Zora Neale Hurston: The Ethnographer Almost Erased

Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, in a town where everyone she knew was Black and the mayor was Black and the police were Black and she did not, by her own account, understand that the world she was moving through was considered inferior by the world outside it. She left in her teens after her mother died and her father remarried. She worked as a maid and a waitress and eventually made her way to Baltimore, then Howard University, then Barnard College, where she became the first Black student to graduate. She studied anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia, the foremost anthropologist in the country, who sent her back south to collect what she knew.

What she brought back was extraordinary. Folktales, hoodoo rituals, work songs, sermons, courtship language, the oral literature of Black Southern life that educated people in the Harlem Renaissance of the nineteen twenties and thirties largely considered embarrassing. Hurston did not consider it embarrassing. She considered it the most sophisticated thing she knew.

Her nineteen thirty-seven novel Their Eyes Were Watching God drew on all of it, and on the nineteen twenty-eight Okeechobee hurricane that she had witnessed. The writer Richard Wright criticized it in a famous review for not being angry enough. The Harlem Renaissance establishment more or less agreed.

Her career fell apart in the nineteen forties and fifties. She worked as a maid again in Fort Lauderdale while writing a biography of Herod the Great that no publisher would take. She died in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida, in January of nineteen sixty. She was buried in a segregated cemetery in an unmarked grave.

In nineteen seventy-three, the author Alice Walker drove to Fort Pierce, located the approximate grave site with the help of a local undertaker, and had a headstone placed. Walker's essay about the search, published in Ms. Magazine, introduced Hurston to a generation that would not let her go unmemorialized again.