Laying Down the Rails: Sacred and Secular Groundwork in Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine and King Vidor’s Hallelujah

Abstract

Dey talkin' 'bout passin' laws tuh keep black folks from buying railroad tickets. --Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine Though it is clear that characters in novel Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and film Hallelujah (1929) have no frame of reference for understanding how sexuality or progressive politics could beneficially coincide with religious practice, writer Zora Neale Hurston and director King Vidor certainly demonstrate that train and railroad are spaces ripe with potential to harness this type of collaborative power. Hurston and Vidor's locomotives and railroads are plot vehicles that illuminate how detrimental division between sacred and secular can be. In particular, their trains, sometimes lurching violently, overdramatize need for people to stop emphatically privileging sacred over secular or secular over sacred. Both narratives engage secular train in conversations about sacred values and identify potential for progress in developed from commingling of or confrontation between sacred and secular. By emphasizing simultaneous excitement and fear that trains inspire and using vehicle as a unique symbol of progress, texts ultimately produce new ideas about how to slowly begin reconciling structure through which sacred/secular debates are engaged. The novel and film argue for letting run its course so that it eventually brings productivity. The term productive dissonance fits Vidor and Hurston's stories nicely: like Brent Hayes Edwards's case studies on black internationalism, interwar period, and new understandings of term Diaspora, these two works signal collaboration between sacred and secular that must necessarily involve debate and dissent (Edwards 143). Vidor and Hurston's model trains are a source of inter-and intraracial discord at same time that they represent possibility of developing strong communities prepared to fight for civil rights or inclusivity. In both texts, conflict trains inspire is an allegory for sacred/secular divide, with resulting leading to new ways of thinking about religious fervor and sex outside of marriage. At some points in texts, trains actually stand-in for black leaders themselves--or, are already model sacred/secular composites. At other points in texts, trains simply suggest that these protagonists engaged in sacred and secular matters have potential to enact great sociopolitical change in their communities. The train indeed simultaneously invokes fear about and suggests positive change; but, rather than indicating train is going nowhere, this doubleness means that vehicle--and therefore texts' ministers and early twentieth-century African American communities that follow them--will move forward sociopolitically if and when they accept ambiguity. Overall, forward movement, however slight, of mind, body, or soul connects syncretism, dissonance, and train in Hurston's and Vidor's works. I treat labor of syncretism in both works in this essay. In particular, both Jonah's Gourd Vine and Hallelujah conclude by depicting train as both an abstract idea and physically useful; it is thus a question mark of sorts--an initiator of debate among readers and viewers--and symbolic of positive sociopolitical change. The train in each tale reflects protagonist's relative political consciousness, symbolizes breaking bonds and expanding horizons, explores limits of African American sociopolitical ambitions because of racism, and functions as a syncretic space. In Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Robert Hemenway writes that trains symbolize the white man's mechanized world (200). Accordingly, trains activate a ringing call to sociopolitical action for blacks in part because railroads are historically linked not only to African American cultural progress but also to white dominance: African Americans' civil rights were usurped for more than half a century via U. …