Zora Neale Hurston

Literary Lady from Eatonville

It's hard to say whether Zora Neale Hurston's father John, was a prosperous carpenter who also served as a minister, or if he was a minister who ran a prosperous side business as a carpenter. In any case, he was a leading citizen of the town of Eatonville, Florida and would eventually serve four years as mayor. So Zora's early life in the last decade of the nineteenth century was definitely one of middle class financial comfort.

Eatonville was one of a number of all black communities that then existed throughout the United States. It was not a segregated area of a larger city. City services, which included good teachers and schools, were competently administered, and the town was largely self-sufficient. It was also an environment that sheltered Zora from the racial tensions that were then rampant throughout the country. Like everyone else, her later politics and philosophy - and her writing - were molded by her childhood experiences, and she always focused more on people as individuals rather than being members of a group.

As pleasant as the community life was, Zora's home life tended to be tense and strained. John was a fairly typical father of the era - rather stern and expecting deference from both his wife and children. But his wife, Lucy, was not a particularly deferential woman. People even nodded that it was she who had stoked John's ambition to rise from being a member of the congregation with a good speaking voice to becoming the minister of several churches in Eatonville and neighboring towns.

John's circulating religious duties took him away from home, sometimes for days at a time. He, like many other religious leaders, found it difficult to live up to the rigid teachings of the faith. Sometimes he would take the call to "minister" to the needs of various ladies in his congregations too literally. For her part, Lucy was well aware that John's faith often failed him, and although she could ultimately forgive, she did not easily forget.

Matters were further complicated in 1889 when Lucy, having borne four sons (one of which did not survive childhood), gave birth to a daughter, Sarah. Sarah quickly became her father's favorite, and John doted on her shamelessly.

Thirteen months later, on January 7, 1891, John and Lucy's second daughter - our Zora - was born. For some reason, she immediately became her father's least favorite. Even with the birth of three more sons, Zora's status did not improve and with each new sibling she was ratcheted to the end of the queue of her father's affections. On the other hand, Zora adored her mother whose attention and kindness counterbalanced John's constant harping about his youngest daughter's many perceived faults.

Then in 1904 Lucy died, possibly of tuberculosis. Zora was thirteen. John immediately sent Zora to the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville. Zora's excellent schoolwork in Eatonville turned out to be something of a disadvantage since she was now placed in advanced classes with older girls who saw her as a rather immature kid.

But almost as soon as she arrived in Jacksonville, Zora got a letter from her father. He had remarried. Zora's new mother was Mattie Moge, a young woman who was only six years Zora's senior and actually three years younger than Zora's oldest brother Bob.

But if her father's remarriage was a surprise, it was nothing like the shock Zora experienced when she was summoned to the office of the academy's headmistresses. As Zora sat in the straightbacked chair so de rigeur in secondary school offices, the headmistress curtly informed her that her father had not sent any payment for room and board. Just what, the rather formidable lady asked, was Zora going to do about it? Zora had no idea.

As the weeks rolled on, the headmistresses kept badgering Zora about the money, sometimes shouting from her office window about the delinquent bills while Zora was outside in the schoolyard with the other girls. Finally Zora was allowed to defray further expenses by cleaning up and helping in the kitchen.

But the biggest shock came when Zora was summoned to the office once again. Her father had sent no money but had finally proposed a solution. Rather than have him pay for Zora's education, why not have the school just adopt the girl? Of course, the academy could not and would not do any such thing. Zora has handed $1.50 for boat fare back home with the understanding her father had to pay it back.

Zora returned to a near impossible situation. Neither her stepmother nor her father wanted her as part of the family, much less to be living at home. Then once Zora returned, she found that Mattie was sleeping on a feather bed that Lucy had said Zora could have. So one day when Mattie was out, Zora and her brothers took the mattress out of Mattie's room. Of course, when Mattie found out about the reallocation of the household furniture, there was what we would call a "scene", a scene which finally ended with older brother John Cornelius yelling at his father who, from fear of his young and stronger son, brandished a knife. He demanded that John Cornelius leave, and Zora soon followed.

From 1905 to 1911, we know little about Zora's whereabouts. Apparently she was passed from relative to relative and neighbor to neighbor. Keeping with the conventions of early twenty century America that a girl in her mid-teens was considered a young woman, Zora worked at various occupations. These ranged from the inevitable job as a waitress to the not too bad job as a receptionist at a doctor's office.

Finally, her brother, Richard, now living in near-by Sanford, invited Zora to live with him. But her father, no doubt feeling remorseful about the whole sorry mess, said, that wasn't necessary. Zora could move back in with him and Mattie in Eatonville..

Needless to say this did not work out. If fact, things quickly went from bad to, if not the absolute worst, then about as bad as it can get without being the absolute worst. Zora, now twenty, found herself in frequent and strident shouting matches with her stepmother. During one of these battles, Mattie picked up a vase and hurled it at Zora, most likely a gesture of anger rather than any real intent to do harm. As Zora herself put it, Mattie was standing so close she had no reason to miss. But as we put it today, Zora lost it. She snapped.

A neighbor heard the noise and rushed inside to find Zora had grabbed Mattie and slammed her against a wall. Although Mattie fought back as best as she could, Zora was a strong girl. Mattie's head was now literally bouncing back and forth between the wall and Zora's fist. The neighbor tried to intervene, but Zora grabbed a hatchet and sent it flying. The missile barely missed the would-be arbitrator who beat a hasty retreat and ran into the street, yelling to everyone that Zora had gone crazy. Only after his wife crumpled to the floor was John able to pull Zora away. For the last time, Zora left the house in Eatonville and never saw her father or stepmother again. When John died seven years later in a traffic accident, Zora did not attend the funeral.

For the next four or five years, Zora was again on the move. We know she worked as what we now call an assistant for a touring theatrical company, which means she did everything the actors wanted her to do. The pay, $15 a week, was actually quite good for the time, but although the company also furnished room and board, Zora found that her actual salary was often not forthcoming. Also all the other members of the troupe were white, and Zora was the target of some racial comments. Zora, though, did not take the remarks as malicious, and the company paid for her to take a manicurist's course which later proved useful.

Eventually Zora moved in with her oldest brother Bob and his family in Nashville. Bob, who was just finishing up his medical studies at the still extant Meharry Medical College, said that once he graduated he would be able to support Zora's education. So for now she acted as a maid and housekeeper. Although Bob didn't treat Zora unkindly, he was cast from the same no-nonsense mold as his father. This environment damped Zora's free spririt a bit. But even after Bob began his medical practice, she saw no indication that she was headed back to school any time soon. So in 1917, Zora decided if she wanted to further her education, she had to do it on her own. She moved to Baltimore.

There were two ways to proceed. Zora could enroll at a college which had a curriculum to make up high school deficiencies. This of course took money and Zora was finding it impossible to make ends meet by working at low paying jobs, much less trying to save enough for tuition.

The second option was to attend one of Baltimore's high schools that offered night classes for students who had to work during the day. The good news was that these were public schools and so did not charge tuition. The bad news was at age 26, Zora was too old to legally enroll.

The solution was simple. Zora just lopped 10 years off her age and went to school. Because she did indeed look far younger than her years, she got away with it. But once you start that type of thing, you have to keep with it, and for the rest of her life she said she was born in 1901, unless she picked another year. The range of her stated birth dates was pretty wide, ranging from 1899 to 1910.

Zora did well in English although she thought math was a necessary evil. But her work attracted the attention of her teachers who said she should go to Morgan Academy. This was the elite preparatory school for Baltimore's Morgan College (now Morgan State University). Of course, it wasn't cheap much less free. Fortunately, the faculty at Morgan helped Zora obtain work that would both cover costs and had a schedule to allow her to attend classes and study.

