Our love/hate relationship with Zora Neale Hurston

Black Collegian, Jan 1994 by Williams, Donna M

If Zora Neale Hurston were walking the Earth today like a natural woman, folks would still, no doubt, be loving her or hating her with a vengeance. They'd either be inviting her to dinner, knowing that she would dominate the conversation with her famous "lies" from Eatonville, Florida, or they'd be running like crazy from her exasperating presence. Actually, Zora does live on in academia, and, literary jargon notwithstanding, the same schizophrenia holds true for the parade of scholars who, having recently discovered the prolific writer/anthropologist/folklorist, have shot down, held up, dissected, psychoanalyzed, apologized for, rationalized, applauded, and decried Zora's life and works. They either love or hate her.

Without a doubt, Zora's still messing with us. With her it's hard to tell from which afterlife locale she's throwing her voice. Not only has there been renewed interest in her life, works, and role in the Harlem Renaissance among scholars, but also HarperPerennial has issued a new series edition of her works, including Moses, Man of the Mountain, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mules and Men, Dust Tracks on a Road, and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. (For a good working list of Hurston's novels, scholarly papers, plays, articles, and short stories, see Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography by Robert E. Hemenway, University of Illinois Press.)

Actress Ruby Dee powerfully performs Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men on audio cassette (Harper Collins Publishers). And the town of Eatonville is sponsoring a Zorafest in January 1994. Probably the most telling Zora revisited event occurred when, in 1973, Alice Walker waded through waist-high weeds" in the neglected, segregated African-American section of the Garden of the Heavenly Rest cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, and placed a tombstone on a depression in the ground that may or may not have been Zora's grave.

Ambivalence best describes the process and the conclusion of trying to make peace with Zora. But make peace with her we must, if we are to understand some of the intellectual dynamics motivating our own progress, or inertia, as a race of people struggling for identity and global and self-respect.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, probably in 1901. Eatonville was the first self-governing African-American town in America, a fact Zora dismisses at some length with unconcealed pride in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Given white America's proclivity for killing African Americans for sport, it was an "uppity," highly dangerous undertaking. Amazingly though, Zora reports a relatively peaceful coexistence with neighboring white towns throughout her childhood.

Zora absorbed Eatonville's independent, risk-taking spirit into her own personality. She was a hotheaded free spirit who dared to talk back to her elders as a child and who had the nerve to smoke in front of white folks as an adult.

One of Zora's favorite childhood pastimes was eavesdropping on the "lying" sessions in Joe Clark's store. The townspeople, usually men but sometimes women, too, would gather to gossip and tell stories that would speak volumes on their feelings about slavery, their color, white folks, God and the devil, love and relationships, magic, animals--life. These stories kindled Zora's love for African-American culture and were the beginning of her lifelong interest in Southern African-American folklore.

After her mother died, Zora lived the life of a foster child, rooming in the homes of relatives. Eventually she made her way North. It was an uphill climb all the way, but her quick intelligence and willfulness finally propelled her to Howard University where she received an associate degree in 1920. Her short story, "John Redding Goes to Sea," was published in the May 1921 issue of Stylus, the campus literary periodical. She attended Barnard College in New York on full scholarship in 1925, where her love for African-American culture was intellectualized and systematized through the discipline of anthropology under Franz Boas. She was able to slip off the "tight chemise" of her culture and look at it from a somewhat more objective perspective.

Never wanting to escape her roots as other scholars tended to do, when Zora was offered the chance to return South to collect folktales, she jumped at the opportunity. She was also published and nurtured as a Renaissance artist by Charles S. Johnson, editor of the Urban League's organ, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life.

Like Josephine Baker, who scandalized European audiences and embarrassed her people with her "neo-African" dancing in the late '20s and '30s, Zora irritated the African-American scholars of the day by refusing to dilute her folk art with a dash of their race consciousness. Zora was thus caught up in the whirlwind of the Great Debate that rages on even today.

Zora was anxious to get on with the business of living, of being an artist. She had no patience for the race men ("Negrotarians"), like W.E.B. DuBois and Richard Wright, who put racial issues over the integrity of art. Her philosophy was "art for art's sake." Her essay, "Art and Such," published for the first time in 1990 in Reading Black, Reading Feminist (Penguin Group), loudly proclaims her position on the issue. Zora, in turn, was harshly criticized by Wright for her "minstrel" interpretations of African-American rural life. Wright, a member of the Communist party, as noted by Hemenway, seemed personally offended by Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of the most beautiful, moving love stories in African-American literature. He wrote that the novel "carried no theme, no message, no thought," and during the 30 years that Wright dominated the African-American literary scene, Hurston's novel was out of print. Even Dr. Allain Locke, Harvard PhD, Rhodes scholar, and Zora's mentor at Howard, called her characters "pseudo-primitives." Today the Great Debate manifests in some critics' fury over Terry McMillan's, Alice Walker's, and others' lack of proportion in their African-American male/female characterizations and neglect of serious race issues.