Today, Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the great documentarians of African American life. Her exploration of early 20th-century Black life, particularly in the South, is honest, complex, and meticulous in its detail.
She employed her skills as an anthropologist to not only document Black life, but give it a texture, tone, and dialect that accurately represented the communities she had grown up in. However, the perception of Zora’s work was not always this positive, and much of her written legacy came dangerously close to extinction shortly after her death. This is the mighty, if oft-misunderstood, legacy of Zora Neale Hurston.
Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, although all her formative childhood experiences took place in Florida. Both her parents were formerly enslaved and looking for a better life for themselves and their daughter. When Hurston was young, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida. Eatonville was the nation’s first incorporated Black township, and Hurston’s father would go on to become one of its earliest mayors.
Hurston loved Eatonville and the peaceful, prosperous, and communal picture of Black life it painted. This community would go on to deeply influence her work, and Hurston speaks of Eatonville with clear reverence. Hurston describes her hometown as “A city of five lakes, three croquet grounds, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.”
When Zora was 13, her mother died, and her father quickly remarried a much younger woman. This, in combination with his refusal to fund her education, left her estranged from her father. Hurston had a notorious temper, and once nearly killed her step-mother in a fistfight. Looking for a way out, Hurston began working odd jobs to support her dream of going to school. One such job was with a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan musical troupe, in which Hurston was employed as a maid.
At the age of 26, she turned up in Baltimore, Maryland. Still without a high school degree, Hurston lied about her age and enrolled in the public school system, passing as a 16-year-old. The ten years she chopped off would remain gone, as Hurston claimed to be a decade younger for the rest of her life.
After graduating high school she attended Howard University in Washington D.C. where she participated in student government and founded the school’s acclaimed newspaper, The Hilltop. From Howard, she attended Barnard College in New York, where she got a BA in anthropology.
While in New York, Hurston became friends with Langston Hughes, with whom she founded the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! and became the “Queen of the Harlem Renaissance.” She was beautiful, charming, and fiercely intelligent, winning the community’s hearts and minds alike. Hurston was known to throw lively gatherings at her apartment, and despite the fact that she rarely drank and would sometimes spend these gatherings writing in her room, fellow writer Sterling Brown said, “When Zora was there, she was the party.”
Hurston began publishing her writing in 1920. One of her early short stories, which won her some acclaim, was "Sweat" (1926), the story of a woman and her thieving, unfaithful husband who eventually gets his comeuppance. Hurston also got attention for her autobiographical essay "How It Feels to be Colored Me" (1928), in which she recounted her childhood in Eatonville and the shock of moving to an all-white area. While Hurston gained a significant Black readership, she was largely neglected by mainstream literary authorities.
“As a child, after having read The Secret Garden, I, an Indian child with brown skin and coal black hair had envisioined a world with me in Mary's shoes and wondered what it would be like if my eyes were blue and I had porcelain, fair skin. But this project made me realize that I could be myself to create a new narrative that could help another child believe they could be a part of the story without losing their identity.” –Fine Artist Suchitra Bosle
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Hurston eventually moved back to Florida, after which she published an anthology of African American folklore in Florida, Mules and Men. Mules and Men embodied a significant passion of Hurston’s, the anthropological aspect of writing. While Hurston was interested in Black culture on a global scale, traveling to Jamaica and Haiti to study African diasporic religions, her great interest was domestic.
Throughout her career, Hurston would travel around the South conducting interviews, desperate to get at the heart of Black speech and vernacular. Armed with only her charm and her tape recorder, she was committed to writing about African American communities in their own voice.
Hurston once wrote of her stylistic choices: “I know I cannot straighten out with a few pen strokes what God and men took centuries to mess up. So I tried to deal with life as we actually live it, not as the sociologists imagine it.”
Not everyone agreed with this approach, however, and the pushback would only escalate after the 1937 publication of Hurston’s seminal novel: Their Eyes Were Watching God. Many African American writers of this period wanted to use their fiction to remedy the stereotypes of Black people as uneducated or unintelligent and bristled against Hurston’s more folksy depictions. Where Hurston saw her commitment to African American Vernacular English as a way to celebrate and affirm Black life, many of her peers saw it as upholding prejudicial views of Black people and pandering to white audiences. Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1952), and Richard Wright, author of Native Son (1940) were particularly vocal against Hurston. Wright even called her writing in Their Eyes Were Watching God “the minstrel technique” referencing Minstrel Shows that had white actors play Black characters as grotesquely exaggerated stereotypes.
The backlash grew so fierce that Their Eyes Were Watching God slowly went out of print and Hurston fell out of the public eye. Privately, she was devastated. In her eyes, the community of Black writers that she loved and had helped pave the way for, was turning on her. By scorning her writing they rejected the more rural, folkloric depictions of Black life that were not only so much of what she wrote, but so much of who she was.
Zora Neale Hurston died penniless and in complete obscurity in 1960, at the age of 69. She was buried in an unmarked grave. But her story was not quite over, not yet.
After Hurston’s literary death and physical death, her complete literary extinction almost occurred. In the wake of her passing all her belongings, including hundreds of papers of her writing were ordered to be burned. Thankfully, a deputy police officer on-site named Patrick DuVal had known Hurston in her nursing home and thought her writing might be important. He quickly doused the already lit flames, and in doing so, gave Hurston’s legacy a second chance that a few moments later, would have been wholly extinguished.
It would take another 15 years for Hurston’s literary legacy to be resurrected. In 1973, Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, published a short non-fiction essay titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” The piece chronicled Walker’s journey to find Hurston’s unmarked grave, and what Hurston’s work meant to her as a writer. The piece completely revived interest in Hurston’s work and led to many scholars reconsidering the previously held notions about its literary value.
Today, Hurston’s rigorous and detailed accounts of southern Black life have become not only a brilliant piece of fiction for future generations to enjoy and cherish, but a time capsule, an anthropological study, and a testament to the enduring power of her resilient spirit.
The daughter of both enslaved individuals and pillars of a proud Black community, Hurston understood where so many did not that the most powerful stories are the true ones. No matter their complexity, no matter the pushback, the best story we can ever tell is the one that is true.
For more information check out:
“About Zora Neale Hurston,” The Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston.
“In the Key of The Blues: Zora Neale Hurston’s Writing,” Signature Theatre, May 8, 2019.
Norwood, Arlisha, R. “Zora Neale Hurston,” National Women’s History Museum, 2017.
“Zora Neale Hurston,” Biography, Apr 23, 2021.
