In her introduction to Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Maya Angelou states: “It is difficult, if not impossible, to find and touch the real Zora Neale Hurston” (xii). Hurston’s life has been surrounded by questions and controversy, and many of these questions, especially about her adult life, are not answered in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston’s autobiography is contained in three volumes: her “official” autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road; her famous anthropological work, Mules and Men; and her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is the first self-conscious effort by an American ethnic writer to simultaneously subvert patriarchal discourse and to give voice to women of color.
Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of eight children. Her father, John Hurston was a sharecropper, carpenter and Baptist preacher, and her mother Lucy Ann Potts had been a schoolteacher. Within a few years of her birth, Hurston’s family moved to the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, where her father preached at the Baptist church and later became mayor on three occasions. Hurston recalled sitting on the gatepost in front of her parent’s house when she was only six or seven years old and boldly chatting with white and black passers-by. When her mother scolded her for her “forward” behavior, her grandmother spoke on her behalf, telling her to “jump at the sun.” Her mother died in 1904 when Hurston was thirteen years old, causing some dramatic changes in her daughter’s life. Her father quickly remarried, and Hurston discovered an “adversary” in his new wife.
Because of the conflict with her stepmother, Hurston left home at the age of fourteen, first to care for her brother’s children and then, at the age of sixteen, to work as a lady’s maid for a soprano in a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan operatic troupe. When the soprano, “Miss M”, left the troupe to marry, Hurston was suddenly unemployed. She sought employment as a domestic servant, and the woman she worked for helped her enroll in high school at Morgan Academy. Hurston wrote of these years that she was determined to “be back in school”, and that she was able to continue her education thanks to her brother’s financial aid. She was actually twenty-six years old when she entered Morgan, but she listed her age as sixteen and her birth date as 1901. After completing her high school diploma at Morgan Academy in Baltimore in 1918, she worked briefly as a waitress and a manicurist, and then went on to attend Howard University in Washington D.C. After four years, Hurston received an Associate’s Degree at Howard and studied intermittently there until 1924.
Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, and played an integral part in the Harlem Renaissance. Soon after her arrival in New York City, she received a scholarship to attend Barnard College where she studied Cultural Anthropology under Franz Boaz, the man who later directed and influenced much of her anthropological research. Boaz not only inspired Hurston’s work in anthropology but also encouraged and supported her first trip back to Eatonville to conduct formal folklore research. While studying at Barnard, Hurston worked as a secretary for Fannie Hurst who later wrote Imitation of Life, a story of a black woman passing as white. After her graduation from Barnard College in 1928, Hurston married a sweetheart from her Howard University days, Herbert Sheen, but the marriage was short-lived.
By the late 1920s, Hurston had published a number of short stories and plays. Although, like her friend and colleague, Langston Hughes, she came under the patronage of Mrs. Osgood (Charlotte) Mason and received several fellowships and awards in the early years of her career, Hurston was always beset by financial difficulties. Her work, like that of a number of Harlem Renaissance artists, musicians and writers, was hindered by the economic depression that began in the late 1920s and extended through the decade of the 1930s. She worked hard and achieved several literary and dramatic successes, but she often could not afford necessities and was at least on one occasion “reduced to begging” Mrs. Mason for a pair of shoes. Despite physical and financial hardships, Hurston wrote and researched for thirty years and in that time she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous stories, articles and plays. Most of her biographers agree, however, that the work she produced was only a fraction of what she might have accomplished, had her economic circumstances been different.
Her first short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea”, was published in 1921 while she was still at Howard University. This story was followed by “Drenched in Light”, “Spunk”, Magnolia Flower”, “’Possum or Pig”, “The Eatonville Anthology”, and “Muttsey” which were all published between 1924 and 1926 while she was living in New York City. She authored several plays during this period, and in 1930, produced a collaborative effort with Langston Hughes: Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. Unfortunately, the two friends fought bitterly over who deserved credit for the play, and as a result, it was never produced.
From 1927-1932, Hurston traveled throughout the south financed by a fellowship from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and by her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. Her efforts in folklore-collecting were directed by her friend and mentor, “Papa” Boaz. During this tour, she claimed to have interviewed a former slave. In 1934, she published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, the story of John Pearson, who migrates to an all-black town in Florida and becomes the preacher in its Baptist church. The town of Sanford, Florida is obviously modeled on Eatonville, just as Pearson is obviously a prototype of John Hurston. In 1935, she published Mules and Men, her collection of sixty-nine folk myths, personal accounts and songs that takes the reader from Eatonville, Florida across the south to New Orleans, Louisiana. While in New Orleans she was initiated into the voodoo or “hoodoo” religion. One of the mule stories that Hurston collected in Mules and Men is the story of “The Talking Mule”. The mule is freed from an abusive owner, but eventually dies and is “dragged out” by the townspeople and given a mock funeral. At least twenty of the folktales in the volume involve animals who talk with people or with each other. The purpose of these talking animals is to comment on their human counterparts. The funeral is a parody on the religious ritual of call-and-response, a parody that focuses the reader’s attention on the patriarchal structure of the church and the community.
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, was written over a seven week period while the author was in Haiti in 1937. Hurston received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Haiti to collect folklore and write about the culture of the Caribbean. She often worked all day collecting anthropological data and then sat up late into the night writing what would become her most famous novel. The impetus for such an outpouring of words was a love affair with Albert Price III, a young graduate student of West Indian descent whom she had left in New York. Although Price and Hurston married, they later divorced and the relationship was strained during the period in which Hurston wrote her novel. The conflict in Price and Hurston’s relationship evidently centered in two areas: the difference in their ages – he was twenty-three while she was over forty – and his objections to the intrusions of her career. Although Hurston waited more than three years after the publication of Their Eyes to end her marriage to Price, she realized as early as 1937 that a long-term relationship with him was, in all probability, doomed.
The setting for Their Eyes is her hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Except for the names of the protagonists, the “fictional” Eatonville is difficult to distinguish from the “real” one. Hurston embodies much of her own emotional life in the creation of her protagonist, Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods. The owner of the store in Hurston’s Eatonville was Joe Clarke, called “Jody” by his wife. The owner of the store in her fictional Eatonville is Joe Starks, the man Janie called “Jody”. Although the resemblance between the real Mrs. Clarke and the fictional Mrs. Starks is minimal, both women worked in stores and were abused by their husbands. In both communities the porch of the town’s store served as a meeting place for the exchange of “lies” and ideas.
Hurston’s voice can be heard as she relates the experiences of Janie’s childhood and the structures of her subsequent relationships. Hurston traces Janie’s origins through her mother, Leafy, who was raped by the local schoolmaster. Leafy abandoned her baby; consequently, Janie was raised by her grandmother, Nanny. Nanny, who was born into slavery, tells Janie that even though “De Nigger woman is de mule uh de world,” she had at once time “wanted to preach a great sermon about coloured women sittin’ on high.” Nanny was denied her pulpit, and freedom found her with a baby in her arms, so she tells Janie that she had planned great things for her daughter. After her daughter’s life took a tragic turn, Nanny had placed all her hopes on her grandaughter, Janie.
Both Hurston and her protagonist, Janie, left their hometowns and what was left of their families. Hurston and Janie became wanderers; Hurston explains it through Janie: “…sittin’ still worries me. Ah wants tuh utilize mahself all over.” In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston recalls the events surrounding her mother’s death: “That hour began my wanderings. Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit.” The journey motif that runs throughout African American slave narratives is recaptured in the novels and autobiography of Hurston.
One can compare the language used to describe the young man who inspired Their Eyes with the language used to describe the younger man with whom Hurston fell in love. Many of the incidents between Janie and her lovers, Jody and Tea Cake, are undoubtedly taken from Hurston’s relationship with A. W. Price. In Dust Tracks, Hurston recalls a conversation she had with Price. “I almost laughed out loud. That was just the way I felt. I hated to think of him smiling unless he was smiling at me. His grins were too precious to be wasted on ordinary mortals, especially women.” In Their Eyes, Janie and Tea Cake, the man who freed her to be herself, “made lots of laughter out of nothing . . . They went inside and the laughter rang out first from the kitchen and all over the house.” There were, however, insecurities in both relationships. As Hurston’s career began to make more demands on her, Price’s insecurities surfaced. “He said once with pathos in his voice, that at times, he could not feel my presence. My real self had escaped him.” Tea Cake likewise tells Janie” “Yo’ face jus’ left here and went off somewhere else.”
Both Hurston and Janie sustain violence as a result of these insecurities. In Dust Tracks, Hurston’s voice excuses the conflict and attempts to soften the blows. She relates an incident in which she slapped Price’s face. “He paid me off then and there with interest.” The conflict was caused by jealousy over a casual kiss from an old friend. In Their Eyes, Tea Cake is also jealous and fearful of another man. “Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behaviour justified her jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. No brutal beating at all.” Interestingly, after Tea Cake beats Janie, God intervenes in the form of a flood, and Tea Cake eventually loses his life in the events that follow the flood.
Hurston spent much of 1936 to 1938 in Jamaica and Haiti gathering folklore. Tell My Horse was published in 1938, a travelogue and study of Caribbean “hoodoo”. She took the name of the book from voodoo ceremonies in which a person who is possessed by a spirit is ridden like a horse by that spirit. In 1939, Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain, and her version of the biblical account with Moses as an Egyptian, a black magician. The central drama of the novel is Moses’ ethnic dilemma. Although he is born a prince, he begins to understand and identify with the plight of the Hebrew slaves. He leads the Hebrews out of Egypt but in the end declines a crown and decides to live a life of anonymity.
Hurston published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, in 1942. It was a witty and vivid account of her life to date but was criticized for its gross and obvious inaccuracies. Although the major events of her life are recounted, Hurston also incorporated her rich fantasy life into the book, seeming to take seriously her own statement that anyone “whose mouth is cut crosswise is a liar”. Her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, was published in 1948. Like several of her other novels, the setting was Florida but the protagonists were a white family named Meserve. By the decade of the 1940s, Hurston’s literary career was waning. She taught for a short time at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, North Carolina. She moved to California and wrote for Warner Brothers and was even employed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Her reputation was tarnished in 1948 when she was accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy. The charges were later dropped, but the scandal haunted her for years. During World War II and in the post-war years, Hurston had injured her reputation among civil rights advocates by refusing to address the subject of racism. In the 1950s, she wrote articles against granting blacks the right to vote in the south because much of the voting was corrupt and against the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, arguing that blacks did not need to go to school with whites in order to learn. In 1952, she angered many African Americans when she campaigned for Senator Robert Taft, ultraconservative GOP candidate for president.
In her last years, Hurston moved back to the area of Eatonville, Florida where she worked as a newspaper journalist, substitute teacher and finally as a domestic servant. Her books were out of print and she was beset by poverty. She continued to write, published three short stories in the early 1950s and worked on a final novel, The Life of Herod the Great. She never completed her final novel, as she sank into depression. She suffered a stroke in 1959, and was placed in the Saint Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She died in the nursing home on January 28, 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Zora Neale Hurston has had a tremendous impact on the African American literary canon. Her literary contribution includes major novels, collections of short stories, essays and plays. Hurston was the “womanist” novelist whose literary contributions help mold a new generation of writers. Alice Walker discovered the works of Zora Neale Hurston in 1970 and described her as her literary “foremother”. In August, 1973, Walker traveled to Florida to locate Hurston’s unmarked grave. She had a marker placed on the spot that was most likely Huston’s grave, and then dedicated herself to calling attention to Hurston’s genius. Through Walker’s efforts, Hurston’s work received the critical acclaim that it deserves. Her books are now back in print, and being taught in university literature courses. Eatonville, Florida is now home to the annual Zora Neale Hurston festival. In 2001, an unpublished manuscript of Hurston’s was discovered and published under the title, Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folktales from the Gulf States.
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Citation: Johnson, Yvonne. "Zora Neale Hurston". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 March 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2272, accessed 15 January 2025.]
