Zora Neale Hurston

(1891-1960)
Novelist, Playwright, Poet

From the 1930s through the 1960s, Zora Neale Hurston was the most prolific and accomplished black woman writer in America. During that thirty-year period she published seven books, many short stories, magazine articles, and plays, and she gained a reputation as an outstanding folklorist and novelist. She called attention to herself because she insisted upon being herself at a time when blacks were being urged to assimilate in an effort to promote better relations between the races. Hurston, however, saw nothing wrong with being black: "I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal." Indeed she felt there was something so special about her blackness that others could benefit just by being around her. Her works, then, may be seen as manifestos of selfhood, as affirmations of blackness and the positive aspects of black life.

Hurston wrote in her autiobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), that she "heard tell" she was born on 7 January 1903 in Eatonville, Florida, the fifth of eight children. However, one brother gave 1891 as the year; another brother, Everette, was convinced by Hurston to set his age back seven years to cover the obvious discrepancies between what he said and what she wrote; and her brother John cited the 1903 date in a 1936 affidavit. Hurston used 1903 most oftenóbut variously gave the year as 1900, 1901, and 1902. Hurston scholars Robert Hemenway and Alice Walker used 1901; but the 1900 census records subsequently proved she was born in 1891. Her parents, Lucy Ann Potts, a country schoolteacher, and John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, met and married in Alabama, then moved to Eatonville, Florida, north of Orlando. Her father, a three-term mayor, helped codify the laws of this all-black community, the first to be incorporated in the United States.

Lucy Hurston died in 1904, and this fact more than any other disrupted Hurston's schooling and her life. She was passed around from relative to relative, rejected by her father and his second wife, and forced to fend for herself. At fourteen Hurston left Eatonville, working as a maid for whites but refusing to act humble or to accept sexual advances from male employers; consequently, she never stayed at one job long. Hired as a wardrobe girl with a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company, she traveled around the South for eighteen months, always reading in hopes of completing her education. Later she enrolled in a Baltimore high school, Morgan Academy (now Morgan State University), while working as a live-in maid. 

In the fall of 1918 Hurston entered Howard University, attending the college preparatory program until 1919 and taking university courses intermittently until 1924, paying for her expenses by working as a barbershop manicurist and as a maid for prominent blacks. At Howard she met and studied under poet Georgia Douglas Johnson and the young philosophy professor Alain Locke. She also met Herbert Sheen, who, on 19 May 1927, became her first husband. As Sheen later told Hurston's biographer, Hemenway, the marriage was doomed "to an early, amicable divorce" because Hurston's career was her first priority. In a 1953 letter to Sheen, Hurston recalls the idealistic dreams they shared in their youth, regretting nothing because she lived her life to the fullest.

Hurston had been extremely imaginative and curious as a child; these qualities inform her fiction. She records in her autobiography that as a child "I used to climb to the top of one of the huge chinaberry trees which guarded our front gate and look out over the world. The most interesting thing that I saw was the horizon.... It grew upon me that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like." This tendency toward the picaresque colors her work. Her main characters are dreamers who long for experience and spiritual freedom and want to break with the fixity of things. Hurston's first short story, "John Redding Goes to Sea" (May 1921), was written in this picaresque tradition and was published in Stylus, the official magazine of the literary club at Howard University. The protagonist of "John Redding Goes to Sea" cannot "stifle that longing for the open road, rolling seas, for peoples and countries I have never seen". The story brought the young author to the attention of sociologist Charles S. Johnson, and by January 1925 Hurston was in New York City with "$1.50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope." 

She could not have arrived in New York at a more opportune time. The Harlem Renaissance, the black literary and cultural movement of the 1920s, was already under way. Countee Cullen, Du Bois were already in New York. Other black writers from all overóClaude McKay from Jamaica, Eric Walrond from Barbados, Langston Hughes from Kansas, Wallace Thurman from Salt Lake City, Rudolph Fisher from Rhode Island, Jean Toomer and Sterling Brown from Washington, D.C.ówere flocking to New York, as Hughes so aptly put it, to "express their individual dark-skinned selves." Charles Johnson was just founding Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, and he was interested in material that exemplified "New Negro" (the phrase coined by Locke) philosophy. Hurston's works celebrated blackness, and she became an enthusiastic contributor to the New Negro Renaissance literary movement. 

The short story "Spunk" was published in Opportunity in June 1925 and in Locke's landmark publication The New Negro (1925). "Spunk" is a story about Spunk Banks, a "giant of a brown skinned man" who goes too far in manipulating and intimidating people. Set in a black village much like Eatonville, the story follows Banks, who "ain't skeered of nothin' on God's green footstoolónothin'." His overweening pride brings his downfall when he "struts 'round wid another man's wife" (Lena Kanty) and triggers revenge from the husband. Joe Kanty, however, is killed when he sneaks up behind Banks, for his pocket razor is no match for Spunk's army .45. Free after a brief murder trial, Spunk ironically finds he has lost his courage, for he believes he is being haunted by a big, black bobcat, Joe's ghost "done sneaked back from Hell!" The townspeople even see Joe Kanty differently; no longer thought of as the town coward, he is considered courageous for seeking revenge with only a razor. Mysteriously caught in the saw blade at the mill, Spunk suffers a grisly death; both Spunk and the townspeople credit Joe's spirit for pushing him into the saw. Hubris is punished as the once-heroic "giant" is quickly forgotten. His corpse, covered by a dingy sheet, lies on three boards on sawhorses at his wake, as the women "ate heartily ... and wondered who would be Lena's next," and the men "whispered coarse conjectures between guzzles of whiskey." 

"Spunk" illustrates Hurston's growth in the way she shows rather than tells about the characters. Her dialogue, using the rural black dialect of central Florida, reflects this increased narrative strength. In addition, Hurston seems more sure of her special expertiseóthe richness of Eatonville's folk beliefs. For example, the black bobcat (Joe's ghost), the three "cooling boards," and the turning of Spunk to the east as he dies all reflect this folklore. 

At an awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity, Hurston's works won second prizes; but more important, Hurston herself was introduced to two people: novelist Fannie Hurst (Imitation of Life, 1933), who gave Hurston a job, and Annie Nathan Meyer, who arranged for her to receive a scholarship to Barnard College. Between 1925 and 1933 Hurston saw several of her works published, including "John Redding" and the tale "Muttsy," which appeared in Opportunity, and a play, The First One, collected in Charles Johnson's Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (1927). Hurston had made a propitious beginning, but many frustrating years passed before she published a full-length work. 

"Sweat," published in the single issue of Wallace Thurman's avant-garde magazine Fire!! (November 1926), depicts the death of a marriage. Founded by Hurston, Hughes, and Thurman, advocated writing for art's sakeócontrary to writers such as Locke and Du Bois, who urged blacks to reflect a racial perspective, especially in portraying relationships with whites. Hurston succeeds in blending the vivid and intense fire of passions in this portrait of the marriage of a black couple, Delia and Sykes Jones. Set in Eatonville, the story shows how the hard work ("sweat") of Delia is counteracted by the hatred of her adulterous husband, who beats her brutally after two months of marriage, openly flaunts his extramarital affairs from the beginning, and chooses as his mistress a woman named Bertha, a big, fat "greasy Mogul ... who couldn't kiss a sardine can ... throwed out de back do' 'way las' yeah." Delia has slaved over whites' laundry to earn a living for fifteen years; she alone has paid for the house, and now Sykes promises to give the house to Bertha. To scare off his wife, who is terrified of snakes, he first tries taunting her with his snakelike bullwhip. When the "long, round, limp and black" whip falls across her shoulders and slithers along the floor beside her, she is so frightened that "it softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it was a full minute before she could cry out or move." When that does not work, he pens up a rattlesnake near the back door. As a final resort, Sykes tries to kill his stubborn wife by placing the deadly snake in the clothes hamper just before she is to sort the clothes. Delia escapes the poisonous fangs, but Sykes is bitten and dies. Delia refuses to warn or even help him, having understood finally how deadly his hatred of her has become; she watches him with "his horribly swollen neck and his one open eye shining with hope." 

As in several of Hurston's stories, the woman is strong, proud, independent; the man does not appreciate these strengths because he feels emasculated and dependent. Sykes attempts to prove his masculinity by cruelly abusing his wife. The townspeople comment on how despicably Sykes treats Delia, saying he had "beat huh 'nough tuh kill three women let 'lone change they looks." This mistreatment is described by general-store owner Joe Clarke: 

There's plenty men dat takes a wif lak dey do a joint uh sugarcane. It's round, juicy, an' sweet when dey gets it. But dey squeeze an grind, squeeze an' grind an' wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat's in 'em out. When dey's satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats 'em jes lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey throws 'em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin' while dey is at it, an' hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hanging after huh tell she's empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein' a cane-chew an' in de way.

Hurston reinforces this narrative action of Sykes's horrible abuse of Delia with the traditional symbolism of the snake to represent evil in the world. Referred to as "Ol Satan" and "Ol Scratch," the snake Sykes brings home to terrify Delia is identified with Sykes's evil (the s sounds in his name hint at the comparison), although Freudian critics may see the snakelike whip in phallic terms as well. 

"Eatonville Anthology" was published in three installments in the Messenger (September-November 1926) and collected in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979). This series of fourteen brief sketches, some only two paragraphs long, illustrates her artistic use of cultural experiences, fusing folklore studies with fiction. These self-contained tales include glimpses of a woman beggar, an incorrigible dog, a backwoods farmer, the greatest liar in the village, and a cheating husband. They become an appropriate transition to mark the end of her short stories of the 1920s and the beginning of her work as folklorist. 

Near the end of her studies at Barnard, Hurston came to the attention of anthropologist Franz Boas, who was then teaching at Columbia. Impressed by a term paper Hurston had written, Boas decided to make an anthropologist of her. Under Boas's tutelage, Hurston learned the value of the material she had already incorporated into her fiction. She learned to view the good old lies and racy, sidesplitting anecdotes that were being passed around among black folk every day in her native Eatonville as invaluable folklore, creative material that continued the African oral tradition and reflected the ebb and flow of a people. Encouraged by Boas and a $1,400 fellowship from the Carter G. Woodson Foundation, Hurston decided to collect some of this African-American lore, to record songs, customs, tales, superstitions, lies, jokes, dances, and games. 

Unfortunately, her Southern, country subjects balked at her "Barnard" accent, and her mission failed. As she says in her autobiography: "When I went about asking, in carefully-accented Barnardese, `Pardon me, do you know any folktales or folk-songs?' the men and women who had whole treasuries of material seeping through their pores looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around here. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn't I try over there?" As a result, Hurston was not able to collect enough material "to make a flea a waltzing jacket." She did not make the attempt again until she accepted the patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason.