exegetical practice leading to interpretation of biblical texts, and to the corpus of those literary interpretations that were eventually compiled from various oral sources over the centuries. The practice flourished among rabbis in Ancient Israel and the diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple, from 70-400 C.E., but has continued as a living interpretive and creative practice until today, being renewed and informed by secular models of textual inquiry which it has also informed, such as deconstruction and feminism. Its goal has always been to illuminate those aspects of the highly condensed biblical narrative which the critic Erich Auerbach has characterized in his book, Mimesis, as being “fraught with background,” and demanding interpretation. Or, as Gerald L. Bruns has characterized it, “Midrash is the word for whatever occurs in a situation in which the understanding of the Torah is called for... The task of midrash is never merely reproductive; it is always productive of new understanding.”2 It is ever-changing in its responses to contemporary crises, and as a practice is process oriented and fluid, rather than definitive or dogmatic. Its instruments include identifying different levels of discourse: literal, allusive or symbolic, investigative, and hidden, or mystical, revealing a profound understanding of the play of words and the undecidability and multivocity of textual meaning. It utilizes different rhetorical strategies, including an interpretive circulation among questions, puns, sayings, commentaries, parables often as fanciful as any folk tale, and the use of proof-text, a self-glossing practice whereby one part of the text can be used to illuminate another part.3 The form is always dialogical, as the collections of midrash include the rabbis as a cast of characters in endless conversation.

  • 4 Midrash and Literature, xi.

6The commentary as narrative constitutes an on-going and infinite series of readings so that we might conceive of midrash in terms of critical activity as an enormous intertext. As Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick state in their introduction to the volume Midrash and Literature: “Its own activity is absorbed into the activity of the text, producing a continuum of textual supplements, often in a spirit of high-serious play.”4 I read Hurston’s novel, then, not as a distortion of the Exodus narrative, but as falling within the spirit of midrash, albeit outside of a strictly religious discourse, in the sense that as a re-creation of the Moses story, it also functions as an interpretation of it, a revision of the story that infuses it with contemporary meaning.

7 The link I argue for here between the hermeneutics of midrash and that of signifying derives from the origin of both in the popular vernacular culture of the oral tradition, but, more importantly, in their common recognition that words simultaneously include multiple layers of significance, and that the ludic function, the linguistic free play that results from that inference, can yield up illuminating insights. The great difference, of course, is one of intentionality. The interpretive work of the midrashic rabbis was meant, ostensibly, to support the discourse of the sacred text, but also, historically, to respond to situations of discontinuity (such as exile), or religious and cultural threats (such as the spread of Hellenism). Signifying, on the other hand, includes a number of rhetorical strategies of indirection or revision meant to subvert the dominant meaning of language practices of the (white) master discourse.

  • 5 The Signifying Monkey, 194.
  • 6 Hurston, Zora Neale, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Negro, Nancy Cunard, ed. (1934. New (...)

8Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the African-American critic who first conceptualized “Signifyin (g)” as the “trope of tropes” capable of adumbrating the relationship between black vernacular discourse, African-American literature, and a theory of African-American literary criticism in his ground-breaking study, The Signifying Monkey, insists, in his chapter on Zora Neale Hurston that, “in a speakerly text certain rhetorical structures seems to exist primarily as representations of oral narration, rather than as integral aspects of plot or character development. These verbal rituals signify the sheer play of black language.”5 There is no transcendant signified, but, rather, infinite plays on the chain of signifiers that use pastiche, parody, and certain specifically African-American vernacular rituals such as playing the dozens, loud-talking, testifying, rapping, calling out. The affect can be insulting, prideful, self-mocking or even self-deprecating. In his discussion of Hurston’s own theory of “Negro Expression,” which first appeared in Nancy Cunard’s 1934 anthology, Negro, Gates points out her identification of “the will to adorn,” that is, the use of figurative language, as well as the Negro’s universal penchant for imitation and mimicry, a form of revision, as defining characteristics of black oral narration.6 That all of these rhetorical strategies are operative at one level or another of Hurston’s Moses demonstrates the extent to which the novel functions as a signifyin (g) text, that is, one that rewrites, revises, re-interprets. The multiple encounters between Moses and Pharaoh in the novel, for example, over the former’s demand for the liberation of the Hebrew slaves - the famous “let my people go” - and the king’s repeated refusal, constitute a series of hilarious one-upsmanships. In the biblical account, each change of heart of Pharaoh’s is answered with a progressively more dramatic plague, leading to the tragic killing of the first-born. Hurston’s pastiche has Moses the conjurer (I shall return to her characterization of Moses), in full control of his mature powers, calling up the plagues as he ups the ante for the court priests and their superficial and inadequate tricks. That there are ten plagues in the biblical narrative leading up to the liberation of the slaves provides Hurston with an infinite variety of humorous possibilities for parody, put-down, satire. She savors each scene for its comic potential in her re-imagining of the power play between her Africanized Moses, and Pharaoh, the (implied) white slave master. Demonstrating her own complete control over the conjuring power of words, she employs the esthetic devices of black folk culture to effect both a poetics and a politics of liberation.

9Three examples of Hurston’s signifying genius will have to suffice here to give a sense of the novel’s texture. The first is the scene of the plague of the frogs which Moses calls upon the Egyptians to make Pharaoh yield. Not only does Hurston give herself over to the sheer pleasure of dilating her humorous imagining of the scene, she also signifies on the signifyin (g) by repeating the scene in a debased version, as enacted by the king’s priest, thus deflating their vacant claims to power:

  • 7 Hurston, Zora Neale, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991): 154-157.

Moses didn’t lose any time. He walked to the made pond in the garden and lifted up his rod in his right hand and frogs swarmed out of the pond all over the garden. They filled the garden and the grounds and still they poured out of the fish pond. Hundreds and thousands and millions struggled over each other in the shallow water, clambered to the stone wall about the pond and leaped off in all directions. Moses still stood with his right hand lifted and the frogs kept on coming. Little frogs, big frogs, green frogs, toad frogs, rain frogs, bull frogs, every kind of frog that ever leaped or hopped. The foundation of the world seemed made of frogs and they came pouring out of that pond. The world croaked and leaped. The party fled inside but the palace was full of frogs. The streets and the cisterns were full. They leaped all over everywhere. They poured their millions out of the Nile, and every other stream and spring and still Moses help up his hand. The frogs kept coming till sundown. By that time the palace was besieged by citizens crying for relief from frogs. So Pharaoh commanded his priests to dispel them. They begged for time, so Pharaoh asked Moses to do away with the things.
“I’ll be back tomorrow and talk it over”, Moses said and went home.
The next morning streets, yards, fields and gardens held mounds of dead and stinking frogs. Moses saw piles and furrows of dead frogs as he made his way to the palace through a terrified populace.
“What! Your priests haven’t done anything about this plague of frogs yet”? Moses demanded of Pharaoh.
“The worthless creatures who live in wealth off my bounty have done nothing yet,” Pharaoh admitted as he hurled a cup of water full of tadpoles out the window.
“Then I reckon the Lord with my poor help will have to do it,” Moses said. He lifted up his rod and went outside and the millions of frogs began their march to the Nile. From all over the city and the province they hopped solemnly riverward and leaped in till only the dead and rotting heaps and furrows were left in street and fields. Moses ordered these to be buried. Men, women and children worked all day and all night and by mid-afternoon the third day of the plague of frogs, Egypt was free of the sending. So Moses went home again...
“Did you want to see me about something?” Moses asked.
“Yes, I want to see you about that frog trick you pulled,” the King said shortly. “My priests want to teach you their version of the same thing. In fact, one of the priests says he remembered teaching you that stunt some years back when you used to hang around the temple so much.”
“He never did,” Moses retorted. “But I am here to be taught.”
They went outside and the frogs poured again. When they began to be plentiful in the garden, Pharaoh held up his hand and said, “That’s aplenty - a gracious plenty. Now send them off like Moses did.”
The officiating priest stopped in his tracks and looked right sheepish at Pharaoh. The frogs kept coming.
“I said stop,” Pharaoh said coldly. The frogs kept on coming.
“You heard me!” Pharaoh roared, “I said stop those frogs and I mean stop. That’s too many frogs already. Enough is enough and more than that is nothing but a nuisance.”
The frogs kept right on coming.
“You chuckle-headed fool! Head those frogs for the river!”
The chief priest made motions, he waved his wand, he chanted something and the whole college of priests began to whirl. But the frogs kept right on coming and filling up the grounds. The priest pointed his rod towards the river but the frogs hopped in every other direction. They had to bring something for Pharaoh to stand on.
Finally Moses lifted his hand and the frogs in solemn procession and in a sort of rhythm moved on to the river as the others had done.7