The plan, of course, was that after graduating Zora would then proceed to Morgan College itself. But one of the visitors to Morgan was a student from Howard University. After talking to Zora, she said Zora should switch to Howard. Howard, though, had the reputation of being formidable and difficult, and when she got to Washington she found that she still had credits to make up before she could enter the school. Fortunately, one of her Baltimore high school teachers was now on Howard's faculty and he said she could take the courses she needed at Howard's own preparatory school. So she began classes at Howard Academy and in May, 1919 - at age 28 - Zora graduated from high school.

Howard University had been founded in 1867 to provide higher education for the freedmen of the Civil War. Within a few years the school had risen to hold its own among US universities, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, many of the leading black writers, doctors, and civic leaders were Howard graduates. Since it was in D. C., put-yourself-through students like Zora could find work. With her manicurist training, she landed a job at a high class barbershop. Although it was run by a black proprietor, it catered to upper crust white clientele. The owner himself had little formal education but would always hire students on part time schedules that would fit with their classes. Zora worked in the afternoons and early evenings, leaving her time for classes in the morning and homework at night.

As she tended the digital carapace of some of the elite Washington insiders, she was a bit nonplussed about the way they would talk to her about some of the shenanigans and peccadilloes of Washington's high and mighty. But overall her clients were nice. When they learned Zora was a student, they were generous with their tips and Zora was clearing $10 - $15 a week. This relatively good salary not only paid for tuition, room, and board, but also let Zora adopt the apparel expected of the stylish Howard co-ed. She also began to develop an active social life which included keeping company with a Howard premedical student named Howard Sheen. Even when Howard left to attend medical school in Chicago, they maintained a long distance romance.

But balancing her job, studies, and social life had a negative effect on Zora's academics. Although during her first three years she did manage at least average grades (and in those pre-grade-inflationary days, a "C" was not necessarily bad), after four years her grades had run the gamut. Usually she got A's or B's in courses she liked but, but let her grades slide in courses she didn't. Her grades also began to drop as time went on and her worst grade was in Spanish which she failed. She still didn't like math, and she withdrew from a physics class. So as 1923 arrived - which was supposed to be her last year - she still had quite a bit of coursework to complete.

The good news was during her time at Howard, Zora had qualified to join Howard's literary club called the Stylus which published a yearly magazine of the same name. Membership was selected based on the quality of submitted manuscripts and was quite exclusive. Her work on the Stylus brought her an invitation to join another literary group - called a "salon" - that met at the home of the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson. Called the "Saturday Nighters", this was not just a collection of students, but boasted a membership drawn from some of the important African American writers and public figures, including the W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the most famous black activist of the time and whose book the Souls of Black Folk had become a classic.

Zora had also begun submitting stories to commercial magazines. In December, 1924, she had her story, "Drenched in Light" published in Opportunity, a magazine edited by Charles Johnson for the National Urban League. This was Zora's first story to appear in a nationally circulated magazine and brought her to the attention of some of American's leading writers, both black and white.

It was Charles who suggested Zora should move to New York where she would be much closer to the literary crowd which was part of what is now called the Harlem Renaissance. She could transfer to one of the New York colleges to finish her degree. One possibility was Barnard College, which was near Harlem.

But if Zora saw getting admitted to Howard was a challenge, then attending Barnard looked impossible. First Zora's Howard transcript left much to be desired, particularly for getting into an elite New York college. Next, Barnard was expensive, and Zora would have to come up with $320 just to get started. Although even adjusted for inflation this is considerably less than today's tuition, it was still big bucks.

Fortunately this was the era of the "patron" where the scions of the wealthy families (whose wealth ironically was sometimes based on the ill-gotten gains of the Guilded Age robber barons) would actually provide private support for writers and artists. The patrons might put up the money that allowed the magazines to pay the contributors (as suffragette Ethel Morehead supported the magazine This Quarter which published a number of later-to-be-famous 1920's authors), or they might actually pay out cash for the living expenses of the authors as they wrote their next literary masterpiece.

