Zora Neale Hurston Lives On

The Hartford Advocate discusses the legacy of Zora Neale Hurston.

From the piece...

Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, anthropologist and playwright, and her works combine an anthropologist’s understanding of human nature with the artist’s vision. Zora, Lucy says, “became infused with the beauty of blackness.” The self-governed Eatonville — where a primary recreational activity was “lying” (telling folktales), and both Baptists and Methodists whispered knowledge of hoodoo (ritualized root work) — supported Zora’s enchantment with life and reflected the essence of her intellectual pursuits. She travelled extensively throughout the American South and the islands of the West Indies collecting folktales and becoming initiated in the mysteries of voodoo and hoodoo. Though contemporaries, black and white alike, largely dismissed this as primitive, Hurston rejoiced in her inner life and her community’s.

Audacious as Hurston was, by the early ’70s, her work was out of print. She had three key fans at that time: Robert Hemenway, who wrote her literary biography; Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple; and Lucy, who discovered her aunt’s masterwork Their Eyes Were Watching God at the age of 9 in a box in the attic and fell instantly in love.

Walker, then a graduate student, writes that she discovered Zora’s work at a time when she “needed” her, as the only cogent resource available on hoodoo and folktales of the American South and as an antecedent to validate her own literary instincts. She went to Florida pretending to be Zora’s niece, and erected a headstone reading “genius of the South” at Zora’s anonymous grave. (Zora had instructed her family to let a Florida county bury her “in anonymity, in a segregated cemetery, with her brothers and sisters.”)

According to Lucy, Walker and cohorts’ devotional act “symbolically marks” Zora’s literary resurgence. Today, all of her work, some previously unpublished, is in print. Eyes is a mainstream classic, an integral part of any decent education in American Literature. Walker writes, “there is no book more important to me than this one.”