Filed under: News, Race and Civil Rights
"Janie knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead. So she became a woman."
"Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah'm lyin'. Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom."
-- Teacake
"Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston's (pictured) fictional exploration of a black woman's self-discovery, was not simply about finding romantic love -- because ultimately that implodes at the end of the story -- but finding her own voice through love.
And it resonates 120 years after her birth, January 7, 1891.
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Zora Neale Hurston died in obscurity in 1960, after a life that came full circle.
Hurston began her working life as a maid and died working as a cleaning woman for a white woman, who was shocked and impressed when she found out her maid was a masterful writer but still kept her cleaning her house.
The iconic writer had been publicly criticized by her black American male peers -- Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison -- for her use of black dialect and her refusal to anchor her stories around the "Negro problem."
Famously she responded:
"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."
What's ironic about their criticism is the dialect is some of the most brilliant, beautiful, insightful prose -- full of witty black idioms and expressions that could have been lost to an undocumented and neglected history.
As an anthropologist, she studied the nuances and cadences of black language, and as a Southern black woman growing up in all-black Eatonville, Fla., she had the privilege of living it.
Eatonville, the first all-black town to be incorporated, was a kind of rural Chocolate City. For blacks who lived under the constant thumb of oppression in more integrated towns, it was difficult to envision an existence outside The Man's glare.
For many blacks from places, such as Eatonville, though, they just lived.
Like everybody else. And most of the time with a lot more color.
Hurston's point of view exemplified this to the consternation of her more parochial contemporaries who felt she was exposing the uneducated dirty laundry of the black community.
Her stories were told with broken English -- how was this going to get us equal privilege? Or more importantly, what will white folks think?!
Courageously, Hurston didn't give a damn what men or white folks or anyone thought.
And, of course, she was punished because of it -- ostracized and criticized.
But even she had to tow the racial line at times. In Valerie Boyd's biography, 'Wrapped in Rainbows,' Boyd illustrates how Hurston tottered on a seesaw in the racial landscape of the 1920s.
Hurston reportedly dumbed herself down in letters to her white female benefactor, playing on racial stereotypes for the purposes of simultaneously soothing her ego and opening her purse.
While 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' is her most celebrated work, her other books, including 'Dust Tracks on a Road,' 'Jonah's Gourd Vine,' and 'Mules and Men,' all explore the comedy, the poignancy and ordinariness of black language and life, while 'Seraph on the Suwanee' explores the dialect and lives of poor white Southerners.
As a journalist and anthropologist, Hurston studied at Morgan State University (then Morgan Academy) and Howard University, where she founded the Hilltop (still in existence today) and became the only black student at Barnard College, which she was able to attend with the help of a scholarship.
She later enrolled at Columbia, studying anthropology. Hurston went on to study African religions and cultural practices, including voudoun in Haiti (where she reportedly wrote 'Their Eyes' in just over a month) and African rituals in Jamaica.
She was high-spirited, didn't hesitate to fight or argue, or alternately party or dazzle when she walked in to a room. Hurson was an author, married and divorced twice, a mentor to children in Harlem, an anthropologist and a journalist. One author said she constantly had him looking in the dictionary after conversations with her.
But mostly she lived. Without fear and with humor -- just like the characters she created.
She was buried in an unmarked grave before Alice Walker found the general area where she may have been buried and provided it with a marker. But even without a marker she could never be forgotten.
Happy birthday, Zora.
You can watch the documentary of her life from California Newsreel and from editor Sam Pollard here: