Seraph on the Suwanee (thoughts)

When I read Their Eyes Were Watching God last year, it was such a magical experience I knew I had to read more Zora Neale Hurston sooner rather than later. So when I suddenly wanted to put more older books on hold, I typed her name into my library’s catalogue and selected this one because of its title. I couldn’t wait to begin reading it, and ended up gobbling it up within a couple of days.

The writing is just as marvelous; it has that Southern lilt to it, and there’s immediately a strong sense of Florida as a place, instead of Florida the idea. Here’s a passage from the first couple of pages, when Hurston is setting the scene:

Few were concerned with the past. They had heard that the stubbornly resisting Indians had been there where they now lived, but they were dead and gone. Osceola, Miccanope, Billy Bow-Legs were nothing more than names that had even lost their bitter flavor. The conquering Spaniards had done their murdering, robbing, and raping and had long ago withdrawn from the Floridas. Few knew and nobody cared that the Hidalgos under De Sota had moved westward along this very route. The people thought no more of them than they did the magnolias and bay and other ornamental trees which grew so plentifully in the swamps along the river, nor the fame of the stream.

As soon as I began reading, I could hear Hurston’s voice in my mind, telling me the story. Here’s another of my favourite bits, just for fun:

She did observe that folks down in these parts did seem to be powerful fond of painting houses and planting flowers. It was a very pretty habit, though, and Arvay put out to have herself a flower yard too. Outside of the miles and miles of orange groves, the people raised nothing but vegetables to eat. Not a speck of cotton or tobacco, or the things she was used to seeing growing. Things had a picnicky, pleasurey look that, while it was pretty, made Arvay wonder if folks were not taking things too easy down in here. Heaven wasn’t going to be any refreshment to folks if they got along with no more trouble than this.

The book follows the married life of Arvay and Jim and spans about twenty-five years; it still feels like a story, though, since Hurston keeps to specifics and just jumps over the intervening years between chapters when necessary. Arvay and Jim felt very real to me, and as I read about their misunderstandings and communication problems, I kept turning the pages hoping that everything would turn out right. I also kept my fingers crossed that Jim’s business ventures would work out…how’s that for getting involved in the story?

So this is a wonderfully written book, featuring vivid characters, that I highly recommend to everyone. I wanted to say that now, because I also need to talk about two aspects of the book that rather bewildered me: the way rape is talked about and the gender relations in general.

Arvay and Jim are engaged, and they’re both really in love, but Jim’s not sure about Arvay (since she’s too afraid to show a lot of affection). So he comes over to her house one day after telling her to put on her nicest dress, with the promise of taking her somewhere as a surprise. Then he asks her to show him her favourite mulberry tree out back, and once they’re under there (hidden from view of the main house), he forces himself on her. Afterwards, they begin driving (Arvay has no idea where) and have this conversation:

“Why, sure you’re married, Arvay. Under that mulberry tree.”
“All I know is that I been raped.”
“You sure was, and the job was done up brown.”
“I could have hollered for Pa.”
“And it would not have done you a damn bit of a good. Just a trashy waste of good time and breath. Sure you was raped, and that ain’t all. You’re going to keep on getting raped. You couldn’t be hollering for your Pa every day for the rest of your life, could you?”
“Every day?” Arvay looked across and up at Jim in startled bewilderment. “You sure got plenty nerve.”
“So I been told. But that’s the way the cloth’s been cut, and that’s the way it’s made. No more missionarying around for you. You done caught yourself a heathen, baby. You got one all by yourself. And I’m here to tell you that you done brought him through religion and absolutely converted his soul. He been hanging around the mourner’s bench for quite some time, but you done brought him through religion, and saved him from a burning shell. You are a wonderful woman, Arvay.”
“You talking about me and you, ain’t you, Jim?”
“You know so well that I ain’t talking about nobody else.”
“But, but, you just got through saying that you meant to keep on raping me. That…”
“You got that right, and I mean to tell you, rape in the first degree. We’re headed for the courthouse now, just as fast as we can wheel and roll. And the minute we get there, we’re going to take out some papers on it.”
“Jim!”

When older Arvay looks back on that scene under the mulberry tree, she primarily remembers her pleasure. And later in the book, when her daughter’s courting, Arvay overhears this conversation:

Arvay’s ears caught a long silence, then some sort of quick and sudden movement, then Hatton’s voice, husky and drugged like.
“Angie! Do that again, and so help me, I’ll rape you!”
“So rape me, and I’ll help you!” came just as fervently from her daughter’s lips.

From a twenty-first century perspective, this mingling of the word rape with love-talk is repugnant. But putting myself back to a time when women weren’t to show any sexual desire, perhaps they used the word ‘rape’ so they could have sex and still retain their womanly modesty? But when Jim rapes Arvay under the tree, there’s no consent, and Arvay definitely feels a lot of shame immediately afterwards (even if later she remembers the incident with a certain fondness). I don’t know: it left me quite confused, so if any of y’all want to chime in feel free!

