Zora Neale Hurston, Champion of Individualism and Black Culture

Hurston was born on the 7th of January 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama. Her father, John Hurston, was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, while her mother, Lucy Ann Hurston, was a schoolteacher. Zora did not come from a prestigious background; her grandparents were former slaves. She was the fifth of eight children in the Hurston family. When Zora was roughly three years old, the Hurstons packed up and moved to Eatonville, Florida. Founded in 1887 by a group of black families, Eatonville was a model of self-​government at a time when black Americans were politically disenfranchised. Zora grew up in a small, close-​knit community of economically poor yet self-​reliant people.

Hurston lived during a time when many whites believed blacks to be of inferior moral and intellectual ability, lacking the capacity for self-​government. But Hurston’s childhood in Eatonville contradicted this myth: she saw laws debated, drafted, and enacted by black people; her father was even the town’s mayor for multiple terms.

Zora’s mother passed away in 1904, and she was sent to boarding school in Jacksonville shortly after. Hurston showed a great deal of intelligence and was eager to learn, but the faculty and administrators created a stifling environment, believing that the primary function of education was to teach people their “proper” place in society. Hurston’s education was cut short when her father stopped paying fees, and her school dismissed her.

Without any prospect for education, Hurston searched for work, shifting from house to house, relying on relatives and friends’ kindness. But finding a steady job was challenging. It was immediately apparent that the young Hurston would not simply shut up and obey any old order. She was fired from one job because she informed the house’s matriarch that her husband was making unwelcome advances.

While searching for employment, Hurston found a copy of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost discarded in the trash. Reading Milton was Hurston’s first step towards a lifelong love of literature and poetry.

Hurston found work as a lady’s maid to the singer of a traveling musical theater troupe. The job paid a decent salary, but the real benefit was Hurston’s encounters with the college-​educated members of high society. By the time she finished her stint with the troupe and arrived in Baltimore, Hurston had decided to seek out further education.

But by then, Hurston was twenty-​six with no high school diploma and lacking options to realistically get one. Hurston decided to lie about her date of birth to be eligible for free schooling. Somehow, Hurston played a convincing sixteen-​year-​old. Working during the day and attending high school at night, Hurston excelled at her studies and even enrolled in her school’s elite wing, showing her potential as a scholar. Upon finishing high school, Hurston moved to Washington to study at Howard University, a historically black institution for higher learning.

As she progressed through her education, Hurston met an array of budding intellectuals such as Alain Locke. Locke was the first black Rhodes scholar and a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance movement, an explosion of black American cultural expression. In 1921, Hurston wrote a short story that qualified her for entry into Alain Locke’s literary club, known as “The Stylus,” where Hurston rubbed shoulders with the Harlem Renaissance’s most important poets, playwrights, novelists, and critics. Throughout college and after, Hurston worked as an independent reporter supported by patrons and whatever money she could glean from writing.

While honing her skills in 1925, she won two cash prizes in a literary contest. While at the awards dinner, she had a pivotal meeting with Annie Nathan Meyer, an author and founder of Barnard College in New York. Meyer offered Hurston the opportunity to study at Barnard. By the time she started, Hurston was the only Black woman enrolled at the school.

While studying, Hurston became a protege of the anthropologist Franz Boas, a foundational figure of American Anthropology. Along with Boas, Hurston traveled to the Deep South, collecting African American folk tales. Inspired by Boas, Hurston continued her studies and attained a graduate degree.

By 1928, when Hurston began her graduate degree, she also published an essay entitled “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” where she explains the cultural shock of moving from her proud home of Eatonville to Jacksonville. When moving to Jacksonville from a majority-​black town, Hurston described herself as feeling like her race overshadowed the rest of her identity, writing that “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” (Hurston 2015). But throughout this short essay, Hurston overcomes that feeling of having lost her individuality by accepting her authentic self.

At the time, even whites sympathetic to civil rights often viewed black people with condescension, an unfortunate race condemned by cruel fate to be downtrodden and victimized. Hurston rebelled against this notion, writing, “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all” (Hurston 2015). Hurston was attempting to evoke a sense that black people were not mere products of a system that brutalized them but individuals with their own cultures and values, and that being black was not inherently something to be lamented.

