Jonah's Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston

First published: 1934

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The post-Civil War period through the early twentieth century

Locale: Alabama and Florida

Principal Characters:

• John Pearson, a minister and carpenter
• Lucy Potts Pearson, John’s first wife
• Judge Alf Pearson, a wealthy white landowner suspected of being John’s father
• Amy Crittenden, John Pearson’s mother
• Ned Crittenden, John’s stepfather
• Hattie Tyson, John Pearson’s second wife
• Sally Lovelace, John’s third wife

The Novel

Jonah’s Gourd Vine is a thinly disguised biography of Zora Neale Hurston’s parents, whose names she barely veils in the novel. The story focuses on John Pearson’s rise from a poor, illiterate Alabama sharecropper to the powerful, well-to-do moderator of the Florida Baptist Convention, to his subsequent fall from power and grace, to his painful resurrection and death.

The narrative opens on a sharecropping farm near the Songahatchee River in Alabama several years after the emancipation. Amy and Ned Crittenden and their three sons, including John, whom Amy had before marrying Ned, live the typically dismal life of the southern black sharecropper—poor, perpetually in debt, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and generally hopeless. These difficulties, coupled with Ned’s heavy drinking and his near hatred of his wife’s mulatto son, make their domestic life a tragedy from which the sixteen-year-old John flees after he knocks Ned down for beating Amy.

John finds employment and an entirely new way of life on the plantation of Judge Alf Pearson, who, readers soon realize, is John’s father. John is given considerable responsibility while in the judge’s employ; he is also given the opportunity to go to school. It is also while at Judge Pearson’s that John becomes involved in several of his many affairs with women.

It is the fiery, petite Lucy Potts whom John vows to marry, which he does eventually, although his numerous extramarital affairs do not stop. During one of these affairs that has kept John away from home for several nights, Lucy’s brother, Bud, comes to collect a debt from John and, finding no money, takes the bed that Judge Pearson had given John and Lucy for a wedding present, dumping Lucy and her newborn baby on the floor in the process. When John does return, he whips Bud within an inch of his life and must flee to escape prosecution and possible lynching.

Subsequent years find John and his family in Eatonville, an all-black town in central Florida, where John has prospered under Lucy’s careful direction. He has become a successful carpenter, a property owner, the popular pastor of neighboring Sanford’s Zion Hope Baptist Church, and the powerful moderator of the Florida Baptist Convention. Likewise, his weakness for other women has increased, and his sexual escapades threaten his security in the church, but Lucy is always there as a constant strength and defender. Lucy dies prematurely, however, from a body weakened by the ravages of tuberculosis, too many years of rapid childbirth, and increasing concern, worry, and aggravation over John’s philandering.

Lucy’s death proves to be John’s undoing, as he soon marries the selfish, self-centered Hattie Tyson, who destroys virtually everything John and Lucy have built together. John loses not only his children, his wife, and his congregation but also his power, his influence, and his dignity. Finally, John leaves the ministry and Eatonville, convinced that he is mostly misunderstood and that distance is the best cure for his social illness.

The last leg of John Pearson’s journey finds him in Plant City, Florida, where, with the help of his third wife, the saintly Sally Lovelace, he puts his life back together: He regains a full measure of dignity and prosperity, and he accepts the call to become pastor of the Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, an even larger congregation than the one he left in Sanford. For a while all is tranquil, but during a visit to Sanford, John gives in to his sexual urges. In a guilt-laden stupor, John is struck and killed by a train as he rushes back to Sally in the new Cadillac she has bought for him. His death is mourned statewide, and in the end John Pearson is remembered for the good things he had done.

The Characters

In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston takes a stock figure from African American literature and lore, the folk preacher, and imbues him with real human characteristics in a successful effort to show the character as a human being, subject to the same strengths, weaknesses, and shortcomings of other human beings rather than as a godlike being who is unaffected by human frailties. Also, because Hurston relies heavily on details from her personal experience—Jonah’s Gourd Vine is loosely based on her parents’ biographies—the characters are all the more real and compelling.

