| Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), which deploys migration
as a theme and structuring device to represent John Buddy Pearson’s search for home,
self-understanding and self-fulfillment, is excluded from scholarly treatments of the
African-American migration narrative. Such scholarship has focused on a South-North
trajectory, although the Great Migration did not strictly lead to ‘the North’ but also to
urban centers of the U.S. South and West. I explore the themes of mobility and escape
depicted in Jonah’s Gourd Vine which, although confined to the South and therefore
presumed to be removed from the site of the Great Migration, are very close to its
world—a world whose narrative conventions Hurston adopts and broadens, deconstructs
and problematizes. Unlike other black Southern migrant heroes who fail to realize their
dreams of opportunity and freedom because they cannot adapt to an industrial society,
John’s tragedy is attributable mainly to behavioral pathology. |