Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow (Reprint)

Originally the introduction to I love myself when I am laughing … and then again when I am looking mean and impressive: a Zora Neale Hurston reader. © 2020 [Copyright Holder]. Reprinted with permission of Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

“She walked into my study one day by telephone appointment; carelessly, a big-boned, good-boned young woman, handsome and light yellow.”

—Fannie Hurst, Zora Hurston’s
employer; novelist ¹

“Zora was rather short and squat and black as coal.”

—Theodore Pratt, writer for the
Florida Historical Society ²

“She was reddish light brown.”

—Mrs. Alzeda Hacker, a friend
of Zora Hurston ³

Whether Zora Neale Hurston was black as coal, light yellow, or light brown seems to have depended a great deal on the imagination and mind-set of the observer. These three divergent descriptions of her color serve as a paradigm for the way Zora Hurston, the personality, and Zora Hurston, the writer, have been looked upon by the world which judged her. Outstanding novelist, skilled folklorist, journalist, and critic, Zora Hurston was for thirty years the most prolific black woman writer in America. And yet, from what has been written about her, it would be difficult to judge the quality of her work or even to know what color she was.

In all of the various personality sketches, full-length literary studies, forewords, and afterwords inspired by Hurston, there is a broad range of contradictory reactions. There were those who saw her as a highly reserved and serious writer, so private that few people ever knew her correct age or that she had been married several times; she was also described as loud and coarse, playing the happy darky role to entertain whites. Some critics put her writing in the same category as minstrel shows; others praised her as the most significant “unread” author in America. One critic wrote that her work reveals an unconscious desire to be white. But a student who heard Hurston speak at Bennett College in 1941 said that what the students were most impressed with was this woman’s deep sense of racial pride.

Certainly nothing ever written about her or her work is lukewarm. Partly, this is attributable to her own unique personality. From the anecdotes and apocryphal tales told about Hurston, one must conclude that she was nothing if not controversial, highly outspoken, arrogant, independent, and eccentric. She was also a black woman determined, in the period between 1920 and 1950, to have a career as a writer, which in itself was eccentric. Though she lived in controversy, died penniless, and was out of print for thirty years, Zora Neale Hurston did indeed establish herself as a writer and folklorist. In her thirty-year career, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous stories, articles, and plays.

To a large extent, the attention focused on Zora Hurston’s controversial personality and lifestyle has inhibited any objective critical analysis of her work. Few male critics have been able to resist sly innuendoes and outright attacks on Hurston’s personal life, even when the work in question was not affected by her disposition or her private affairs. But these controversies have loomed so large in the reviews of her work that once again the task of confronting them must precede any reappraisal or reevaluation of her highly neglected work. Jumping up and down in the same foot-tracks, as Zora would call it.

Three recent literary events signaled the end of the inadequate, sometimes venomous, often highly inaccurate, assessment of Hurston’s life and work: the appearance of Robert Hemenway’s excellent and thoroughly researched book, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography ⁴ ; the reissue of Hurston’s finest novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God ⁵ ; and the publication of this volume, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … These are three important steps in bringing Hurston to the place her mother meant for her to occupy when she urged Zora to “jump at de sun.”

Questions and controversies have surrounded Hurston and her career since she stepped into New York City in 1925 to join the Harlem Renaissance. Like the “lyin’ tales” Hurston collected in her folklore research, some have become as familiar as legend and have the same degree of veracity. But still the questions must be posed and answered if one is to understand the richly complicated Zora Hurston. How did this poor, unschooled girl from a peasant background in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, manage, in the early 1900s, to get to Howard University, Barnard College, and Columbia University, and eventually become one of the shapers of the important black literary and cultural movement of the twenties, the Harlem Renaissance? Is there any truth to the often-made accusation that Hurston played the obsequious role of the swinging, happy darkie in order to sustain the financial support of wealthy white patrons? Did Hurston deliberately avoid any condemnation of racism in order not to offend white friends? What is the truth behind the 1948 morals charge that she sexually abused a ten-year-old boy? How did this celebrant of black folk culture become, in later years, a right-wing Republican, publicly supporting a staunch segregationist and opposing the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision? Why, in the last decade of her life, did she remove herself from all her acquaintances and contacts and die in poverty in a Florida county welfare home?

Any probing of the life and times of Zora Neale Hurston must begin in the town of Eatonville, Florida, where she was born, probably around 1901. ⁶ Incorporated in 1886 as an all-black town, Eatonville, Florida, five miles from Orlando, was, according to Hurston’s autobiography, a “pure Negro town—charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all.” ⁷ It was neither ghetto, nor slum, nor black bottom, but a rich source of black cultural traditions where Zora would be nourished on black folktales and tropical fruits and sheltered from the early contacts with racial prejudice that have so indelibly marked almost all other Afro-American writers. It was a sheltering for which Hurston paid dearly, as it caused her to develop attitudes that were out of the mainstream, particularly in the protest years of the forties.

