Zora Neale Hurston Tuesday, Aug 25 2009

Born and raised in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black town in the United States, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th century, not simply for her influence on subsequent African-American writers but also for the passionate voice she gave to black culture in this country. 

After attending Howard, Columbia and Barnard universities, Hurston began her career as a folklorist and social anthropologist, traveling to Haiti to study the voodoo tradition. She quickly rejected the distanced, scientific attitude of the researcher, in order to become immersed in the culture. In two volumes, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse(1938), Hurston gathered the tales of the American South and the Caribbean. 

Hurston is best known for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel that created controversy by refusing to admit black inferiority while simultaneously refusing to depict its characters as victims of a world that thought them inferior.

Hurston died penniless in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her work was largely forgotten and all of it was out of print. In 1973, African-American novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried and marked it as hers. Walker wrote an article titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” for the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine. This article revived interest in her work. Her works were republished and have been in print ever since.

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Their Eyes Were Watching God Overview Tuesday, Aug 25 2009

Their Eyes Were Watching God begins with the reader’s eyes fixed on a woman who returns from burying the dead. Written in only seven weeks while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel chronicles the journey of Janie Mae Crawford from her grandmother’s plantation shack to Logan Killicks’ farm, to the all-black community of Eatonville, to the Everglades, until a tragedy brings her back to Eatonville. From this vantage point, Janie narrates her life story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson, satisfying the “oldest human longing – self-revelation.” 

Forced to marry for money at 16, Janie at first believes that love automatically comes with marriage. Unable to endure her mule-like servitude and the desecration of her dreams, she spontaneously leaves Logan for Joe Starks, a handsome, ambitious man determined to put her on a pedestal once he becomes mayor of Eatonville. After enduring a mostly joyless 20-year marriage to him, Janie finally meets a young, uneducated wastrel named Tea Cake. She thinks she can find with him genuine love for the first time, but fate intervenes, and Janie must choose between his safety and her own. 

Although the novel is not an autobiography, Hurston once reflected that it is a love story, inspired by a real love affair in her life. She also fictionalized another important incident in her life in the novel: In 1929, Hurston survived a five-day hurricane in the Bahamas, getting herself and another family out of a house before it began to collapse. 

Hurston’s conviction that black culture is valuable, unique and worthy of preservation comes through in Their Eyes Were Watching God via its harmonious blend of folklore and black idiom. In Janie Mae Crawford, Hurston rejects 19th- and early 20th-century stereotypes for women and creates a protagonist who, though silenced for most of her life, ultimately finds her own voice.

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