Zora Heale Hurston

“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.” Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to poet Countee Cullen

Zora! An incredibly fascinating woman whose life and works ignited the Western historical and literary canon like a force of nature.  In the process, through her works, Zora Neale Hurston widened our horizons, and found her own.  Like Janie in Their Eyes were Watching God, she came to know herself: she "pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder.  So much of life in its meshes! She called her soul to come in and see." 

Zora Neale Hurston, in Humanities magazine.

Zora was smart and strong. No barriers stopped her. She worked all her life to be true to herself.  Nor did her determination wither in the face of adversity. She called up the age-old struggle between humans and nature in ways that uncovered the sources of human inventiveness and creativity, and it moved her.  

In the novel Their Eyes were Watching God,  a violent hurricane, more fierce than any other, howled through Eatonville, filling the shanties with water and the townfolks with fear.  "They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."   The raging hurricane unleashed nature's chaos, but it also revealed the human capacity to survive the wrath of God. 

Love this stamp and have saved a
 few for posterity.

I learned a lot about Zora Neale Hurston when I worked with the Florida Humanities Council, an NEH state affiliate.   The Florida council funded many Zora grant projects. It also had a Chautauqua-like character who traveled from town to town bringing Zora's voice to life; wrote articles about her in FORUM magazine; sponsored scholar-led workshops and seminars for public school teachers about her life and work.  

When I retired from public humanities work, I taught Zora in my Women's History classes at Eckerd College.  Their Eyes were Watching God was a favorite.  It was an opportunity as well to explore how the Western literary canon changed over time as more African American, immigrant, and women's works were discovered. 
 
After her mom died, Zora went to an elementary school in Jacksonville that "made me know that I was a little colored girl." That didn't stop her. After high school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore and a few years at Howard University, her world opened up. She started writing, focused on  scholarly interests, and in 1925 got into Barnard college in New York to study with famous anthropologist Franz Boas.  It was the takeoff of her pioneering anthropological and ethnographic field research and life-long interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore.  

Hurston brought her unique interests to her brief involvement with the 1930s Harlem Renaissance. During this time she befriended Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, and others.  She didn't stay long.  "She was not a joiner of movements or trends. Like her hometown, Hurston was iconoclastic." (Trebek)  She carved out her own niche wherever she went in her lifelong quest for her own identity.  That scared some folks, inspired others. 

Her field work and research are illustrative.  She did research in New Orleans, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean, in addition to Florida.  While working in Haiti, she studied voodoo and zombies.  She published her groundbreaking anthropological work in Mules and Men, about African American folk tales and Florida culture, and  in Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica.  For some folks the subjects were unusual, even suspect; for others they helped define the growing universe of anthropology and folklore studies in which she made her mark. 

Zora collection folk music with Woodie
Guthrie, part of her WPA work. This is a
 great story in itself. Lib. of Congress.

For all her achievements, Zora struggled in poverty most of her adult life. She had to scrape like a mule to make ends meet. In 1938, she went to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), receiving a government check for field work she did in Florida. In 1941, she worked briefly for Paramount Pictures, earning $100 a month, the highest salary she would ever earn. In 1942, Dust Tracks on a Road, her autobiography, was published. It won the Anisfield-Wolf award for best book on racial relations, but it was the $1,000 award she needed most. (Trebek)

Harold Newton, one of the 26 "highwaymen" artists, including one woman, 
Mary Ann Carroll. I like to think Zora knew some of these young 
artists in Fort Pierce. She surely knew the landscape intimately. 

Hurston lived the rest of her life in Fort Pierce, Florida, where she found a community of artists and kin folk who welcomed her.  She briefly worked as a domestic to pay her bills, and then as a substitute teacher.  She published articles sharing her views on controverial issues of the day, including her opposition to the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. She considered the ruling “insulting rather than honoring my race.”  She abhored notions of "victimhood." 

 “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

Zora was Black pride and Woman proud. She was a warrior until she died from the complications of a stroke at the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in January 1960.  

Friends raised money to pay for her casket and burial, but there was no money for a marker on her grave. Her name and her work slid into obscurity, her books no longer in print. In Dust Tracks, Zora sang a song to herself.  "I have been in sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands."  

A decade later, Alice Walker, poet and author of "The Color Purple," resurrected Zora.  She gathered stories about her life, talked to Floridians who remembered her in Eatonville, and went searching for Zora's unmarked grave in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, a segregated and terribly neglected cemetary.  When she found the site, deep within the tall grasses, weeds and snaked-filled grounds, she determined to put a permanent marker there. In a gesture of homage and respect, Walker bought a tombstone, a memorial marker to Zora Heale Hurston, "Genius of the South."   I remember reading Alice Walker's article about her Zora search in MS magazine in 1975, the year I finally finished my dissertation at the University of Wisconsin.  Walker's determination and persistence, along with Zora's, resonated.

A Zora revival followed.  Her books were reprinted and came to light. Robert E. Hemenway's literary biography in 1980 brought Hurston further attention.  Scholars studied her works, which were included in college curricula. Still are. The lovely town of Fort Pierce created a "Dust Tracks" heritage trail to draw in tourists, a nice complement to its Highwaymen artists memorials and the Gallery of A.E. Backus, a white artists who took the Highwaymen under his wing. The gallery sells their paintings as well as Backus' own works.    

Eatonville, Zora's hometown, hosts a popular ZORA festival every year. The Florida council was among the Festival's funders, which featured scholars and authors telling about the various facets of her life. The Humanities council, as well as NEH and the State, funded seminars for public school teachers, who in turn brought Zora into their classrooms across the State.  Her legacy lives on.  

"Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance."

Some Sources:
  *  https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/75wfe2mn9780252008078.html, for Robert E. Hemenway, a literary biography of Zora Neal Hurson, with a forward by Alice Walker, U. of Illinois Press, 1980.
*  "Zora's Place," Anne Trubek, Oberlin College, Humanities magazine, November/December 2011. 
*    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_M-PfhgMsg.  Zora's work and life were included in
"Soul of a People," a television documentary on the Federal Writers’ Project, from which came an exhibit that traveled to thirty libraries around the country. NEH has funded many Zora projects.
*  https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-09-074/
*  https://www.allisonbolah.com/site_resources/readin_list/Walker_In_Search_of_Zora.pdf.  Alice Walter, "In search of Zora Neale Hurston, MS magazine, March 1975.
*  https://www.floridamemory.com/onlineclassroom/zora_hurston/photos/
*  https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-floridas-black-highwaymen-painters-made-living-jim-crow-south   The Highwaymen refer to a group of  26 black self-taught landscape artists (one of whom was a woman, Mary Ann Carroll), who created over 200,000 paintings despite facing fearsome race and cultural barriers. Mostly from the Fort Pierce area, where they had the good fortune to meet Al Backus, a white artists who took them under his wing, they painted beautiful landscapes of Florida and made a living selling them door-to-door throughout florida from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. They also peddled their work from the trunks of their cars along the eastern coastal roads A1A and US 1. Their paintings once sold for pennies, maybe up to $25 or $30, but they are now worth thousands of dollars. 

added after post  * https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/02/24/zora-neale-hurston-literary-hero-fame-florida/4566091002/?fbclid=IwAR1iOl6o9Qp46r0kcjJDeW8aFz82gNwa5YHqp_h-CvbB19msVHMHIcxrJJM