Okay, let's unpack this. Welcome to the deep
dive, where we take the densest stack of sources,
the articles, the biographies, the academic papers,
and pull out the absolutely essential nuggets
of knowledge you need to be instantly well -informed.
And today, we are profiling one of the most fascinating,
brilliant, um... uncompromising and ultimately
one of the most tragic figures of 20th century
American culture. Zora Neale Hurston. Zora Neale
Hurston. And if you know her name, you probably
know her as the literary giant, right? Yeah.
The author who gave us their eyes were Watching
God in 1937. Which is a masterpiece. It is. But
to stop there is to miss the staggering complexity
of her actual career. Our sources reveal a woman
who didn't just write novels. She fundamentally
reshaped how African -American culture was studied.
Right. She was a formally trained anthropologist,
a dedicated folklorist, a pioneering essayist,
and even an early documentary filmmaker. I mean,
her output profoundly shaped Africana studies
and ethnography in ways we are still, you know,
still grasping today. Exactly. We have this incredible
duality right at the core of her identity. On
the one hand, she held a degree from Barnard
and Columbia, placing her in the highest echelons
of academia. And on the other, she spent years
sleeping on porches, collecting stories, and
participating in rituals in the deepest parts
of the American South and the Caribbean. And
that dual nature. is the key to our deep dive
mission today. Her core academic goal, which
was largely influenced by her mentors at Columbia,
was revolutionary for its time. What was it specifically?
To study African -American and Caribbean communities
from the inside. to treat their culture, their
language, their spiritual practices, including
hoodoo and voodoo, with immense respect. This
is long before that was the standard. Oh, long
before. We need to explore how she managed to
merge that literary genius, that raw conversational
voice of her subjects, with the rigorous demands
of academia, and then why this monumental figure
essentially vanished into obscurity for decades,
only to be resurrected later. And when we talk
about volume, her output is just... It's almost
hard to comprehend. It crossed almost every genre
boundary. I mean, you've got four major novels,
including her masterwork. Then there's her compelling
autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. The groundbreaking
ethnographies, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse.
Over 50 short stories and plays. And we're still
discovering her work. Right, like the folktale
collection Every Tongue Got to Confess and the
essential narrative Baratun. Her life was this
constant, almost exhausting movement between
high literary culture, rigorous academic pursuit,
and deep community immersion. It's a miracle
she accomplished half of what she did, especially
when you consider the financial volatility of
her life. Okay, so let's start at the very beginning.
Or perhaps what our sources suggest we could
call the two beginnings of Zora Neale Hurston.
A good way to put it. The physical facts tell
us she was born on January 7, 1891. She was the
fifth of eight children in Notosulga, Alabama.
Now, this fact often gets glossed over, but it's
crucial to understand her context. It really
is. Both sets of her grandparents had been born
into slavery. This was not far -removed history
for her. Not at all. Her father, John Hurston,
began as a sharecropper, then became a Baptist
preacher, and later a carpenter, while her mother,
Lucienne Potts, was a schoolteacher. But that
physical birthplace, notice Olga, is far less
important than the geography of her soul. The
place that truly shaped her worldview and became
the fundamental setting for so many of her greatest
stories. Eatonville, Florida. Eatonville. Her
family moved there in 1894 when she was just
three, and Eatonville was a truly exceptional
place. It was established in 1887, making it
one of the very first all -black incorporated
towns in the United States. So she grew up in
an environment where black people were the government,
the law enforcement, the merchants. They defined
the culture and the politics entirely. Wow. Precisely.
Hurston grew up here, and, crucially, she described
it as a place where African Americans could live
and act as they desired, independent of the pervasive
daily interference of white society and white
supremacy that defined the rest of the Jim Crow
South. So her father wasn't just a preacher there.
No. He was elected mayor in 1897, and he was
minister of the largest church, Macedonia Missionary
Baptist. She experienced black self -governance
and self -determination from childhood. Which
explains why she so often claimed Eatonville
as her actual birthplace. Exactly. She was effectively
declaring it her mythic hometown. It was where
her identity, her freedom, and her narrative
truly began. And that independence, it seems,
fed her intellectual curiosity very early on.
We see the start of her lifelong literary awakening
around 1901. Yeah, what happened was a group
of northern school teachers visited Edenville
and gave her books. She later described this
influx of literature and mythology as a kind
of personal birth. where she realized the world
extended far beyond her town, but she already
possessed the confidence to interact with it.
