A beautiful young woman sweeps through the halls of Barnard College, clutching her anthropology books to her chest as she glides down the hallway to her classroom. Students rush by her, unaware of the greatness lurking beneath her calm exterior, as they head towards their own classes. She glances at the posters on the walls, clamoring for her attention, oblivious to the fact that one day the clamoring will be quelled as she is recognized in the Women's Hall of Fame for the work she has accomplished.
The fifth child of eight born to John and Lucy Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston was a vibrant child with a flair for life. Born in 1891 in Notasulga, Ala. (although she claimed her birth year to be 1901), Hurston and her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, within the first few years of her life.
The influence of the all-black Eatonville community is prevalent throughout her writings as the ambiance that shaped her life and appears in many of her stories. Zora never enjoyed a close relationship with her parents; her mother died in 1904, and the subsequent remarriage of her father distanced Hurston from him as well as her new stepmother. In order to avoid the changing family life, Hurston left home to work for a traveling theatre company.
After finishing high school, Hurston supported herself through college by working as a manicurist. Although she studied anthropology and folklore, her studies and interests were driving her into the realm of literature and storytelling. Her stories began gaining renown as they were published in college publications as well as in such magazines as Opportunity.
After winning second place in a literary contest, Hurston moved to New York and became involved in the growing Negro movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, where she met Langston Hughes and other notable African-American authors, and continued her writing. She describes writing during this time as a "…force from somewhere in Space which commands you write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you."
Although she became well known in the African-American community, many booksellers were afraid to carry her books on their shelves for fear of being viewed as "advocating equality," so Hurston's works eventually were forgotten and overlooked. Hurston herself melted away into the faceless unknown, looking heavenward upon her deathbed inside a welfare home, and was finally buried in an unmarked grave.
A resurgence of interest in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1960's, however, drew literary notable Alice Walker to Hurston’s most famous book, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The book, which told the story of the hardships of a black woman’s life and her overcoming of the hardships, had such an impact on Alice Walker that she involved herself in the story of Zora Neale Hurston and birthed the mission to find the location of Hurston's grave. In 1973, when Hurston was finally being recognized for her accomplishments, Walker placed a gravestone in the field where Hurston was buried. The gravestone reads:
Zora Neale Hurston
"A Genius of the South"
1901 [sic]---1960
Novelist, Folklorist
Anthropologist
Hurston grasps and expresses the struggles of African Americans as no other human being has. The imagery with which she writes takes on a personality of its own and speaks universally, infecting every person, regardless of race, as they read the words she has penned. Hurston shed new light onto the worlds of the written word. In the words of fellow writer Rita Dove, "Zora Neale Hurston...has created a glorious paean to the power of the word."
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Copyright © 2002 by Susan Sims. All rights reserved.
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