Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays. Some of her work, namely Tell My Horse (1937), explored ethnomusicological methods of study long before there were formal boundaries for the discipline, especially not boundaries that included the respectful study of communities of color. Hurston's unique background and exceptional approach to anthropology laid key foundations for the growth of ethnography, literature, and Africana Studies.

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories.

In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research as a scholar at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.

She also wrote about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!!. After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935), and her first three novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.

Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. In 1975, fifteen years after Hurston's death, interest in her work was revived after author Alice Walker published an article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (later retitled "Looking for Zora"), in Ms. magazine.

In 2001, Hurston's manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" (2018), about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), one of the last survivors of slaves brought illegally to the US in 1860, was also published posthumously.

Early life

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891, the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). All four of her grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, who later became a carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891. This was her father's hometown and her paternal grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church. Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there. Sometimes she claimed it as her birthplace.

As an adult, Hurston often used Eatonville as a setting in her stories—it was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. Hurston grew up in Eatonville and described the experience in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me". Eatonville now holds an annual "Zora! Festival" in her honor.

Hurston's mother died in 1904. Her father married Mattie Moge in 1905. This was considered scandalous, as it was rumored that he had had sexual relations with Moge before his first wife's death.

In 1916, Hurston was employed as a maid by the lead singer of a touring Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company.

In 1917, she resumed her formal education by attending night school at Morgan Academy, now known as Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore, Maryland. At this time, to qualify for a free high-school education, the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her year of birth. She graduated from the high school in 1918.

College and graduate studies

In college, Hurston learned how to view life through an anthropological lens apart from Eatonville. One of her main goals was to show similarities between ethnicities. In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC. She was a member of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, founded by and for black women. She was also the first in her family to attend college, meaning that she was a first-generation college student. While at Howard, Hurston co-founded The Hilltop, the university's student newspaper. She took courses in Spanish, English, Greek, and public speaking, and earned an associate degree in 1920. She also joined the Howard literary club, where she published her first two short stories. Despite this success, Hurston paid for school by working as a manicurist in the evenings to Barnard College of Columbia University. She was the first African-American admitted to this women's college.

Hurston assisted Meyer in crafting the play Black Souls; which is considered one of the first "lynching dramas" written by a white woman. She conducted ethnographic research with anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University and later studied with him as a graduate student. She also worked with Ruth Benedict and fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead. Hurston received her B.A. in anthropology in 1928.

At the same time, Hurston needed to satisfy Boas as her academic adviser. Boas was a cultural relativist who wanted to overturn ideas about ranking cultures in a hierarchy of values.

After graduating from Barnard, Hurston spent two years as a graduate student in anthropology, working with Boas at Columbia University. Living in Harlem in the 1920s, Hurston befriended writers including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Her apartment, according to some accounts, was a popular spot for social gatherings. Around this time, Hurston had a few literary successes, placing in short-story and playwriting contests in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League.

Personal life

In 1927, Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and a former teacher at Howard. He later went to medical school and became a physician. Their marriage ended in 1931.

In 1935, Hurston was involved with Percy Punter, a graduate student at Columbia University. He inspired the character of Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Patronage and support

When foundation grants ended during the Great Depression, Hurston and her friend Langston Hughes both relied on the patronage of philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white literary patron. During the 1930s, Hurston was a resident of Westfield, New Jersey, a suburb of New York, where her friend Hughes was among her neighbors. In 1956, Hurston received the Bethune-Cookman College Award for Education and Human Relations in recognition of her achievements. The English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy.

For the 1939–1940 academic year, Hurston joined the drama department at the North Carolina College for Negroes (NCC) in Durham. At the beginning of her tenure, Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain.

During her time in the Durham area, Hurston primarily participated in a variety of theater activities, marking her lasting interest in Black folkloric theater and drama. On October 7, 1939, Hurston addressed the Carolina Dramatic Association, remarking that "our drama must be like us or it doesn't exist... I want to build the drama of North Carolina out of ourselves." She noted that her students were largely supportive of this endeavor because many of the plays performed and viewed by them previously were not relatable to their own experiences and instead prioritized a "highbrow" view of society. She was persuaded by them to move to North Carolina for the prospect of collaboration with UNC faculty and students, Because her formal participation was limited, Hurston became a "secret student", participating in coursework and theater groups without enrolling at UNC. The Daily Tar Heel, the UNC student newspaper, even named Hurston as a student in one such course, which focused on radio production.

Hurston left NCC after one year to pursue a new fieldwork project in South Carolina. It is likely that her departure was partially due to her poor relationship with NCC's president, James E. Shepard, to which she briefly alluded in her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. To Shepard, Hurston's attire and lifestyle choices were inappropriate for an unmarried woman, leading to many disagreements; her severance was rumored to be "the only thing that [they] could apparently agree upon."

In 2015, UNC students called for Saunders Hall (named after former Ku Klux Klan leader William L. Saunders) to be renamed "Hurston Hall" in recognition of Hurston's contributions to academic life in the Durham-Chapel Hill area. UNC Trustees controversially voted to name the building Carolina Hall instead, but it is still known informally by many students as Hurston Hall. Despite the brief nature of her residency in North Carolina, Hurston is still honored at a variety of events in the area, including readings of her work. In 2024, Bree L. Davis received funding from the Southern Documentary Fund to produce a podcast documenting Hurston's experiences in the Durham-Chapel Hill area (forthcoming).

Anthropological and folkloric fieldwork

Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research. Based on her work in the South, sponsored from 1928 to 1932 by Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy philanthropist, Hurston wrote Mules and Men in 1935.

thumb|Hurston playing a hountar, or mama drum, 1937

In 1936 and 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research, with support from the Guggenheim Foundation. She drew from this research for Tell My Horse (1938), a genre-defying book that mixes anthropology, folklore, and personal narrative. In the fourth chapter of this book, titled "Night Song After Death", Hurston recounts the time she visited St. Thomas, Jamaica, where she observed and participated in the ritual of the "Nine Night". This chapter illustrates how Hurston's method of fieldwork was not overly analytical or quantitative, as she primarily aimed at capturing the experiences and perspectives of the Jamaican people, while also encapsulating the atmosphere and spiritual fervor that surrounded the ritual. Although Hurston's more qualitative work lacks the technicalities used in quantitative ethnographic work, such as a thorough analysis describing the form or tonalities of the music played during the "Nine Night", it provides advantages that quantitative research cannot cover: Hurston's qualitative ethnographic fieldwork has the ability to convey how the social interactions (e.g., through dance), stories and beliefs/superstitions (e.g., the ever-changing stories interviewees told her, concerning the "duppy" or spirit), and the culture's use of music, are used celebrate the life and afterlife of the recently deceased.

In 1938 and 1939, Hurston worked for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), part of the Works Progress Administration. including: “Crow Dance,” a Bahamian-American dance song with West African roots; the Gullah Geechee song, “Oh, the Buford Boat Done Come”; and the folk song “John Henry,” performed by Gabriel Brown.

From May 1947 to February 1948, Hurston lived in Honduras, in the north coastal town of Puerto Cortés. She had some hopes of locating either Mayan ruins or vestiges of an undiscovered civilization. Hurston recalled what she had seen of white male sexual dominance in the lumber camps in North Florida, and discussed it with Nunn. They both thought the case might be about such "paramour rights", and wanted to "expose it to a national audience". Her part was ended abruptly when she and Nunn disagreed about her pay, and she left.

Hurston celebrated that