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Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Glenda B. Weathers

Enslaved by law or custom, African Americans have found the Promised Land metaphor an apt vehicle for describing the epic proportion of their suffering. Using this metaphor, they can identify with the Old Testament Israelites who were under God's special providence. When read typologically, their persecutions offer evidence that they are God's new chosen who, like the biblical Jews, can hope for a better life in a different place--a land attainable by a "flight out of Egypt," implying a "crossing over" the Red Sea or its symbolic equivalent. Black vernacular songs such as "Bound for the Promised Land," "Going Into Canaan," "I Won't Have to Cross Jordan Alone," and "Go Down Moses" attest to the metaphor's power for engendering hope. Indeed, the journey to the Promised Land frequently assumes the same symbolic significance as a return to the Garden of Eden or a search for it. The two places, Eden and the Promised Land, can share the same tropes and images, evoking an imaginative place on the other side of some barrier--often a river--that must be crossed for deliverance.

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The Promised Land and Eden have been metaphors understood and used by such historic figures as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. In one of the most poignant passages from Narrative of the Life, Douglass describes how the slaves were literally shut out of the master's garden, a metaphoric Eden, by a perverse chief gardener anxious to punish slaves who wished to eat from the tempting, fruit-bearing trees--trees that, by implication, would afford slaves access to knowledge of the good life or a land of milk and honey (39). In an implicit comparison of himself to Moses a century later, King famously proclaimed, "I've been to the mountaintop.... And I've seen the promised land" (286). More than any other Civil Rights leader, King understood the power of such rhetoric for galvanizing an oppressed people; indeed, his rhetorical stance proved a compelling metaphor in not only creating a watershed moment in American history but also in aligning that event with biblical precedent, the Hebrews' escape from slavery under God's protective eye. (1)

The Promised Land/Garden typology affords writers and speakers a host of images that carry symbolic weight. Garden images, notably the knowledge-giving trees of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, are powerful tools for African American writers inscribing into fiction the painful history of slavery and some psychological truths about enslavement. (2) Nonetheless, in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Beloved tree images convey multiple ideas; they posit knowledge of both good and evil. Hurston and Morrison respectively imply, however, that the fruit of trees must be tasted to provide protagonists the self-knowledge necessary for personal growth, redemption, and deliverance.

Fifty years following the 1937 publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Toni Morrison in 1987 published Beloved, a novel with striking affinities with its literary precursor. Like Hurston's, Morrison's novel brings her readers into a life of re-memory. While Hurston's protagonist realizes selfhood within and against a free black community, Morrison's Sethe sorts out her life within the context of slavery. Although their heroines have different backgrounds, Hurston and Morrison turn to some of the same tropes and images, drawn from black vernacular culture, to document their protagonists' attempts at self-liberation. The similarity of these images indicates not so much Morrison's indebtedness to Hurston as it does the existence of a tradition described by Morrison in an interview with critic Gloria Naylor. "Before I began to write," Morrison claims, "I had never read Zora Neale Hurston." She suggests that the similarities critics find mean that "the tradition really exists"; it "makes the cheese more binding, not less, because it means that the world as perceived by black women at certain times does exist" (qtd. in Awkward 165). (3) Thus, in comparing images perceived by characters in the two novels, we can discover much about that binding tradition. Among such critics as Michael Awkward, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Trudier Harris, Karla Holloway, Nellie Y. McKay, and Cheryl A. Wall, the fictions published by Hurston and Morrison have generated substantive and innovative response. Of particular interest to this paper is the variety of image and narrative patterns in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Beloved.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's protagonist relates her experiences retrospectively. (4) Telling her story to Pheoby, Janie re-visions herself, as she looks back in recognition of the garden images, both negative and positive, that have shaped her personality and identity. Hers is a personal fulfillment realized when she turns her silence into speech, for it is through the power of storytelling that she records who she is and negates the hegemonic voices threatening that identity. As we read Janie re-membering herself, we are struck by the accumulated power of her frequent references to the pear tree through which she has come to know herself. For Janie, the pear tree is the informing image against which all other trees are measured. To understand herself, Janie has revisited that pear tree time and again, documenting life's experiences with references to the pear tree situated in her grandmother's garden, a tree symbolically proffering knowledge that Janie, Eve-like, accepts. In an innovative shift, Hurston replaces the legendary tree of knowledge, the apple tree, with an arguably more fitting symbol of the acquisition of carnal knowledge and sexual experience, the pear tree.

Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Glenda B. Weathers

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