Zora Neale Hurston: Short Stories Zora Neale Hurston

Early life and education

Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). All four of her grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, who later became a carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, where her father grew up and her paternal grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church.[1]: 14–17, 439–440 [2]: 8 

When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, it was one of the first all-black towns incorporated in the United States.[9] Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there. Sometimes she claimed it as her birthplace.[1]: 25  A few years later, her father was elected as mayor of the town in 1897. In 1902 he was called to serve as minister of its largest church, Macedonia Missionary Baptist.

As an adult, Hurston often used Eatonville as a setting in her stories—it was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. In 1901, some northern school teachers had visited Eatonville and given Hurston several books that opened her mind to literature. She later described this personal literary awakening as a kind of "birth".[10]: 3–4  Hurston lived for the rest of her childhood in Eatonville and described the experience of growing up there in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me". Eatonville now holds an annual "Zora! Festival" in her honor.[11]

Hurston's mother died in 1904, and her father married Mattie Moge in 1905.[12][13] This was considered scandalous, as it was rumored that he had had sexual relations with Moge before his first wife's death.[1]: 52  Hurston's father and stepmother sent her to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, but she was dismissed after they stopped paying her tuition.

Work and study

In 1916, Hurston was employed as a maid by the lead singer of a touring Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company.[12][14]

In 1917, she resumed her formal education, attending Morgan College, the high school division of Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore, Maryland. At this time, apparently to qualify for a free high-school education, the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her year of birth.[12][15] She graduated from the high school in 1918.[16]

College and slightly after

In college, Hurston learned how to view life through an anthropological lens apart from Eatonville. One of her main goals was to show similarities between ethnicities.[17] In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC. She was one of the first members of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, founded by and for black women, and she co-founded The Hilltop, the university's student newspaper.[18] She took courses in Spanish, English, Greek, and public speaking, and earned an associate degree in 1920.[10]: 4  In 1921, she wrote a short story, "John Redding Goes to Sea", that qualified her to become a member of Alain Locke's literary club, The Stylus.

Hurston left Howard in 1924, and in 1925 was offered a scholarship by Barnard trustee Annie Nathan Meyer[19] to Barnard College of Columbia University, a women's college, where she was the sole black student.[20]: 210  Hurston assisted Meyer in crafting the play Black Souls; which is considered one of the first "lynching dramas" written by a white woman.[21] She conducted ethnographic research with anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University and later studied with him as a graduate student. She also worked with Ruth Benedict and fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead.[22] Hurston received her B.A. in anthropology in 1928.[23]

Alain Locke recommended Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, a philanthropist and literary patron who had supported Locke and other African-American authors, such as Langston Hughes; however, she also tried to direct their work. Mason became interested in Hurston's work and supported her travel in the South for research from 1927 to 1932[1]: 157  with a stipend of $200 per month. In return, she wanted Hurston to give her all the material she collected about Negro music, folklore, literature, hoodoo, and other forms of culture. At the same time, Hurston needed to satisfy Boas as her academic adviser. Boas was a cultural relativist who wanted to overturn ideas about ranking cultures in a hierarchy of values.[24]

After graduating from Barnard, Hurston spent two years as a graduate student in anthropology, working with Boas at Columbia University.[23] Living in Harlem in the 1920s, Hurston befriended writers including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Her apartment, according to some accounts, was a popular spot for social gatherings. Around this time, Hurston had a few literary successes, placing in short-story and playwriting contests in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League.

Marriages

In 1927, Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and a former teacher at Howard; he later became a physician. Their marriage ended in 1931. In 1935, Hurston was involved with Percy Punter, a graduate student at Columbia University. He inspired the character of Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God.[25][13]

In 1939, while Hurston was working for the WPA in Florida, she married Albert Price. The marriage ended after a few months,[20]: 211  but they did not divorce until 1943. The following year, Hurston married James Howell Pitts of Cleveland. That marriage, too, lasted less than a year.[2]: 27 [1]: 373 

Hurston twice lived in a cottage in Eau Gallie, Florida: in 1929 and again in 1951.[26]

Patronage and support

When foundation grants ended during the Great Depression, Hurston and her friend Langston Hughes both relied on the patronage of philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white literary patron.[27][28][29] During the 1930s, Hurston was a resident of Westfield, New Jersey, a suburb of New York, where her friend Hughes was among her neighbors.[27][28][29]

Academic institutions

In 1934, Hurston established a school of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression" at Bethune-Cookman University (at the time, Bethune-Cookman College), a historically black college in Daytona Beach, Florida.[30] In 1956, Hurston received the Bethune-Cookman College Award for Education and Human Relations in recognition of her achievements. The English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy.[31]

In later life, in addition to continuing her literary career, Hurston served on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham.[23]

Anthropological and folkloric fieldwork

Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research. Based on her work in the South, sponsored from 1928 to 1932 by Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy philanthropist, Hurston wrote Mules and Men in 1935.[1]: 157  She was researching lumber camps in north Florida and commented on the practice of white men in power taking black women as concubines, including having them bear children. This practice later was referred to as "paramour rights", based on the men's power under racial segregation and related to practices during slavery times. The book also includes much folklore. Hurston drew from this material as well in the fictional treatment she developed for her novels such as Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934).[1]: 246–247 

