Author Biography:
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891 in Notasuga, Alabama. Her father was a Baptist preacher and her mother was a schoolteacher. She was one of eight children. When she was three years of age, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black town that had been incorporated in the United States, also being the place she claimed to have been born in later years. Her father was elected as mayor of Eatonville allowing Zora a nice lifestyle, which would later be important to her writings of how Black Americans lived, as they wished, independent of the white Americans.
Zora’s mother passed away when she was 13 years old prompting her father to remarry. Her stepmother was not as interested in raising such a large family and shipped Zora away to a boarding school in Jacksonville. However, after some time they chose not to continue to pay for the tuition and Zora had to leave the school. She chose to not return to the family that scorned her and began working as a house cleaner to a traveling theatrical group called Gilbert & Sullivan. She decided to complete her high school education and attended Morgan Academy (by qualifying for free tuition). Once she graduated, she went on to Howard University, an African-American college in Washington DC, initiating among the first of the Zeta Phi Beta and co-founding the student campus newspaper called The Hilltop. She chose to leave Howard and attended Barnard College, being one of the colleges only black students and received her anthropology degree in 1927.
After graduation at Barnard College, Zora decided to travel at length around the Caribbean and the southern parts of the United States in order to take in the cultural practices for her anthropological research. She met and married Herbert Sheen who was a former classmate of hers at Howard. Herbert was a local jazz musician (who later became a doctor). However, the marriage was not to last and they divorced 4 years later.
Eight years after Zora’s divorce with Herbert, she met and married Albert Prince who she worked with at the WPA. Albert was 25 years younger than Zora at the time and this marriage only lasted a few months.
Undeterred, Zora continued living the life she chose for herself and decided to focus on a literary career. She served on the faculty of the North Carolina College for Negroes and established a school of dramatic arts (which was based on “pure Negro expression) at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida. She was awarded recognition of these achievements by Bethune-Cookman College by having the English Department dedicated to her.
In 1925, Zora became a writer at the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. During this time she also wrote freelance and was honored when one of her writings called “Spunk” was chosen by The New Negro, a published collection of nonfiction essays, poems and fictions written by African-American’s. She was among some of the greatest writers of all time including Mr. Langston Hughes and Mr. Wallace Thurman, in production of a literary magazine called Fire!!
Zora Continued her literary work and chose to publish several short stories, including Mules and Men which was a sort of literary anthropology documenting African American folklore. She later collaborated with Langston Hughes to write Mule Bone, which was a comedic play that was never finished (although published well after her death in 1991). In 1937, she was awarded with the Guggenheim fellowship, which she used to travel to Jamaica and Haiti in order to study African and voudon rituals. She used her results in order to translate it into using it through the performance arts writing Tell My Horse and The Great Day (which was a folk revue that played at the John Golden Theatre in New York City in 1932). Somehow, during this time she also found time to write and publish several books including Their Eyes Were Watching God.
In her later years, Zora focused her work on periodicals, often writing for The Saturday Evening Post although she did focus on a book called Seraph on the Suwannee. This creation was quite different and distinguished from her other writings as this focused not on African-American culture or peoples but rather Caucasian women including white trash characters.
Zora was also ostracized over several events in her life. The first being in 1948 when she was accused of molestation of a ten-year old boy. The case was dismissed but the scandal tormented her. She was also unappreciated due to the dialect in her writings and was criticized by contemporaries being accused of allowing a racist culture to continue.
Her roots were in a right-wing feministic and conservative angle. She was not quiet about her feelings in politics or religion and often stated her views – especially when it was based about equality. She often referred to her different beliefs in her novels allowing her characters to fight out the situations and the aftermath.
Zora’s last years were not as exciting as her life. She went through financial hardship and then suffered a stroke after being forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home. Due to the stroke, she suffered from hypertensive heart disease, which would eventually take her life. She is at rest in the Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida in an unmarked grave. A poetic end to a poetic and fascinating life where we meet a woman who did things her way in a time when women (especially African-American women) were following in line.
This was written by: Sossy Matos