The most critical fact of Zora Neale Hurston’s childhood was that her mother, Lucy Hurston, who encouraged her daughter’s indomitable and creative spirit, died when Zora was nine. In the years that followed, Zora went from one relative to another and was eventually rejected by her father and his new wife. She hired herself out as a domestic in several homes, and, around the age of fourteen, she joined a Gilbert and Sullivan traveling dramatic troupe as a wardrobe girl and maid, ending up, after eighteen months, in Baltimore. There she enrolled in Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University), with one dress, a change of underwear, a pair of oxfords, and the intelligence and drive that were her hallmarks. ⁸ After graduation in June 1918, she went on to Howard University in Washington, DC. She received an associate degree in 1920, though she studied intermittently at Howard until 1924, getting As in courses she liked, and Fs in those she didn’t. ⁹

During her years in school, Zora Hurston was frequently in debt, though she worked at all sorts of jobs from a manicurist in a Washington barbershop to a maid for distinguished black families. Throughout her life, Hurston would not be a stranger to either debt or hard work. In 1950, when she was a noted American writer, she was discovered “masquerading” as a maid for a wealthy white woman in a fashionable section of Miami. ¹⁰ Though she claimed she was temporarily “written out” and wanted the experience for an article about domestics, the truth was she was living in a shabby studio, had received a number of rejection slips for stories, was hustling speaking dates and borrowing from friends, and was flat broke. These were some of the most critical facts of her adult life. On the other hand, during her early writing period, Zora Hurston was extremely adept at finding people to give her money to further her career, a talent which sparked the accusation that she pumped whites for money, compromising her own dignity in the process. Fellow artist Langston Hughes, who for years was supported by the same white woman as Hurston, said that “in her youth she was always getting scholarships and things from wealthy white people, some of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the Negro race for them, she did it in such a racy fashion…. To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect ‘darkie.’ …” ¹¹

Behind that spurious comment was an old feud between these onetime good friends over their collaboration in writing the play Mule Bone. Each accused the other of stealing a part of the play. Robert Hemenway concludes, in his biography of Hurston, that while most of the play was Hurston’s work, she reneged on the partnership when Hughes tried to include a third party, a woman, in the deal. Hughes’s self-serving, chauvinistic remark about the incident, “Girls are funny creatures,” was designed to make Hurston look childish and fickle, rather than like a colleague who felt betrayed, however mistaken she might have been. ¹²

Critic Nathan Huggins gives Hurston the same kind of going over in his book, Harlem Renaissance. ¹³ Huggins says Hurston thrived on her dependent relationship to an elderly white patron, Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, and deliberately played the role of the simple, childlike primitive. In his critical evaluation of Hurston, Huggins devotes an entire page to Wallace Thurman’s satire of Hurston in his book, Infants of the Spring, in which Thurman caricatures Hurston as Sweetie Mae Carr, a Negro opportunist cutting the fool for white folks in order to get her tuition paid and her stories sold. Nearly every word of the four and one-half pages on Zora Hurston is taken up with whether or not Hurston’s “darky act” was real or put on, and there is little effort by Huggins to examine her literary contributions to the period.

There are other invasions of Hurston’s personality under the guise of critical commentary. Theodore Pratt of the Florida Historical Society says she was pampered and spoiled, having been given too many scholarships, fellowships, and grants. And Darwin Turner’s lengthy critique of Hurston in his book, In a Minor Chord, makes clear that, like previous critics, he intends to evaluate Hurston’s work on the basis of her personality. Turner describes her as a “quick-tempered woman, arrogant toward her peers, obsequious toward her supposed superiors, desperate for recognition and reassurance to assuage her feelings of inferiority….” Then he concludes: “It is in reference to this image that one must examine her novels, her folklore, and her view of the Southern scene.” ¹⁴ It is ironic and telling that in his critique of Renaissance writer Jean Toomer in the very same book, Turner does not evaluate Toomer’s work on the basis of his marriage to a white woman or his refusal to be identified with blacks after the publication of Cane. On the contrary, Turner delicately tiptoes around that controversy and declares that Toomer’s vehement insistence that he was neither “Negro” nor Caucasian—but a member of the “American” race—is “philosophically viable and utterly sincere.” ¹⁵ Few critics ever considered Hurston’s idiosyncratic views “philosophically viable,” and even fewer excused her because she was sincere. Although Darwin Turner blames Zora Hurston’s obscurity on the fact that she got sandwiched in between the exotic primitivism of the Harlem Renaissance and the protest mood of the forties, another possibility suggests itself: she was a black woman whose entire career output was subjected to the judgment of critics, both white and black, who were all men.