Hurston concludes by saying at times, she feels like a brown bag of random items propped against a wall. Next to her are a bunch of other red, white, and yellow bags representing other races. When the bags are emptied, they reveal both priceless and worthless objects. If we emptied every bag, we could dump all their contents in a heap, and refill the bags arbitrarily while leaving their outward appearances the same.

In Hurston’s understanding, people of different races can only be judged individually, not collectively, and her conception of race was a narrow one such that race would be, in an ideal world, relatively inconsequential. Hurston found she only felt “colored” when surrounded by the “sharp white background” of a racist society. Race indeed can be, like Hurston wished, largely irrelevant—unless and until some actors establishes race-​based rules backed by violence. This actor is usually a small group in a position of arbitrary power, a role historically assumed by private actors like the Ku Klux Klan, public actors like the state, and by combinations of state and private actors working in tacit or explicit collusion.

Hurston was among the vanguard of anthropologists who argued that black Americans had developed their own unique traditions, especially in manipulating languages with rich epigrams and imagery. Hurston believed black culture, speech, and art promoted the virtues of resilience and a good-​humored stoicism, helping black people live through the pain and misery of slavery and discrimination. According to Hurston, the ultimate virtue of black culture was a sense of internal freedom that could never be taken.

While studying, Hurston lived in Harlem and played a role in the Harlem Renaissance. Of all the big names in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was one of the few that grew up in the South and had first-​hand experience with Jim Crow laws. Key figures such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright were communists. Hurston thought that these communist intellectuals did not want to celebrate black culture but to exploit it for their political ends. Writing to Charlotte Mason, Hurston explained, “The things our ‘leaders’ are fighting for are privileges for the intellectuals not benefits for the humble” (Kaplan 2007, p.234). Unlike her fellow writers in Harlem, Hurston did not subscribe to communist ideals and had no sympathy for the Soviet Union, which she viewed as another colonial power.

By 1930, Hurston had published plays, short stories, essays, and academic articles, but not yet a novel. This was to change by 1934 with her first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, a semi-​autobiographical novel that was very obviously inspired by her experiences in Eatonville. The novel’s use of folktales, sermons, and jokes taken directly from Hurston’s experiences studying the South is especially noteworthy. While the novel hardly seems groundbreaking, it was published during a period when black culture was ignored or belittled by the white majority. Jonah’s Gourd Vine was reviewed positively in large publications and deemed an impressively original work.

By 1936, Hurston earned prestigious Guggenheim grants that allowed her to travel throughout Haiti and Jamaica for research. While living abroad, she began writing her magnum opus known as Their Eyes Were Watching God, telling the story of the fictional Janine Crawford, who bears a resemblance to the real-​life Zora Neale Hurston. Like Hurston, Janine grew up in poverty but remains optimistic about her future. Her grandmother is a former slave like Hurston’s. Janine’s mother intends to wed her to a hardworking but ultimately dull farmer many years her senior in want of a servant rather than a loving companion.

Janine meets an ambitious young man named Jody Starks and quickly runs away with him to Eatonville. But Jody’s character comes up short. His image matters more than his actual accomplishments and he quickly turns abusive. After constant berating, Janine stands up for herself and is beaten by the furious Jody, who demands submission. Jody dies from illness, but with his death comes Janine’s rebirth; she takes over Jody’s store and manages it with great care.

Though single for a time, Janine meets the handsome, hardworking, and confident man known as “Tea Cake” for his sweet demeanor. Though half her age, the pair become inseparable. Tea Cake represents the confident, good-​natured, authentic individualism that Hurston admired all her life.

Tragically, their romance abruptly ends during a hurricane; Tea Cake is bitten by a dog who infects him with rabies. Tea Cake’s mind deteriorates to the point where he tries to kill Janine, who shoots him in self-​defense. The story ends with Janine alone, contemplating how wonderful it was to meet and love Tea Cake despite her hardships.

Their Eyes was received well, but Hurston’s intellectual peers were less impressed. Critics like Alain Locke praised her prose but argued her work fell short because she did not prioritize racial and political issues.

