Passionate Minds by Claudia Roth Pierpont

Author:Claudia Roth Pierpont [Pierpont, Claudia Roth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77331-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

In her autobiography, Hurston quickly dismisses her first marriage and entirely neglects to mention her second; each lasted only a matter of months. She wed her longtime Howard University boyfriend in May 1927 and bailed out that August. (Apparently unruffled, Hurston wrote her friends that her husband had been an obstacle and had held her back.) In 1939 her marriage to a twenty-three-year-old WPA playground worker dissolved with her claims that he drank and his claims that she’d failed to pay for his college education, as she had promised, and had threatened him with voodoo. “The great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last night’s moment to a day which has no knowledge of it,” she writes in Dust Tracks on a Road. She concludes, “I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.”

Those admirers who wish Hurston to be a model feminist as well as a racial symbol have seized on the issue of a woman’s historic choice between love and work, and have claimed that Hurston instinctively took the less travelled path. On the basis of Hurston’s public insouciance, Alice Walker describes, with delicious offhand aplomb, “the way she tended to marry or not marry men, but enjoyed them anyway, while never missing a beat in her work.” No sweat, no tears—one for the girls. It is true that Hurston was never financially supported by a man—or by anyone except Mrs. Mason. Hemenway, her biographer, writes that it was precisely because of her desire to avoid “such encroachments” on her freedom that her marriages failed.

Without doubt, Hurston was a woman of strong character, and she went through life mostly alone. She burned sorrow and fear like fuel, to keep herself going. She made a point of not needing what she could not have: whites who avoided her company suffered their own loss; she claimed not to have “ever really wanted” her father’s affection. Other needs were just as unwelcome. About love, she knew the way it could make a woman take “second place in her own life.” Repeatedly, she fought the pull.

There is little insouciance in the way Hurston writes of the man she calls P.M.P. in Dust Tracks on a Road. He was “tall, dark brown, magnificently built,” with “a fine mind and that intrigued me.… He stood on his own feet so firmly that he reared back.” In fact, he was her “perfect” love—although he was only twenty-five or so to her forty, and he resented her career. It is hard to know whether his youth or his resentment or his perfection was the central problem. Resolved to “fight myself free from my obsession,” she took little experimental trips away from him to see if she could bear it. When she found she couldn’t, she left him for good.

Her diligent biographer, who located the man decades later, reports that he never understood exactly what had happened. She’d simply packed her bags and gone off to the Caribbean.

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