Back home in Florida, penniless as usual, Hurston became a writer for the Florida Writers Project, an extension of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) programs. For whatever nebulous work she did, she was paid $67.50 a month, bare sustenance wages even in 1935. She worked briefly on a research task with Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress, and this project would be her first foray into research in Florida. Afterward, she settled in Haiti, where she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks. The novel roughly parallels Hurston's moving but hopeless romance with a delightful younger man who may have been the prototype for Tea Cake. Later, Hurston sailed to Jamaica, and Tell My Horse was the result of the research that she did there.
Was Hurston ahead of her time in her writings, or was she, as one of her characters puts it, "a mite too previous"? Although publication many years after one's death does not bring a promise of wealth or an audience for any writer, there are more opportunities for black female writers today than were open to Hurston while she was alive. She makes no mention of ever working with a literary agent, an intermediary that any post-Hurston writer would find essential. When the feminist (or, as Alice Walker prefers, womanist) critics, led by Walker, reintroduced Hurston's work to the public's attention in 1975, they opened not just a narrow path to Eatonville, but a broad national highway for black female writers to travel. Hurston would have reveled in their journeys.