One of Zora's new literary acquaintances, Annie Nathan Meyer, was not only a member of one of New York's pre-eminent white (and wealthy) families that specifically helped fund black artists and writers, but she was also on the board of Barnard. Annie arranged for Zora to interview Barnard's dean, Virginia Gildersleeve, who recognized Zora's potential. With tuition largely supplied by Annie's friend, the well-known novelist and screenwriter Fannie Hurst, Zora was accepted as a transfer student. Later, though, Zora applied for and received a Barnard scholarship.

Although the east coast schools of New York or Boston like Harvard and Columbia, were open to all races, they were segregated by gender. To counter this inequality, the all-male universities sometimes "affiliated" themselves with a nearby women's college. The girls could then attend the same classes and have the same teachers as the men. What Radcliffe was to Harvard, Barnard became to Columbia.

Of course, scholarships for tuition are fine, but Zora also had to pay for mundane costs like rent and food. Here Fannie came to Zora's aid and thought Zora would be well suited for a work-study type job as a personal assistant. Fannie, as a prolific and popular writer, had need for clerical help, and Zora seemed perfect for the job. However, Fannie soon found that Zora's filing system was chaotic, and her typing was hit-or-miss ("usually the later" Fannie noted). The job as Fannie's secretary may not have lasted much more than a month. Nonetheless, Fannie had a real interest in seeing Zora succeed and even served as an informal agent for at least a couple of Zora's stories. Fannie was also adamant that Zora finish college and was a bit stern with her supposedly much younger friend (they were really almost the same age) when she learned Zora had cut a history test.

But the watershed event in Zora's life occurred soon after her arrival in New York. Charles Johnson had decided that Opportunity should offer prizes for the best writing they had published for the year. Zora's contributions won four prizes - two second places (which came with welcome cash awards) and two honorable mentions. When the ceremonies were over, Zora was not only a writer, but a literary celebrity.

Zora was becoming increasingly interested in the African American folk traditions, and she realized her writing would profit from serious studies in anthropology. Fortunately, Barnard/Columbia had one of the premiere anthropology departments which boasted the premiere American anthropologist, Frank Boas. A number of Frank's students went on to became noted anthropologists in their own right, including Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and one of Ruth's students, Ashley Montague, would later hit the height of anthropological fame in being a frequent guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Although most people think of Zora primarily as a writer, she should also be seen as one of the Columbia's early anthropologists, and her studies had a major influence on the style and subject of her books.

Today a reader opening one of Zora's books is often surprised by her use of "dialect", that is, representing rural African American speech phonetically. Even at the time, this style of rendering dialog sometimes got Zora into hot water with other black writers and reviewers who saw the style as reinforcing racial stereotypes. Although there is some merit in the latter arguments, what Zora was doing was nothing less than what Mark Twain was trying to accomplish when he wrote Huckleberry Finn to much less criticism. We should also remember that the books were also a product of the technology - or the lack thereof - of the time.

In a day when recording equipment was considerably more bulky and temperamental than today, most folklorists had to use non-electronic devices - called paper and pencil - to document variant dialects. In this approach you had two options. You could - as did Zora and Mark - do your best to write the words as you heard them. Unfortunately, such transcriptions usually employed informal systems devised by the author, and so readers unfamiliar with the speech of the groups or regions will not necessarily reproduce the speech in their mind's ear as the writer intended.

Perhaps the major problem with the phonetic writing is the transcriptions often exaggerate the differences between folk and standard speech since the distinctions are often more a product of variant inflections and tone, substitution of pure vowels for dipthongs, and changes in the speed and rhythm of the speech. Sometimes a phonetic transcriptions even indicates there is a different pronunciation when there is none (such as writing "wuz" for "was"). Finally as the speech of the various regional groups become increasingly standardized (today kids in Little Rock sound a lot like those in Chicago), later readers - and some at the time - find the writing comes out not only as contrived and artificial, but simply hard to read.

The alternative approach is that used by Zora's contemporaries, the black novelist, Richard Wright, and folklorist Vance Randolph who wrote about the Ozark hill people. Both Richard and Vance preferred to stick with standard spelling and limited any dialectal distinctions to grammatical constructions or specialized vocabulary. Irish-American novelist James T. Farrell, also found Vance's approach was preferable but only after his first book, Young Lonigan, was on the shelves. He soon realized his attempts to put a Chicago street-speech in the mouth of some of the characters sounded ridiculous, and he switched to standard spelling in later editions. Of course, we won't resolve the question as to whether Zora or Vance's approach was best, but all in all, fiction that primarily use standard English and limit phonetic transcriptions seem to hold up better as the decades roll on.

But Zora was now working for Frank which had a major advantage that sooner or later all research students learn. If your advisor is the #1 expert in the field, you will find your research is supported by grants and fellowships, and you don't need to hassle with part time jobs, grading papers, or teaching undergrads (the latter a most horrible fate). So Zora soon found herself off on her first "collecting" trip to the South. She had a fine time and soon was filling notebooks with stories, speeches, sermons, and folk tales. Frank, though, - a fairly demanding investigator - grumped that Zora was collecting the same type of stuff that other folklorists had already reported. But we can't really fault Zora who was, after all, new to anthropology. Besides, her English teachers thought what she collected was great background material for short stories and novels. In any case and despite Frank's grumblings, on February 23, 1928, at long last, the 37 year old Zora got her BA in English from Barnard. Now she could really begin to write.

Despite, or perhaps because of the distance between New York and Chicago, Zora and Herbert had maintained their relationship. So on May 19, 1927 - which was the day before Charles Lindbergh took off across the Atlantic - they were married. However, Herbert was still was studying in Chicago, and Zora continued to live in New York. Both had their careers, and for all practical purposes they went their separate ways after about a year. But it wasn't until 1931 that they finally agreed to an amicable divorce.

The Fount of All Knowledge (i. e., the Internet) is replete with misinformation on the number and duration of Zora's marriages. Point of fact, she was married three times. The first, as we just said, was to Herbert, and although it ended in divorce, they maintained a strong friendship even after Herbert remarried and became a successful physician.

Her second marriage was to Albert Price III in 1939. Although the marriage officially lasted four years, for all practical purposes the marriage was over in a few weeks. Zora had misgivings from the first, and the newlyweds quickly found they were not very compatible. Zora soon moved out, and she and Albert only saw each other briefly and sporadically and rarely more than a few days at a time. When Zora and Albert finally did divorce in 1943, most of her friends were surprised because they hadn't even known she was married. This time the separation was not amicable, and many recriminations flew back and forth Then the next year Zora's married James Howell Pitts, and this marriage only lasted eight months.

The 1930's was a busy decade for Zora. With increasing success as a writer, living in New York put her in close proximity to other authors and publishers. However, she also wanted to continue her anthropological research. Fortunately, in early 1930, she had met Charlotte Osgood Mason, a 70 year old widow of prominent (and wealthy) New York physician. Mrs. Mason - called "Godmother" by those who knew her well - was another of the white "patrons" of the Harlem Renaissance. In particular she had an interest in African American folklore, and she talked to Zora about doing more fieldwork in the South.

The good news was Zora would get $2400 for the year - a good salary - plus an automobile and a motion picture camera (very high tech at the time). Then if things worked out, she could expect to get hired for another year. The bad news was Zora had no rights to the material she collected, and anything garnered from her trips could not be published without Godmother's approval. In other words, far from being an actual patron for a young and increasingly important African American writer, Godmother simply hired Zora as a research assistant under a strict contract.