10Hurston is having a wonderful time here, adorning her language, intensifying it through rhythmic repetitions, dramatizing its performative aspect, as she doubles her audience by calling on the reader to witness what the people are witnessing. She also basks in the delight of Moses as trickster character, using his wits and resources to get the better of the powers that be, cajoling and humiliating, exaggerating the ridicule through the use of hyperbole. That Hurston as verbal conjurer is identified with Moses is obvious, but deserves more exploration. I shall return to this creative aspect of her (self-) empowerment.

11A second example of signifyin (g) occurs in the form of a pastiche of folk etymology. Irreverent, syllogistic, Hurston describes the magic food that Moses conjured for the Israelites in the wilderness. Although he had found this “trick” while he was honing his magic skills, long before he got the “calling” and became their leader, its actual use in feeding the people allows Hurston to speculate for them, using another signifyin (g) device, a kind of double-voicedness which Gates identifies with free indirect discourse:

  • 8 Ibid., 206.

They never had seen any bread like that. It wasn’t a loaf and it wasn’t rolls and it wasn’t pone bread and it wasn’t hoe-cake. It was in grains like seeds. So the people looked at it and called it manna because they didn’t know what else to call it. Manna was a word that didn’t mean anything in particular anyhow, so they called the grains of bread by that name.8

  • 9 Ginzberg, Louis, The Legends of The Jews: Moses in the Wilderness (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication (...)

12Hurston is delighting here with signifyin (g) on the arbitrariness of the signifier, deterritorializing and reterritorializing her Hebrews as Negroes, providing a playful glimpse into southern black culinary culture, and demystifying the sense of wonder at the “miracle” of manna by ascribing a meaningless word to it. It is worth noting here, however, that in ancient midrashic literature, we also find somewhat similar musings, imaginative if not comical, as to the nature of manna. The rabbis wondered out loud what the food tasted like, characterizing it not by exclusion, but rather by inclusion, fantasizing a totality of tastes inflected by subjective desire: “It contained the flavor of every conceivable dish. One had only to desire a certain dish, and no sooner had he thought of it, than manna had the flavor of the dish desired. The same food had a different taste to everyone who partook of it.”9

13A discussion of Hurston’s Hebrews would certainly be in order here, particularly an analysis of the politics of liberation and the politics of founding a collective awareness for a people. So, too, would be a study of the signifyin (g) allegory of the unruly, petty, unwilling Israelites as African-Americans in the 1930’s. However, I shall touch only briefly on her portrait of the people, to move to a more detailed discussion of Hurston and Moses.

14In both the biblical narrative and Hurston’s novel, if Moses is a reluctant liberator, the Hebrews/Negroes are reluctant liberatees. The wanderings of the Israelites in the wilderness can be read as a function of what Emmanuel Levinas terms, “difficult liberty,” enacting the paradigmatic insecurities of freedom for a people long enslaved. They are frightened, wary, worried, prone to recidivistic longings to go back to Egypt and, finally, drawn back to idol worship at the crucial moment before receiving the (monotheistic) law. Hurston’s version of these travails constitutes both a midrashic reading of the Book of Exodus, dilating our understanding of it by specifying (on) it and a scathing signifyin (g) on her own folks disguised as Israelites, characterizing them as thick-headed, ambivalent, cowardly, bickering, grumbling. When Pharaoh finally relents, Moses gives the people the order:

