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

(20.) The object of Earl's attack is Lucy Ann Corregio. While this essay does not treat the significance of the Portuguese American Corregio family in relation to the racial politics of the novel, it is interesting to note that Arvay struggles with an attempt to racialize this family. The arrival of the Corregio family on the Meserve property angers Arvay, because Jim had not told her of their "ethnic touch": "Jim had said that they were white folks, but the man turned out to be a Portuguese, and his name was Corregio. That made them foreigners, and no foreigners were ever quite white to Arvay. Real white people talked English and without any funny sounds to it" (120; emphasis added). The irony of this discourse of nationalist racial purity is, of course, that Arvay herself is ashamed of her "funny sounding" English, which is particularly evident when she and Jim travel to the University of Gainesville to see Kenny perform as drum-major for the band: Arvay, we are told, "felt awkward and out of place. Listen ing to the people around her, she became terribly conscious of her way of speech. She hated to open her mouth for fear of making a balk, and putting her children to shame" (209-10). Still, later in the novel, Arvay returns to this "not quite" theory of whiteness: "Felicia [Corregio] and her mother were nothing but heathen idolaters, and not to be treated white. Arvay proceeded to set up images of them among the African savages and heathen Chinee. They were not fellow-humans, they were nothing of the kind" (242).

(21.) Arvay's otherness within the Sawley community materializes so that she is both unlike other whites and, to a degree, more like blacks. Throughout Seraph, music is associated with African American culture--Kenny's apprenticeship under Joe Kelsey assures us of this. Arvay's "great interest and ... quick ability" (9) to master the organ sets her apart from the rest of the white community in Sawley, and marks her as more like blacks than whites. More to the point, Arvay's religious fervor at the novel's beginning is labeled as "excessive," and the narrator tells us that "excessive ceremonies were things that Negroes went in for. White folks just didn't go on like that" (4). The point here is not to read Arvay as a substitute black character, but rather to shed light on the way in which Arvay's own behavior does not exist in an isolated, pure-white space which has been passed down from generation to generation, but rather that there exists more cultural overlap than she might suspect. If Arvay is like black s, it is not simply that she was born that way, but that there is a strong cultural connection which allows for it.

(22.) More can be said about the term Cracker in Joe's joke. The disruption of Joe's speech, the replacement of Cracker with "a white man from back in the woods," signifies the political weight of the term. The fact that Joe cannot fully articulate the epithet signifies a quasi-danger in its usage. Joe obviously knows that Cracker cannot be spoken in front of Jim and Arvay, yet his readiness to use the term shows that it would not be the first time he has referred to the Meserves (or other poor whites) as "Crackers." If the term Cracker implies both white supremacist and white trash, then perhaps this struck Hurston as comic: If Arvay, the Hensons, Earl, and even Jim are "Crackers" to Joe Kelsey, are they racist rednecks or white morons? For a full history of the term, see Otto.