Zora Neale Hurston is one of my favorite writers. I read in Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” that today is her birthday. A reader wrote me offline to criticize my reference to Keillor’s work because many women credibly accused him of making sexual advances. I am aware of that. I think everyone has a chance to redeem themselves. In the meanwhile, I will continue to post whatever interests me.
Today is the birthday of Zora Neale Hurston (books by this author), born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated African-American community in the United States, with a population of about 125. Hurston loved it there, and would set many of her stories in Eatonville, depicting it as a sort of Utopia; she also described it in her 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” When she was 13, her mother died, and her father remarried immediately, so she was sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. She was expelled when her father stopped paying her tuition, and she went to live with a series of family members.
She went to Howard University and co-founded the school’s newspaper, The Hilltop. She was offered a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology, and she was the college’s only black student. She published many short stories in the 1920s and early ’30s, and her first book, Mules and Men (1935), was an anthropological study of African-American folklore. She’s best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
A founding member of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston died in poverty in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the cemetery where Hurston was buried, and marked it as hers. Alice Walker wrote about the event in her article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (1975), and the article sparked a renewed interest in Hurston’s writing.
The rediscovery of Hurston continues to this day. Her book Baracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was published posthumously in 2018. Based on interviews she conducted in 1927 with Cudjo Lewis––one of the last known slaves transported to America 50 years after the trade was outlawed––the biography became a bestseller.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Happy celebrating Zora day, everyone!
Click to access Hurston%20How%20it%20Feels%20to%20Be%20Colored%20Me.pdf
Years ago, I adopted a daughter, as a baby, from Peru. In time, I entered into a preschool where I was living, in New Hampshire, and a few days later, she was obviously very, very troubled. “How come I look different from everybody else?” she asked. That’s when I knew I needed to move.
Years later, when she was in high school, she was on the bus one morning, and one of the kids behind her yelled out that she should “Go back to Mexico.” She leaned back over her seat and said, “I’m not from Mexico. I was born in Peru. But I doubt seriously that you would be able to find that on a map.”
cx: “entered her into,” ofc
I am a “special” to regional PreK schools, so I’ve seen a variety of them, all types, over the years. Happy to report that over the 20 yrs I’ve been doing this, our NJ regional PreK’s are trending to very mixed, ethnically. Even the Jewish preK’s have a smattering of black/ brown/ Asian, & over the 2 decades it’s obvious there are a lot more mixed marriages than was the norm when I was growing up. It’s important, because– just judging anecdotally from my own kids– age 3-4 is when kids become aware of skin-color difference. Wonderful that increasing numbers of US kids are in daycare/ PreK from very early ages, because they make friends w/every color before they “see” color.
I’m glad you moved, for yr dghtr’s sake! She needed to be someplace where she wasn’t the only ‘different’ one. Was it a white suburban area? I’m remembering my own early schooling in a 1-room rural schoolhouse [1st-3rd], which taught whoever lived in our hamlet. There were no students “of color,” but in my area [near a collegetown] in those days, our 25 or so kids encompassed a spectrum from professors’ kids to somebody’s cousins just moved north from Appalachia [complete w/home-done bowl cuts], & everything in between. 4th-6th in the next hamlet [a 3-room schoolhouse w/2 grades in each classroom] was similar.
What one learned pronto was that being very different from each other was the norm. Despite the lack of kids of color in my 1-6 experience, the wild mix of SES prepared me well for jr-hi/ hi-sch, & I made friends easily w/local ‘downtown’ blacks as well as Cuban et al early-’60’s immigrants.
We were in New Hampshire, the the wonderful little town of Petersborough. But it is, sadly, very white. We moved to a Washington, DC, suburb.
A number of years ago, Barnard College had a conference featuring Barnard Alumnae authors, of which I was one. We were each give a black spiral bound note book with words by Zora Neale Hurston ’28 engraved on the cover:
“Those that don’t got it, can’t show it.
“Those that got it, can’t hide it.”
I still have it but have put nothing in it of any consequence.
Interestingly, she opposed Brown v. Board of Education…. But her opposition was complicated and, in the end, quite principled.
It was. But she was wrong. It was not condescension toward black people, as she believed, to force white kids to associate with their kids. It was the fact that racism is bred of fear which is bred of ignorance which is bred of not living among and knowing the Other.
It is interesting that some people refuse to accept the violence in history. Some people refused to accept that the Clotilda ever existed, and they believed story of the last slave ship was fiction. In 2018 an Alabama archeologist discovered the remains of what is believed to be the Clotilda in a part of the Mobile River that had not been dredged.https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/05/clotilda-the-last-american-slave-ship-found-in-alabama/
I really learned alot about her reading “Gods of the Upper Air : How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century” by Charles King.