The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction Ondra Krouse Dismukes (bio) Sundquist, Eric J. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction by Eric J. Sundquist builds upon the foundation laid by W. E. B. Du Bois with his groundbreaking book, Souls of Black Folk (1903), which celebrates the retentions of African culture in America. Each chapter of Sundquist's book is an extension of the author's presentations at the Lamar Memorial Lecture Series held at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, in October 1991. Sundquist analyzes James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) for their examinations of African American performance—music, sermons, and songs—as repositories of African culture. Through his focus on the influence of African American folk culture on America-at-large, Sundquist lays the foundation for his succeeding work, To Wake the Nations: Race in American Literature and Culture, 1830–1930 (1993), as well as his later scholarship that re-examines the way African American authors such as Ralph Ellison, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois have affected the cultural landscape of American literature. Sundquist begins this particular project with an examination of the James Weldon Johnson novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Chapter 1, entitled "'These Old Slave Songs': The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," illuminates spirituals as repositories of African American culture. Moreover, just as Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk elucidates spirituals, or "sorrow songs," as stories of a sad African American people displaced from home and in search of community, Johnson's work suggests spirituals are indicative of what Sundquist describes as "longing and memory" (17) for and of a connection to one's home, in this case one's African heritage. A theme consistent with literature during this post-Reconstruction period, when the aforementioned works of Du Bois and Johnson were written, is that of the liminal mulatto. As the term suggests, this type of figure is characteristically displaced from both his African and European ancestry. Accordingly, Du Bois proclaims the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of the color line, whereas Johnson describes the African American spiritual as a "melody without words" (17), which becomes the metaphor for the African's (mulatto protagonist included) fragmentary survival in America. This scenario that Sundquist creates in this first chapter juxtaposes that in Johnson's earlier work, God's Trombones (1927), in which he posits African American sermons as an attempt at recovery from this fragmented existence. According to Sundquist, in the second chapter of his book, Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine builds upon Johnson's treatment of sermons. He posits Hurston's description of sermons as existing somewhere between "preservation and erosion" (91). The daughter of John Hurston, an African American minister in the Baptist church, Hurston was no stranger to the sermon as a repository of African American culture. In some of her earlier works, such as the essay entitled "Shouting," first published in The Negro: An Anthology (1934), Hurston references the power of the sermon, particularly in the black church. Sundquist observes Hurston's focus on African American sermons in chapter 2, "'The Drum with the Man Skin': Jonah's Gourd Vine." In fact, he compares Hurston's treatment of sermons with that of Johnson's in God's Trombones. In this book of poetry, Johnson presents what Hurston calls the "barbaric poetry" rooted in black sermons. Embedded in each sermon [End Page 897] is a rhythmic quality emerging from the preacher's cadence and intonations. Hurston, on the other hand, does not create verse from a sermon as much as she reproduces an actual sermon of the Reverend C. C. Lovelace. Hurston originally transcribed the Lovelace sermon in Eau Gallie, Florida, in 1929, and published it in "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals" in Nancy Cunard's anthology, entitled Negro (1931). Then, in Jonah's Gourd Vine, Hurston inserted Lovelace's words into...