文档介绍：10
Rethinking the African American Great
Migration Narrative: Reading Zora Neale
Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine
Helen Yitah
Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) deploys migration
as a theme and structuring device to portray John Buddy Pearson’s trav-
els within the south, mainly in Alabama and Florida. Although Hurston
situates John’s story in the larger context of the African American Great
Migration of the early decades of the twentieth century, she still focuses
on his individual struggle with his internal “brute beast” (88) that im-
pels his blind rage, physical violence, and philandering, thus clogging
the pathway to his self-discovery. By offering a look inward into her
protagonist to find reasons for his failures, Hurston challenges dominant
ideological models of the migration narrative, such as the “urban adjust-
ment” model that looks outward to socio-cultural factors to explain the
plight of black migrants.
The “urban adjustment” model was influenced by scholars of the
Chicago School of Sociology whose studies traced black poverty to the
constricting environment of the urban ghetto. One group of Great Mi-
gration writers influenced by the ideas of these sociologists includes the
social realists of the 1930s and 1940s. The realists did not see migration
north as a relocation to a promised land, but, rather, as a frustrating ex-
perience. They portrayed black migrants as poor and disoriented people
trapped in oppressive and dehumanizing northern ghettos, bereft of
the skills, values, and ethos necessary for surviving in the urban north.
Many writers of Great Migration narratives were realists who wrote in
this mode. August Wilson, for example, viewed the migration of blacks
up north as a big mistake and called for contemporary descendants of
African American Great Migration Narrative 11
the Great Migration to embark upon an actual physical relocatio