Zora Neale Hurston: I have served and been served

Zora Neale Hurston is one of my favorite writers. Her works continue to touch my heart, long after I’ve finished her stories. Her tales are our history, and we live as her characters as we read and feel. -- Jalilah Hamin

Zora Neale Hurston is one of the greatest writers/ anthropologists of the 20th century. She could write about the most ordinary things and make them infinitely gorgeous. In Zora Neale Hurston’s books, the reader empathizes, loves, hates, and mourns, because Zora makes her characters so real and human it is impossible not to. She has the rare power to write fiction that is timeless and vibrant. The relationships, the trauma, the power struggles, everything just sears itself into your consciousness.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, Zora Neale Hurston was the most prolific and accomplished black woman writer in America. During that thirty-year period she published seven books, many short stories, magazine articles, and plays, and she gained a reputation as an outstanding folklorist and novelist. She called attention to herself because she insisted upon being herself at a time when blacks were being urged to assimilate in an effort to promote better relations between the races. Hurston, however, saw nothing wrong with being black: “I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negro-hood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.” Indeed she felt there was something so special about her Blackness that others could benefit just by being around her. Her works, then, may be seen as manifestos of selfhood, affirmations of blackness and the positive aspects of black life.

Her parents, Lucy Ann Potts, a country schoolteacher, and John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, met and married in Alabama, then moved to Eatonville, Florida, north of Orlando. Her father, a three-term mayor, helped codify the laws of this all-black community the first to be incorporated in the United States.

Lucy Hurston died in 1904, and this fact more than any other disrupted Hurston’s schooling and her life. She was passed around from relative to relative, rejected by her father and his second wife, and forced to fend for herself. At fourteen Hurston left Eatonville, working as a maid for whites but refusing to act humble or to accept sexual advances from male employers; consequently, she never stayed at one job long. Hired as a wardrobe girl with a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company, she traveled around the South for eighteen months, always reading in hopes of completing her education. Later she enrolled in a Baltimore high school, Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University), while working as a live-in maid.

In the fall of 1918 Hurston entered Howard University, attending the college preparatory program until 1919 and taking university courses intermittently until 1924, paying for her expenses by working as a barbershop manicurist and as a maid for prominent blacks. At Howard she met and studied under poet Georgia Douglas Johnson and the young philosophy professor Alain Locke. She also met Herbert Sheen, who, on 19 May 1927, became her first husband. As Sheen later told Hurston’s biographer, Hemenway, the marriage was doomed “to an early, amicable divorce” because Hurston’s career was her first priority. In a 1953 letter to Sheen, Hurston recalls the idealistic dreams they shared in their youth, regretting nothing because she lived her life to the fullest.

Hurston’s first short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea” (May 1921), was published in Stylus, the official magazine of the literary club at Howard University. The protagonist of “John Redding Goes to Sea” cannot “stifle that longing for the open road, rolling seas, for peoples and countries I have never seen”. The story brought the young author to the attention of sociologist Charles S. Johnson, and by January 1925 Hurston was in New York City with “$1.50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope.”

She could not have arrived in New York at a more opportune time. The Harlem Renaissance, the black literary and cultural movement of the 1920s, was already under way. Countee Cullen, DuBois were already in New York. Other black writers from all over—Claude McKay from Jamaica, Eric Walrond from Barbados, Langston Hughes from Kansas, Wallace Thurman from Salt Lake City, Rudolph Fisher from Rhode Island, Jean Toomer and Sterling Brown from Washington, D.C.—were flocking to New York, as Hughes so aptly put it, to “express their individual dark-skinned selves.” Charles Johnson was just founding Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, and he was interested in material that exemplified “New Negro” (the phrase coined by Locke) philosophy. Hurston’s works celebrated blackness, and she became an enthusiastic contributor to the New Negro Renaissance literary movement.

In the fall of 1935 she joined the WPA Federal Theater Project. While working with the Project, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to collect folklore in the West Indies. By 14 April 1936 she was in the Caribbean, collecting material for her second book of folklore, Tell My Horse (1938). She stopped in Haiti and Kingston, Jamaica, proposing to make an exhaustive study of Obeah (magic) practices. She did much more than study magic, however, for the romantic atmosphere of the islands triggered emotions that had been “dammed up in” her since she had left the United States. Back in America she had been romantically involved with a twenty-three-year-old college student who had been a member of the cast of The Great Day. As usual the callings of Hurston’s career were stronger than those of her heart, and she had left the young man to continue to pursue what she considered her mission in life. Fortunately, she was able to transpose her emotions into literature, releasing on paper, in just seven weeks, what became her best novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Lippincott liked the story, and the book was published on 18 September 1937.

