Zora Neale Hurston, revisited

 Zora Neale Hurston, was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated African-American community in the United States, with a population of about 125. 

Hurston loved it there, and would set many of her stories in Eatonville, depicting it as a sort of Utopia; she also described it in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." When she was 13, her mother died, and her father remarried immediately, so she was sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. She was expelled when her father stopped paying her tuition, and she went to live with a series of family members.

She went to Howard University, and cofounded the school's newspaper, The Hilltop. She was offered a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology, and she was the college's only black student. She published many short stories in the 1920s and early '30s, and her first book, Mules and Men (1935), was an anthropological study of African-American folklore. She's best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Having been a founding member of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston died in poverty in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the cemetery where Hurston was buried, and marked it as hers. Alice Walker wrote about the event in her article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (1975), and the article sparked a renewed interest in Hurston's writing.*

The University of Florida named a "Chair" after her, while I was a student there in 1981-86.

Zora Neal Hurston said "I love myself when I am laughing … and then again when I am looking mean and impressive."

And American Heritage Facebook page gives this:

"... Zora Neale Hurston, [was] a pioneering folklorist and a great American writer. Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, and died in 1960. She attended Howard University and Columbia University, where she worked with anthropologists Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. She wrote novels, folklore collections, plays, an autobiography, and a wealth of short fiction and essays. During the 1930s, she worked for the WPA, collecting folklore in her native Florida; the fruits of those efforts are here at AFC [American Folklife Center] and can be heard online at the Library of Congress website [see link below]

Most of Hurston's collecting was done in writing, partly because, as a Black folklorist in the segregated South, she was not allowed access to recording equipment. However, sometimes she learned songs from her informants and then sang them for her white colleagues, who recorded her voice. Because of this, we have fascinating recordings of Hurston singing traditional work songs, jook songs, and blues. Hear the recordings she made of others, and the recordings others made of her, at the link:

https://www.loc.gov/search/?q=zora...

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Barracoon which tells the story of Cudjoe Lewis, the last survivor of the Middle Passage. Though Transatlantic Chattel Slavery was abolished in 1808 in the United States, smugglers continued to operate off and on. The Clotilde was the last known 'slave' ship to arrive in the Americas, landing in Mobile Bay in July 1860. Cudjoe was one of its passengers. Hurston paid many visits to Cudjoe collecting his remembrances. These were published after her death in “Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo.”

Sharing with Sepia Saturday this week.