“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”- Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
by Belle Becker
As a prolific Harlem Renaissance writer , Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an enigmatic and important voice for black people. She was born in an entirely black town, and both of her parents had been previously enslaved. After the death of her mother at 13, she floated between different family members and she was suddenly presented with many obstacles that stood between herself and continuing to go to school. Feeling backed into a corner, she began working for a traveling theater troupe. Eventually, she was able to get her high school diploma and went on to attend Howard University, which is where her writing really took off. After writing several short stories for her school’s newspaper, her piece titled “Drenched in Light” was picked up by an influential Harlem literary magazine called Opportunity. She became well-known in the black writing scene and was friends with several other well-known Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Langston Hughes.
Due to her experiences growing up in an all black town, Zora became intrigued with studying the different cultures, languages, and mythologies of Africans and African Americans. She was given the opportunity to go to Africa, and she wrote about her newfound anthropological insights in the story, Of Mules and Men. She would take road trips around the United States and interview other African Americans because propelling black voices, especially those of women, was something that she cared very deeply about. This idea can be seen in her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a very progressive story in which a young black woman learns how to be her own person and speak up for herself. She faced plenty of backlash from this story for presenting African Americans in a “negative light” by using the dialects that actual black southerners would have used, rather than standard English. However, her intention was to simply present and celebrate black culture as it was, with all of its intricacies.
After being essentially blacklisted by many of her peers for writing in a seemingly offensive manner, she struggled to find work and had to take whatever jobs she could to survive. She wrote her last literary work in 1948, which was called Seraph on the Suwanee. Interestingly, the characters in this piece were all white. Her health steadily declined until she died alone with nothing to her name in 1960. Seemingly forgotten, she was sadly buried in an unmarked grave. Luckily, fellow writer Alice Walker took the time to determine where she had been laid to rest and gave her name back, with the inscription, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”
The Deadline 