Their Eyes Were Watching God has been called “a classic of black literature, one of the best novels of the period.” It is a tribute to self-assertion and black womanhood, the story of a young black woman in search of self and genuine happiness, of people rather than things, the story of a woman with her eyes on the horizon. The heroine, Janie Crawford, against her better judgment, lives conventionally for much of her life. When she finds no real satisfaction in that life, she strikes out, like Huckleberry Finn, and like Hurston herself, for the territory and the possibility of a better life beyond the horizon.

Janie Crawford wants “marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.” The limited, non-communicative alliances that she makes, however, desecrate this image. She sees herself as a pear tree in bloom, but she is around forty years old before she finds the right “dust-bearing bee.” Before that, she marries two men who represent her grandmother’s and society’s ideas of success. Both husbands own or acquire property, are much older than Janie, and are conventional in their thinking, the second husband even going so far as to group women with “chilluns, and chickens, and cows,” all helpless beings who need a man to think and do for them. The first marriage had been arranged by the well-meaning grandmother to provide some “protection” for Janie’ the second had been Janie’s own doing. Janie survives these marriages by retreating into herself. She discovers that “she had an inside and an outside and how not to mix them.”

Janie realizes her “pear tree” dreams with the man who becomes her third husband. Although Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods is several years Janie’s junior, he is more mature and wiser in the ways that count. Whereas Janie’s other husbands had wanted to restrict Janie’s participation in life, Tea Cake, a hedonist, encourages her to enjoy it to the fullest. There are no forbidden areas. The two give and take equally and, for Janie, arriving at the horizon seems imminent.

The novel is a powerful affirmation of life, of physical and spiritual fulfillment. Its power is in its language, its vividly emotional, folksy, often heart-rending descriptions of the day-to-day yearnings of a woman who wanted more than a house and “respectability.”

On 29 October 1959, after suffering a stroke, Hurston was forced to enter the Saint Lucie County Welfare Home. She died there of hypertensive heart disease on 28 January 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, the segregated cemetery at Fort Pierce. She had died in poverty, and a collection had to be taken up to pay for her funeral. Yet Hurston had lived a rich life. She had risen from obscurity to become a member of the American Folklore Society, American Anthropological Society, American Ethnological Society, New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and she was listed in the 1937 edition of Who’s Who in America. She had been courted by political figures and, most important, she had published an exceptional body of literature. Like Janie of Their Eyes Were Watching God, she had seen the “light,” and no amount of dusk could dim its glow. As she wrote in 1941 while working on her autobiography:

While I am still below the allotted span of time, and notwithstanding, I feel that I have lived. I have had the joy and pain of strong friendships. I have served and been served. I have made enemies of which I am not ashamed. I have been faithless, and then I have been faithful and steadfast until the blood ran down into my shoes. I have loved unselfishly with all the ardor of a strong heart, and I have hated with all the power of my soul. What waits for me in the future? I do not know. I can’t even imagine, and I am glad for that. But already, I have touched the four corners of the horizon, for from hard searching it seems to me that tears and laughter, love and hate make up the sum of life.

Interest in Hurston had diminished long before her death. Her works had been long out of print, and the literary world was being dominated by such male giants as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Fortunately, however, a few readers were beginning to discover Hurston, and in the 1970s this interest mushroomed into a coterie of Hurston followers. Comprehensive appraisal came in 1977 with Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Acknowledging his “white man’s reconstruction of the intellectual process in a black woman’s mind,” he offers a favorable assessment of her literary career and tries to explain her enigmatic personality. Praising her work as a celebration of black culture, he concludes that her failure to achieve recognition in her life reflects America’s poor treatment of its black artists. “Zora was funny, irreverent (she was the first to call the Harlem Renaissance literati the ‘niggerati’), good-looking and sexy.” The University of Florida set up a Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship in Anthropology; the City of Orlando, Florida, acknowledged Hurston’s accomplishments by naming a city building after her. In 1973, as a tribute to Hurston’s inspiration, Walker placed a gravestone inscribed: “ZORA NEALE HURSTON / ‘A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH’ / 1901 - 1960 / NOVELIST, FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST.”

AWARDS AND HONORS: Guggenheim fellowships, 1936 and 1938; honorary Litt.D., Morgan College, 1939; Anisfield-Wolf Award for Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942.

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