Rethinking King Cotton: George W. Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, and Global/Local Revisions of the South and the Nation

Abstract

In 1930s and 1940s, Zora Neale Hurston and George W. Lee tell compelling and competing stories of in agriculture. To be sure, each narrates impressive achievements as well as great misery and need. Lee's River George (1937) describes record-setting cotton crop that protagonist Aaron George produces when he returns to his late father's shares, for example, while Hurston's novels and stories present black communities that, despite racist and classist pogrom of early twentieth-century agriculture, affirm and sustain its members. At same time, each narrates great misery and need: River George ends in Aaron's graphic lynching, while Hurston's work tends toward wholesale African American rejection of American agriculture: as she asks in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Why must I chop cotton at all? (345). What's more, their works defy relegation of the status of Negro farmer within a regional or national circuit, for they contest American agriculture as solely national or local and instead acknowledge its global dimensions. While Aaron does not recognize that he is victim of plantation, a transnational system far greater than he and fundamental in refusing him agency or equity, Hurston's works embrace global consciousness, repudiating emplacement in and fealty to a world order that denies her characters autonomy and equity.