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Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Zora Neale Hurston's follow-up to Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), transforms the long-established African American comparison of black freedom struggles to Exodus.1 Hurston's work recapitulates famous biblical scenes from Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and other ancient and modern traditions,2 giving many characters African American Vernacular English speech, and the larger Hebrew community numerous social and cultural features of post-Reconstruction black communities. Yet this instance of the allegory concerns itself not with Emancipation alone, nor with black political and spiritual freedom in general, but with the rise of elite black male leadership. In this novel, a great class and educational divide separates the Egyptian prince Moses from a largely illiterate, often obstreperous body of Hebrews, and much of the narration recounts his constantly checked efforts to impose both personal authority, and an impersonal notion of social and spiritual progress, on people who neither respect him nor particularly want to change.
Thus, as scholars including Erica Edwards, Melanie Wright, Michael Lackey, and Joshua Pederson have noted, Hurston's version is unheroic, antitraditionalist, and strongly feminist. Where conventional Exodus allegories use the Pentateuch's implicit and explicit theological assurances-the group coheres, its leaders are good, the text is reliable, God is there-to assert, ideologically, that black community, leaders, history, and values are also a transhistorical, indivisible whole, this novel systematically undermines both received biblical interpretations, and the presumption of solidarity among antebellum African Americans. On one hand, it thoroughly debunks Moses's claims to prophecy, and scriptural supernaturalism in general. On the other, it emphasizes women's disorderly speech, and expounds forms of violence against the enslaved, particularly high infant mortality, that are normally foreclosed from canonical black literatures. For Hurston the lesson of Exodus for African Americans is that the group is fragmented, the leaders illegitimate, all texts ambiguous, and God elusive.
Importantly, while it often relies on a sardonic rationalism, Hurston's attack on the Moses tradition is not cynical, scientistic, or even atheist. Instead, the novel demonstrates a broadly psychoanalytic interest in locating and examining repressed images and emotions-separation and waste; anger and despair-that characterize the experience of powerlessness and that in Hurston's careful description contribute foundationally to an African American culture of resistance. Her novel doesn't so much diagnose the trouble with Moses,...