In/visible Men: Hurston, "Sweat" and Laundry Icons

Abstract

In/visible Men:Hurston, "Sweat" and Laundry Icons Barbara Ryan (bio) Man, don't hang out that dirty washing in my back yard. The tale of Delia the washwoman is one of Zora Neale Hurston's best known. It's also been judged "by far the best of [her] early writings" and "arguably [her] finest short story." As a result, "Sweat" (1926) has incited wide-ranging discussion. Not fully appreciated, though, is how teasingly it dances at the dizzy edge of dangerous wit. So dizzy is that edge that critics are still falling into a trap set by the laughing-up-her-sleeve satirist who remains half-known, only, to the academy. That was the risk run by an artist whose aesthetic merged anti-racist initiatives with ironization of figurations circulated so energetically, over so many years, that they signified as icons. With the passage of time, those icons' disappearance has left even labor-alert readers likely to miss trenchant play in "Sweat." I spotlight that play by tackling the misapprehension that the laundry Delia whitens laboriously symbolizes her "innate goodness."1 That interpretation is short-sighted for two reasons. One, white laundry puns on the means by which she bought and keeps the house in which she invests so much (too much?) love. Two, goodness doesn't mesh with her decision to say nothing when her unloved husband Sykes intrudes on a rattlesnake. The morality play enacted by her silence is honored by realization that "Sweat" blurs folkloric narrative methods [End Page 69] into allegory.2 That's a vital insight. Vital too, though, are selections of the same narratology in representations of washwomen penned by Langston Hughes and Carter G. Woodson. Explaining shared topic, and tactics, is the prevalence in their day of laundry icons. Visuals aren't common in Hurston scholarship. Nor are Hurston, Hughes and Woodson usually studied in converse with each other. True, the Hurston recognized as a race-alert feminist is often allied with the "Negro Poet Laureate." That makes sense, since she and Hughes were good friends. Both, moreover, spent time on the payroll of the journal Woodson edited. His efforts aren't often studied in conjunction with those of the younger writers because he was less radical on a left-right axis. Woodson was in several respects a populist, nonetheless; that, indeed, is why he worked hard to establish Black History Month. As a populist, Woodson had cause to keep a close eye on Hurston and Hughes as they found ways to draw readerships, sell politicized interventions, and explore new genres and subjects. Judging by Woodson's oeuvre, I would not expect him to have noticed, as Deborah Clarke did in 2001, that in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1935), Hurston "examines the process of learning to see and be seen." Hughes could have noticed this, though, or realized what Hurston would reveal in her autobiography: "I am so visual minded," she attested in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), "that all the other senses induce pictures in me."3 This essay tracks a visual genealogy—a heritage of icons—repudiated by plot and character decisions in "Sweat." I look more briefly at how Hughes and Woodson contributed to that genealogy to sketch a reception history which, for all its sketchiness, indicates what Hurston risked with high-wire wit. My interest in reception was sparked by Vivyan Campbell Adair's observation that the story of a hymn-singer and her wastrel husband "alienated readers" who felt affronted by how that tale "threatened traditional literary and social conventions." But I learned, also, from Warren J. Carson's explanation of that reaction. "Many were put off by [Hurston's] portrayals of characters and situations they had just as soon forget," he explained in 2007, "in a time when they were trying to be recognized for their American-ness instead of their blackness." Carson's specification of Richard Wright and Alain Locke, in this context, suggests an elite attitude rather than a general consensus. When, however, we ask what Hurston intended, "Sweat"'s debut in the radical forum FIRE!! implies the purposefulness of any alienation experienced by conventional readers. Why would she want to alienate...