“Youse in New Yawk now”

Abstract

This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston’s recently rediscovered early short stories from the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most popular and widely read African American newspapers. Hurston’s 1920s tales focus on the love lives of rural migrants in the city, explore rural-urban culture clash, and refute the important period claim that rural Black people and culture inevitably would be changed by urban life. This chapter examines sartorial style to argue that Hurston’s humor belies the fierce ideological conflicts that her periodical fiction waged against different rural aesthetics, values, and reform programs; her depictions and assessments of Black rural education undermined alternative contemporary models of African American rural uplift predicated on respectability politics.