Still the terms seemed OK to Zora. After all, she was given considerable resources for collecting folklore and and good pay to boot. Also the contract did not prohibit Zora from writing stories or articles not related to her fieldwork for Godmother.

Unfortunately, Godmother thought that even if it wasn't what the contract said then that was what the contract meant. When she saw one of Zora's articles in a magazine, she went apoplectic, and Zora had to get the editor to write Godmother that the story had been written and accepted before they two ladies even met. Rather than debate the nuances of the contract, Zora thought for now it was best to accept Godmother's seemingly increasing tight control on her professional life. In any case, Zora's work was good enough for Godmother, and she renewed Zora's contract.

It was at this time that Zora had her famous feud with Langston Hughes, who had been a particularly close personal and literary friend. Both Langston and Zora had been at the Opportunity awards dinner, and after a while they decided to collaborate on an opera. But soon they revised their plans to co-author a play which was to be a comedy featuring an African American cast. The play - Mule Bone - was duly written, and everything went along fine - for a while.

The problem was most of the actual writing - particularly the dialog - was by Zora. The plot was also very much based on her hometown of Eatonville. So when it came time to get it typed up and sent to a publisher (and find a theater), Zora thought she should get the actual credit as the author. Langston, while never denying Zora did most of the actual writing, felt he had given sufficient input that he should get part credit - or at the very least, he should have part ownership of the copyright plus a portion of the royalties (Langston said he thought two-thirds for Zora and one-third for him was fair). Zora also was a bit concerned that the typist - who was a very good friend of Langston - would also be credited, although Langston assured her this would not happen.

Further attempts to come to an agreement involved Langston calling in his attorney, the manuscript being sent without Langston's or Zora's knowledge to an amateur theatrical company (which loved the play and was planning the premiere), a multitude of phone calls, letters, and telegrams flying back and forth with a rapidity that anticipated E-mail, Langston and Zora both filing for sole copyright (and both being granted it), and finally a highly acrimonious confrontation at the home of Langston's elderly mother whom at one point Langston had to restrain from leaping out of bed and going after Zora. Finally in 1932, Langston ceded to Zora any copyright of the play. Sadly, Langston's concession did not restore his and Zora's friendship although later both expressed remorse at the schism. It wasn't until 1991 - after a lapse of 60 years - that Mule Bone was finally performed. Credited to both Zora and Langston it was not very successful nor did it receive very good reviews.

After her employment with Godmother came to an end, Zora decided to pursue formal graduate studies at Columbia University with Frank. She applied for and then received a $3000 fellowship - enough to take her through two years and at least a master's degree. But then suddenly the fellowship was reduced to $700 - enough for one semester.

Why was the fellowship grant changed? Apparently someone had sent out the word that Zora was unreliable and her research techniques haphazard. The fink could have been anyone of her influential "friends", who although willing to praise Zora publicly and to her face, were more than willing to disparage her behind her back. When she later applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, the references she listed - which included Fannie Hurst and Frank Boas - wrote quite negative letters. Knowing their letters would be confidential, Frank and Fannie squelched Zora's Guggenheim in short order. Frank's complaint was her anthropological work was "journalistic" rather than "scientific" (whatever that means), and Fannie, remembering Zora's secretarial work, remarked on Zora's lack of organization. As far as the Columbia fellowship went, Zora's solution to the reduced money was 1) to accept the fellowship, 2) not attend classes, and 3) use the time on the fellowship to write.

The "Harlem Renaissance" ended like so much of the optimism of the Roaring Twenties, with the stock market crash of October, 1929. However, Zora weathered the depression fairly well, and most of her books were published in the years 1932 and 1943. She had worked on the WPA Writers' Project, met and collected folksongs with Alan Lomax, and gained sufficient fame and prestige as a writer and folklorist that she was (finally) awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the remnants of West African religions then and now labeled (and often dismissed) as voodoo. She wrote of her trip in the interesting and readable book, Tell My Horse.

