According to a bit of folk wisdom that Zora Neale Hurston may have known, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” In this case, for boy, read girl, and for girl, read Hurston. Throughout her professional career as an anthropologist and writer, as well as her personal life, Hurston never really left the little country town of Eatonville, Florida, and its environs. Writing at a time when “local color” was out of fashion as an ingredient of worthy literature, Hurston’s writings were rich in local color, and the front porch of Joe Clarke’s Eatonville store became Hurston’s symbol of hometown security. That setting could easily have been the place that Robert Frost described when he wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Eatonville was that sort of home for Hurston, but she did not ask Eatonville to “take her in.” Instead, she took Eatonville into her life and kept it there.
The Early Years
The date of Hurston’s birth is open to question. According to her, she was 9 years old when her mother died. The 1900 census report, however, which lists all members of her family, gives her year of birth as 1891. For reasons of her own, she gave the public the year 1901. She died on January 28, 1960. In between were 69 years of an extraordinary life.
Life for Hurston began in Eatonville, the setting of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Incorporated in 1866, this small, all-black town, about five miles north of Orlando, is located on the road that connects Florida Highway 17 and Interstate 4.
Biographers, including Robert Hemenway, must rely on Hurston’s own story of her childhood as she tells it in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Hers was a carefree, rough-and-tumble childhood lived as children should live, at least until her mother’s sudden death. Perhaps because Hurston grew up without a lot of mothering, she became a strong, vigorous, independent girl who did not back off from fights with her brothers and other boys. She climbed trees to look at the horizon, just as Janie does in this novel, and she knew the different scent of blossoms and various colors of foliage in her yard.
As a youngster, Hurston loitered at Joe Clarke’s store in Eatonville as much as she dared, listening to men talking, absorbing their tall tales and stories and filing them away for future use. As an adult, wherever it seemed as though she would stay in one place for a year or more, she always planted a garden of flowers, greens, and beans. Perhaps this habit was a carryover from the large gardens that helped her parents, John and Lucy Hurston, feed their family of eight children.
Family Life
If her parents had marital problems, Hurston never elaborated on them. The closest she came to baring paternal infidelities is reflected in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). A major character in the novel is, like her father, a popular pastor of a small Baptist church and a man who is attractive to the ladies in the church. Lucy Hurston, Zora’s mother, was a small, frail woman. However, she was quite capable of managing her husband, as well as her children. Although he was an assertive, three-time mayor of Eatonville, John Hurston never stressed education. Lucy, on the other hand, encouraged Hurston and the other children to “jump at de sun.” Like Janie’s Nanny, Lucy was ambitious for her children.
Lucy’s death was half of a double trauma for Hurston. When Lucy was dying, she asked Hurston to reject two folklore traditions: her pillow was not to be removed from under her head, and the clock and mirror were not to be draped. These requests were heavy burdens for the child. Needless to say, the women of the town always followed tradition, and little Zora was told to disobey her dying mother’s last requests. As a result, Lucy left a distraught daughter, one who would carry a bothersome sense of guilt for many years.
The other half of Hurston’s trauma was her father’s rather hasty marriage to a woman who rejected his children. Hurston and her sister Sarah had been sent to a school in Jacksonville, Florida, but Sarah pleaded homesickness and returned to Eatonville. It was Sarah who wrote to Zora that their father had remarried. Whenever Hurston was home, squabbling between her and her stepmother continued, and several years later, the miserable situation finally culminated in a pitched battle between Hurston and her stepmother. Experienced from many fights with her brothers, Hurston easily won. However, she realized later that, during the fight with her stepmother, she was well on her way to killing the woman, a fate that Hurston believed that the woman deserved.
Work and School
Hurston describes herself as a student who always kept an inner privacy. She was something of a loner, and that inner loneliness may have been part of the baggage she carried with her when she left school, presumably to follow her mother’s advice to “jump at de sun.”
Hurston’s first real job was far from the sun. She worked for about a year and a half as a maid to a performer in a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan company. When she left that job, she continued her education, first at the secondary school division of Morgan Academy in Baltimore (graduating in 1918), and later at Howard University in Washington, D.C., for five years. With limited employment opportunities, Hurston worked as a waitress and manicurist, barely supporting herself on the average income of twelve to fifteen dollars a week at Howard. However, in spite of the economic hardships, these were happy and challenging years for Hurston.
