SPUNK
by Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was the “Queen of the Harlem Renaissance.” A folklorist, anthropologist, and writer, Hurston integrated traditional AfricanAmerican folklore into her writing. She lived during the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans moved from the South to the North for a better economic and social life. Unlike other Harlem Renaissance writers who focused on the African-American experience in the North, she centered many of her stories on life in the South. The subjects she covered led to conflicts and disagreements with her contemporaries resulting in a decline in her popularity. Although she was born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891, Zora Neale Hurston claimed in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road (1942), that she was born in Eatonville, Florida in 1901. Hurston did not live in Eatonville until she was thirteen, when she moved there with her mother and father. Eatonville’s status as the first incorporated all-black town in the country provided Hurston cultural inspiration for her stories surrounding black, rural life in the South. Hurston’s upbringing in this self-governed town impacted her attitude about the boundaries in everyday rural Afrcan-American life, from self-determination to segregation to what was deemed “respectable” black art. Hurston’s parents were two former slaves: Lucy Ann Potts and John Hurston. Hurston’s mother died in 1904. Her father, a pastor, remarried after her mother’s death. Hurston spent the remainder of her childhood living with different family members and touring with a theatre troupe. She completed high school work at Morgan State University (then called Morgan Academy) in 1918, graduated from Howard University with an associate’s degree in 1920, and entered Barnard College in New York to study anthropology in 1925. Hurston completed her bachelor’s degree at Barnard and went on to graduate school at Columbia University. Hurston experienced life in New York during the height of the Harlem Renaissance — a period of rebirth in AfricanAmerican music, poetry, art and writing. She became acquainted with other figures like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman and Alain Locke, who dubbed the Harlem Renaissance the “New Negro Movement,” a term indicating the new class and sophistication that African Americans were hoping to present in their lives and works at the turn of the century. In 1926, Hurston joined with Hughes and Thurman to create Fire!!, a quarterly literary magazine reflecting the AfricanAmerican experience during the Harlem Renaissance. Among many topics, it covered relationships, sexuality and intraracial prejudices. The magazine had poor sales and faced criticism that it did not fit with the “New Negro” image that African Americans wanted to portray in Harlem. Financial problems, coupled with the headquarters burning down, forced Fire!! to cease operations the same year, after publishing only one issue. Hurston also began to clash with other writers of the Harlem Renaissance on the image of the “New Negro.” Rather than adhere to the idealized image or focus on contentious issues facing the community, Hurston connected with African-American folklore and blues from the South in her work. In her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), she was criticized for trying too hard to appeal to whites, even though her immersion in folklore culture left a disconnect between her and white audiences. Her colleagues felt that she was utilizing minstrelsy images within language and dialect. In a letter she wrote to Countee Cullen in 1943, Hurston fired back at her critics, stating: “Just point out that we are suffering injustices and denied our rights, as if the white people did not know that already! Why don’t I put something about lynchings in my books? As if all the world did not know about Negroes being lynched! My stand is this: either we must do something about it that the white man will understand and respect, or shut up. No whiner ever got any respect or relief. If some of us must die for human justice, then let us die. For my own part, this poor body of mine is not so precious that I would not be willing to give it up for a good cause. But my own self-respect refuses to let me go to the mourner’s bench.” Hurston studied various parts of the African diaspora in her anthropological research. Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, she traveled to Jamaica and Haiti to study the folk religion Obeah. The Federal Writers Project also commissioned her to study African-American culture in Florida. Hurston had a fascination for conjure and voodoo culture that was prevalent in the South, particularly Louisiana and her hometown, Eatonville. She published her findings in works like Mules and Men, on African-American folklore; Tell My Horse, on her research about Obeah; Seraph on the Swanee, on the Diaspora experience in Honduras; and Their Eyes Were Watching God, which she wrote during her travels to Haiti. Hurston faced financial problems toward the end of her life. She worked as a maid and journalist in Florida in the 1950s. Unfortunately, she suffered a stroke in 1959 and had to move into the St. Lucie County Welfare Home. On January 28, 1960, Zora Neale Hurston died of heart disease. She died alone, and because she had no money, was buried in an unmarked grave in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida. In 1973, writer Alice Walker rediscovered and brought attention back to Hurston’s body of work. And in honor of the great writer and woman, Walker bought a headstone for Hurston’s grave that read, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”