Zora Neale Hurston, noted novelist and folklorist of the Harlem Renaissance era, was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, the fifth of the eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston. When Hurston was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida—one of the first and oldest all-black towns in the United States—where she spent the majority of her childhood years. Eatonville later served as the backdrop for much of Hurston’s fiction and ethnographic work, the town having a significant impact on Hurston’s appreciation for the vibrant black culture and her desire to record the stories she once heard around the general store porch. Because of this focus, she is considered an integral part of the developing African American literary tradition. With her anthropological focus and her endeavor to capture the stories of black folk throughout the South, Hurston offered a new and fresh perspective, bringing to the foreground the folk and folk culture largely ignored elsewhere in the literature of the time.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), anthropologist, author, and prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In possibly her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston used her perspective as an anthropologist to weave together strands of fiction and autobiography in the context of African American small town communities. (Library of Congress)
Hurston first received critical attention with the publication of her debut novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine by J. B. Lippincott in 1934. The novel, filled with religious allegory, explores the complex relationship of John Pearson and Lucy Ann Potts as Pearson rises to esteem as a local preacher in the black community while struggling with past affairs and sexual transgressions. Though much of the novel focuses on the life-altering influence of Potts on her husband after death, the novel is significant in the African American literary tradition for its emphasis on the black folk culture, specifically the culture of Eatonville where she grew up. At a time when the New Negro philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke was the driving force for many black artists and intellectuals, Hurston emphasized the common black folk, intrigued by the stories, tall tales, and myths shared around the porch. For her, depicting the vitality of the African American people was the cultural and intellectual project at the core of her work.
The publication of Mules and Men in 1935 furthered that larger endeavor. In this book, Hurston compiled folklore gathered from throughout southern Louisiana and central Florida. Supported by her mentor Franz Boas, Hurston began her travels in search of stories, hoping to record the vital oral history of America’s black folk and the rich treasury of sermons, songs, tales, and myths of black culture. Exploring, in part, contacts introduced by the renowned poet Langston Hughes, Hurston was able to develop a rather extensive collection of folktales, many depicting what Hurston has identified as the culture hero in her 1934 essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Mules and Men is therefore filled with tales of the lion, the alligator, and the trickster Brer Rabbit—all culture heroes of African American folklore, wisdom of the ancestors transplanted from the hills of West Africa to the forests and towns of the American South.
In addition, Mules and Men offers Hurston’s insight into religions of the African Diaspora in America, particularly through her ethnographic studies of hoodoo, a form of folk spirituality. This preoccupation is also a preeminent theme in her 1939 nonfiction text Tell My Horse. These two works explored the tradition of voodoo in the United States, Jamaica, and Haiti, an interest rooted in her academic studies and anthropological inquiry with Boas at Barnard College and later at Columbia University. These books brought increased attention to African American religious practices outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. These works, therefore, represent a virtually unparalleled contribution to recording folkloric culture at the time, exploring a multitude of topics, many originating in the time of slavery, such as how the slaves found freedom and the pseudoreligious tale of why African Americans are black. By seeking and recording these stories, Hurston attempted to preserve the storytelling tradition she cherished in her youth as well as the cultural heritage that these stories convey—the same notion she explores in her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain. Across these works, she moved to record traditional folk practices such as conjuring, magic, and possession to combat the erasure of such religious traditions that she maintained were far too long ignored.
Her second novel, titled Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, is debatably her most successful and controversial novel. Following the story of Janie and her struggle to rediscover the horizon she believes her grandmother once stamped out, the novel focuses on Janie’s quest for self-discovery, from her loveless marriage to Logan Killicks to her oppressive relationship with Mayor Jody Starks to her most fulfilling encounters with Tea Cake on the muck. Much of the novel, however, is presented through the lens of anthropology, first and foremost through the depiction of life on the porch. Hurston illustrates the unique communal culture and storytelling tradition enacted on the porch with all its lies and exaggerations. Here, the men engage in bouts of utter hyperbole that captivate Janie’s interest in the same way they captivated Hurston. In the novel, the porch is thus a personified creature, embodying the men both laughing and boiling in anger outside the general store. Ultimately, Hurston is then able to communicate the consciousness of the larger community upon which African American folklore is largely based.