That formative environment, though, it didn't
last. Unfortunately, no. The pre -college years
were incredibly turbulent. This is where we see
the first cracks in her foundational structure.
Her mother, who was her great intellectual influence,
died in 1904. And her father remarried very quickly.
Very quickly, he married Maddie Moj in 1905.
And the whole thing was surrounded by scandal
because he was rumored to have had relations
with Moj before his first wife's death. And that
turmoil directly impacted her education. It did.
It led to a serious disruption. She was dismissed
from a Baptist boarding school when the tuition
payments just stopped. That must have been devastating,
going from the daughter of the mayor and a respected
preacher to... Suddenly being adrift. It was.
She bounced around, lived with various family
members, and eventually worked as a maid and
wardrobe mistress for a touring theatrical company
in 1916. This period of upheaval forced her to
become fiercely resourceful and to, you know,
quite literally, write her own ticket. Which
brings us to the famous and necessary deception
that altered the record of her life. Right. In
1917, she's now 26 years old, and she wants to
resume her formal education by attending night
school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore. But to
qualify for a free high school education, she
had to appear much younger. So Zora Neale Hurston
began claiming 1901 as her birth year. Shaming
off a full decade. A critical decade. It made
her 16 instead of 26. And this wasn't about vanity.
It was a pragmatic decision. essential for securing
her future. And the deception worked so well
that 1901 was later incorrectly inscribed on
her headstone. A lie that outlived her. She successfully
graduated from high school in 1918. And this
early act of self -invention is foundational
to understanding her later literary and political
life. She believed profoundly in the individual's
right to shape their own narrative and destiny,
regardless of bureaucratic reality. So armed
with this new, younger identity, she begins her
academic launch pad at Howard University, an
HBCU in Washington, D .C., starting in 1918.
A first -generation college student. And she
didn't just attend. She immediately contributed
to the intellectual life of the campus. She co
-founded the Hilltop Student Newspaper and published
her very first short stories. She earned an associate
degree in 1920. And her career just began to
accelerate. Her short story, John Redding Goes
to Sea, published in 1921, was her first major
literary achievement. And that qualified her
for Elaine Locke's prestigious literary club,
The Stylists. Which was her official entry into
the intellectual circles of the burgeoning Harlem
Renaissance. She had transitioned from the independent
Black South to the epicenter of Black cultural
production in the North. The real academic lead,
however, came in 1925. She jumped from Howard
to Barnard College, part of Columbia University,
on a scholarship facilitated by Barnard trustee
Annie Nathan -Meyer. Think about the stark contrast
here. I mean, she was the sole black student
at the women's college. She's leaving a nurturing,
all -black educational environment for a segregated,
overwhelmingly white, elite academic setting.
And this transition is absolutely critical to
understanding her intellectual formation. While
she assisted Annie Nathan -Meyer in crashing
a play, Black Souls, the academic core of her
time, was spent training under the legendary
Franz Boas at Columbia. Boas. He's often called
the father of American anthropology. And his
influence on Hurston was just enormous. It really
was. Can you elaborate on the significance of
Boas for a moment? What did he teach that was
so foundational to her life's work? Well, Boas
championed what's called cultural relativism.
This was a radical concept in the 1920s, a time
when hierarchical and evolutionary models of
race models that ranked cultures from primitive
to advanced were still common, even in science.
Boas sought to overturn that framework entirely.
He argued that every culture should be understood
on its own terms, within its own context, without
being judged against some arbitrary Western standard.
It was a profoundly anti -racist, anti -supremacist
framework. So for a black scholar studying under
Boas, the message is clear. African -American
culture was not a degradation of African culture
or an inferior version of white culture. It was
complete, valid, complex system unto itself.
Right. And this directly shaped Hurston's lifelong
goal. Right. To use the anthropological lens
to show the deep complexity, wisdom, and simply
validity of black vernacular culture, effectively
overturning the notion of racial hierarchy through
detailed, respectful observation. She studied
not only with Bose, but also with his students,
like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, earning
her B .A. in anthropology in 1928. Which solidifies
her identity, not just as a writer who happened
to use folklore, but as a professionally trained
scientist of culture. Okay, so she has the Ivy
League pedigree and the mentorship of Boas. But
to execute the kind of immersive field work that
Boas demanded, living among the people, speaking
their language, she needed significant funding.