Much of the criticism of Zora Hurston that was commonplace from the twenties on seems to have stemmed from her early relationship with a white patron. Just what did go on between Zora Hurston and Mrs. R. Osgood Mason of Park Avenue, New York, and why did it inspire such severe and, in some cases, venomous attacks on Hurston? According to the letters she wrote to the wealthy Mrs. Mason, Zora Hurston signed a contract on December 8, 1928, granting her a monthly allowance of two hundred dollars so that she could collect folklore in the South, gathering materials for her first book. The contract stipulated that Hurston’s folklore collections would become Mrs. Mason’s exclusive property, and that she would exercise full control over Hurston’s work because she felt Hurston could not be trusted to know best what to do with it. ¹⁶ Over a period of five years, Mrs. Mason gave Hurston approximately fifteen thousand dollars for her work and self-support. ¹⁷ Although the entire collection, except for the contract, is a one-way correspondence—all of the letters between them are from Hurston to Mrs. Mason—there is a great deal about Mrs. Mason that can be read between the lines. She must have been an extremely controlling woman because Zora Hurston was kept walking a tightrope so as not to offend her. Hurston wrote an article in which she said that “white people could not be trusted to collect the lore of others,” and “Godmother” Mason was so upset that Hurston had to hastily explain that “Godmother” was not included in that remark. ¹⁸ “Godmother” encouraged a childlike dependency from those under her patronage and demanded obedience and loyalty in return for the monthly checks. Hurston felt that she could not make a move in her career without this woman’s permission, and, according to the terms of the contract, she was absolutely correct.

The letters reveal some unpleasant things about Hurston too. She was capable not only of surviving the terrible constrictures of this arrangement, but of dredging up some pretty self-serving flattery for the woman she addressed variously as “Dearest Godmother,” “little mother of the primitive world,” “the immaculate conception,” and “a glimpse of the holy grail.” Some letters sound almost mystical, as though Hurston is petitioning favors from a high priestess. This poetic tribute to Mrs. Mason, dated Sunday morning, 1931, would be humorous in its excessiveness if it were not also so hopelessly servile:

Out of the essence of my Godmother
Out of the True one
Out of the Wise one I am made to be
From her breath I am born
Yes, as the world is made new by the breath of Spring
And is strengthened by the winds of Summer
The Sea is stirred by its passion
Thus, I have taken from the breath of your mouth
From the vapor of your soul I am made to be
By the warmth of your love I am made to stand erect
You are the Spring and Summer of my existence. ¹⁹

The next letter, dated August 14, 1932, begins:

Now about the money, Godmother.

Beneath all the subterfuge and posturing in these letters is one cold, inescapable fact: Zora was hard pressed for the money for her career. She needed to travel to the South to spend time with people who knew the folk stories and would tell them only to trusted friends. Few black scholars had the kind of money to finance such an expedition. But even the contract with Mrs. Mason did not relieve Hurston of money worries. At one time she had to itemize her expenses for Mrs. Mason to show her how she was handling the money. She had to account for such obvious necessities as shoe repair, car fare, and medicine; even a box of Kotex is listed. Once or twice she mentions the intestinal problem that was beginning to trouble her, in order to justify buying medication for treatment. In a letter dated April 27, 1932, Hurston was reduced to begging “Godmother darling” for a pair of shoes:

I really need a pair of shoes. You remember that we discussed the matter in the fall and agreed that I should own only one pair at a time. I bought a pair in mid-December and they have held up until now. My big toe is about to burst out of my right shoe and so I must do something about it. ²⁰

There are many letters from this period documenting Hurston’s efforts to become self-supporting. She staged concerts and plays in order to make money on her own, and at one point proposed utilizing her culinary skills by becoming a “chicken specialist,” making chicken soup, salad, à la king, and supplying hot chicken at a moment’s notice to fifty to one hundred customers—“an exclusive mouth to mouth service” to New York’s finer hostesses. ²¹ In her efforts to economize, she washed her face with laundry soap and ignored a growing and painful stomach ailment. 

If one thinks of the arrogant, individualistic woman who once went after her domineering stepmother with a hatchet, then these letters are strangely un-Hurston-like. But Zora Hurston was fiercely determined to have a career, no matter what or who had to be sacrificed. In consideration of that determined will, perhaps the most Hurston-like statement in the whole passel of letters is one which is unintentionally revealing of the use to which Mrs. Mason had been put: “I shall wrassle me up a future or die trying.” ²²  

Zora Hurston had been able to “wrassle up” a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied under the noted anthropologist, Dr. Franz Boas. Later she continued to work under him at Columbia University. Her association with “Papa” Franz, as she called him, was partly responsible for sending Hurston back to her hometown of Eatonville in 1927 to do formal folklore research. There was a gold mine for a folklorist, a rich storehouse of authentic tales, songs, and folkways of black people—unresearched by any black scholar until Hurston. Thus began the unique effort of Zora Neale Hurston to tell the tales, sing the songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings and doings of the Negro farthest down. ²³ It was out of this material that Hurston would fashion her career as folklorist and novelist.

