Hurston, Zora Neale (1891–1960), novelist, anthropologist, folklorist, and genius of the South. In February1927, Zora Neale Hurston left New York City aboard a southbound train. Her destination was Eatonville, Florida, her hometown, where she began collecting folktales, spirituals, sermons, work songs, blues, and children's games. To Hurston this frequently disparaged folklore was priceless; it constituted the “arts of the people before they find out that there is any such thing as art.” At a time when the Great Migration, the movement that brought blacks by the hundreds of thousands from the rural South to the urban North, seemed a sign of racial progress, as did the poetry and fiction of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, Hurston moved against the tide. Crisscrossing Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana, Hurston spent the next six years documenting the art of “the Negro farthest down,” who, she contended, had made the greatest contribution to American culture.
Her years in the field culminated with the 1935 publication of Mules and Men, the first volume of black American folklore published by an African American. A self-styled “literary anthropologist,” Hurston blurs the boundaries of literature and ethnography in her writing. She employed fictional techniques to shape the narrative of Mules and Men. Her theories about language and culture, which she summarized in a 1934 article, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” inspired the technical innovations of her fiction. Her effort was not merely to interpolate folk sayings in her novels; it was to write fiction according to the aesthetic principles that undergirded oral culture. Consequently, Hurston strove to re-create the sense of drama and “will to adorn” she admired in the oral culture and to create a literary language informed by the poetry as well as the perspective of rural black Southerners.
This she did in four novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); a second volume of ethnography based on field work in Jamaica and Haiti, Tell My Horse (1938); a memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942); and more than fifty published short stories, essays, and plays. No black woman writer had been as prolific. But unstinting devotion to her artistic vision and iconoclastic political views exacted a price. Despite the excellent quality of her writing, none of Hurston's books were in print when she died on 28 January 1960.
Even without her frequent embellishments, Hurston's life was as dramatic as any story she wrote. Born 7 January 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, a small hamlet near Tuskegee, Zora was the fifth of eight children of John and Lucy Ann Potts Hurston. The family resettled in Eatonville, the first incorporated black community in America, where John served three terms as mayor. Lucy, a former country schoolteacher, encouraged her children to “jump at de sun.” A bright pupil, Zora loved fanciful play and the “lies” (stories) adults told on the porch of Joe Clarke's store. But the idyll of her childhood ended with Lucy's death in 1904. Sent to school in Jacksonville, no longer “Eatonville's Zora,” she “became a little colored girl.”
During the next few years Hurston did domestic work as she lived with relatives in neighboring Sanford and in Memphis; she then joined a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe as a lady's maid. Leaving the troupe in Baltimore, she enrolled in the high school division of what is now Morgan State University in September1917. The following fall she registered at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Working as a waitress and manicurist, she attended Howard intermittently from 1918 to 1924. An English major, Hurston joined the campus literary club; her first published story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” evoked her memories of Eatonville. Off campus, Hurston attended poet Georgia Douglas Johnson's literary salon. Two of her poems appeared in Negro World, the official newspaper of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. After Opportunity published the story “Drenched in Light” in December1924, Hurston decided to ply her luck in New York.
Her luck held. AlainLocke selected her short story “Spunk” for the landmark anthology The New Negro (1925). Attending the Opportunity awards dinner in May1925, she took two second-place prizes and met poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and novelists Fannie Hurst, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Carl Van Vechten. Hurst employed her as secretary, then chauffeur, and Meyer secured her a scholarship to Barnard College in September1926. Hurston was thirty-five years old; everyone she met in New York believed she was at least ten years younger. The only black student at Barnard, Hurston studied anthropology with Franz Boas, who pioneered the discipline in the United States. Although she continued to write, and joined Hughes and other young artists to plan the first and only issue of Fire!!, Hurston determined to pursue a career as a social scientist. With Boas's assistance, she obtained a research fellowship from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) and made her journey South.
Her introduction to Mules and Men proclaims: “I was glad when somebody told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore.”’ But gaining the wherewithal to pursue the mission was complicated. Hurston needed more consistent funding than the ASNLH could provide. She needed a patron. Charlotte (Mrs. R. Osgood) Mason had bloodlines and bank accounts traceable to the founding of the Republic. Indians of the Southwest had been Mason's enthusiasm before Harlem's black artists caught her fancy. In December1927 she contracted Hurston to compile and collect the “music, poetry, folk-lore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art and kindred subjects relating to and existing among the North American Negroes.” If the list reflected Hurston's sensibility, the clause asserting that the material collected would belong to Mason was alien both to Hurston's assertive spirit and her understanding that folklore cannot be owned. Yet, in return for a two-hundred-dollar monthly stipend, Hurston agreed not to share the fruits of her research without Mason's permission.
Hurston signed on in lumber camps in Florida, apprenticed herself to hoodoo doctors in New Orleans, and learned Bahamian dances on a research trip to Nassau. Gaining people's confidence could be difficult. In one turpentine camp the workers thought she was a government agent until she alleviated their suspicions by pretending she was a bootlegger's girlfriend on the lam. To learn work songs, she had to sing them. To understand hoodoo curses and cures, she had to undergo harrowing initiation rituals, which she described in Mules and Men. Hurston's dedication contributed to the failure of a short-lived marriage to Herbert Sheen, a physician and Howard classmate, in 1927.