She did. And this brings us to what I find to
be one of the most fraught and difficult relationships
of her early career, the patronage dynamic. You're
talking about Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason. Yes,
often referred to as Godmother by Hurston and
Langston Hughes, whom Mason also supported. Mason
was a wealthy white philanthropist, and in 1927,
she began providing Hurston with a critical $200
per month stipend for fieldwork. Which was a
substantial sum for the time. A huge sum. And
that support lasted until 1932. A $200 stipend
sounds like a great deal, especially for a black
woman pursuing field science in the Jim Crow
South. But the critique suggests this support
came with massive strings attached. It came with
a heavy cost of intellectual control. Mason demanded
all the material Hurston collected. Negro music,
folklore, literature, hoodoo, everything. She
insisted on complete ownership over Hurston's
intellectual property and even restricted who
she could share it with. Mason was interested
in what she considered primitive or pure cultural
expressions, often viewing the field material
through her own romanticized or even paternalistic
lens. So Hurston, for five crucial years, had
to constantly balance satisfying Mason's financial
expectations with meeting the rigorous academic
demands of Boas. It was a tightrope walk between
survival and intellectual integrity. She used
that money to dive deep into what she knew best,
the cultural landscape of the South. Between
1928 and 1932, she traveled extensively, leading
to her pioneering work, Mules and Men, published
in 1935. And Mules and Men is rightly celebrated
as a truly groundbreaking work of what we now
call literary anthropology. It documents African
-American folklore, sermons, games, and material
from turpentine camps, sawmills, and timber camps,
particularly in North Florida. And crucially,
she didn't just record the stories. She inserted
herself as a character. Exactly. An ethnographer
in the text who is accepted by the community
and participates in the storytelling and ritual
life. This methodological choice was highly influential.
And what makes this more than just a collection
of quaint stories are the specific sociological
observations she embedded right alongside the
folklore. You mentioned the practice of paramour
rites. This is where her anthropological training
provided a sharp political edge. She didn't shy
away from documenting the power dynamics of racialized
patriarchy. So what was that exactly? She described
the common, disturbing practice of white men
in positions of power owners, bosses, local politicians,
taking black women as concubines, often fathering
children with them, and exercising dominance
rooted in slavery -era practices. And she called
the system paramour rights. She or others later
referred to it explicitly as that. based on the
white men's unchallenged societal authority within
the segregated South. This shows that her work
was never merely a celebration of Black culture.
It was a deeply observant critique of the oppressive
structures surrounding it. Here is where we encounter
the figure who truly links her fieldwork to the
history of slavery. Cajoe Cazola Lewis or Cazola?
Right. He was the last known survivor of the
illegal transatlantic slave trade, trafficked
aboard the Clotilda in 1860, and Hurston traveled
to Plateau, Alabama, to interview him extensively.
Her first published account based on his life
came out in 1928 titled Kajo's Own Story of the
Last African Slaver. This interaction is foundational,
but it is also where the academic controversy
first emerged regarding her methodology. Yes,
and this is where we need to dive into that specific
detail. The sources suggest that this initial
1928 article contained plagiarism. That's a massive
academic failing, especially for a student mentored
by Boas. What exactly happened? Well, the initial
discovery, later detailed by her biographer,
Robert E. Hemenway, was that the 1928 article
was largely lifted, sometimes word for word,
from a 1914 book written by M. Emma Langdon Roche,
who had also interviewed Lewis. So it wasn't
just a similar idea. It was actual text. It was
actual text. Now, Hurston did add new original
information about Lewis's home village of Bante,
but the core narrative structure and some phrasing
were copied. Humanway later claimed that she
never plagiarized again, suggesting it was an
early, perhaps desperate mistake made under the
pressure of needing to produce content for her
patron, Mason. But plagiarism is a huge ethical
red flag. How did a figure so committed to the
truth of black life compromise her academic integrity
at this critical juncture? That tension is the
central paradox of her early career. The patronage
dynamic created an environment of haste and pressure.
She was often traveling with little support,
needing to constantly produce material that satisfied
Mason's aesthetic tastes and Boas' scientific
requirements. It's possible she saw the earlier
text as simply existing folklore that she was
refining, or maybe she just cut corners. It's
a significant mark against her academic record,
though. No question. It established a pattern
of ethical flexibility in the pursuit of a compelling
narrative, a pattern that would surface again.
Despite that misstep, she returned to Lewis,
conducting more interviews, taking photographs,
and recording the only known film footage of
him. This material became the basis for Barracoon,
the story of the last black cargo. A book she
completed in 1931, but shockingly, wasn't published
until 2018. 2018. Why the delay? Publishers in
the 1930s rejected it, primarily because Hurston
refused to modernize Lewis's dialect. She insisted
on transcribing his language exactly as he spoke
it, a method that publishers worried would be
inaccessible or off -putting to a mainstream
audience. And the title Barracoon, what does
that mean? It refers to the temporary barracks,
where captured Africans were imprisoned before
being shipped overseas. The narrative she created
was highly dramatic and emotionally resonant,
a semi -fictionalized account that allowed Lewis's
voice to be heard directly, uncensored. That
blending of hard fact and storytelling, where
she prioritizes the emotional or narrative truth
over strict quantitative objectivity, that seems
to be the hallmark of her methodology, right?
Absolutely. And that approach continued when
she went international. In 1937, she received
a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed
her to escape the Mason patronage dynamic and
conduct independent ethnographic research in
Jamaica and Haiti. And this resulted in Tell
My Horse, Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica,
published in 1938. A truly genre -defying book.
It mixes rigorous anthropology with folklore
and deeply personal narrative. Can you give us
a specific example of her fieldwork method in
that context? Sure. Look at her description of
the nine -night ritual in St. Thomas, Jamaica,
which is a traditional period of mourning and
celebration after a death. Instead of delivering
a dry, technical, or quantitative analysis of
the social structure of the ritual, She participates.
She aims to capture the atmosphere, the spiritual
fervor, and the dynamic social interactions.
She describes the singing, the dancing, the atmosphere
of dread and excitement regarding the dhupi,
or spirit, lingering around the body. So she's
documenting the experience of belief, not just
the data points of the ritual. Precisely. And
I can see how that makes for powerful reading,
but I can also imagine why it would make traditional
academics nervous. It seems like it would. It
did. That vibrancy drew significant criticism.
Her representation of voodoo in Tell My Horse,
with its focus on zombies and dramatic rituals,
was seen by some as sensationalist, playing into
existing exotic stereotypes rather than conducting
sober science. And the critique went deeper,
didn't it, regarding her earlier work? It did.
We know from a later letter she wrote to Ruth
Benedict that she admitted to fabricating material
and dialogue for mules and men. Wait, she admitted
to fabrication? That undermines the entire premise
of objective ethnography. It does. She specifically
mentioned inventing the story of rival voodoo
doctors as a child in her later autobiography,
Dust Tracks on a Road, to satisfy the expectations
of her audience or patrons, likely Mason. Critics
have argued that while her qualitative method
was revolutionary, the blurring of lines between
authentic documentation and narrative flair that
need to tell a better story made her methodology
highly questionable to academic colleagues. The
constant friction between the novelist and the
scientist in her head. That's it exactly. But
despite the controversies, her commitment to
documenting Black culture continued unabated
during the Depression era, even leading her to
federal employment. Right. She worked for the
Federal Writers Project, the FWP, from 1938 to
1939. Yes, part of the Works Progress Administration.
She was gathering information for Florida's historical
and cultural collection, leveraging her fieldwork
skills for a public history project. And this
is where her ethnomusicology, her study of music
in its cultural context, truly shines through.
The materials she collected for the FWP included
incredible audio documents of Black vernacular
music and performance. She preserved pieces like
the Crow Dance, which is a Bahamian American
dance song with deep West African roots. She
recorded the Gullah Geechee song, Oh, the Beaufort
Boat Done Come, documenting the culture of the
Sea Islands. And she captured Gabriel Brown's
performance of the legendary folk song John Henry.
Yeah. It shows a deep, multifaceted commitment
to preserving the total cultural tradition, the
language, the story, and the song, all of which
she saw as integral to Black identity. It's truly
amazing that she found the time and the mental
space to write novels while simultaneously navigating
dangerous field conditions and dealing with demanding
patrons. Let's pivot fully now to the literary
explosion that happened concurrently with her
fieldwork. When Hurston arrived in New York City
in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was absolutely
at its cultural zenith. And she didn't just attend
the Renaissance. She became one of its central,
most firebrand figures. She published her short
story, Spunk, in The New Negro. Elaine Locke's
landmark anthology, immediately establishing
her voice. And she was quickly involved with
what they playfully, perhaps provocatively, called
the Niggerati group. A group that included fellow
literary giants like Langston Hughes and Wallace
Thurman. What was their focus? This cohort was
focused on rejecting the traditional, often sentimental
portrayal of black life that was popular among
older black intellectuals and white patrons.
They wanted something raw, complex, and sometimes
deliberately shocking. And this ambition resulted
in the short -lived but incredibly influential
literary magazine called Fire in 1926. One issue.
It only lasted one issue because it was so controversial
and financially disastrous, but it crystallized
a generational split in the Harlem literary scene.
And that desire for uncompromising creative control
led to one of the great collaborations and subsequent
falling outs of the movement. The dramatic dispute
with Langston Hughes over the play Mule Bone,
a comedy of Negro life. Right. They wrote it
together in 1930. The premise was based on the
folklore she had collected, capturing the specific
idiom and humor of the Southern Black community.
But a dispute over ownership and performance
rights. Partially fueled by the interference
of their patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who
often stoked competition, destroyed their friendship
permanently. And the play was shelled for decades.
It was so bitter that the play itself was never
staged in its own time. It only premiered in
1991. Wow. That collapse over the play, which
was essentially a fight over whose vision of
black vernacular culture would prevail, really
underscores that fierce individualism that defined
Hurston. Absolutely. She was unwilling to compromise
her artistic interpretation, even if it cost
her one of the most important friendships and
professional collaborations of her career. Her
individual literary career flourished nonetheless
throughout her fieldwork years. Her first novel,
Jonah's Gordvine, was published in 1934. Drawing
heavily on her family history and the culture
of Black Southern preachers. Then came their
eyes were watching God in 1937, her masterwork.
Which she famously wrote in just seven weeks
while conducting ethnographic research in Haiti.
Under the Guggenheim. Just incredible. Our third
novel, a retelling of the Exodus story, Moses,
Man of the Mountain, followed in 1939. And then
there's the final published novel, Seraph on
the Suwannee from 1948. A radical departure.
In what way? It centers principally on white
characters and explores the identities of so
-called white trash women in Florida. Which is
a very different focus for her. It's a complex
and often overlooked novel. Some scholars suggest
that this meditation on objection, poverty, and
the construction of class and gender identities
among poor whites. It actually reflects a complicated
engagement with the eugenics discourses of the
1920s and 30s. Eugenics, that was a highly problematic
pseudoscientific movement. How does her novel
engage with that? Well, it doesn't endorse it,
but it certainly investigates the social construction
of supposed inherent worth or lack thereof, even
among different groups of white Americans. By
shifting her focus away from the politics of
race and onto the politics of class and character
among poor whites, she was perhaps trying to
universalize the struggle for self -determination
that was central to her own life, regardless
of skin color. Concurrent with her novel writing,
she was deeply committed to developing black
dramatic expression. She didn't just want to
collect folklore. She wanted to perform it. Right.
In 1934, she established a school of dramatic
arts at Bethune -Cookman College, an HBCU in
Daytona Beach. Her goal was to create theater
based on pure Negro expression. drawing directly
from the songs, dances, and rituals she documented.
And her theatrical reviews, like The Great Day,
reflected this belief that folklore should not
remain passive on the page. It should be dramatized
and brought to life by the community it came
from, but that passion for performance cost her.
Financially, I mean. Oh, yeah. The Great Day
only had one performance and left Hurston in
$600 worth of debt, a huge amount back then.
It shows the sheer financial volatility of her
career. She was constantly reinvesting any money
she earned back into her art and her research.
Her academic residencies also reflect this constant
tension between her brilliant mind and her unconventional
persona. Yes. She took a position in the drama
department at the North Carolina College for
Negroes NCC for the 1939 -1940 academic year.
But while she was teaching there, she was simultaneously
engaged in a remarkable academic maneuver. She
was secretly studying at the segregated University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill UNC. A secret
student at the highly segregated white institution.
She was participating in coursework in theater
groups and being mentored by faculty like the
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paul Green.
That's just audacious. She's simultaneously working
at a black college and taking classes at a segregated
white college. How did that even work? It was
an open secret among the faculty who respected
her brilliance, if not publicly acknowledged
by the administration. However, her tenure at
NCC ended abruptly after only one year. Why?
Well, the sources point clearly to a difficult
departure stemming from her relationship with
NCC's president, James E. Shepard. And the conflict
was personal, wasn't it? Not just intellectual.
Profoundly personal. Shepard reportedly found
Hurston's attire. She was known for her flamboyant,
slightly bohemian style and her overall lifestyle
inappropriate for an unmarried woman on campus.
She was fiercely independent, unmarried, traveling
extensively and unwilling to conform to the strict
behavioral codes expected of a female academic
at an HBCU at the time. Her independent spirit,
while fueling her creativity, fundamentally clashed
with institutional expectations of respectability.
