Judging a book by its cover is easy, but judging a book by its drafts is much more complicated. I feel it is almost impossible to evaluate an unfinished book as a book. Publishing unfinished books posthumously has become a widespread practice—recent years have seen marquee recovered novels by David Foster Wallace and Claude McKay—but that has not made it any less fraught.
Plant’s closing words in the commentary to Herod compare the king to the writer: “After hundreds of years, King Herod the Great is coming out of the shadows. After decades, Dr. Zora Neale Hurston can finally tell her untold story. Both Herod and Hurston have ‘come out more than conquer.’” Quoting from Hurston’s autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Plant positions the untold story as the fulfillment of fate. The mirrored celebration of Herod and Hurston can be passed over as a platitude—but it also provides cover for a rigid literary politics.
The editing and publication of Hurston’s work has often been contentious. Barracoon evolved from an early anthropological article by Hurston that was marred by charges of plagiarism—charges that Plant downplays in her afterword to the 2018 edition and that hardly made a blip in marketing and book reviews. I have no hunger to relitigate such cases. But I do worry that the ongoing project of cementing Hurston within contemporary culture entails idealizing black women thinkers who seem yet to have earned the right to full complexity. Plant’s anxious effort to protect Hurston from the charges of plagiarism is a way of avoiding a more difficult and honest reckoning with Hurston’s imperfections. The lionization of Hurston, and her conscription as a source of black women’s tradition, forbid us from considering these lapses and challenges. What if our black women literary heroines made mistakes? Perhaps then we would have to rethink our perception of them as heroes, and our very desire for heroism.
The desire for heroism and the salvation of a forebear like Hurston have a spiritual dimension. We want to save her, and we want black women’s history to be saved through her. We want redemption and reparation. Hurston herself had a deep investment in, and curiosity about, religious feeling and tradition, from Christianity and Judaism to hoodoo. It’s important to grapple with Herod not just as a recovery narrative of its titular hero but as theological criticism.