Charley Bevill

Zora Neale Hurston:

Her Life as Art

Harlem, 1925, was "[…] the center of urban black life. If you wanted to write, you went to Harlem. If you wanted to dance, you went to Harlem. If you wanted to effect social change, you went to Harlem. […] If you wanted the best chance at changing your circumstances and you were black, you went to Harlem" (UNC).

Originally known as ‘The New Negro Movement’, the Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement, which centered in Harlem, New York. There was a great migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north. Many were artists, musicians, writers and other intellectuals out to make their mark. "[…A]n unprecedented outburst of creative activity among black Americans occurred in all fields of art" with a large body of literature being produced (Encarta). Because of this, "[m]any critics […] date the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance with the publication of Jean Toomer’s novel Cane (1923). […] Toomer’s novel was one of the first to treat the subject of the African American life with dignity, respect, and realism" (UNC). "During this heady ‘jazz age’, the Harlem Renaissance flourished and a woman from the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, arrived there to ‘jump at de sun’" (Russell 35).

Zora Neale Hurston was her name. The story of this outgoing, independent, and sometimes difficult woman’s life is the material great novels are made of. Hurston has done just that. She has taken aspects of her own life, coupled with the folklore of the Caribbean Black and southern African American "[…] to create realistic black characters and speech in her books, an ability that delighted some critics and irritated others" (Lyons ix).

Zora Neale Hurston was born January 1891, the seventh of eight children. Hurston felt unloved by her preacher father. "He was always threatening to break [my spirit] or kill me in the attempt. [Her mother however encouraged her to learn because s]he didn’t want to ‘squinch my spirit’ too much for fear that I would turn out to be a mealy-mouthed rag doll by the time I got grown" (Dust 29). After many missteps and side roads, Hurston followed her mother’s advice. She studied anthropology at Barnard College and received a degree from Howard University. But "[…] the force from somewhere in space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded" (Dust 221).

Hurston began her journey. She submitted her short story "Spunk" along with the play Color Struck in the National Urban League’s journal, Opportunity 1925 writing contest, winning prizes for both (Russell 36).

Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), is loosely based on the story of her father and mother. The story centers on John Pearson, a good-looking, uneducated but eloquent African American man. John is challenged in his efforts to better his life. In his rise from tenant farmer to preacher, John struggles with his commitment to God and to his wife, Lucy. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Hurston writes:

White "[…] critics praised her highly. A reviewer for "The New York Times Book Review" described Jonah’s Gourd Vine […], as ‘the most vital and original novel’ ever written by an American Negro" (Turner iii). However, many of Hurston’s male contemporaries took offense with her work. Men like Richard Wright viewed Hurston’s portrait of African Americans "as naïve ‘Uncle Tomming’" (Russell 44). What he and others like him failed to see was that Hurston’s work was like their own. Hurston, like themselves, was looking at African American life from and African American perspective. Her stories just happened to include a female perspective. Hurston wrote:

Zora Neale Hurston continued to write. Most of her stories are set in small, southern towns, usually her hometown of Eatonville. Reminiscent of the chorus of a Greek tragedy, the town’s folk in many of her stories watch and comment on the goings-on from the front porch:

Hurston’s porch chorus characters are only slightly involved in the action of the story. However, "[a]nyone passing by could hear the ‘lyin’ sessions’, ‘dozens’, songs and comments about the state of the world" (Russell 36). Their conversations tell her story.

Typically, Hurston separates the male ‘chorus’ from the female ‘chorus’, each with its own version of the story to convey. Perhaps this is an effort to reshape her childhood memory of her mother and father on that porch. Her father "[…] would start to put up an argument that would have been terrific on the store porch, but Mama would pitch in with a single word or a sentence and mess it all up. You could tell he was mad as fire with no words to blow it out with. He would sit over in the corner and cut his eyes at her real hard" (Dust 100).

As a child, Hurston desperately wanted to be a part of that chorus. In her autobiography, she reminiscences about this special place: "For me, the store porch was the most interesting place that I could think of. I was not allowed to sit around there, naturally" (Dust 70). Hurston, as a young girl, felt about the porch much like the heroine, Janie in her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Janie’s life with her second husband, Joe Starks has become strained. She is his trophy, but one he wants no one else to admire. On one of her last sojourns to the store’s front porch, Janie pitches in more than a mere sentence:

In Janie Crawford, Hurston creates a positive heroine. She "[…] is the first black woman in American fiction who is not stereotyped as either a slut, a ‘tragic mulatta’, a mammy or a victim of racist oppression" (Russell 41).