“Get everything you got together and let’s go, and that quick.”
“Why, Moses? Some of them asked. “We’re free now and we can take our own time about everything. “
“You people been around Pharaoh all this time and don’t know him no better than that? He is scared today and so he says you can go. Tomorrow or next day he will realize what he’s losing and send his army into Goshen to put you back to work. Grab your things right now. Tonight we leave Egypt forever. “
“Good gracious!” somebody grumbled, “I was figuring on going fishing tomorrow morning. I don’t want to be bothered with no packing up today. It’s too much like work and I just got free this morning. “
“That’s the heaven’s truth, too,” plenty of others chimed in. “Looks like we done swapped one bossman for another one. I don’t want nobody giving me no orders no more.” (180-181)

15These riffs, theme and variations, the incorporation of the “speakerly” vernacular, such as testifying, the use of African-American grammar to denote popular culture and, of course, the mocking of stereotypical self-defeating African-American attitudes towards work and authority, of these typify Hurston’s signifyin (g) practices.

16I would now like to turn our attention to what it is that so fascinates Hurston about Moses that she devoted this novel to him. For it is not only the collective saga of her people that compells Hurston. She traces the ways he was assimilated into the Afro-Caribbean pantheon of voodoo, and the numerous myths world-wide that associate him to African witch doctors, conjurers, tricksters, and men of power. In Tell My Horse, her study of Haitian voodoo published in 1938, one year before the Moses novel, she hypothesizes an Afro-Asian Mosaic tradition, while avoiding positing a definitive origin for him:

  • 10 Hurston, Zora Neale, Tell My Horse (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981): 139-140.

Damballah is identified as Moses, whose symbol was the serpent. This worship of Moses recalls the hard-to-explain fact that wherever the Negro is found, there are traditional tales of Moses and his supernatural powers that are not in the Bible, nor can they be found in any written life of Moses. The rod of Moses is said to have been a subtle serpent and hence came his great powers. All over the Southern United States, the British West Indies and Haiti there are reverent tales of Moses and his magic... It is... probable that there is a tradition of Moses as the great father of magic scattered over Africa and Asia. Perhaps some of his feats recorded in the Pentateuch are the folk beliefs of such a character grouped about a man, for it is well established that if a memory is great enough, other memories will cluster about it, and those in turn will bring their suites of memories to gather about this focal point.10

17Clearly, then, the figure of Moses functions as both memory trace and narrative matrix, traversing cultures and centuries, expanding and transcending the specificity of Judaic origins. And Hurston as ethnographer hypothesizes folkloric roots for the so-called Mosaic miracles, a paradigm which is completely consistent with current biblical scholarship concerning the redaction of the Book of Exodus as a hybrid text woven of multiple oral strands.

18In the second part of her folk-tale collection, Mules and Men, Hurston recounts her own initiation into the rites of “hoo-doo” in New Orleans, during her tour of the South collecting stories in 1931 and 1934. As she herself becomes inducted into the mysteries of conjuring, we see her identification with Moses, the supreme initiate:

  • 11 Hurston, Zora Neale, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990): 184.

Moses was the first man who ever learned God’s power-compelling words and it took him forty years to learn ten words. So he made ten plagues and ten commandments. But God gave him his rod for a present and showed him the back part of his glory... The snake had told him God’s making words... No king has ever had the power of even one of Moses’ ten words. Because Moses made a nation and a book, a thousand million leaves of ordinary men’s writing couldn’t tell what Moses said.11

  • 12 Moses, Man of the Mountain, 2.