In 1935, Hurston traveled to Georgia and Florida with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle for research on African American song traditions and their relationship to slave and African antecedent music. She was tasked with selecting the geographic areas and contacting the research subjects.[32]

In 1936 and 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research, with support from the Guggenheim Foundation. She drew from this research for Tell My Horse (1938), a genre-defying book that mixes anthropology, folklore, and personal narrative.[33]

In 1938 and 1939, Hurston worked for the Federal Writer's Project (FWP), part of the Works Progress Administration.[1] Hired for her experience as a writer and folklorist, she gathered information to add to Florida's historical and cultural collection.[1]

From May 1947 to February 1948, Hurston lived in Honduras, in the north coastal town of Puerto Cortés. She had some hopes of locating either Mayan ruins or vestiges of an undiscovered civilization.[1]: 375–387  While in Puerto Cortés, she wrote much of Seraph on the Suwanee, set in Florida. Hurston expressed interest in the polyethnic nature of the population in the region (many, such as the Miskito Zambu and Garifuna, were of partial African ancestry and had developed creole cultures).

During her last decade, Hurston worked as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. In the fall of 1952, she was contacted by Sam Nunn, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, to go to Florida to cover the murder trial of Ruby McCollum. McCollum was charged with murdering the white Dr. C. Leroy Adams, who was also a politician. McCollum said he had forced her to have sex and bear his child.[34] Hurston recalled what she had seen of white male sexual dominance in the lumber camps in North Florida, and discussed it with Nunn. They both thought the case might be about such "paramour rights", and wanted to "expose it to a national audience".[34]

Upon reaching Live Oak, Hurston was surprised not only by the gag order the judge in the trial placed on the defense but by her inability to get residents in town to talk about the case; both blacks and whites were silent. She believed that might have been related to Dr. Adams' alleged involvement in the gambling operation of Ruby's husband Sam McCollum. Her articles were published by the newspaper during the trial. Ruby McCollum was convicted by an all-male, all-white jury, and sentenced to death. Hurston had a special assignment to write a serialized account, The Life Story of Ruby McCollum, over three months in 1953 in the newspaper.[35] Her part was ended abruptly when she and Nunn disagreed about her pay, and she left.[34]

Unable to pay independently to return for the appeal and second trial, Hurston contacted journalist William Bradford Huie, with whom she had worked at The American Mercury, to try to interest him in the case. He covered the appeal and second trial, and also developed material from a background investigation. Hurston shared her material with him from the first trial, but he acknowledged her only briefly in his book, Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail (1956), which became a bestseller.[36] Hurston celebrated that

"McCollum's testimony in her own defense marked the first time that a woman of African-American descent was allowed to testify as to the paternity of her child by a white man. Hurston firmly believed that Ruby McCollum's testimony sounded the death toll of 'paramour rights' in the Segregationist South."[34]

Among other positions, Hurston later worked at the Pan American World Airways Technical Library at Patrick Air Force Base in 1956. She was fired for being "too well-educated" for her job in 1957.[37]

She moved to Fort Pierce, Florida. Taking jobs where she could find them, Hurston worked occasionally as a substitute teacher. At age 60, Hurston had to fight "to make ends meet" with the help of public assistance. At one point she worked as a maid on Miami Beach's Rivo Alto Island.

Death

During a period of financial and medical difficulties, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she had a stroke. She died of hypertensive heart disease on January 28, 1960, and was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her remains were in an unmarked grave until 1973.[38] Novelist Alice Walker and fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried; they decided to mark it as hers.[39] Walker commissioned a gray marker inscribed with "ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960."[40] The line "a genius of the south" is from Jean Toomer's poem, "Georgia Dusk", which appears in his book Cane.[40] Hurston was born in 1891, not 1901.[1][2]

After Hurston's death, a yardman, who had been told to clean the house, was burning Hurston's papers and belongings. A law officer and friend, Patrick DuVal, passing by the house where she had lived, stopped and put out the fire, thus saving an invaluable collection of literary documents for posterity. For two years, he stored them on his covered porch until he and a group of Hurston's friends could find an archive to take the material. The nucleus of this collection was given to the University of Florida libraries in 1961 by Mrs. Marjorie Silver, a friend, and neighbor of Hurston. Within the collection is a manuscript and photograph of Seraph on the Suwanee and an unpublished biography of Herod the Great. Luckily, she donated some of her manuscripts to the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Yale University.[41] Other materials were donated in 1970 and 1971 by Frances Grover, daughter of E. O. Grover, a Rollins College professor and long-time friend of Hurston's. In 1979, Stetson Kennedy of Jacksonville, who knew Hurston through his work with the Federal Writers Project, added additional papers (Zora Neale Hurston Papers, University of Florida Smathers Libraries, August 2008).