New York Times
August 15, 2002
Party for Zora Neale Hurston, Obscure No More
n a day hot enough to send the knots in the
trees crawling off to sit in the shade, Zora Neale Hurston, the protean folklorist and
queen of the Harlem Renaissance, conjured an appearance on a Central Park stage Tuesday
for a long-postponed party with 2,000 friends.
"She's smiling on us right now," said the actor Russell Hornsby, who turned out with Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and other stars to salute Hurston in a program of readings at SummerStage called "Zora's Salon."
Her words, including Southern folk tales collected by Hurston and read faithfully in dialect the way she had copied them down from her sources, complete with unsparing racial stereotypes of the day, drew occasional groans but mostly easy laughter. Tears, too, for the letters recounting her crushing rebuffs and flirtation with suicide after a hideous libel falsely accused her of child molestation.
"Zora is a goddess," said Alyson Solomon, a consultant from Oregon who was sitting with friends from Johannesburg, Budapest and New York, all of whom said they were worshipful Hurston readers.
Forty-two years after she died a pauper's obscure death in Florida at 69, none of her books in print, Hurston is emerging as an epic literary figure as her reputation grows under a surge of new scholarship, started by the quest of the writer Alice Walker to find her unmarked grave in 1973.
Hurston wrote seven books, including her acclaimed 1937 novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," but at last count 29 books have been written about her, including a groundbreaking 1977 literary biography by Robert E. Hemenway, as well as hundreds of articles, chapters and dissertations.
The latest work, a collection of 600 recently discovered letters, is to be published this fall by Doubleday, and a second volume of collected folk tales, "Every Tongue Got to Confess," was put out last year by HarperCollins. In April "Polk County," one of 10 long-lost Hurston plays found in the Library of Congress five years ago, drew raves at its premiere in Washington.
A widely beloved but never easily fathomable figure, Hurston straddled the worlds of social science and art, starting as Barnard College's only black student and protégé of the anthropologist Franz Boas.
Born in Alabama and raised in Eatonville, Fla., Hurston landed in New York in 1925 with $1.50 in her pocket and was soon drawn to the black cultural blossoming known as the Harlem Renaissance. "The Negro was in vogue," said Langston Hughes, her on-again, off-again confidant and collaborator. The novelist Rudolph Fisher put it another way: "Negro stock is going up, and everyone's buying."
Hurston counted herself one of the progressive "New Negroes" and slyly proclaimed herself "Queen of the Niggerati." She feuded with Richard Wright and the Communists, drove a red convertible, packed a gun at times for protection and once knocked out a masher who propositioned her in an elevator.
An avid anthropologist (and shrewd grant-getter), she returned to Eatonville and her Southern roots in 1927 to hunt down folk tales, convinced that folklore is the art people create before they know there is such a thing as art. The tales suggested to her that "the Negro's outstanding characteristic is drama," and she wrote: "Who has not observed a young Negro chap posing up a street corner, possessed of nothing but his clothing, his strength and his youth? Does he bear himself like a pauper? No, Louis XIV could be no more insolent in his assurance."
She haunted "jook joints," or bawdy houses, and with Guggenheim fellowships went on lone expeditions to Haiti studying voodoo. She traveled to Honduras searching for lost Mayan cities. She married three times, short-lived attachments, and carried on other romances about which little is known. She published her first novel, "Jonah's Vine Gourd," a semi-autobiographical account of her philandering preacher-father and the rest of their family, in 1934 and followed that with "Mules and Men," her first collection of folk tales. Then came "Their Eyes Were Watching God," an autobiographical love story destined to become — too late for Hurston — a perennial best-seller and standard school text.
Inured to struggle, financial and artistic, she was often rebuffed by publishers. She distanced herself, too, from some of her more radical contemporaries, insisting she was not "one of the sobbing school of Negrohood." Some accused her of accommodating white injustice, but her letters make clear that she was often burning with indignation over racial mistreatment.
Her lowest moment came in 1948, when a vindictive neighbor accused Hurston of sexual relations with her 10-year-old son. The charges were patently false — Hurston had been in Honduras at the time, and the boy was mentally unstable — but she was indicted, and the story leaked to a black newspaper, which sensationalized it. "My race has seen fit to destroy me," she wrote, contemplating suicide. The case was finally thrown out, and, characteristically, Hurston rebounded to work on a final published novel, "Seraph on the Suwanee," and a unfinished nonfiction work called "Herod the Great" that no publisher would touch.
The free Central Park reading, a "Spoken Word" presentation of the City Parks Foundation, was developed by Alexa Birdsong, executive producer of SummerStage, based on the new books of folk tales and letters. She engaged Jill Newman, an independent producer, as co-curator, and they persuaded the director Lloyd Richards to pull it together on short notice, in conjunction with an afternoon forum on Hurston's legacy that included her niece Lucy Hurston, also a writer.
An unexpectedly large audience of about 2,000 showed up on a night of record heat that some of Hurston's tall tales seemed meant to address: "I seen it so hot dat de li'dwood knots wuz crawling off in de shade. . . . It wuz so hot once uh cake of ice walked away from de ice house and went down de street and fainted."
With the stage set like a living room evoking a period salon, Mr. Davis and Ms. Dee opened by reading some of Hurston's collected folk tales. One went: "Once there was a Negro. Every day he went under the hill to pray. So one day a white man went to see what he was doing. He was praying to God to kill all the white people; so the white man threw a brick on his head. The Negro said, `Lord, can't you tell a white man from a Negro?' "
The actor Avery Brooks, recognizable from his roles in the "Star Trek" and "Man Called Hawk" television series, read another folk tale called "Why Negroes Have Nothing." Unflinchingly rendering the racial epithets in the original text, which drew some disapproving clucks, it tells how God granted all the nations what they asked for but the Negro replied, "Ah don't want nothin' and went back tuh sleep."
But he also drew laughs with Hurston's portrait of a windy preacher. And he read a Hurston letter that showed her indignation over white injustice: "I know the Anglo-Saxon mentality is one of violence. Violence is his religion."
Other selections were read by the actors Kevin Jackson, Kerry Washington and Lillias White. Vincent Patmore Lewis, first violinist of the Metropolitan Opera, provided an improvised accompaniment.
"She was a hustler," said Asha Bandele, a poet and editor at large of Essence magazine who participated in the Hurston literary forum. "She did whatever she had to do, but she never hustled her soul or creative spirit."