19 The diction in this passage, resonant with the ludic quality of African-American vernacular, contains several elements of the practice of signifyin (g) I have discussed earlier: humor; mirroring; exaggeration; boasting; irreverence; and the deflating of worldly power. I read this vignette as a microcosmic prefiguration of Moses, Man of The Mountain, in that it stresses the power of the word, for it is precisely through a word-of-mouth transference that I mean to suggest Hurston identifies with Moses as an alter ego. Who, then, is Hurston’s Moses? The theme of the baby boy born into slavery under threat of death by decree of the Master is familiar both from the Exodus narrative and later slave narratives, as is the maternal dilemma of whether to murder the infant herself first. “Babies take notice,” decrees Hurston’s Pharaoh in an example of signifyin (g) meant both to ridicule the king and exemplify the underlying terror of the arbitrary use of power for its victims. “Positively no more boy babies allowed among Hebrews. Infants defying this law shall be drowned in the Nile.”12 But the famous biblical scene in which Miriam watches her baby brother Moses float through the bulrushes of the Nile to be taken up by Pharaoh’s daughter is signified upon by Hurston in a radical way. Her little Miriam is guilty of an inaugural parapraxis, for at the crucial moment, she falls asleep. That she never actually witnesses the scene that Hurston expects her reader to be familiar with, of course puts into question the truth value of the tales Miriam spins for her mother afterwards to cover over her guilt. But more importantly, it undermines the decidability of Moses’s origins, thereby scrambling the racial plot. For whoever he really is, he passes as a prince in the Master’s house, growing up as the son of Pharaoh’s widowed daughter who supposedly returned to Egypt with the child from Assyria. I note in passing here that Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, in which the Viennese analyst argued that Moses had to have been an Egyptian to be willing to lead a people to freedom in the name of monotheism, was published in 1939, exactly the same year as Hurston’s Moses. It is difficult not to see both texts as inflected by and responses to the dark plague of anti-Semitism that was moving across Europe at the time.

20Hurston’s prince Moses is a fully fleshed persona, a curious, inquiring boy, “that little smart aleck who was always nosing among the papyrus rolls in the library,” who learns magic from the court priest, but especially from a character whom Hurston invents, a kind of house slave, the Nubian stable-man, Mentu. Mentu functions as a repository of folk wisdom, hoodoo-like conjuring powers, oral story-telling traditions, even serving as a mentor in matters military, as his the phonemes of his name suggest. By the time Moses must flee from the palace for murdering the Egyptian foreman who beat the Hebrew slave, he has risen to fame as a conquering hero. Mentu is not only a surrogate father. He also initiates Moses into the mysteries, serving as a spiritual father as well, in the same way Moses’s father-in-law, Jethro, will do later in the novel. Jethro encourages Moses in his askesis, initiates him into the priestly rites in the service of his (one) God, but the young prince had already taken a significant step on his own path to knowledge and self-knowledge. It is in this self-empowering turn that we see Hurston mirrored in her Moses character.

21What I would like to focus on in the remainder of this essay is Hurston’s rendering of Moses’s spiritual journey, up to the point where he hears the voice that calls him to lead the Hebrews from slavery to freedom. Hurston designates this moment as “crossing over.” Embedded in this spiritual quest I read an individual slave narrative of an idiosyncratic nature, with autobiographical resonances, that both signifies on the drama of escape and calling, and can also serve as a midrash on young Moses’s deep motivations. These two interpretive practices serve complementary functions here, and stand in chiasmatic relation to one another. For just as Hurston’s signifying practices africanize Moses, showing us his progress in the acquisition of conjuring powers and deepening his qualities as a spiritual leader to ready him for political leadership so that he will be able to effect the collective liberation of his people, so can this story be read as an addition to the enormous body of midrashic literature on Moses, in turn illuminating those dense, condensed, elliptical aspects of biblical narrative. We know very little of what Moses experiences internally in the Book of Exodus, what he thinks, how he feels or what motivates him. Hurston’s novel quite literally fleshes him out, even providing an erotic frame for his marriage to Jethro’s daughter, Zipporah.

  • 13 Ibid., 75.
  • 14 For a thorough and illuminating discussion of this tradition, see Theosophus Smith’s study, Conjuri (...)
  • 15 Moses, Man of The Mountain, 78.