She simply refused to be contained. That refusal
to be contained by conventional expectations
brings us sharply into the later phase of her
career, where her contrarian political edge became
so pronounced that it contributed significantly
to her professional obscurity. Yes, and let's
start with a major late career assignment that
allowed her to use her anthropological background
for journalism. The sensational Ruby McCollum
murder trial of 1952 -1953. Right. She was hired
by the prominent black newspaper, the Pittsburgh
Courier, to cover this highly publicized case.
Ruby McCollum, a wealthy black woman, was accused
of killing C. Leroy Adams, a white doctor, state
politician, and alleged lover. And Hurston immediately
approached this not just as a crime story, but
through her own academic lens. She saw the case
potentially revolving entirely around the system
of paramour rights. That same white male sexual
dominance she had documented decades earlier
in the North Florida lumber camps. Exactly. She
and the editor believed the trial was a prime
opportunity to expose this toxic, systemic practice
to a national audience. But upon arrival, she
faced immediate journalistic hurdles. The judge
issued a strict gag order. A gag order, and there
was a profound silence from both black and white
residents. This silence was likely enforced by
fear, possibly related to Dr. Adams' alleged
involvement in Ruby's husband's illegal gambling
operation. A dangerous undercurrent to the whole
affair. Very. Despite the obstacles, Hurston
achieved something monumentally important in
that coverage. She focused intensely on Ruby
McCollum's testimony in her own defense. And
this is the achievement. McCollum's testimony
marked the first time an African -American woman
was allowed to testify as to the paternity of
her child by a white man in a segregated Southern
court. A crack in the Jim Crow wall. It was.
Hurston celebrated this victory, declaring in
print that McCollum's testimony had sounded the
death toll of paramour rights in the segregated
South. But once again, her professional ethics
became murky. She shared her deep foundational
material from the first trial with a white journalist,
William Bradford Huey, who then wrote the bestseller
Ruby McCollum, Woman in the Sewanee Jail in 1956.
And Huey, despite using her essential fieldwork
and insights, only gave Hurston a brief passing
acknowledgement. Which again points to her difficulty
navigating the practical world of professional
advancement. Right. She was perhaps too trusting
or too focused on the larger goal of getting
the story out, regardless of who published the
definitive account. Regardless of the journalistic
setbacks, the truly defining characteristic of
her later life was her profound and unwavering
political individualism. Hurston was a Republican.
Yes, aligning herself with the politics of the
old right. We need to unpack what that means.
The old right of the mid -20th century was largely
isolationist, fiscally conservative, and fiercely
opposed to the expansion of federal governmental
power. She was a spiritual heir to the philosophy
of Booker T. Washington. The emphasis on self
-reliance, economic independence, and working
within established structures to build community
strength, rather than prioritizing federal intervention
or social upheaval. She famously separated herself
from the collective civil rights activism of
the rising generation. She stated, I am not interested
in the race problem, but I am interested in the
problems of individuals, white ones and black
ones. It's a radical individualist position.
She criticized race pride and race consciousness,
arguing it was a thing to be abhorred. What was
her reasoning there? Her reasoning was fascinating.
She believed that basing one's pride on something
as arbitrary as race was illogical. Why assume
every black person is automatically a genius
like Carver or every white person is a genius
like Edison? Achievement, she argued, belongs
purely to the individual. And these contrarian
views extended to her economic philosophy, placing
her firmly against the liberal consensus that
was forming around Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1951,
she harshly criticized the New Deal, arguing
it had inadvertently created a harmful dependency
among African -Americans on the government, ceding
too much power and self -determination to distant
politicians. This fear of centralized paternalistic
government control was paramount for her. Absolutely.
She supported the conservative Republican Senator
Robert A. Taft's 1952 presidential campaign and
consistently opposed interventionist foreign
policy. She even called Harry Truman the butcher
of Asia after the dropping of the atomic bombs
on Japan. Given this staunch individualism and
anti -political stance, it's not surprising that
she drew the ire of her more politically motivated
literary peers. Yes. This is where we return
to Richard Wright, who essentially delivered
a devastating career blow. His famous critique
of their eyes were watching God. Right. He argued
that the novel exploits that phase of Negro life
which is quaint and satisfies the chauvinistic
tastes of a white audience. He dismissed it as
lacking theme. No message, no thought. Which
was more than a literary disagreement. It was
a political indictment. It was. Wright, who wrote
explicitly about the brutal realities of racial
oppression, believed literature had to serve
the political struggle of the race. He saw Hurston's
focus on folklore, dialect, and the internal
dynamics of a segregated community as an evasion.
