ZORA NEALE HURSTON is considered one of the most brilliant African-American folklorists who ever lived today, although she died a pauper’s obscure death in 1960s Florida at age 69, after suffering a lifetime of frustration and rejection. Since Hurston often referred to herself as one of the progressive “New Negroes” and slyly proclaimed herself as “Queen Niggerati,” she most likely would have relished the irony of over 2000 celebrities gathering on August 13, 2002, in New York’s Central Park to honor her (as the “Queen of the Harlem Renaissance”), 42 years after her death.

“She’s smiling on us right now,” said the actor Russell Hornsby, who turned out with Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and other stars to salute Hurston with a program of readings at Summer Stage called “Zora’s Salon.” Inasmuch as Hurston didn’t live to see any of her seven books (including her acclaimed 1937 novel: “Their Eyes Were Watching God”), in print, she has emerged as an epic literary figure as her reputation grows under a surge of new scholarship, started in 1973 by the writer Alice Walker’s quest to find her role model’s unmarked grave. At last count, 29 books have been written about Hurston, including a groundbreaking 1977 literary biography by Robert E. Hemenway.

More amazing, is the fact that her recently published books have created a cult following that was embellished by hundreds of articles, chapters and dissertations. The latest work, a collection of 600 recently discovered letters is to be published this fall by Doubleday, and a second volume of collected folk tales, “Every Tongue Got to Confess,” was put out last year by Harper-Collins. In April “Polk County,” one of 10 long-lost Hurston plays found in the Library of Congress five years ago, drew raves at its premiere in Washington. Born in Alabama and raised in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston became a widely beloved but never easily fathomable figure.
Hurston, after leaving Florida, landed in New York in 1925 with $1.50 in her pocket and was soon drawn to the Black cultural blossoming known as the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston straddled the worlds of social science and art, starting as Barnard College’s only Black student and protégé of the anthropologist Franz Boas. “The Negro was in vogue,” said Langston Hughes, her on-again, off-again confidant and collaborator. The novelist Rudolph Fisher put it another way: “Negro stock is going up, and everyone’s buying.” It was at that time Hurston began referring to herself as “Queen Niggerati.”

Living up to her reputation, Hurston feuded with Richard Wright and the Communists, drove a red convertible, packed a gun at times for protection and once knocked out a masher who proposition her in an elevator. An avid anthropologist (and shrewd grant-getter), she returned to Eatonville and her Southern roots in 1927 to hunt down folk tales, convinced that folklore is the art people create before they know there is such as thing as art. The tales suggested to her that “the Negro’s outstanding characteristic is drama,” and she wrote: “Who has not observed a young Negro chap posing up a street corner, possessed of nothing but his clothing, his strength and his youth? Does he bear himself like a pauper? No, Louis XIV could be no more insolent in his assurance.”

She haunted “jook joints,” or bawdy houses, and with Guggenheim fellowships went on lone expeditions to Haiti studying voodoo. She traveled to Honduras searching for lost Mayan cities. She married three times, short-lived attachments, and carried on other romances about which little is known. She published her first novel “Jonah’s Vine Gourd,” a semi-autobiographical account of her philandering preacher-father and the rest of their family, in 1934 and followed that with “Mules and Men,” her first collection of folk tales. Then came “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” an autobiographical love story destined to become—too late for Hurston—a perennial bestseller and standard school text.

Inured to struggle, financial and artistic, she was often rebuffed by publishers. She distanced herself, too, from some of her more radical contemporaries, insisting she was not “one of the sobbing school of Negrohood.” Her lowest moment came in 1948, when a vindictive neighbor accused Hurston of sexual relations with her 10-year-old son. The charges were patently false—Hurston had been in Honduras at the time, and the boy was mentally unstable—but she was indicted, and the story leaked to a Black newspaper, which sensationalized it.
“My race has seen fit to destroy me,” she wrote contemplating suicide. The case was finally thrown out, and characteristically Hurston rebounded to work on a final published novel, “Seraph on the Suwannee,” and an unfinished nonfiction work called “Herod the Great” that publishers wouldn’t touch. During the tribute to this magnificent woman, Asha Bandele, a poet and editor at large of Essence magazine, eulogized: “She was a hustler. She did whatever she had to do, but she never hustled her soul or creative spirit.”

(Black History contributed by retired Barbara Jordan School counselor Cybelle McAllen)