22Moses’s fleeing Egypt the first time, after the murder, is textualized as a spiritual conversion in Hurston’s novel. We have no such insight into his character in the Hebrew Bible narrative, and Hurston’s rendering adds, midrashically, we might say, to the enormous literature on Moses, the figure who also fascinated the rabbis. Tired of the glories of battle, estranged from his “treaty wife,” and progressively endowed with a developing if inarticulate compassion for the suffering of the enslaved Hebrews, Moses escapes from Pharaoh’s court and travels toward the Red Sea. On that night journey, Moses experiences a vision which, of course, prefigures the voyage out he will effect as leader of the Israelite Exodus later in the narrative. “All night he traveled and thought,” Hurston tells us. “He found his unformed wishes taking shape. He was wishing for a country he had never seen. He was seeing visions of a nation he had never heard of where there would be more equality of opportunity and less difference between top and bottom.”13 At the edge of the Red Sea Moses learns a secret: it is possible to cross without a boat if the tides are right. Hurston constructs this scene as another acquisition of a trick, deflating the dramatic notion of a divine miracle. The real miracle here is the one of Moses’s transformation through a kind of divesting of self down to what might be called the degree zero, the bedrock of one’s humanity, and, therefore, of one’s identity. In a stunning passage of enormous lyrical power, in which Hurston makes use of the literary device of free indirect discourse as well as the transformative language that is mimetically related to the African-American religious tradition of narrative reenactment14, she first takes Moses alone across the Red Sea, using anaphoric repetition to rhythm him towards spiritual selfhood, for which she invents a neologism: “So Moses felt himself moving Godward with an understanding of force and time. So he walked out with clean feet on the other side.”15 The psychic function of the crossing over in the Exodus narrative for African-American culture is, of course, that it reverses the Middle Passage voyage, that crossing of the Atlantic from freedom to slavery, and it is not surprising that we find its imagery as such a persistent presence in black discourse, from Negro spirituals to the speeches of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. What is compelling about Hurston’s passage, worth citing in its entirety, is that it is concerned first of all with Moses as an individual:

  • 16 Ibid.

Moses had crossed over. He was not in Egypt. He had crossed over and now he was not an Egyptian. He had crossed over. The short sword at his thigh had a jeweled hilt but he had crossed over and so it was no longer the sign of high birth and power. He had crossed over, so he sat down on a rock near the seashore to rest himself. He had crossed over so he was not of the house of Pharaoh. He did not own a palace because he had crossed over. He did not have an Ethiopian Princess for a wife. He had crossed over. He did not have friends to sustain him. He had crossed over. He did not have enemies to strain against his strength and power. He had crossed over. He was subject to no law except the laws of tooth and talon. He had crossed over. The sun who was his friend and ancestor in Egypt was arrogant and bitter in Asia. He had crossed over. He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he once had been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over.16

23The rhetoric here, one of simplification and exaltation, is also the rhetoric of liberation. Freedom, Hurston seems to be saying, begins at home. A seeker of freedom is one who must relinquish worldly privilege, one who must risk leaving everything behind. This first, individual crossing over that Moses effects signifies both on the biblical story and on slave narratives. For Hurston’s Prince Moses, his wealth, status, fame and glory as Pharaoh’s grandson were forms of personal enslavement. After crossing over, he will truly become a man of science, magic, knowledge and power. He will practice conjuring to bring on plagues of flies and frogs, to turn water to blood, and even to produce manna, all before he even hears the voice in the burning bush. His initiation is completed with a scene of Hurston’s invention, as Moses journeys to the bottom of the Nile at Koptos, in a kind of prototype of a submarine that he commands into existence, in order to consult the Book of Thoth, Egyptian God of Death and Writing, and to master the snake that guards it. In this way, of course, Hurston emphasizes the multiple cultural origins that she has ascribed all along to her figure of Moses. But the pivotal moment in the novel, I would suggest, is this crossing over. It is critical in the etymological sense of a turning point, a moment of discernment, a physical and metaphorical en-lightening. One of the most compelling aspects of the Exodus narrative in African-American culture is in the reversal that such crossing over enacts, a reading backwards in time to project forward to the hope of liberation. But what is striking about the scene as it is imagined by Hurston is its emphasis on Moses the individual. And throughout her novel, she stresses his importance in personal terms, as well as his qualities as a leader, both political and spiritual.

  • 17 Rampersad, Arnold, “Foreward” to Hurston’s Mules and Men, xxii.
  • 18 Ibid., xxi.
  • 19 Lionnet, Françoise Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (New York: Cornell Unive (...)
  • 20 Mules and Men, 1.