Then in 1948, Zora lived through one of the worst episodes in her life when she was accused of abusing three teenage boys. The charges were totally and completely false - her passport proved she was out of the country at the alleged time. The prosecutor, after discussing the case with Zora's lawyer and reviewing the evidence, dropped the charges, and the judge ordered Zora's record expunged. Unfortunately bad publicity is never helpful and this was the time Zora's writing, certainly in output, began to decline.

Of course, Zora wasn't getting any younger, and in any case, it isn't correct to say that in the 1950's she immediately fell from sight and lived in abject poverty for the rest of her life. Although the story she worked for a time as a maid is correct - a story reported in the newspapers - this was not typical of her employment. In addition to continuing to write free lance articles for magazines and newspapers, she found supplementary work as a teacher and librarian. None of these jobs lasted very long, though, partly because she considered herself a writer, and partly because her independent nature made her impatient with workplace politics and pain-in-the-rear-end coworkers. But publishers and editors certainly knew who she was, and in 1956 - when Zora was 65 - she was honored at the Howard University commencement ceremonies.

But her money problems were real enough. The era of the literary patron was long gone and in the days when television was rapidly becoming the preferred sedentary activity, freelance magazine writing was a job where it was becoming increasingly hard to earn a full time living. Zora also found she was more and more at odds with her friends - and many publishers - regarding how to proceed in ending racial discrimination which, if anything, was more of a problem than ever as the 1950's rolled in.

Although it had been almost a century since the Civil War, progress at ending discrimination was glacial at its best and sometimes seemed to run in reverse. But Zora often not only seemed unconcerned about what was in essence two nations living in the same country, but at times came off as quite content with the status quo. For her own part, whenever Zora encountered discrimination and bigotry, she was more surprised than angered. Her way of handling prejudice was simply to ignore it.

But it is hard to deny that Zora's views on a number of civil rights issues strikes us today as decidedly conservative. She generally opposed federal intervention in the Civil Rights issues, even speaking against the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education which ruled segregated schools were unconstitutional. She also supported Robert Taft (of Taft-Hartley fame) over Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election despite Taft's stand against abolition of segregated schools. Senator Taft, Zora said, was a "true liberal" in the mold of Thomas Jefferson. In this case, Zora seems to be following Humpty Dumpty's maxim that a word means what we want it to mean, nothing more and nothing less. As anyone knows who has read Thomas Jefferson's biographies - not to mention his own Notes on the State of Virginia - you can only call Tom a "liberal" if you define the word so that it means you believe in superior and inferior races, the right to be a life long slaveholder, and (possibly) father a child from one of your slaves.

Zora's friends couldn't understand her. After all, she had been a beneficiary of the WPA program and yet refused to support Roosevelt's New Deal. She had accepted financing from the rich and famous, and did Zora think everyone could advance by the same route? Didn't ordinary people without patrons also have the the right to decent job and educational opportunities, equal pay for equal work, and above all, freedom from discrimination?

Like everyone else, Zora's views are understandable in the context of her background, childhood, and environment. Zora's growing up in Eatonville had largely sheltered her from the effects of segregation which many of her friends and colleagues had experienced at its worst. Also Zora was basically an optimist, and she tended to see Eatonville as a rule when it was actually an extreme exception. More accurate accounts of life in the South (and even in the North) were represented in novels like Richard Wright's Black Boy. But it wasn't until 1961, when Black Like Me recounted white writer John Howard Griffin's experience disguised as a black man, that mainstream white Americans got even a hint of what it was to be black before the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of the mid-1960's.

On the other hand, Zora could certainly tell when she overstepped the bounds into a major faux pas. Once she was interviewed by the New York World Telegram and asked about the civil rights issues of the day. She stated that things were worse in the North than in the South. Yes, she said, there was segregation in the South. But segregation meant that you had the same things available for the different groups. What white people had, she said, there was the same for blacks. She concluded saying, "the Jim Crow system works."