The characters are presented in a more or less straightforward narrative manner; there are few if any experimental techniques. The central characters, John Pearson and his wife Lucy, are presented as complex, wholly believable characters with tragic flaws that prove, especially in John’s case, to be their undoing.

The plot is likewise developed in a linear fashion. Although the ending—with John’s death after he is struck by a locomotive—seems gratuitous and melodramatic, it is nevertheless believable within the context of the story.

John Pearson is presented as a man with many conflicts; however, it is his uncheckable tendency to be a “man amongst women” that is presented as so incompatible with his role as pastor of a Baptist congregation. His inability, perhaps his refusal, to control his sexual appetite leads to his downfall. Pearson has the makings of a successful man, however: He is physically strong, he is a talented carpenter, he possesses a superb singing voice, and he is an exceptionally powerful preacher of the gospel. These traits seem to suit Hurston’s narrative strategy quite well, as she explores the adage “the bigger they come, the harder they fall.”

Similarly, Hurston’s portrayal of the petite Lucy Pearson is designed to contrast directly to John’s character. Lucy is physically small, yet she is a paragon of goodness and propriety. She, too, sings superbly, but she lives the life she sings about, and for that reason she emerges as a wholly sympathetic character who is victimized by her philandering, hypocritical husband.

Hurston’s greatest strength is her depiction of her native Florida and most especially of the folk who populate the all-black town of Eatonville and its surroundings. Her characterizations in Jonah’s Gourd Vine are a tribute to her talent for portraying folk characters in a realistic, uncondescending manner. The dialect of the characters is superbly drawn, as are their appearances, habits, and even their naming processes. Several characters are true stereotypes—Hattie Tyson, the “bad woman,” is one example—but they nevertheless fit well in this archetypal examination of the fall of man.

As such, Hurston presents a realistic and compassionate picture of black life in a small southern town. As in most of her fiction, whites appear only on the periphery; racial strife is mostly insignificant in Hurston’s world. Rather, she shows with great skill and consummate artistry the day-to-day struggles of black folk in this native setting.

Critical Context

Hurston published Jonah’s Gourd Vine in 1934, thirteen years after she had published her first short story, nearly a decade after she had become an award-winning writer, and several years after she had established herself as an important American folklorist whose specialty was black life of the American South and the Caribbean. Naturally, there was considerable interest in her first novel. Few were disappointed in her craft, although writers and critics with socialist leanings were disturbed that Hurston refrained from writing much protest fiction in favor of writing stories that celebrated the culture and values of black communities in the South. Jonah’s Gourd Vine was generally well received, and its publication was the beginning of Hurston’s most fruitful and rewarding period of writing that included Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and the award-winning Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942).

With the revival of interest in Hurston’s canon that began in 1973 after two decades of general neglect, critics have looked favorably upon Jonah’s Gourd Vine as a novel important not only for its artistic value but also for its folkloric value. In addition, this first novel shows the development of its author as a craftsperson who had perfected the short story and then gone on to master the longer genre of the novel.

Bibliography

Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2002.

Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977. The most complete study of Hurston’s life and works. Includes biography, textual analyses, and a general wealth of information suitable for any student of Hurston.

Holloway, Karla F. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. An important study of Hurston’s use of language to delineate and differentiate character. The author provides a number of interesting readings and rereadings of Hurston’s characters.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. A collection of more than 500 letters, annotated and arranged chronologically.

Lupton, Mary Jane. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Survival of the Female.” Southern Literary Journal 15 (Fall, 1982): 45-54. Explores an all-important and all-encompassing theme of Hurston’s work. While much of the focus is on Their Eyes Were Watching God, there is considerable information that is useful for the study of all Hurston’s work, including Jonah’s Gourd Vine.

Newson, Adele S. Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. A valuable resource for scholars of Hurston. This reference book catalogs all the Hurston criticism up to the time of the book’s publication.

Walker, Alice. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. An interesting essay by one of Hurston’s leading champions.