Local Heroes

by Jon Ward
Contributing Writer

In the mid-1950's, the once more famous, but now reflective, Zora Neale Hurston began to keep a personal writer's journal in a green hardcover sketchbook. It had been many years since the 1937 publication of the widely praised Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Describing the novel's impact on her life, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker (The Color Purple) would later write: "Reading Their Eyes for perhaps the eleventh time, I am still amazed that it speaks to me as no novel, past or present, has ever done. . . There is enough self-love in that one book - love of community, culture, and traditions - to restore a world. Or create a new one."

Zora, now in her mid-sixties, however, found herself in a reflective mood. "I have no sentimental involvements. I have neither talent for business nor finance, but I do not mind that. . . I am not materialistic." Because of her lack of output over the preceding few years, Zora no longer had a literary agent and was handling her own business affairs while half-heartedly working on her hoped-for opus, Herod the Great.

Near the end of 1957, C. E. Bolen, owner of the black weekly newspaper, the Fort Pierce Chronicle, paid Zora a visit at her rented house-trailer on Merritt Island, just across the river from Cocoa. He offered her a job writing for his paper and the presently unemployed novelist was grateful for the chance. Packing up her few possessions, she moved to Fort Pierce and began hammering out a column called "Hoodoo and Black Magic" which, according to Bolen, "kept me running to the dictionary all the time" with her still-voracious intellectual appetite and command of the English language.

Hurston, born January 7, 1891 in the tiny hamlet of Notasulga, Alabama, had gone on to become one of America's most widely read authors. Withthe dawn of the twenty-first century, forty years after her passing, over a million copies of Their Eyes were in circulation. No less a luminary than Oprah Winfrey would produce a television movie based on the book in 2005.

As biographer Valerie Boyd wrote in her award-winning 2003 homage, Wrapped in Rainbows, "There was never quite enough for Zora Neale Hurston in the world she grew up in, so she made up whatever she needed."

Nowhere was this more evident than in Hurston's own 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Zora apparently felt that her talents as a writer gave her license to shave ten years off her birth date – who wouldn't, given the chance? She rewrote relationships and events in a perfectly entertaining manner that continues to befuddle serious Hurston scholars. Even a stickler for details like writer Alice Walker, who, in 1973, would erect a headstone on Hurston's unmarked Fort Pierce grave, was taken in by the deliberately incorrect birth year that Zora, herself, had fabricated in 1917, as a then-26 year-old student (to allow herself to appear to be 16 and continue to go to school without charge).

Hurston memorialized this fictitious 1901 birth year in Dust Tracks and today, it appears on the grey granite monolith that Walker erected in her memory below the quotation "A Genius of the South", a line excerpted from Jean Toomer's poem Georgia Dusk.

In February 1958, Zora took over homeroom 10-C at Lincoln Park Academy, but her local teaching career was to be short lived. Getting along fine with her students, she felt less welcomed by her fellow teachers, noting, "They feel invaded and defeated by the presence of creative folk among them." Zora left the job, commenting "I can live without teaching."

Hurston was surrounded by supporters in Fort Pierce. When he learned that Zora was now living off unemployment checks and part-time work at the Chronicle, Dr. C. C. Benton, from whom she had been renting a small, concreteblock house on School Court for ten dollars a week, waived her rent. He made a point to visit her often.

"Sometimes, when I closed my office, I'd go by her house and just talk to her for an hour or two." Zora was a regular at local journalist Marjorie Silver's frequent dinner parties. She haunted Bean Backus' regular Sunday jazz jams where the music could urge her sixty-seven year old bones into a feral inner state.

Hurston had earlier written, "I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum."

However, Zora Neale Hurston, major contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930's and a chronicler of Florida's culture, recipient of Rosenwald and Guggenheim fellowships, award-winning writer of seven books including 1935's Mules and Men, a collection of folktales that Alice Walker used as reference material, proudly proclaiming, “Here was this perfect book!” - Zora had begun to recognize her mortality

"I have known the joy and pain of deep friendship.” she once wrote. "I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies, for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.”

Hypertensive heart disease leading to a series of strokes finally silenced the pen of one of America's most expressive authors. On Thursday, January 28, 1960, Zora Hurston crossed over. Her impressive funeral, held on February 7, was well attended. Funeral Director Curtis E. Johnson recalled, "There were so many folks here, we had to set chairs out to the sidewalk."

In 1972, scholar Robert Hemenway, indignant that Hurston's life and work had ended in obscurity, wrote an essay entitled Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology that appeared in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. "It was his efforts to define Zora's legacy and his exploration of her life that led me. . . to an overgrown graveyard in an attempt to locate and mark Zora's grave," wrote Alice Walker.

In August, 1973, spurred by her admiration for a "revolutionary petunia" who was resting in obscurity, Walker made a pilgrimage to Florida and set up her flawed granite headstone and chronicled the experience in an article for Ms. Magazine, where she served as an editor. In so doing, she began the resurrection process that has now elevated Zora Neale Hurston to the level of a cultural icon.

Her work is taught on every major American college campus and many overseas. All seven books are again in print. Major festivals celebrate her life and work, including one here in Fort Pierce, where she came home to rest.