The decade of the thirties was the meridian of Hurston’s career. In 1935, she published her first book of folklore, Mules and Men, based on material she collected in Florida and Louisiana. A classic in form and style, Mules and Men goes far beyond the mere reproduction of the tales; it introduces the reader to the whole world of jook joints, lying contests, and tall-tale sessions that make up the drama of the folk life of black people in the rural South. The tales are set in the framework of a story in which Hurston herself is a character. The other characters, who in conventional folklore collections are merely informants, are real personalities in Mules and Men, exposing their prejudices, love affairs, jealousies, while they tell the old stories about how black people got black or how John outwitted Ole Massa during slavery. In her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, also published in the thirties, Zora Hurston continued to use the folk life of Eatonville as the essential experience. Loosely based on the lives of her parents, Jonah’s Gourd Vine presents one of Hurston’s many powerful women characters—Lucy Pearson, wife of the town’s philandering preacher, John Pearson. On her deathbed, Lucy Pearson is such a strong-willed woman that John is afraid to be in the same room with her, and with the advice she gives Isis (probably Zora), she bequeaths the spirit to her daughter: “You always strain tuh be de bell-cow, never be de tail uh nothin’.” ²⁴ With these publications and the ones that were to follow in the thirties, Zora Hurston had begun to take her work in directions that would earn her both high praise and severe censure. In an era when many educated and cultured blacks prided themselves on removing all traces of their rural black origins, when a high-class “Negro” virtue was not to “act one’s color,” Zora not only celebrated the distinctiveness of black culture, but saw those traditional black folkways as marked improvements over the “imaginative wasteland of white society.” ²⁵

Then, in 1937, came the novel in which Hurston triumphed in the art of taking the imagery, imagination, and experiences of black folk and making literature—Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston says in her autobiography that she wrote the novel in seven straight weeks in the Caribbean after a love affair ended, and, though the circumstances were difficult, she tried to “embalm” the novel with all of her tenderness for this man.

Perhaps because the novel’s main character, Janie Woods, has a succession of husbands and finally finds joy and fulfillment in her third marriage, the novel has generally been thought of as a love story about love. On a much deeper and more important level, however, its theme is Janie’s search for identity, an identity which finally begins to take shape as she throws off the false images which have been thrust upon her because she is both black and woman in a society where neither is allowed to exist naturally and freely. Hurston uses two images from nature to symbolize Janie’s quest: the horizon and the blossoming pear tree. One, the horizon, suggests that the search is an individual quest; the other, the pear tree in blossom, suggests a fulfillment in union with another. Janie describes her journey to find herself in a language that takes us deep into black folk traditions: ²⁶

Ah been a delegate to de big ’ssociation of life. Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin’ is just where Ah been dis year and a half y’all ain’t seen me. ²⁷

Folk language, folkways, and folk stories work symbolically in the novel as a measure of a character’s integrity and freedom. Those characters whose self-esteem and identity are based on illusion and false values are alienated from the black folk community, and, conversely, those, like Janie herself, who struggle against those self-alienating values toward a deeper sense of community, experience wholeness. Janie is both humiliated and angered by the attempts of her first two husbands to win her with materialistic gifts and to make her subservient to them. Thus the dramatic tension of the novel takes place on two levels: Janie has to resist both male domination and the empty materialism of white culture in order to get to the horizon.

Janie (née Crawford) Killicks Starks Woods ²⁸ is one of the few—and certainly the earliest—heroic black women in the Afro-American literary tradition. Critic Robert Stepto says that the primary voice in a literary tradition is “the personal, heroic voice, delineating the dimensions of heroism by aspiring to a heroic posture … or expressing an awareness of that which they ought to be.” ²⁹ Janie assumes this heroic stature by her struggles for self-definition, for autonomy, for liberation from the illusions that others have tried to make her live by or that she herself has submitted to. Moreover, she is always the aware voice, consciously undergoing the most severe tests of that autonomy.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston the creative artist and Hurston the folklorist were perfectly united. Zora Neale Hurston went on to publish two more books in the next two years—Tell My Horse (1938), a book of folklore from her experiences in Haiti, and another novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), a re-creation of the Moses myth with black folk characters. By the end of the thirties, she deserved her title: the best and most prolific black woman writer in America.