Well, as Harry Truman might have put it, the manure hit the fan. Roy Wilkins, the famous civil rights attorney who then edited the magazine of the NAACP, the Crisis, was flabbergasted. Everyone knows Jim Crow works, Roy wrote, but it only works for the white man. Zora, realizing she had pulled a whopper, immediately issued a statement disavowing the article, saying it did not accurately reflect her statements. Later she even said that if black people had to go into the streets and lay down their lives to end discrimination, then that's what they would do.

With Zora giving such complex (if not contradictory) opinions, it's not surprising that today different groups with mutually exclusive agendas view Zora as one of their own. Of course, since Zora is not here to speak for herself, we have no idea which group - if any - she would have preferred. She never saw the Civil Right marches where southern policemen turned dogs on people or hit them with water canons (and sometimes worse) just because they were walking to the courthouse to register to vote. Still it can't be denied that usually Zora voiced support for a bottom-up approach to the race issues of the time - that is, solving problems of discrimination at the local and state level rather than through federal legislation.

But what, we wonder, what would Zora have thought of Malcolm X? Certainly Malcolm neither believed nor trusted that the either state or federal government really would or wanted to improve the lot of black Americans, and he believed individual separate independent black communities were the real answer. Malcolm and and Zora very well may have agreed on a lot of things, but few people call Malcolm a libertarian or political conservative.

So in the end Zora Neale Hurston is whoever we are. If we want to believe she was a staunch conservative and opposed to big government and an advocate of states' rights, then we can find in her writings or statements everything we need to prove the case. If we want to believe she was a radical revolutionary ready to take to the streets, then we'll find everything we need to prove that case as well. And we can expect the debate as to who Zora Neal Hurston really was to continue indefinitely. After all, assistant professors of history have to make a living, too.

References

Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, Valerie Boyd, Scribner, 2003. Without doubt the definitive biography.

Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston, Lippincott, 1938, Reprint, Perennial Library, New York, 1995. A very readable book about Zora's tour of the Caribbean studying what is called voodoo, but is actually the survival in the Americas of a number of West African religions. Although well recognized by folkorists, it is a surprise to many layman how many characteristics of worship in rural churches of the South were transferred from black to white congregations, and even include, as Alan Lomax pointed out, the saut or possession dance where the vaudou god mounts the worshipper.

A particularly interesting chapter is the one Zora wrote about zombies. In a 1943, interview Zora said that she did not believe zombies were actually resurrected from the dead but had been put in some kind of suspended animation by drugs. More recently there have been theories that zombies were created by use of tetrodotoxin but this explanation has major problems ("Zombies and Tetrodotoxin", Terence Hines, the Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 2008, http://www.csicop.org/si/show/zombies_and_tetrodotoxin/). The possibility that the individuals identified as zombies are actually mentally ill and mistakenly identified as previously deceased individuals is far more likely.

"A Difficult Birth for Mule Bone", Frank Rich, the New York Times, February, 15, 1991. A review of the first performance of Zora and Langston's play.

The Natural Superiority of Women, Ashley Montagu, Collier (1974). An interesting example of mid-20th century anthropology that ultimately arose from the Frank Boas school - but not, we should point out, by Frank or from Columbia University. When this later edition came out (the original edition was published in 1953), Ashley appeared on the Tonight Show and got into a spirited but good-natured debate with the host (who the writer remembers was a guest host, possibly Harry Belafonte). This book, though, is most useful as an example of how to - quote - "prove" - unquote - one group of individuals is - quote - "superior to" - unquote - another. You identify differences that distinguish the groups and then you simply define "superiority" to be the properties of the group you want to be superior. As one reviewer of the book pointed out, Ashley used the relative longevity of women as one of the superior characteristics of women over men. So with this criterion, we can conclude that Galapagos turtles are vastly superior to humans. The turtles certainly agree.