After compiling the lore, Hurston's challenge was to find an appropriate mode for its presentation. Although she wrote scholarly articles, notably the hundred-page “Hoodoo in America,” published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1931, she believed black folklore was too vital to collect dust on library shelves. Instead she was convinced the lore could form the basis for “the real Negro theatre.” Mule Bone, written in collaboration with Hughes, is the best known of her theatrical ventures, but it was never performed in their lifetimes. More successful were the folklore concerts Hurston produced, beginning in 1932, after she left Mason's payroll. Dramatizations of a day in a railroad camp, the concerts presented work songs, folktales, and other expressions in context, as part of a lived culture. The concerts helped Hurston devise a format for Mules and Men. By placing folklore texts in context and demonstrating the process of their creation, Hurston anticipated what is now common practice among ethnographers. She was years ahead of her time.
Some of Hurston's field work saw print first in Jonah's Gourd Vine. Based in part on her parents’ lives, the novel told the story of a preacher-poet, who defines himself through his art; its centerpiece is a sermon Hurston transcribed from her field notes. Her research had revealed how women were denied access to the pulpit and the store porch, the privileged site of storytelling, and consequently denied the commensurate possibility of self-definition. Throughout her writing, she revised and adapted vernacular forms to give voice to women.
In Hurston's finest novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist Janie Crawford must reject the racist and sexist definitions society would impose on her. As her knowledge of her culture deepens, she gains the wisdom and strength to claim her voice and her self. Many vibrant voices speak through the novel; some seek to silence Janie, while others inspire her. Hurston writes the oral culture brilliantly. “Words walking without masters” is an apt metaphor for both the novel's folk speech and its singular prose.
Their Eyes was written while Hurston was in Haiti conducting ethnographic research on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The account of her field work, Tell My Horse (1938), is notable for its investigation of African survivals, such as “The Nine Night” in Jamaica and vodun rituals in Haiti. Songs appended to the volume were perhaps the first published transcriptions of Haitian Creole.
When she returned to the United States, Hurston worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), drafting sections on folklore for a proposed volume on “The Florida Negro.” In time stolen from the job, she wrote the novel Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Here she explored the myth of Moses, as recorded in the Bible and in the oral traditions of Africa, and as appropriated by American slaves. Although written in a comic mode, Moses was an allegorical history of black Americans and a serious meditation on liberation and leadership. As Hurston realized, her reach in Moses exceeded her grasp. In another disappointment, her 1939 marriage to Albert Price, a twenty-three-year-old WPA employee, lasted only months.
Hurston had been a highly productive writer— Dust Tracks was her sixth book in eight years—but the quantity and quality of her work began to wane. Although her byline appeared frequently in the 1940s in such mainstream journals as American Mercury and the Saturday Evening Post, few pieces captured the verve and flair of her earlier writing. When she essayed political analysis, she wrapped sophisticated critique in the glove of folk humor. Folk humor was passe after Richard Wright's searing 1940 novel Native Son transformed the black literary landscape. Social realism and political protest were the black writers’ mandate. Critics missed the protest implicit in Hurston's art: by rejecting the definitions of themselves the dominant society attempted to impose and by preserving, adapting, and creating their own cultural practices, Hurston asserted, African Americans waged a heroic struggle of resistance.
Her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, a turgid melodrama of white Floridian life, did little for Hurston's literary reputation. Worse, just as the novel was published, Hurston's personal life was shattered by scandal. She was falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy. Devastated both by the charges and the scurrilous press coverage, Hurston presented her passport as evidence that she was in Honduras on an ethnographic expedition when the alleged crime occurred. The case was dismissed in March1949.
By 1950 Hurston was working as a maid in Miami. Seeking to recover happier times, she moved to Eau Gallie, Florida, where she had written Mules and Men. What she wrote now, a novel fictionalizing the life of entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker and a biography of Herod the Great, was unpublishable. Hurston's political views grew more reactionary. Long a critic of civil rights organizations, she concluded that their struggle for integration was predicated on a belief in black inferiority. She wrote the editor of the Orlando Sentinel condemning the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregation unconstitutional. The sensation the letter caused marked Hurston's last public notice. Forgotten and penniless, she died in a Fort Pierce, Florida, welfare home.
Hurston's rediscovery is among the most dramatic chapters in African American literary history. It was inspired first by writers and critics such as Alice Walker, who went “in search of our mothers’ gardens.” For many black women writers, Hurston is a foremother. Critics investigating the impact of oral forms on African American literature find a theoretical foundation as well as a wealth of material in Hurston's writings. Readers respond to the laugh-out-loud humor, the poetry, and the pleasure of her texts.
[See also Nanny.]
Bibliography
- Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, 1977.
- Alice Walker, ed., I Love Myself: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 1979.
- Karla F. C. Holloway, The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston, 1987.
- Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960, 1987.
- Michael Awkward, ed., New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1990.
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,, and Anthony Appiah, eds., Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993.
- John Lowe, Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy, 1994.
- Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 1995
Cheryl A. Wall
