“She Told Them About Her Trips to the Horizon”: Creative Democracy in the Short Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston

Abstract

This chapter examines two short stories that Zora Neale Hurston wrote during the early phase of her career, “Drenched in Light” (1924) and “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933). The chapter argues that “Drenched” and “Gilded” present a cast of characters who enact elements of creative democracy, including a child, a young couple, and a grandmother. Through these characters, Hurston builds a portrait of Eatonville, Florida (her setting of choice) as a place that wavers between a robust community of aesthetic activity and a place besieged by intersectional stratifications. On the one hand, Eatonville is founded on amicable relations and local networks of trade, communication, and art. On the other hand, prosperous outsiders from urban centres expose the ways diffuse ideals of interdependence buttress status quos that propagate racism and misogyny. The young black female protagonists in “Drenched” and “Gilded” find ways to extricate and build upon the local networks, harnessing them in order to externalize their ideals and fantasies. In the process, they strengthen their authority by remaking the most versatile tool of self-definition at their disposal, the black maternal archetype.