1931 Publishes “Hoodoo in America” in the Journal of American Folklore.
February 1931 Breaks with Langston Hughes over the authorship of Mule Bone.
July 7, 1931 Divorces Sheen.
September 1931 Writes for a theatrical revue called Fast and Furt-ous.
January 1932 Writes and stages a theatrical revue called The Great Day, first performed on January 10 on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre; works with the creative literature department of Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, to produce a concert program of Negro music.
1933 Writes “The Fiery Chariot.”
January 1933 Stages From Sun to Sun (a version of Great Day) at Rollins College.
August 1933 Publishes “The Gilded Six-Bits” in Story.
1934 Publishes six essays in Nancy Cunard’s anthology, Negro.
January 1934 Goes to Bethune-Cookman College to establish a school of dramatic arts “based on pure Negro expression.”
May 1934 Publishes Jonah’s Gourd Vine, originally titled Big Nigger, it is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
September 1934 Publishes “The Fire and the Cloud” in the Challenge.
November 1934 Singing Steel (a version of Great Day) performed in Chicago.
January 1935 Makes an abortive attempt to study for a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University on a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation. In fact, she seldom attends classes.
August 1935 Joins the WPA Federal Theatre Project as a “dramatic coach.”
October 1935 Mules and Men published.
March 1936 Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study West Indian Obeah practices.
April–September 1936 In Jamaica.
September-March 1937 In Haiti; writes Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks.
May 1937 Returns to Haiti on a renewed Guggenheim.
September 1937 Returns to the United States; Their Eyes Were Watching God published, September 18.
February–March 1938. Writes Tell My Horse; it is published the same year.
April 1938 Joins the Federal Writers Project in Florida to work on The Florida Negro.
1939 Publishes “Now Take Noses” in Cordially Yours.
June 1939 Receives an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Morgan State College.
June 27, 1939 Marries Albert Price III in Florida.
Summer 1939 Hired as a drama instructor by North Carolina College for Negroes at Durham; meets Paul Green, professor of drama, at the University of North Carolina.
November 1939 Moses, Man of the Mountain published.
February 1940 Files for divorce from Price, though the two are reconciled briefly.
Summer 1940 Makes a folklore-collecting trip to South Carolina.
Spring–July 1941 Writes Dust Tracks on a Road.
July 1941 Publishes “Cock Robin, Beale Street” in the Southern Literary Messenger.
October 1941–January 1942 Works as a story consultant at Paramount Pictures.
July 1942 Publishes “Story in Harlem Slang” in the American Mercury.
September 5, 1942 Publishes a profile of Lawrence Silas in the Saturday Evening Post.
November 1942 Dust Tracks on a Road published.
February 1943 Awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Dust Tracks; on the cover of the Saturday Review.
March 1943 Receives Howard University’s Distinguished Alumni Award.
May 1943 Publishes “The ‘Pet Negro’ Syndrome” in the American Mercury.
November 1943 Divorce from Price granted.
June 1944 Publishes “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” in the Negro Digest.
1945 Writes Mrs. Doctor, it is rejected by Lippincott.
March 1945 Publishes “The Rise of the Begging Joints” in the American Mercury.
December 1945 Publishes “Crazy for This Democracy” in the Negro Digest.
1947 Publishes a review of Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans in the Journal of American Folklore.
May 1947 Goes to British Honduras to research black communities in Central America; writes Seraph on the Suwanee; stays in Honduras until March 1948.
September 1948 Falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy and arrested; case finally dismissed in March 1949.
October 1948 Seraph on the Suwanee published.
March 1950 Publishes “Conscience of the Court” in the Saturday Evening Post, while working as a maid in Rivo Island, Florida.
April 1950 Publishes “What White Publishers Won’t Print” in the Saturday Evening Post.
November 1950 Publishes “I Saw Negro Votes Peddled” in the American Legion magazine.
Winter 1950–51 Moves to Belle Glade, Florida.
June 1951 Publishes “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism” in the American Legion magazine.
December 8, 1951 Publishes “A Negro Voter Sizes Up Taft” in the Saturday Evening Post.
1952 Hired by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the Ruby McCollum case.
May 1956 Receives an award for “education and human relations” at Bethune-Cookman College.
