The Story of Zora Neale Hurston 

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, and articles.

In the early 1970s, Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple", located the grave that she determined to be Zora's, and so began Zora's second rise from near obscurity to fame.

Whether Zora Neale Hurston was black as coal, or light brown seems to have depended a great deal on the mind-set of the observer. These 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, 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. Some critics put her writing in the same category as minstrel shows; others praised her as the most significant “unread” author in America. 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, and independent. She was also a black woman determined, in the period between 1920 and 1950, to have a career as a Writer.

To a large extent, the attention focused on Zora Hurston’s controversial personality has inhibited any objective critical analysis of her work. Few male critics have been able to resist sly innuendos and outright attacks on Hurston’s personal life, even when the work in question was not affected by her disposition. But these controversies loomed so large in the reviews of her work that 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 literary events signaled the end of the inadequate, sometimes venomous, often highly inaccurate, assessment of Hurston’s life and work. The reissuance of Hurston finest novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God  and the publication of  ILove Myself When I Am Laughing. These were important steps in bringing Hurston to the place her mother meant for her to occupy when she urged Zora to “Jump at de Sun.”

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. 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, and eventually become one of the shapers of the important black literary and cultural movement of the twenties, the Harlem Renaissance? Did Hurston deliberately avoid any condemnation of racism in order not to offend white friends? How did this celebrant of black folk culture become, in later years, a right-wing Republican, 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. 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."  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 that 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 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 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.  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. 

During her years in school, Zora Hurston was frequently in debt, though she worked at all sorts of jobs. Hurston would not be a stranger to either debt or hard work. In 1950, when she was a noted American writer, she was discovered as a Maid to a Wealthy White Woman. 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, 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 controversy. 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.

Just a few books by Zora Hurston include
THERE EYES WERE WATCHING GOD 1937: SWEAT 1926
HOW IT FEELS TO BE COLORED 1928; MULES AND MEN 1935
DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD 1942: SPUNK 1945
TELL MY HORSE,1938: MOSES MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN 1938
JONAH’S GOURD VINE 1934: THE LIFE OF HEROD THE GREAT
SERAPH ON THE SUWANEE 1948 MAGNOLIA FLOWER