If the thirties were Hurston’s meridian, they were also the beginning of a groundswell of criticism that would become the intellectual lynching of Zora Neale Hurston. The 1936 review of Mules and Men written by educator and critic Sterling Brown praised Mules for its dramatic appeal but was extremely critical of the book’s failure to reveal the exploitation and terrorism in southern black life. This was criticism of Hurston that became commonplace, though undeserved. Brown felt that southern black life was rendered “pastorally” in Mules, the characters made to appear easygoing and carefree in a land “shadowed by squalor, poverty, disease, violence, enforced ignorance, and exploitation.” ³⁰ It was not a bitter enough book for Brown, especially considering that 1935, the year of the Scottsboro trial, was a very bitter time for blacks. Brown was expressing an honest concern; Hurston’s point of view is open to misinterpretation because her views on race, true to her personality, were unpredictable, ambivalent, sometimes contradictory, but certainly never conventional.

In the twenties, thirties, and forties, there were tremendous pressures on black writers. Militant organizations, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, expected them to be “race” people, defending black people, protesting against racism and oppression; while the advocates of the genteel school of literature wanted black writers to create respectable characters that would be “a credit to the race.” Many black writers chafed under these restrictions, including Hurston, who chose to write about the positive side of the black experience and to ignore the brutal side. She saw black lives as psychologically integral—not mutilated half-lives, stunted by the effects of racism and poverty. She simply could not depict blacks as defeated, humiliated, degraded, or victimized, because she did not experience black people or herself that way. In her now famous and somewhat controversial essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she boldly asserts:

But 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…. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. ³¹

Sadly for Zora Hurston’s career, “tragically colored” was in vogue in the forties. Richard Wright’s best sellers, Uncle Tom’s Children (1937); Native Son (1940); and Black Boy (1945), were clearly in the mode of radical racial protest literature. Wright’s black characters, in contrast to Hurston’s, are victimized, hunted people who, in Hurston’s view, created the impression that black lives were nothing more than the sum total of their oppression. They were “a problem,” economically deprived and psychologically crippled. Hurston was determined to write about black life as it existed apart from racism, injustice, Jim Crow—where black people laughed, celebrated, loved, sorrowed, struggled—unconcerned about white people and completely unaware of being “a problem.” Wright said Hurston’s characters were nothing but minstrels. In a niggling review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937, he says the novel “carries no theme, no message, no thought”; it is just a “minstrel technique” to make white folks laugh. ³² Richard Wright, it must be noted, brooded aloud in about “the Black Boy strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions….” ³³

The great power of Wright lay in his ability to depict the violence and brutality of oppression and the resulting tension in black life; but these preoccupations were also restrictions. Being black was such grimly serious business to Wright that he was incapable of judging Hurston’s characters, who laugh and tease as well as suffer and who do not hate themselves or their blackness. But Wright was one of the big names of the forties. He set the model for the period, while Zora Hurston “suffered through devastating critical and popular neglect, inspired no imitators [her work being out of print] and finally died with not even a marker to identify her grave.” ³⁴

The controversy over Hurston’s work and her political views, which surfaced after the publication of Mules and Men in 1935, mushroomed and spread in the forties and fifties as Hurston, typically erratic, continued to make unorthodox and paradoxical assertions on racial issues. She was quoted in one newspaper interview as saying that the Jim Crow system worked, and that blacks were better off in the South because, although there was no social intermingling, blacks had the “equivalent” of everything whites had. ³⁵ Roy Wilkins of the NAACP wrote a scathing rebuke of Hurston in New York’s black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, accusing her of being a publicity hound and selling out her people in order to promote her books. ³⁶ Wilkins obviously did not question the accuracy of the quote, and Hurston insisted that she had been misquoted, which was probably true, given that she had few illusions about Jim Crow or the South. She hated, however, the hypocritical notion that intolerance was located in the South, and that, by comparison, the North was a haven of equality. 

They [northern whites] use the Negro vote up there to get power, and then bar us from jobs and decent living quarters, and if there is any protests, [they] riot, and terrify Negro workers away from town and jobs, and then laugh up their sleeves while they brush it off with folk-lore about the south the Sout [sic] is certainly doing its bit toward discrimination down here, but they are not pulling off that up there. That is a monstrous insult to our intelligence, or is it? ³⁷

In another news article, entitled “Author Plans to Upbraid Own Race,” Hurston was quoted as saying she was planning a book “that would give her own people ‘an awful going over,’ particularly the ones who talk about the tragedy of being Negroes.” In typical Hurston fashion, she emphasized that what she deplored even more than prejudice was the “appalling waste of young genius” while prosperous Negroes, who could help these young black boys and girls, complain that they “can’t go to tea at the Ritz.” ³⁸