A failure to advance the political cause. And
this critique had weight because it captured
the changing literary mood. In the late 30s and
40s, the mood shifted toward realism. urban grit
and political protest, embodied by Wright and
later Ralph Ellison. Hurston's celebration of
the vernacular just seemed outdated and apolitical
by comparison. But perhaps the most jarring political
stance she took, viewed through the modern historical
lens, was her opposition to the 1954 Brown v.
Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. This
stance baffles many modern readers, but it must
be understood within her framework of radical
individualism and anti -centralism. In her 1955
piece in the Orlando Sentinel, Court Order Can't
Make the Races Mix, she argued that if separate
schools were truly equal, which she contended
they were rapidly becoming mandated, mixing wouldn't
improve education. So what was the deeper philosophical
motivation for opposing a ruling designed to
end segregation? Her fear was twofold. First,
she feared the demise of established black schools
and the subsequent displacement of black teachers
and administrators who were essential custodians
of cultural tradition. Okay. Second, and critically,
she viewed the ruling as establishing a dangerous
legal precedent for an all -powerful federal
government to undermine individual liberty on
a broad range of future issues. To her, mandated
mixing was just as tyrannical as mandated separation
if it came from a centralized, coercive power
source. So her position wasn't one of supporting
segregation, which she had always opposed. No,
not at all. It was a deeply skeptical view of
centralized power forcing societal change upon
the individual. This is why scholars today categorize
her political identity using terms like conservative
and libertarian. Exactly. John McWhorter characterized
her as America's favorite black conservative.
Others have compared her radical individualism
to figures like Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Patterson,
early libertarian writers who shared that deep,
almost visceral distrust of federal intervention.
Her genius was rooted in the black community,
but her politics placed her far outside the emerging
black political consensus. Far outside. And finally,
we should touch on her personal spiritual views,
which, like everything else about her, defy simple
categorization. She rejected organized religion
and theism. She wrote very clearly in Dust Tracks
on a Road, And yet, This deeply skeptical, rational
mind was the same person who dedicated her life
to documenting and even participating in rituals
of deep spiritual faith like voodoo and hoodoo.
It's a profound contradiction. The anthropologist
in her retained an intense professional interest
in religion and folklore from a cultural standpoint.
She didn't just study voodoo. She participated
in the rituals alongside her research subjects,
sometimes even to the point of trance, to better
understand and document the cultural experience.
The pursuit of anthropological knowledge often
transcended her personal non -belief. It did.
It showed that for Hurston, the search for truth
about humanity was always more important than
personal dogma. So we have this amazing, complex,
prolific woman writer, scholar, firebrand, and
yet she slid quickly into obscurity for decades.
It wasn't just her contrarian politics that alienated
her from the progressive intellectual community.
It was a fundamental cultural shift in literary
taste that left her behind. A shift centered
on language and representation. That's right.
Her distinctive use of African -American dialect,
which she painstakingly documented through her
fieldwork to represent the authentic speech pattern
to the time, suddenly fell out of favor. Why?
Why did the language she had championed as authentic
suddenly become a problem? Younger writers and
critics regarded dialect as demeaning, often
linking it to minstrelsy or a caricature rooted
in white racist traditions that exploited black
culture for entertainment. So the literary landscape
was shifting. Hurston, who championed the internal
life and vernacular expression of the community,
was perceived as having failed to evolve with
the times. The outcome was financially devastating.
Hurston struggled immensely in her last decade,
often living in grinding poverty. She worked
as a freelance writer. a substitute teacher,
and in her 60s, she took work as a maid on Miami
Beach's affluent Rivo Alto Island, fighting just
to make ends meet and eventually relying on public
assistance. There are details from this period
that truly illustrate the tragedy of her neglect.
The one that always gets me is from 1957. She
managed to secure a job at the Pan American World
Airways Technical Library at Patrick Air Force
Base, hoping to leverage her extensive academic
background. She was fired after only a few months
for being deemed too well -educated for the role.
The breadth of her knowledge, the very thing
we celebrate, became an obstacle to earning a
stable living. It's an indictment of the era
that a major American author and anthropologist
died in poverty. She passed away from hypertensive
heart disease on January 28, 1960 at the age
of 69 in a St. Lucie County welfare home. And
she was buried in Fort Pierce, Florida. in an
unmarked grave, seemingly forgotten by the world
she had so brilliantly documented. But her story
doesn't end with her burial. This is where we
encounter a critical intervention that saved
her intellectual legacy from complete destruction.