Regardless of what the critics once said, Their Eyes is now a renowned piece of literature that is easily Hurston’s best-​known work. Janine, like Hurston, struggled for equality with her partners. Hurston had two marriages that ended in divorce and a failed engagement. Throughout the novel, Janine attempts to assert that she is not a servant to command but an equal partner deserving of both love and respect, neither of which can exist independently of the other. Throughout her life, Janine learned to stand up for herself and ignore the gossiping and chattering of others, becoming an authentic individual.

In 1941, Hurston relocated to Los Angeles and began writing her autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston embellished some stories and had an eye on her public image and persona. Dust Tracks was reviewed well and was praised by many for its style. Published during World War II, publishers were concerned with wartime censorship. Editors removed anything critical of the US, including a whole chapter where Hurston unleashes a raging critique of US imperialism.

Hurston focuses on cataloging the long list of violent abuses both Axis and Allied powers have carried out against the inhabitants of their colonies. Hurston believed the increasing American involvement in Asian affairs would make America resemble its European counterparts as a colonial power.

The major players of the Allied and Axis forces all had brutally exploited their conquered colonies for centuries. Stressing the double standard, Hurston quips, “Hitler’s crime is that he is actually doing a thing like that to his own kind” (Patterson 2005, p. 178). Europeans were on the receiving end of the savagery they inflicted on their colonial subjects. By contrasting the Allies’ moral outrage against the Axis alongside the heinous crimes of colonialism, Hurston stressed the need for colonial powers to operate on double standards constantly.

The war also intensified Hurston’s fear of the ever-​expanding unchecked power of the president. She viewed FDR’s New Deal as the establishment of a paternal state. Later, in 1945, Hurston called for the repeal of Jim Crow laws but argued this should be done through the legislative branch, not the executive. Even if for good intentions, the use of such power opens the door to the law becoming null; she explained that “if you turn an executive loose to go outside the law in your favor on Monday…you have also given him the power to go outside the law on Thursday against you” (Kaplan 2007, p. 763). She concluded, “No country is safe from tyranny unless the chief executive is kept within the bounds of law made and provided.”

Dust Tracks also contains Hurston’s views on racial identity, wildly different from her Harlem peers. Hurston refused to think in terms of racial categories. Races cannot achieve things. Race is an abstract concept, only individuals can achieve things; Edison may have been a white man who invented the lightbulb, but this does not mean the white race invented the lightbulb, that was Edison. Hurston committed to individualism, casting aside racial categorization, a difficult prospect in such a racially divided society, but Hurston wrote of her views stating that though “[t]he solace of easy generalization was taken,” she received “the richer gift of individualism. When I have been made to suffer or when I have been made happy by others, I have known that individuals were responsible for that, not races” (Griffin 2021, p. 323).

After writing Dust Tracks, Hurston moved to Daytona Beach, lived on a houseboat, and fantasized about sailing to Honduras and uncovering ancient Mayan ruins. However, economic shortcomings thwarted her dream. Hurston was a successful author with impeccable intellectual clout, but writing never fully afforded her financial independence.

Throughout the 1950s, Hurston was forced to work several short-​lived jobs, relegating writing to her spare time. After meandering from place to place in search of employment, Hurston’s health caught up with her, and after suffering from a stroke, she lived in Saint Lucie County Welfare Home, where she remained for the last years of her life. She died in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. When Hurston died, her papers were ordered to be burnt, but a passing law officer knew of Hurston’s work and quickly put out the fire, saving her personal letters and unpublished manuscripts, a gift to the world.

At her zenith, Hurston was an icon of the Harlem Renaissance movement, but over the years her reputation waned. Her name was relegated to obscurity until interest in Hurston was revived by scholars like Alice Walker. Now, scholars are returning to her writings and reexamining their relevance and importance. She used fiction to allude to the big issues in life through the lens of the individual and not of race, creed, gender, or any other collective. Her ability to identify and cherish the richness of black culture many had ignored set her apart from her contemporaries. A fiercely independent thinker who refused to see the world through the lens of racial categories like many of her contemporaries, Hurston remained firm that races do not dream, aspire, or achieve; only individuals can do such things.