Though criticized for its lack of militancy and propaganda at a time when critics such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright demanded propaganda in black art, Their Eyes Were Watching God remains Hurston’s most celebrated text—a fusion of fiction and autobiography, both core components of African American folkloric expression. In one of the central themes of the novel, Hurston explores the architecture of male and female relationships, emerging from her anthropological study of small-town black folk. As she suggests in her 1942 semiautobiographical work Dust Tracks on a Road, she grew tired of discussing the Negro problem and instead endeavored to explore the psychosocial factors that motivate how men and women interact. As a result, Hurston, throughout her body of work, sought to express the culture of gender within American society, even venturing in her 1948 novel Seraph on the Sewanee to illustrate the troubled relationship between two white characters struggling to escape poverty in the South.
In addition to her examination and retelling of traditional folk narratives as well as her emphasis on gender, Hurston is most renowned for her use of dialect and African American vernacular to reveal folk language as the extension of folkloric expression. Throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God, for instance, Hurston uses dialect to represent the individuality and cultural identity of the black folk she once knew in Eatonville. Though far from just a dialectician, Hurston sought to celebrate African American folk expression by employing the idioms and distinct language of black folk she encountered throughout the South, enabling the black folk to finally speak for themselves. Because language is an integral part of the black community, Hurston consciously employed dialect and idiomatic expressions to represent the essence of the black storytelling tradition and the community her characters were intended to represent.
Hurston’s final contribution to American folklore was the 1981 collection The Sanctified Church, a posthumous collection of articles on the subject of hoodoo and African American religions. Included within this collection are essays such as “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” which examines the core tenets of African American art from mimicry to the absence of privacy. For Hurston, these characteristics are essential to the storytelling tradition and to the heart of the black folklore she grew to love. Hurston also includes her rendition of “High John de Conquer,” the quintessential culture hero or legend of African American folklore, which also appears in Langston Hughes’s 1958 anthology The Book of Negro Folklore. Each of the tales Hurston gathered in this text expresses the wealth of knowledge (whether literal or symbolic) passed down across generations to reflect the philosophy of African ancestors as well as the newfound wisdom of current and emerging generations.
Even after her death in 1960 after a stroke and a bout with failing health, Hurston is far from forgotten as an important novelist and folklorist. Her works engage the field of American folklore and present to her readers the same stories and tales that once captivated her attention as a child. Just as Alice Walker sought to rediscover Hurston’s once unmarked grave, renewed critical attention and scholarship has recently been devoted to Hurston’s works, both fictional and anthropological, questioning, for example, the role of African folklore in the tales of Mules and Men as well as the gender mountain that Hurston attempts to scale in her short fiction. This newfound interest in the folklore of the African American past is, perhaps, exactly what Hurston intended: an ongoing conversation on the collective wisdom these stories have to offer.
Morrison, Toni (1931–)
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Toni Morrison, perhaps more than any other writer, has popularized, appropriated, and developed tropes of African American myth, legend, and folklore into immensely popular literary vehicles that have taught Americans more about our shared stories, as well as teaching us to be more critical in our understanding of these stories, especially those concerning our origins and identities. Morrison does so with heartbreaking intensity, from The Bluest Eye, which explored notions of beauty and identity; to Tar Baby, which took a Caribbean setting and aspects of folklore and myth drawn from Haitian Vodou to explore American perceptions of race and class; to Beloved, which employed a specific account of the horrors of slave days to tell a supernatural story of haunting and possession, and which attempts to help exorcise the abiding demons of slavery and racial oppression from the American soul.
C. Fee
Christopher Allen Varlack
See also Brer Rabbit; Culture Heroes of the Native Americans; Folklore and Folktales; Hughes, Langston; John the Conqueror (High John the Conqueror); Storytelling
Further Reading
Boyd, Valerie. 2003. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner.
Hemenway, Robert E. 1980. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. 1993. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press.
Kaplan, Carla, ed. 2002. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday.