Zora Neale Hurston: Literary Legend
Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. At a literary awards dinner in 1925, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she accepted four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story "Spunk," a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions. The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come.
By all accounts, Hurston could walk into a roomful of strangers and, a few minutes and a couple of stories later, leave them so completely charmed that many offered to help her in any way they could. She had a fiery intellect, an infectious sense of humor, and "the gift," as one friend put it, "of walking into hearts." Her unique combination of talent, determination, and charm led her to become one of the bright lights of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the most successful and most significant writers of the first half of the 20th century. Over a career that spanned more than thirty years, Hurston published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles, and plays.
Born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. In Eatonville, Zora saw evidence of black achievement all around her. In the town hall, black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulated the laws that governed Eatonville. In the town's two churches, black women, including her mother, Lucy, directed the Sunday School curricula. On the porch of the village store black men and women passed worlds through their mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories.
Growing up in a large house on five acres of land in this culturally-affirming community, Zora had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father, who sometimes sought - as she put it - to "squinch" her rambunctious spirit. In contrast, her mother urged young Zora and her seven siblings to "jump at de sun," employing the African-American vernacular common in Eatonville. "We might not land on the sun," Hurston explained, "but at least we would get off the ground."
Hurston's idyllic early years abruptly ended, however, when her mother died in 1904. Following Lucy Hurston's death, Zora's father quickly remarried and seemed to have little time or money for his children. Eventually, after Zora got into a fistfight with her young stepmother, her father sent Zora away to live with various relatives and to find her own way to adulthood. "Bare and bony of comfort and love," was how Zora described those lean years. She worked a series of menial jobs through her teens while struggling to complete her education. For almost a decade, Zora disappeared from the public record. When she re-emerged, in 1917, she was 26 years old and living in Baltimore - but still lacked a high school diploma. Disguising herself as a teenager to qualify for free public schooling, Zora listed her birth year as 1901 - making her a full decade younger than she really was. From then on, she always presented herself as at least ten years younger than her true age. Fortunately, Hurston had the looks to pull it off. Photographs reveal that she was a handsome, big-boned woman with playful yet penetrating eyes, high cheekbones, and a full, graceful mouth always animated with expression.
After finally completing high school, Hurston went on to earn a bachelor's degree from prestigious Barnard College and, from there, pursued a Ph.D. at Columbia University under world-renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. Later, Hurston garnered a coveted Guggenheim fellowship to study indigenous communities in Jamaica and Haiti.
By 1935, Hurston was firmly ensconced in the American literary scene. She had published several short stories and articles, a well-received collection of black Southern folklore (Mules and Men), and a novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, that the New York Times called, "without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written." The late 1930s and early '40s marked the zenith of Hurston's career. Her masterwork, a novel called Their Eyes Were Watching God, is now required reading in high schools and colleges throughout the United States.
"There is no book more important to me than this one," novelist Alice Walker said of Their Eyes Were Watching God. TV personality Oprah Winfrey ( http://www.america.gov/st/develop-english/2010/February/20100209085751berehellek0.9821588.html ) has called the novel her "favorite love story of all time." Winfrey was so inspired by the story, in fact, that in 2005 she produced a television adaptation of it, starring Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry. The film was viewed by a television audience of an estimated 24.6 million Americans, further entrenching Hurston's novel in the public consciousness and the American literary canon.
Today, Their Eyes Were Watching God is widely regarded as a masterpiece. But when it was first published in 1937, author Richard Wright, a contemporary of Hurston's, was unimpressed with her book: "The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought," he wrote. Still, the book earned largely positive reviews. Hurston was featured in several contemporary newspaper articles, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay sent Hurston a telegram congratulating her on her success. "God does love black people, doesn't He?" Hurston joked with a friend, reveling in the praise the novel had garnered, despite persistent racism in much of the U.S. at that time. "Or am I just out on parole?"
Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved for her writing. (The largest publisher's advance she ever received for any of her books was $500, while her white peers routinely received $5,000 advances.) Consequently, when she died of a stroke in 1960 at the age of 69, her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida had to collect donations to fund her funeral. The collection did not yield enough to pay for a headstone, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked for more than a decade.
Ironically, back in 1945, Hurston had foreseen the possibility of dying without money. At the time, she had proposed a solution that would have benefited her and countless others. In a letter to W.E.B. Du Bois ( http://www.america.gov/st/diversity-english/2008/December/20090105161923jmnamdeirf0.9908258.html ), whom Hurston considered the "dean" of African-American artists, she proposed "a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead" on 100 acres of land in Florida. "Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness," Hurston urged Du Bois. "We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored." But Du Bois, citing practical complications, wrote a curt reply discouraging her proposal.
As if impelled by Hurston's prescience, in the summer of 1973, Alice Walker, then a young writer, journeyed to Fort Pierce to place a marker at Hurston's grave in commemoration of the author who had so inspired Walker's own budding talent. The Garden of Heavenly Rest, where Hurston had been buried, was a neglected, segregated cemetery at the dead end of North 17th Street. Walker braved the snake-infested grounds to search for the final resting place of her literary heroine. Wading through waist-high undergrowth, Walker stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she identified as Hurston's grave. Unable to afford the majestic black headstone called "Ebony Mist" that Walker felt best honored Hurston's illustrious legacy, Walker purchased a plain, gray headstone instead. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, Walker bestowed a fitting epitaph on the humble headstone: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South."
Valerie Boyd is the author of the award-winning biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She teaches journalism and narrative nonfiction writing at the University of Georgia.
