Zora Neale Hurston Depending on Her Own Gods

MARCH 2 - Women's History Month
Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.
(Zora Neale Hurston)


Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)














I have read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God more times than I can count. If you haven’t yet met Janie and Teacake, then you have a treat waiting on you. A huge treat.

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American author and folklorist who wrote four novels and more than fifty short stories, plays, and essays.

Her father was a carpenter, tenant farmer, and Baptist preacher, and her mother was a schoolteacher. She was born in Alabama, and her family moved to Eatonville, the first all-Black town incorporated in the United States. To learn more about Eatonville then and now, please click here

Hurston therefore grew up with Blacks in prominent positions – her father was at one time the mayor of the town.

After her mother died and her father remarried, Zora was sent to boarding school. When the fees were unpaid, she worked at menial jobs in an attempt to finish her schooling. When she was 26 years old, she still hadn’t finished high school, but she looked young enough to give her age as 16 and complete her schooling.

She attended Howard University and Barnard College, and received her degree in anthropology in 1927. As an anthropologist, she carried out research in Haiti, Jamaica, Honduras and the American South. Her study of African rituals in Jamaica and in Haiti.

Like Jamaica’s Louise Bennett, Hurston broke new ground by including the speech of the people in her work, despite the debate that continues even till today about the value of the vernacular.

Hurston was part of the Harlem Renaissance, collaborating with outstanding literary figures such as Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurmon, and Ethel Waters. In the 1940s her work was published in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post.

Despite her tremendous talent, Hurston died without money. Her friends took up a collection for her funeral, but didn’t have enough money for a marker. When Alice Walker found the grave in 1973, she provided it with a marker.



For decades, Hurston’s work was unrecognized. Then Alice Walker stimulated interest in Hurston’s writings with a March 1975 article published in Ms magazine: “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”. The article revived interest in Hurston.

For more on Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work, please see:

Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography by Robert Hemenway

Wrapped in Rainbows by Valerie Boys

Speak So You Can Speak Again by Hurston's niece, Lucy Anne Hurston

I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979). Alice Walker, editor

If you have read Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, please share your thoughts:
• What does the title signify to you?
• What impression do you form about Janie?
• What would you consider to be some of the joys/challenges in the relationship between Teacake and Janie?

I would also be happy to hear from you with any question, comment or added information about Hurston's life and literary talent.

Black History Month - Arthur Ashe and Alice Walker

FEBRUARY 9
To obtain equality is not a month's job. (Kenya (Gikuyu)



1944: Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize Winning Author of the Color Purple born

Alice Walker is probably best known for her novel, The Color Purple. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a film that many of us have seen more times than we remember. The Color Purple was also adapted into a Broadway musical play, starring Fantasia Barrino who was American Idol in 2004.

Her activism places her close to my heart. She knew Jim Crow laws because she was born in Georgia to a father who was a sharecropper and a mother who worked as a housemaid. Influenced by Martin Luther King Jr, she registered voters in Mississippi and in Georgia during the 1960s. In March 2003, she was arrested in an anti-war protest outside the White House. Further, her writings focus on the struggles of women against racism and sexism.

But Walker's most greatest gift to us all, in my view, is restoring Zora Neale Hurston to her rightful place in literature. Hurston was forgotten and her work was out of print when Walker discovered her unmarked grave and read her stories. Thanks to Walker, we have access to Hurston’s inspired writings, and we have come to know her memorable characters from Their Eyes Were Watching God – Janie and Teacake. Thanks to her, also, Hurston’s gravesite now has a headstone.


1964 - Arthur Ashe, Jr. became first Black to play on U.S. Davis Cup team.

Arthur Ashe was the first Black picked to play for the US Davis Cup team. He was also the first (and only) African-American to be ranked #1 in the world. Before him, the most prominent Black tennis player was Althea Gibson. She was the first Black American woman to compete in a world tennis tour, and to win a Grand Slam title in 1956.

Ashe remains the only Black American player to win the men’s single at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open.

Apart from being an outstanding tennis player, Ashe played a critical role as a human rights advocate. When apartheid South African authorities denied him a visa to play in the South Africa Open, he used this denial to call for South Africa to be expelled from the professional tennis circuit. He was arrested in 1985 for protesting during an anti-apartheid rally, and again in 1992 for protesting a crackdown on Haitian refugees.

Venus and Serena Williams owe much to trail blazers like Arthur Ashe.

Also on this date in:

1780 - Paul Cuffe & six other U.S. Blacks petitioned state legislature for right to vote claiming “no taxation without representation.

Cuffe, Walker, and Ashe have indeed shown by exanple that equality is not a month's job. The struggle continues...