June 1956 Works as a librarian at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida; fired in 1957.
1957–59 Writes a column on “Hoodoo and Black Magic” for the Fort Pierce Chronicle.
1958 Works as a substitute teacher at Lincoln Park Academy, Fort Pierce.
Early 1959 Suffers a stroke.
October 1959 Forced to enter the St. Lucie County Welfare Home.
January 28, 1960 Dies in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home of “hypertensive heart disease” buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest, Fort Pierce.
August 1973 Alice Walker discovers and marks Hurston’s grave.
March 1975 Walker publishes “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” in Ms., launching a Hurston revival.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
2 “She Was the Party”
8 Snapshots of Zora Neale Hurston
About the book
10 The Contemporary Response to Dust Tracks on a Road
Read on
15 Have You Read? More by Zora Neale Hurston
About the author
“She Was the Party”
by Valerie Boyd
ZORA NEALE HURSTON knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story “Spunk,” a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions.
The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come.
Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room—jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white—and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: “Colooooooor Struuckkkk!” Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived.
By all accounts, Zora Neale Hurston could walk into a roomful of strangers and, a few minutes and a few stories later, leave them so completely charmed that they often found themselves offering to help her in any way they could.
Gamely accepting such offers—and employing her own talent and scrappiness—Hurston became the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Over a career that spanned more than thirty years, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles, and plays.
“In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement
all around her.”
Born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. Her writings reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings. For Hurston, Eatonville was always home.
Established in 1887, the rural community near Orlando was the nation’s first incorporated black township. It was, as Hurston described it, “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.”
In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. She could look to town hall and see black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday schools of the town’s two churches and see black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula. She could look to the porch of the village store and see black men and women passing worlds through their mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories.
Growing up in this culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land, Zora had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father, who sometimes sought to “squinch” her rambunctious spirit, she recalled. Her mother, on the other hand, urged young Zora and her seven siblings to “jump at de sun.” Hurston explained, “We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”
“Zora had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father, who sometimes sought to ‘squinch’ her rambunctious spirit.”
Hurston’s idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end, though, when her mother died in 1904. Zora was only thirteen years old. “That hour began my wanderings,” she later wrote. “Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit.”
After Lucy Hurston’s death, Zora’s father remarried quickly—to a young woman whom the hotheaded Zora almost killed in a fistfight—and seemed to have little time or money for his children. “Bare and bony of comfort and love,” Zora worked a series of menial jobs over the ensuing years, struggled to finish her schooling, and eventually joined a Gilbert & Sullivan traveling troupe as a maid to the lead singer. In 1917, she turned up in Baltimore; by then, she was twenty-six years old and still hadn’t finished high school. Needing to present herself as a teenager to qualify for free public schooling, she lopped ten years off her life—giving her year of birth as 1901. Once gone, those years were never restored: From that moment forward, Hurston would always present herself as at least ten years younger than she actually was.
Apparently, she had the looks to pull it off. Photographs reveal that she was a handsome, big-boned woman with playful yet penetrating eyes, high cheekbones, and a full, graceful mouth that was never without expression.
Zora also had a fiery intellect, an infectious sense of humor, and “the gift,” as one friend put it, “of walking into hearts.” Zora used these talents—and dozens more—to elbow her way into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, befriending such luminaries as poet Langston Hughes and popular singer-actress Ethel Waters.
“‘When Zora was there, she was the party.’”
Though Hurston rarely drank, fellow writer Sterling Brown recalled, “When Zora was there, she was the party.” Another friend remembered Hurston’s apartment—furnished by donations she solicited from friends—as a spirited “open house” for artists. All this socializing didn’t keep Hurston from her work, though. She would sometimes write in her bedroom while the party went on in the living room.
By 1935, Hurston—who’d graduated from Barnard College in 1928—had published several short stories and articles, as well as a novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and a well-received collection of black Southern folklore, Mules and Men. But the late thirties and early forties marked the real zenith of her career. She published her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937; Tell My Horse, her study of Haitian Vodou practices and Caribbean culture, in 1938; and another masterful novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. When her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942, Hurston finally received the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. That year, she was profiled in Who’s Who in America, Current Biography, and Twentieth Century Authors. She went on to publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948.
Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.) So when she died on January 28, 1960—at age sixty-nine, after suffering a stroke—her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her February 7 funeral. The collection didn’t yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973.
“Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973.”
That summer a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work. Walker found the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery at the dead end of North Seventeenth Street, abandoned and overgrown with yellow-flowered weeds.
Back in 1945, Hurston had foreseen the possibility of dying without money—and she’d proposed a solution that would have benefited her and countless others. Writing to W. E. B. Du Bois, whom she called the “Dean of American Negro Artists,” Hurston suggested “a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead” on one hundred acres of land in Florida. “Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness,” she urged. “We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored.” Du Bois, citing practical complications, wrote a curt reply discounting her argument.
As if impelled by Hurston’s words, Walker bravely entered the snake-infested cemetery where the writer’s remains had been laid to rest. Wading through waist-high weeds, she soon stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she determined to be Hurston’s grave. Unable to afford the marker she wanted—a tall, majestic black stone called “Ebony Mist”—Walker chose a plain gray headstone instead. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”
“Wading through waist-high weeds, Alice Walker stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she determined to be Hurston’s grave.”
Valerie Boyd is the author of the award-winning Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Formerly the arts editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she is a professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Snapshots of Zora Neale Hurston
Zora surrounded by her nieces Wilhelmina (standing) and Winifred, her nephew Edgar (in Zora’s lap), and Uncle Ben’s dog, Prince.
Zora (standing), with her eldest brother, Robert Hurston, sister-in-law, and nephew.
Zora with two young children.
Zora drumming on her trip to Haiti, where she penned Their Eyes Were Watching God and collected information on Vodou for her nonfiction work Tell My Horse.
About the book
The Contemporary Response to Dust Tracks on a Road
“Zora Sums Up”
Reprinted from The Saturday Review,
November 28, 1942
by Phil Strong
ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S FATHER was the preacher and chief factotum of Eatonville, Florida, one of the few villages of, for, and by Negroes in the United States. The old man was a powerful preacher and also a powerful man and husband; as a slave, says Zora, with the charming practicality which marks the manner of the whole book, he would have fetched a high price for stud stock. He could flatten people to the floor either with his big fists or his hellfire eloquence.
“As a slave, says Zora, with the charming practicality which marks the manner of the whole book, [her father] would have fetched a high price for stud
stock.”
Zora had a good deal of her father’s violence and more of her tiny mother’s sensitivity, intelligence, and determination. These got her through school, after a bitter struggle, then through Howard University and Barnard, and finally made her what she is, an outstanding anthropologist in the field of Negro folklore and other Negro cultures. She has surveyed everything from Afro-American songs to Vodou and left a mark on modern American music and reasonable accounts of the over-romanticized magic of the Haitians.
This book is more of a summary than the autobiography it advertises itself as being. It is a delightful one and a wise one, full of humor, color, and good sense. It is told in exactly the right manner, simply and with candor, with a seasoning—not overdone—of the marvelous locutions of the imaginative field nigger. Miss Hurston explains that there are white niggers and black niggers; being a nigger is a matter of character rather than color among the Negroes.
“The girl held ‘maiding’ jobs but very briefly because of her fondness for books and children.”
After Zora’s mother died her father married a fat shrew who wanted to make the social jump of being the preacher’s wife. The stepmother was jealous of the children and drove them from home, one by one, including Zora, who was still in her earliest teens. The girl held “maiding” jobs but very briefly because of her fondness for books and children. These tastes conflicted with her allotted labors virtually to the exclusion of the latter; and Zora moved on and on. Finally, she caught on as a maid to the lead singer in a touring comic opera company, learned manicuring, and manicured her way through Howard.
She had learned that if one wanted to go to school the thing to do was to go to school, so she went on to Barnard, became Fanny Hurst’s secretary and a favorite of Franz Boas, and thereafter made her way in research on fellowships and the five books which precede this one. She might have taken either of two attitudes from these experiences; either an arrogant, self-made Negro attitude, or the conventional bitter and downtrodden one. She takes neither because she does not see that she was under any special disadvantage, and in the end she has no reason for bitterness. This text indicates that anyone that tries to downtread Zora Neale Hurston had better wear thick-soled boots.