Profile On Zora Neale Hurston

When Alice Walker s The Color Purple was released in 1982 it was hailed by the New York Times as a striking and consummately well-written novel that enabled her to tell a poignant tale of women`s struggle for equality and independence . Since winning the Pullitzer prize for fiction, it s proved to be an enduring classic, and thanks to Steven Spielberg, the story straddles across film and literature. The book has become a touchstone for texts dealing with the inter-sectionality of race, gender and sexuality. But no piece of work exists in a vacuum, and whilst it shares some thematic DNA with Walker s earlier novels, The Color Purple has much in common with the works of Zora Neale Hurston, a writer whose work lay all but forgotten for decades. So who was this woman, and why did she have such an influence over Alice Walker?

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in Alabama to a father who was a carpenter and Baptist preacher and her mother who was a former schoolteacher. The fifth of eight children, Zora was not able to get a satisfactory education when she was growing up up, so in 1918, aged 26, she lied about her age in order to get into high school and get the necessary qualifications to go to college. She then went onto attend Howard University, where her first story was published in the on-campus literary magazine. Hurston went on to have a diverse career, including being a prolific writer, producing essays, articles, books and theatrical revues. She also worked as an anthropologist, studying mainly black societies and cultures. This job also included a grant to study the practise of West Indian sorcery used in the Caribbean in 1937. It was during this time in just seven weeks in Haiti that Hurston wrote the novel that she would become most famous for. Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford who struggles to find happiness and freedom whilst surviving several unhappy marriages and dealing with the prejudicial attitudes of her own black community. However, Hurston struggled financially in later life. Despite her numerous publications and awards she ended up working as a supply teacher, a librarian and finally a maid. She suffered a stroke in 1959 and was forced to enter the St. Lucie County Welfare Home where she died aged sixty-nine, on the 28^th of January 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave, her life and works languishing in obscurity.

That was until 1973, when Alice Walker along with fellow scholar Charlotte D. Hunt conducted something of a pilgrimage to The Garden of Heavenly Rest, a cemetery in Fort Worth, Florida. They found the spot they believed to be Zora Neale Hurston s final resting place, and left a sign that read ZORA NEALE HURSTON / GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FLOKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901-1960. The inaccuracy about her date of birth was compounded by Hurston s autobiography, Dust Tracks On A Road. This book was deemed controversial as she made significant parts of her life up, adding to the confusion about aspects of her history. Following on from this, Walker wrote an article entitled In Search of Zora Neale Hurston in Ms magazine, which sparked a renewed interest in her work. Hurston s reputation soared greatly after her death with more people reading her works since 1975 than ever before. As a result, the legacy of both writers have become inextricably interlinked.

So why did Zora s work end up being forgotten in the first place?

Well, in simple terms, it comes down to a difference of opinion with her contemporaries in a literary movement known as The Harlem Renaissance. Harlem is a predominantly a black area in upper Manhattan, New York. The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic, literary and intellectual explosion, a rebirth for African-American arts that happened during the 1920s. Hurston lived in Harlem between 1925 and 1929, and became part of this movement. One of her short stories was selected for The New Negro, an anthology of fiction, poetry and essays centred around African and African American art and literature. She also produced a literary magazine called Fire!! with some of her contemporaries. This group of writers sought to challenge the way black people were represented in society. Whilst Hurston was initially part of this literary movement she gradually began to drift away from it. One of the aims of the Harlem renaissance was to portray black people in a positive light only and to show them resisting racial oppression. However, Hurston s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God can be seen as a rejection of this ideal. Hurston s characters are very multi-faceted, with character flaws as well as good qualities she created male characters who were prone to violence and gambling and women who were aware and in control of their own sexuality. Modern audiences may not see a problem with this, but writers and critics who were associated with the Harlem renaissance criticised it for not having overtly challenging the political oppression and in some ways, perpetuating some of the negative racial stereotypes that were prominent in this time period. One critic, Richard Wright accused her novel of having no theme, no message, no thought and that her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy .

Now, it s important to remember that some of the criticisms of Hurston are quite valid, and some less so. Despite her work calling for the liberation of women, Hurston was a staunch conservative when it came to many other matters, often putting her on the wrong side of history during many of the social changes in America in the twentieth century. She famously opposed the de-segregation of education brought about by the Brown vs. The Board of Education case in 1954. She published a letter entitled Court Order Can t Make the Races Mix . It seems that much of her opinions are borne out of frustration with the inherent racism of American society at this time. With the benefit of hindsight, we can even see how the criticism of desegregation in education is valid as well. Malcolm Gladwell points out in his Revisionist Historypodcast that integrating black children into previously whites only schools robbed many black children of role-models who looked like them by closing down black schools and making black teachers redundant.

Hurston felt that many believed that Black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions and rebelled strongly against this idea. In other words, she was not interested in showing Black characters reacting against white oppression but instead, focused on the internal workings of Black only societies. Their Eyes Were Watching God chronicles the life of Janie Crawford, who at seventeen is married off by her grandmother to a man much older than him. Janie escapes this unhappy relationship very quickly only to fall into a marriage with a man named Jody Starks who, whilst he provides her with economic security, status and fine goods, constantly berates and belittles her whilst occasionally straying into physical abuse. After Jody s death by natural causes, Janie meets Tea Cake, a young man twelve years her junior who she at first worries is only interested in her for fortune. However, she has a happy, if brief relationship with Tea Cake where her emotional needs are finally met and she has the chance to gain a level of self-actualisation.

In this novel, she was able to probe the psychological scars of a generation brought up by former slaves and how black men, seeing the oppression they received from white men, would pass this oppression down to their women. It is these elements of sexism, shadeism, gaslighting and one woman s quest for personal freedom that puts Hurston decades ahead of her time, and inevitably invites comparisons to Walker s seminal novel. Both stories are set over a period of decades around the early twentieth century, both focus on female oppression in the black community and both deal with sexual liberation for a black woman.

Celie, Walker s main protagonist is repeatedly abused both physically and sexually by the man she believes to be her father, and her main aim is to protect her younger sister Nettie from undergoing the same treatment. Whilst Janie s early life is nowhere near as traumatic, she is raised by her grandmother, as neither of her parents are around. We learn that her mother, Leafy, was raped by her school-teacher who ran off and Leafy, unable to cope, also disappeared. As soon as Janie shows an expression of sexual awakening, she is promptly married off by her grandmother to Logan Killicks, a man much older than her who marries her mainly for convenience and devoid of any love. This marriage of convenience is echoed by Celie marrying Mr________. Both characters find love in later life, Janie with Tea Cake and Celie with Shug, even though her relationship with Shug is very antagonistic to start off with. Lastly, whilst both books deal with the relationships, within a black community, neither of them are completely without white oppression in Jim Crow era America. In The Color Purple, Sofia is asked by the mayor s wife if she wants to be her maid, Sofia responds with a simple Hell no . The mayor slaps her and Sofia responds by knocking him to the floor. This is met by a savage beating by the police, being thrown into prison and then forced to work for the mayor s wife for 12 years. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, after the hurricane, Tea Cake is forced at gun point to help bury the dead by the only two white men with speaking roles in the novel. He is even made to segregate the white corpses, who will be buried in a coffin from the black corpses who are buried in a mass grave and covered in quick lime. It seems that in spite of herself, Hurston still found herself writing a black character reacting against white actions.

The similarities don t end with the narrative either. Both novels speak to some extent, in ebonics. Ebonics has multiple names. It is sometimes known as African American English, or Black English Vernacular. Ebonics is the dialect that the majority of the characters speak. A dialect is a particular form of language that is specific to a certain region or social group, in this case, African Americans. Ebonics, which is a mixture of ebony and phonics has some grammatical structure in common with some West African languages. It also has some features in common with Creole, a language formed from a combination of European languages mixing with African languages that became necessary in the Caribbean during slavery. Whilst it may have derived from slaves who were for the most part uneducated, the use of ebonics is not considered slang or poor speech, but rather it is an important part of many people s culture and racial heritage. Both novels switch effortlessly between standard American English and Ebonics, showing that Alice Walker was fascinated not just by Hurston s narrative, but the voice in which it was told. With all these comparisons in mind, it becomes clear that in the same way you can t fully appreciate The Wide Sargasso Sea without Jane Eyre, or James Joyce s Ulyssess without Homer s Odyssey, you cannot fully comprehend The Color Purple without understanding Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the literary context from which it springs.

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