Hurston’s most highly controversial stand was her opposition to the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision, which she criticized because she thought it implied the inferiority of black teachers, black students, and black schools in the South. She resented any suggestion that whites were superior and that blacks could learn better if they went to school with them. This was consistent with her cultural philosophy that blacks had adorned a rather pallid American culture with colorful, dramatic, and dynamic contributions. In every art form, she saw truly original expression rooted in black culture. In language, for example, Hurston claimed that

whatever the Negro does of his own volition he embellishes. His religious service is for the greater part excellent prose poetry. Both prayers and sermons are tooled and polished until they are true works of art…. The prayer of the white man is considered humorous in its bleakness. The beauty of the Old Testament does not exceed that of a Negro prayer. ³⁹

Little wonder, then, that she, as well as many other southern blacks, feared that they would be the losers in the integration plan. It is both ironic and sad to realize that Hurston would not have been denounced for any of these views in the sixties or seventies. She might even have been considered militant.

For Zora Hurston, the forties were “Hell’s Basement.” In his biography of Hurston, Hemenway calls this chapter in her life “The Pots in Sorrow’s Kitchen,” after the old Gulla proverb, “Ah done been in sorrow’s kitchen and ah licked de pots clean.” Almost like an augur of what the coming years held in store for her, Zora began the decade with a bitter divorce from her second husband ⁴⁰ , a twenty-three-year-old man named Albert Price III, who claimed in his countersuit that Zora was practicing hoodoo on him. ⁴¹ In 1942, her autobiography, , was published—a strangely disoriented book Dust Tracks on a Road which Alice Walker calls “oddly false-sounding.” ⁴² Zora used all sorts of manipulative and diversionary tactics in the autobiography to avoid any real self-disclosure. The sections on her adult life are a study in the art of subterfuge. The chapter on “Love” begins,

What do I really know about love? I have had some experiences and feel fluent enough for my own satisfaction. Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much. That is the way it is with me, but whether I know anything unusual, I couldn’t say. Don’t look for me to call a string of names and point out chapter and verse. Ladies do not kiss and tell any more than gentlemen do….

But pay no attention to what I say about love…. Just because my mouth opens like a prayer book, it does not have to flap like a Bible. And then again, anybody whose mouth is cut cross-ways is given to lying, unconsciously as well as knowingly. ⁴³

The autobiography provides a fairly clear view of Hurston as a child, and it is especially useful for detailing her relationships with her mother, father, and Eatonville, but the rest of it rambles on from one pose to another, sometimes boasting about her achievements and at all times deftly avoiding self-revelation. She was later to admit that she did not want to write the book at all because “it is too hard to reveal one’s inner self.” ⁴⁴ The mask Hurston assumed in was a sign of the growing Dust Tracks evisceration of her work. After Dust Tracks, which was a commercial success, “her mission to celebrate black folkways lost its public intensity.” ⁴⁵ Although she still collected folklore for her own use, she did not write about it after 1942.

The 1940s continued their spiraling trend downward for Zora Hurston. In 1945, she was stricken with a gallbladder and colon infection, a condition which became chronic and seriously impaired her ability to support herself. That same year, her publisher, Lippincott, rejected her proposal for a book on the lives of upper-class blacks. In the essay “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” written in 1950 for Negro Digest, Hurston indicated her belief that the racist American publishing industry was uninterested in the “average struggling non-morbid Negro,” because there was more money to be made exploiting the race problem with stereotyped stories of simple, oppressed sharecroppers. Zora spent part of 1947 and 1948 in British Honduras, where she wrote the major portion of her worst novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). All of the main characters in Seraph are white, and, apparently, Zora wrote this strange book to prove that she was capable of writing about white people. The intent may have been admirable, but all the white characters in Seraph sound exactly like the Eatonville folks sitting on Joe Clarke’s front porch. The result is an awkward and contrived novel, as vacuous as a soap opera. It was as though, in abandoning the source of her unique esthetic—the black cultural tradition—she also submerged her power and creativity.

Hurston sailed home from Honduras to take her turn in sorrow’s kitchen. On September 13, 1948, she was arrested in New York and charged, along with two other adults she had never met, with sodomizing a young boy, the son of a woman who had rented her a room during the winter of 1946–47. The evidence presented was so flimsy and so contra-dictory—Hurston was out of the country during the time of the alleged crime, and the boy was found to be psychologically disturbed—that the district attorney, convinced of Zora’s innocence, ordered the case dismissed. A court employee leaked the story to a national black newspaper. The October 23, 1948, issue of the New York Age featured these headlines: “NOTED NOVELIST DENIES SHE ‘ABUSED’ 10-YEAR-OLD BOY: ZORA NEALE HURSTON RELEASED ON BAIL.” The Afro-American, a black Baltimore newspaper, released an even more sensationalized account, using this quote from the novel Seraph on the Suwanee: “I’m just as hungry as a dog for a knowing and doing love,” intimating that this quote might represent the author’s own desperate need for love. ⁴⁶ The papers accurately described Hurston as “hysterical and almost prostrate.” She was terribly demoralized and even contemplated suicide: “I care nothing for anything anymore. My country has failed me utterly. My race has seen fit to destroy me without reason, and with the vilest tools conceived of by man so far…. I have resolved to die.” ⁴⁷