24What I would like to suggest, then, in guise of conclusion, is that Moses’s personal “crossing over” might fruitfully be read as an allegory for Hurston’s spiritual journey into initiation on the one hand, and her self-empowerment as a writer on the other. For a woman who referred to herself ironically as the “Queen of the niggerati” during the Harlem Renaissance years, this moment of self-stripping and self-scrutiny is clearly another liberating step toward her achieving the authenticity of voice. “None may wear the crown of power,” Arnold Rampersad quotes Hurston as writing of her own initiation, into hoodoo, “without preparation. It must be earned.”17 So we read the exhilaration of the language in the “crossing over” passage as indicative of an identification between author and subject, as a crossing over to true self that enacts and combines the different aspects Hurston’s own intellectual and artistic trajectory. The African American critic Arnold Rampersad argues that these elements come together in the work of Hurston the novelist when he states: “The power she gained from seeing her life in coherence with the storytelling imagination of country blacks and the world of conjure... represented by voodoo was placed largely in a different service - self-empoweringly to facilitate her emergence as a writer of fiction.”18 And Françoise Lionnet makes a similar point in her discussion of the dialectical relationship between Hurston’s work as a folklorist and her coming to voice as a writer in her study of Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road: “... the self she fashions through language is not a fixed essence... Rather, it is a process of active self-discovery through self-invention by means of the folk narratives of ethnic interest.”19 I would argue in closing here that the displacement of this self-awareness onto Moses through the fluid use of free indirect discourse, can be compared to what she said of her own coming North to college in Mules and Men: “... away from my native surroundings, I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment.”20 As in all quest stories, it is essential to leave home, to divest oneself of the trappings of the palace, and to be able to view oneself from the outside.

25There is a midrash that imagines God taking Moses’s soul up to heaven with a kiss on the mouth. As Hurston’s novel demonstrates, Africa does indeed “have its mouth on Moses.” The expression is hers, signifying on the story, transforming it, adding to its seemingly infinite variations. Yet it is really Hurston herself who has her mouth on Moses, she who claimed in her autobiography that she “listened at the lips of books.” By retelling his story, she empowers herself through him, and him through herself, as she posits connections between ancient deities, Moses, herself, and those conjurers who initiated her whom she terms the “two-headed doctors of voodoo.” The common denominator among them is the belief in the power of the word - as command, as prophesy, as creation, as self-invention. Hurston signifies on the Moses story for her own emancipatory purposes through this act of creative ventriloquism, crossing over to her authentic voice. Her mouth on Moses is not an act of cannibalization of the Exodus narrative any more than midrashic stories are. It is one more version of its transmission, highly original in both concept and execution, illuminating new aspects of Moses’s character on the one hand, while exploring the problematics of liberation for the individual and for society on the other.

Notes

1 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, The Signifying Monkey (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

2 Bruns, Gerald L., “Midrash and Allegory,” in The Literary Guide to The Bible, Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987): 625-646.

3 For good introductory discussions of midrash, see, among others, Barry W. Holtz’s essay, “Midrash”, in Back to the Sources, Barry W. Holtz, ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, Touchstone, 1984): 177-211, and various essays in Midrash and Literature, Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

4 Midrash and Literature, xi.

5 The Signifying Monkey, 194.

6 Hurston, Zora Neale, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Negro, Nancy Cunard, ed. (1934. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969): 39-62.

7 Hurston, Zora Neale, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991): 154-157.

8 Ibid., 206.

9 Ginzberg, Louis, The Legends of The Jews: Moses in the Wilderness (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1968): 44.

10 Hurston, Zora Neale, Tell My Horse (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981): 139-140.

11 Hurston, Zora Neale, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990): 184.

12 Moses, Man of the Mountain, 2.

13 Ibid., 75.

14 For a thorough and illuminating discussion of this tradition, see Theosophus Smith’s study, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Foundations of Black America, (New York: Oxford Press, 1994).

15 Moses, Man of The Mountain, 78.

16 Ibid.

17 Rampersad, Arnold, “Foreward” to Hurston’s Mules and Men, xxii.

18 Ibid., xxi.

19 Lionnet, Françoise Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989): 98n.

20 Mules and Men, 1.

Auteur

Purchase College, State University of New York

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