Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics

Hurston's Jo(K)e

Arvay's function as a corporeal center for the processing of inherited goodness and badness speaks to the problem of "race" as it intersects with science and purity. However, Hurston also presents interracial differences to question the "nature" of inherited properties, to subvert the assumed naturalness of the body as the referent for racial essence. Hurston pulls in and fades out the African American Kelsey family (Joe and Dessie) to hyperbolize Arvay's whiteness and to amplify the acquisition (rather than natural inheritance) of cultural traits as integral to racial identity.

The scene in which Arvay and Joe Kelsey muse over Kenny's musical abilities reinscribes Kenny as the socially productive white subject, but it also gestures toward a split between subject formation as culturally mutable and subject formation as naturally occurring, running in the blood and trapped within the body. When Joe and Arvay discuss Kenny, it is Joe who insists that Kenny inherits his musical abilities from Arvay. [21] Joe's prospect soothes Arvay, providing a link that she had not yet considered between Arvay and the good son. Yet the broader context in which Joe reassures Arvay that she is the natural source of Kenny's brilliance alerts the reader to the fact that Joe might be pandering to Arvay, and that the underlying message which Hurston wants to come through exists between the lines. Joe remarks:

"Anyhow, I done raised Kenny and trained him to make a good living. I done done my share."

Arvay felt the same painful twist that she had felt years ago about Joe and Kenny. Then she took hold of herself. It wasn't right to feel jealous that way. She saw now why she had been so set against the music. It gave Joe a hold over her boy that made her feel excluded.

"Between you and me, Miss Arvie, we sure pulled that boy through, didn't us?"

"You mean you did, Joe. You learnt Kenny all that your ownself. I don't know the first pick on a box."

"That's where you'se ever so wrong, Miss Arvay. 'Taint everybody that can learn music like that. Kenny took to it because he brought that talent in the world with him. He got that part from you. He just naturally worried and pestered me to death to teach him. .... What's bred in the bones'll be bound to come out in the flesh. Yeah, that boy come here full of music from you."

"I always thought about Kenny as taking after Jim," Arvay said as if she were talking to herself. Joe looked at Jim and gave a great guffaw. "Mister Jim? Why, Mister Jim couldn't even tote a tune if you put it in a basket for him. Looks, yeah, but that music part he takes right after you.

... Arvay sat quietly for a minute and her face lighted timidly. "Yeah, I guess, I hope, that Kenny did take his music after me."

"Couldn't be nobody else, Miss Arvay," Joe said positively. (250-51)

Joe detours from having "raised" Kenny himself, to having co-raised Kenny alongside of Arvay, to persuading Arvay that her role as biological mother far outweighs his own influence (as cultural father) on the boy. Does Joe's "positive" assertion that Kenny inherited his musical flair from Arvay have a joking quality to it? Is Joe K(elsey) messing with Arvay?