As far as gender relations more generally, this book is almost the opposite of Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is about Janie finding true love and fulfillment by bucking society’s norms. Arvay, on the other hand, really loves Jim, who believes that a wife should be pretty and have babies and obey him and make him happy and in return he’ll work for her and think for her and take care of her. It’s a testament to Hurston’s writing that I didn’t loathe Jim…yes, his values are not my own, but he holds true to those values and is honourable. He often tries to figure out Arvay’s motivations when she’s frustrating him, and for much of the novel he’s portrayed as the one putting more work into their marriage. There are a lot of tender scenes between them, and Jim works so hard so he can give Arvay the life he thinks she deserves. That being said, there is this ugly scene, which occurs after Arvay has insisted on coming home from a party when Jim didn’t want to, and which felt ‘out-of-character’ for Jim (in the sense that he never behaved like this otherwise, not in the Hurston is a bad writer sense) and took me aback:

“Did I tell you that you could leave this room, Arvay?”
“N-n-no, Jim.”
“Well, what did you start out of here for, then?”
“I th-th-thought.”
“You thought like Lit! Did I tell you to do any thinking?”
“No, Jim, you didn’t.”
“Well, don’t let me hear none of your thinking unless I give you my command.”
Jim stood and frowned down on the thoroughly frightened Arvay for a long time. She felt like a mouse under the paw of a cat. She looked up at him fearfully, caught his eyes on her, and then down quickly.
…”Didn’t I tell you to off with them rags? Off with ‘em! Up with that petticoat and down with them pants before you make me hurt you. Move!”
Arvay, pulled at her underclothes in a desperate effort to get them off. Her slip stuck as she got it up her shoulders, and she screamed as she felt Jim with a rough hand rip it off and hurl it away. She reached for her nightgown on the bed to cover herself, but Jim brought her up short.
“Did I command you to put on a gown, Madam? Leave it lay!”
Arvay stood with nothing on but her shoes and stockings, then remembered them and fairly clawed them off, and stood shivering with fright as naked as she had been born. She looked longingly at the closet door and took a step in that direction.
“Don’t you move!” Jim bellowed harshly. “You’re my damn property, and I want you right where you are, and I want you naked. Stand right there in your tracks until I tell you that you can move.”

Um. And while I won’t tell you the ending, I will say that it doesn’t at all subvert the gender roles that the characters believe in, and that their society believes in as well. Although we do see the power Arvay holds over Jim, that power all stems from her ‘femininity’ and willingness to play along with that. I believe that Hurston wanted to write a story about a woman who finds her own strength within society, and to validate the role of woman as a wife and mother…to show that that role is just as important and just as much work as the man’s role. If so, she succeeds marvelously, and in this day and age of so-called ‘Mommy wars’ (can we even talk about the inherent dismissiveness in that phrase and how much it upsets me?), that argument still has relevance. If only there weren’t those two scenes of Jim asserting power over Arvay in the worst way! But they didn’t feel manufactured, and I’m sure for the time they were spot on…in other bits of the book, it talks about how Jim is a model husband because he doesn’t sleep around and doesn’t ever hit Arvay. It’s a tough, complicated thing…but isn’t that how life is sometimes?

The funny thing is, despite the ugliness of those two moments, this really does read like a tender love story. Here’s one of my favourite quotes from Jim:

I feel and believe that you do love me, Arvay, but I dn’t want that stand-still, hap-hazard kind of love. I’m just as hungry as a dog for a knowing and a doing love. You love like a coward. Don’t take no steps at all. Just stand around and hope for things to happen out right. Unthankful and unknowing like a hog under a acorn tree. Eating and grunting with your ears hanging over your eyes, and never even looking up to see where the acorns are falling from. What satisfaction can I get out of that kind of love, Arvay? Ain’t you never stopped to consider at all?’

I don’t know what to make of it all. But I do know that Hurston is a marvelous author, and I can’t wait to see what her other books are like. I hope that my long discussion of these issues hasn’t made you decide to completely skip the book: as regular readers of mine know, I’m quite sensitive to discussions of rape, and I didn’t find it at all prurient or ‘secondary’ to the story, even if Hurston’s historical views are not the same as my own. This is an incredible piece of literature, and I would hate to have made anyone miss out on it.

(I also want to make it clear that I’m not at all condoning abusive relationships in real life or the ‘men will be men and just can’t help themselves’ attitude that is so pervasive in rape culture. I’m sure you can understand that my exploration of the ‘grey’ bits are a sign of the high caliber of writing in this book, and not a sign of my feelings towards rapists and abusers in life, who I’m also aware are sometimes the women.)

Have you read this one? What did you think of Jim & Arvay’s relationship?