Zora Neale Hurston, 1891-1960,
Author

By MARGO HAMMOND

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 28, 1999

In 1973 author Alice Walker tramped through the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery overgrown with weeds in Fort Pierce. She had been told that Zora Neale Hurston was buried there in an unmarked grave, but Walker was not interested merely in locating the burial spot. She was looking for the storyteller herself.

Hurston had always been elusive, inventing her own history just as she invented stories about the rural community around her. She was hard to pin down politically, artistically, even biographically. She gave the date of her birth as 1901 or sometimes 1903, always in Eatonville, though the 1900 census says 1891 in Alabama.

But some facts were uncontested. In the '20s and '30s she had hobnobbed with Langston Hughes and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. She had been on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. From the height of the Harlem Renaissance until the end of the Korean War, she was the most prolific black woman writer in the United States, publishing four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography and more than 50 shorter works.

But by 1960, when Hurston died in St. Lucie County Welfare Home, the once-rich storyteller was penniless and virtually forgotten. None of her books was in print.

How can a writer matter and then not matter?

Literary success is a slippery concept. It depends on so many things a writer can't control. A publisher who continues to believe in you. Financial support to keep you going. An audience willing to be challenged. Herman Melville was a popular romance writer until he published Moby Dick, a critical and commercial failure. He died in poverty and obscurity.

The narratives of Zora Neale Hurston were "lost" for nearly three decades after her death. Perhaps her prose, dense with the rhythms and expressions of rural black people, seemed politically backward in times of social struggle. Perhaps the male authors who dominated the black literary scene were uncomfortable with a woman who luxuriated in the nuances of idiomatic speech. Perhaps Hurston was stifled by one too many ignorant editors (one of her published essays was titled "What White Publishers Won't Print").

Or perhaps Hurston simply needed an audience that could appreciate the things she wrote about: The distinct cultural place women, and especially black women, inhabit. The place of a woman in a male-dominated world. The place of a black person in a non-black world.

While other black writers were writing what Hurston called "treatises on sociology," she was busy listening and recording the lyrical voices of the people around her. These are not bitter voices, but, for all women, self-empowering ones.

When Alice Walker finally found Hurston's grave, she marked it "A Genius of the South," and her 1975 Ms. magazine article about her Florida pilgrimage launched a Hurston revival that continues more than a quarter-century later.

"No, I do not weep at the world," Zora Neale Hurston wrote in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, the Hurston anthology edited by Walker. "I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

Margo Hammond is the Times' book editor.