Yes. After her death, a local law officer and
friend, Patrick Duvall, noticed a yardman in
Fort Pierce burning Hurston's papers and belongings.
Burning them. Just destroying her life's work.
Burning them. Duval stopped the burning, literally
snatching her manuscripts and notes from the
flames. This act of quick thinking saved an invaluable
collection of literary and anthropological documents.
What was in there? A manuscript of her novel
Seraph on the Swanee. and, crucially, an unpublished
biography of Herod the Great. At that saved material,
that was the roadmap for her eventual scholarly
rediscovery. It was. It was stored for two years
and eventually donated to the University of Florida
Libraries, Yale's James Weldon Johnson Collection,
and other archives. And the catalyst for that
rediscovery came over a decade later in 1973.
With novelist Alice Walker. Walker was researching
Hurston for a feature, and she and scholar Charlotte
D. Hunt traveled to Fort Pierce to find her grave.
And they found an unmarked plot in the general
area and installed a marker. A marker that, though
it mistakenly used the incorrect 1901 birth year,
bore a defiant inscription, A Genius of the South,
a line borrowed from the poet Jean Toomer. That
marker was a declaration, and the official global
revival kicked off just two years later. When
Alice Walker published her seminal article in
search of Zora Neale Hurston in Mrs. Magazine
in 1975. And that single essay acted like an
intellectual earthquake. It prompted a massive,
decades -long resurgence of interest among scholars,
readers, and literary critics who recognized
that Hurston's unique voice, her celebration
of internal community life, and her unapologetic
use of vernacular were not flaws. but fundamental
strengths. She was retroactively placed into
the American literary canon. And today the recognition
is finally widespread and ongoing. Eatonville
hosts the annual Zora Festival. Her house in
Fort Pierce is now a National Historic Landmark,
and she's been inducted into the National Women's
Hall of Fame and the Alabama Writers Hall of
Fame. And we continue to see posthumous publications
drawing from those salvaged papers. Including
the complete folktales in every tongue got to
confess in 2001, and the full narrative of the
slave ship survivor in Barracoon in 2018. And
there's one more major discovery coming. Her
unfinished novel The Life of Herod the Great
is forthcoming in January 2025, demonstrating
that even 65 years after her death, her work
is still teaching us and challenging us. Her
legacy, once nearly lost to poverty and flames,
is now celebrated globally as an essential pillar
of American literature and anthropology. When
we look back at Zora Neale Hurston's dual life,
we see a trajectory of profound and often contradictory
identities. She was the academically trained
folklorist who insisted on capturing the authentic
vernacular and voice of the black community and
all its complexity. And the writer who used that
voice to create timeless stories that transcended
or perhaps rejected the political slogans of
her time. Her entire life was an uncompromising
stand for individuality and self -reliance, no
matter the personal or. professional cost. Her
trajectory is truly startling, spanning from
being the sole black student at Barnard College,
receiving mentorship from the greatest anthropologists
of her generation, to fighting poverty as a maid
on Miami Beach, deemed too well educated for
a library job. It's just stunning. Her ability
to operate within the highest academic circles
while simultaneously immersing herself completely
in the rituals of hoodoo and the realities of
Florida lumber camps, not as an outsider, but
as an accepted participating community member.
raises a profound question about authenticity
and representation in ethnographic work that
scholars still debate today. And that deep tension,
that uncompromising individualism also characterized
her political life. It forces us to ask, how
do we as readers and students of history reconcile
the celebration of her artistic genius with the
critique of her fiercely individualistic and
often contrarian political choices? I mean, she
once stood firmly against mandatory integration,
not out of support for Jim Crow. Right. But because
of a deeply rooted libertarian fear that centralized
federal power would ultimately destroy black.
cultural institutions like black schools and
black colleges and strip individuals of their
hard -won sense of self -reliance. This position
alienated her from the civil rights consensus
that defined the latter half of the 20th century.
So here's the question for you, the listener,
to mull over as you conclude this deep dive.
Do her fiercely contrarian political positions,
which undeniably led to her immediate professional
obscurity among her progressive peers in the
mid -20th century, ultimately serve to make her
legacy of radical self -reliance even stronger
and more provocative today? What does it mean
to celebrate a genius whose political philosophy
actively undermined the consensus of the very
movement that produced her? That tension between
cultural affirmation and political independence
remains the deepest, most challenging part of
the Zora Neale Hurston legacy.