This tragedy did not kill Zora. Nor, as it has been popularly recounted, did she retire immediately to obscurity, eccentricity, and penury. But the last decade of her life—the fifties—was a difficult time, mainly because she had very little money and few means of self-support other than her writing, which was not going well. She did a few journalistic pieces for the Saturday Evening Post and an anti-Communist article for the American Legion Magazine that documents a developing political conservatism. She supported the Republican Taft in the 1952 presidential primary and denounced Communism during the rabid McCarthy era. This growing conservatism, which was interpreted as antiblack, is difficult to explain. Hurston always saw herself as a self-made success, and she had the kind of individualism and egoism that generally accompanies that belief. Moreover, her very positive experiences in Eatonville encouraged her to believe that brilliance and talent will out, regardless of political conditions. Thus, she was able to dismiss slavery as an anachronism which no longer concerned her, since all the slaveholders were long since dead and she was too busy getting on with the future to care. ⁴⁸ It was a naïve and dangerous viewpoint, and one that led directly to her right-wing politics.

With the one thousand dollars she received from the Saturday Evening Post article, Hurston moved to a one-room cabin in Eau Gallie, Florida, where she lived quite peacefully for five years, 

digging in my garden, painting my house, planting seeds…. I have planted pink verbena, and around the palms and the park-like ground west of the stones, I have scattered bright colored poppies. Going to let them run wild …

Living the kind of life for which I was made, strenuous and close to the soil, I am happier than I have been for at least ten years. ⁴⁹

Still, there was the problem of money and the recurring stomach ailment. Scribner’s rejected a manuscript in 1955, and she was forced to work as a librarian at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida in 1956 for $1.88 per hour, hating every minute of it. In 1956, her landlord sold the little cabin where she had lived modestly but happily for five years. She moved to Fort Pierce and worked briefly as a substitute teacher. In 1959, weighing over two hundred pounds and having suffered a stroke, Zora Neale Hurston, penniless, entered the Saint Lucie county welfare home, and, three months later, on January 28, 1960, she died. Contrary to rumor, Hurston did not die in total obscurity. More than a hundred people attended the funeral services, a testament to the fact that she was well known and loved by the people who perhaps knew her best. ⁵⁰

Robert Hemenway has a term for the genius of Zora Hurston. He calls it her “autonomous imagination.” Partly that just means that Hurston did as she pleased. More importantly, it means that she insisted on a medium, however unorthodox, that would satisfy her need to be both folklorist and creative artist. She succeeded magnificently in Their Eyes Were Watching God. When Langston Hughes urged the young black writers of the Harlem Renaissance to create a truly racial art based on the rich cultural heritage of black people and to stop trying to ape white writers and artists, in all probability, he did not realize how prophetically he spoke of Hurston:

[The common folks] furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. ⁵¹ (emphasis mine)

Change himself to read herself, and this is a perfect description of Hurston. She believed wholeheartedly in the beauty of black expression and traditions and in the psychological wholeness of black life. With little to guide her, except fidelity to her own experience, she documented the survival of love, loyalty, joy, humor, and affirmation, as well as tragedy, in black life.

Who can help wondering what would have been the difference in Zora Hurston’s life and career if there had been a large black reading public, and if she had been able to earn enough money to be self-supporting? Behind those deceptively simple “ifs,” and the conditions they allude to, are the very severe complications in Zora’s career that would have destroyed a weaker person—that did, in fact, diminish her powers so that we will never know the full potential of this pioneer artist.

“What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmother’s time? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.” ⁵² The answer is shown in the life of Zora Neale Hurston. It meant that the black woman who chose to work as an artist, as creator, would be subjected to the same kind of violence that a black domestic worker had to face. It meant the kind of economic oppression that reduced Hurston to beg her publishers to look at her work—even after she was an established writer. It meant that, besides the struggle every writer faces to find her own voice, to combat loneliness, she would have to work with little hope of triumph.

And yet, she did work. In poverty and ill health, dogged by an undeserved scandal, and without the support of any academic or intellectual community, Zora Neale Hurston worked as writer and scholar for thirty years. She worked without the freedom and peace, without the time to contemplate, that Virginia Woolf insisted were essential for any woman to write. She worked consistently without the necessary five hundred pounds a year, without a room of her own with lock and key. Indeed, she worked most of the time without a door of her own on which to put a lock. What she left us is only a fraction of what she might have accomplished. We should be grateful for the work she did.

We should be grateful for her survival.