Their Eyes Were Watching God was received well by white critics. However, even with the advent of a positive female role model, the African American male elite of the Harlem Renaissance criticized Zora Neale Hurston. But Hurston wrote from what she knew. She did not create idealized societies in which to promote political agenda. She wrote what was real for her. She wrote of the South. She wrote of her home. She wrote of her people.

There would be "[n]o middle-class assimilationist theories for this one: if blacks were looking for their unique culture, the ‘New Negro’ could find it in his own Southern backyard. It was the songs, tales, language and creativity of the ‘folk’ that gave black existence its distinctiveness" (Russell 35). With this creed and her anthropological interests in hand, Hurston set out to experience and record the folk life and folklore of rural southern African America and the Caribbean.

Hurston believed that the African American contributed a much-needed flavor to the English language. In the mouths of the African American, a formal, dry, factual language blossomed with the richness of metaphor and simile, the double descriptive, and the use of verbal nouns (Russell 38). Hurston’s ear veraciously recorded the spice of southern African American speech and lore. She vividly transmitted the subtle nuances in her dialogue:

"Hurston sought to capture the ‘folk voice’ of the south out of deep respect for its canny inventiveness, subversive humor, and immeasurable impact on the American character" (Seaman).

"[Hurston’s] second book of folklore, Tell My Horse (1938), came out of her search for truth in the practices of voodoo in Haiti and Jamaica […taking] away much of the sensationalism usually associated with investigations of voodoo practices" (Russell 42). However, her short story "Black Death", left a bit of the mystery of supernatural forces for the reader to ponder:

Hurston tells the story of Old Man Morgan’s "masterpiece", the death of Beau Diddely. Again, the dialect is done so authentically, that had the reader not known Beau was from the North, he would have easily recognized the difference in his dialogue with other characters in the story.

Penned ‘a genius of the South’ by Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston produced more literary work than any other African American woman did during the Harlem Renaissance. "Two of her books are considered masterpieces: Their Eyes Were Watching God and Moses, Man of the Mountain" (Lyons ix).

Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist, essayist, journalist, lecturer, maid, manicurist, teacher, "student of voodoo, and the most competent female Afro-American author of her generation" (Turner ii). But her life was no rags-to-riches story. Her last job was as a "[…] maid for a white family in Florida. Her employer discovered her identity accidentally while thumbing through a magazine." (Turner ii). Hurston continued writing until her death of ‘hypertensive disease’ on January 28, 1960. Penniless, "[she] was buried in an unmarked grave in the city’s segregated cemetery. Some twenty years later Alice Walker had a gravestone inscribed and placed near the site of her burial […]" (Russell 45).

Before her death, she published four novels, including Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Hurston’s only novel to deal with Southern White America. She also had in print two collections of folklore, her first being Mules and Men (1935). She produced twelve short stories, two musicals and one libretto for a folk opera (Russell 37). Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, won the Anisfield Wolf award in 1942" (Turner ii).

Zora Neale Hurston is one of many African American female writers whose contribution to the Harlem Renaissance and American literature has gone virtually unnoticed. Thanks to writer Alice Walker’s "search for foremothers", there has been a rebirth of Hurston’s work (Russell vii). Though, out of print for many years, publishers are reissuing her work. Older copies can be found, including original and autographed. However, since most scholars find these additions well out of their price range, The Library of America has released two volumes of Hurston’s work, making collecting affordable.

Some of Hurston’s work is also being published for the first time. Released November 2001, Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folktales from the Gulf States is a collection of Hurston’s misplaced papers from her journeys in the 1920s. According to the introduction, Hurston intended to produce a seven-volume collection of folk tales but only two were published, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse (Seaman). Another work entitled Barracoon is due to be released October 2004.

"Zora Neale Hurston’s gifts to her people and the world have been prodigious. She has inspired countless African-American women writers, among them Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Sherley Anne Williams and many others" (Russell 45). In researching Zora Neale Hurston and the other women of the Harlem Renaissance, I came across a passage in Sandi Russell’s Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers From Slavery to the Present. I find it sums up my own feelings about this journey:

Works Cited

---. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942. The American Negro: His History and Literature Ser.

Introduction Darwin T. Turner. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969.

---. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Foreword Mary Helen Washington. Afterword Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Perennial Classics-HarperCollins, 1998.

Lyons, Mary E. Sorrow’s Kitchen: The Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990.

Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Turner, Darwin T. Introduction. Dust Tracks on a Road. By Zora Neale Hurston. 1942.

The American Negro: His History and Literature Ser. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969. i-v.