Zora Neale Hurston's
'Polk County'

By Kenneth Carroll
SeeingBlack.com Theater Critic

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Poet and critic Sterling Brown, in Haile Gerima's documentary "After Winter," described a patron party in the late 1930s where Zora Neale Hurston shocked and angered her fellow Black Harlem artists by showing up in a red bandanna looking like Aunt Jemima. Hurston's legacy is defined by her disregard for convention and orthodoxy. She put her trust not in the race men of the Harlem Renaissance, or in the academics at Barnard or Howard, but in the folk traditions of Southern Black life. If her belief in the efficacy of folklore to explain and define the world offended, so be it. She liked pricking sensibilities, especially if it could get her a few dollars more from her often gullible White patrons to fund her literary and anthropology projects.

In the adaptation of Hurston's "Polk County," recently unearthed after 53 years and produced at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, Hurston again revels in pricking sensibilities by giving audiences a hokey comedy about Black life that borders on minstrelsy. What keeps Polk County from disintegrating into minstrelsy is her attention to and respect for Southern Black folk traditions. Her background as anthropologist serves the actors in "Polk County" well, as the characters deliver lines that are recognizable to common folks. Also a saving grace for "Polk County" is the wondrous music of top-flight musicians and the abilities of the actors to bring the music alive with genuine blues.

The story takes place in an African American sawmill community in 1930s Florida and focuses on the power of love between protagonist Big Sweet, richly played by Harriett D. Foy, and Lonnie, played by David Toney. As in Hurston's other works, "Polk County" is unconcerned about the social/political ramifications associated with Black life in the South. The story is about love—lost, found, and endangered. Big Sweet, a kick-butt female, raises hell at the sawmill, putting the fear of death in men and women who inhabit the company-owned shacks and jook joints.

The play opens with Big Sweet roughing up a gambler who has cheated Lonnie out of his money. Big Sweet explains that Lonnie is sensitive and can't deal with fighting. It is typical Hurston to have a woman dominate, flipping roles is not a big deal to her. While Big Sweet terrorizes, she also parties, and while the folks at the sawmill know to avoid her bad side, they also know that the party can't start until Big Sweet arrives.

"Polk County's" never fully developed tensions center around the sawmill supervisor Quarter Boss, played by Hugh Nees, in a useless role, and his dislike for the shenanigans of Big Sweet, whose social dominance challenges his own. He is determined to oust her from the sawmill and gets help from two of Big Sweets rivals, Dicey Long, played by Perri Gaffney, and Maudella, played by Sherri LaVie Linton. Perri Gaffney nearly steals the show, imbuing her character with a palpable bitterness that oozes off the stage like acid. Dicey Long's acerbity is caused by the unrequited love she carries for My Honey, a blues singer, played by Clinton Derricks-Carroll, who spurns her every advance.

Awkwardly thrown in for bad measure, is the character Leafy Lee, who returns to Polk County from New York City to find her White father. She's taken under the wing of Big Sweet, and falls in love with My Honey. Both characters teach her how to sing the sho nuff blues, which she whimsically and implausibly decides is more important than finding her father. And besides, with only one White character in the play, the mystery is too transparent to mean anything.

With "Polk County," the audience is best served when it forgets most of the characters, the shaky plot, and focuses solely on the music, the funny and wonderful folk expression and rituals, and the performances of Gaffney and Foy. Thomas Lynch and Paul Tazewell help to redirect our attention with a superb set and costume design respectively. With the celebrated blues duo of Cephas and Wiggins, supported by Daryl Davis (piano) and Norvus Miller (trombone), musical director Stephen Wade allows the natural talents of the live musicians to enter "Polk County," providing a depth that is not always apparent in other aspects of the production.

While it is hard to know how much of Zora Neale Hurston's vision for Polk County survived in the necessary adaptation of a her four-hour, forty-actor script, there is certainly enough here for her fans to affirm her greatness and for her detractors to affirm her shallowness. What director/adapter Kyle Donnelly and dramaturg/adapter Cathy Madison do in "Polk County" is the obvious—provide us with Southern Black characters who can sing, dance, and toss around funny folk witticisms.

What they, and perhaps Zora Neale Hurston, cannot do is to provide tension or depth that would make the characters actual human. Every time a seemingly formidable antagonist goes against Big Sweet they are dispatched with TV movie swiftness. Hurston, a rugged and sometimes reactionary individualist, may have refused to deal with the social/political realities of Black workers in the 1930s but what comes across in its place in "Polk County" is a presentation of stereotypical happy darkies whose only aspiration is to work until the weekend when they can party.

Big Sweet's threatened eviction launches her into an ineffectual and contrived soliloquy that never deals with the fact that the White sawmill proprietors own her home and can control her life. The ending of "Polk County" ending could have been written by the Hallmark Corporation. Everyone dances off to their company-owned futures where, as in the life of Zora Neale Hurston, folklore is never enough to thwart reality.

-- June 7, 2002

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