1. Fannie Hurst, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Personality Sketch,” Yale University Library Gazette 35 (July 1960): 17.[↑]
2. Theodore Pratt, “A Memoir: Zora Neale Hurston: Florida’s First Distinguished Author,” Negro Digest (February 1962): 54.[↑]
3. Telephone interview with Mrs. Alzeda Hacker, October 19, 1977. Mrs. Hacker’s description most closely corresponds with photographs of Hurston and other eyewitness reports.[↑]
4. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) [↑]
5. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God ((Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978). Originally published in 1937 by J. B. Lippincott Company[↑]
6. Hemenway, p. 13. There are no surviving birth records, and Hemenway reports that Hurston was purposely inconsistent about her age, dispensing fictitious birth dates when she was trying to impress someone with either her youth or her age.[↑]
7. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1942, 1971), p.3[↑]
8. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks, p. 151[↑]
9. Hemenway, p. 18[↑]
10. Randy Discon, “Author Found Masquerading as Maid for ‘Change of Pace,'” Philadelphia Daily News, March 30, 1950, p. 6.[↑]
11. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), p. 239.[↑]
12. Hemenway, pp. 146-147.[↑]
13. Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 75.[↑]
14. Darwin Turner, In a Minor Chord (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 98.[↑]
15. Turner, p. 35.[↑]
16. Contract between Mrs. R. Osgood Mason and Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Library, Washington, DC.[↑]
17. Hemenway, p. 105.[↑]
18. Zora Neale Hurston, Letter to Alain Locke, June 14, 1928, Alain Locke Papers.[↑]
19. Zora Neale Hurston, Letter to Mrs. Mason, Sunday morning, 1931, Alain Locke Papers.[↑]
20. Zora Neale Hurston to Mrs. Mason, April 27, 1937.[↑]
21. Zora Neale Hurston to Mrs. Mason, September 25, 1931.[↑]
22. Zora Neale Hurston to Mrs. Mason, November 25, 1930.[↑]
23. Dust Tracks, p. 177[↑]
24. Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1934, 1971), p. 206.[↑]
25. Hemenway, p. 162[↑]
26. Mary Helen Washington, “Zora Neale Hurston: The Black Woman’s Search for Identity,” Black World 21 (August, 1972). This idea, which I am expanding here, was first developed in the Black World essay.[↑]
27. Their Eyes, p. 18[↑]
28. The main character, born Janie Crawford, is married three times – to Logan Killicks, Jody Starks, and Vergible (Tea Cake) Woods.[↑]
29. Robert B. Stepto, “I Thought I Knew These People: Richard Wright and the Afro-American Literary Tradition,” Massachusetts Review 28, No. 3 (Autumn, 1977): 528.[↑]
30. Sterling Brown, “Old Time Tales,” review of Mules and Men, 1936. Unidentified clipping, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut.[↑]
31. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” The World Tomorrow 11 (May, 1928): 216.[↑]
32. Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, in New Masses (October 5, 1937): 23.[↑]
33. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1945), p. 33[↑]
34. June Jordan, “On Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston: Notes Toward a Balancing of Love and Hatred,” Black World 23 (August, 1974): 5.[↑]
35. Zora Neale Hurston, in New York World-Telegram, article by Douglas Gilbert, “When Negro Succeeds, South Is Proud, Zora Hurston Says,” February 1, 1943.[↑]
36. Roy Wilkins, Amsterdam News, February 27, 1943[↑]
37. Zora Neale Hurston, Letter to Alain Locke, July 23, 1943, Alain Locke Papers.[↑]
38. Zora Neale Hurston, New York World-Telegram, February 6, 1943[↑]
39. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (London: Wishart, 1934), p. 26.[↑]
40. Hurston was at least thirty-eight. She had been married previously to Herbert Sheen, a fellow student at Howard University. They were separated after eight months and divorced a few years later. Zora said in her autobiography that her love affairs always conflicted with her work, and her work took precedence.[↑]
41. Hemenway, p. 274[↑]
42. Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South,” Ms. (May, 1974): 67.[↑]
43. Dust Tracks, pp. 249, 256[↑]
44. Hemenway, p. 278.[↑]
45. Hemenway, p. 288.[↑]
46. Hemenway, pp. 319-323. Hemenway’s notes give the most accurate examination of the story of the morals charge. This summary is based on his findings and conclusions.[↑]
47. Hemenway, pp. 321-322.[↑]
48. Dust Tracks, p. 282.[↑]
49. Hemenway, p. 340.[↑]
50. Alice Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” Ms. 3 (March, 1975): 87.[↑]
51. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in The Negro Renaissance: An Anthology, eds. Michael W. Peplow and Arthur P. David (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1975), p. 472. This essay first appeared in the Nation in 1926[↑]
52. Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” p. 60.[↑]