Tell My Horse, or Why I Love Zora

I've decided to use this website to do some mildly academic writing about literature. Below is an essay I wrote for my World Literature class at Juniata College, taught by Judy Katz. Feel free to discuss in comments!

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I remember reading Zora Neale Hurston’s novels for the first time many years ago, the first, obviously, Their Eyes Were Watching God and after that I read Seraph on the Suwanee. While reading Seraph I decided to do some research on Hurston because I didn’t know much about her other than Oprah loved her and that many scholars considered her one of the greatest writers of her time. What I was surprised to learn was that Zora led an astoundingly interesting yet somehow depressing life. Thinking about it now I know she would not appreciate the sympathy that seems to well up in my chest; she did not seem like that kind of woman.

She was born in Alabama in 1891, but it wasn’t long after that her family moved to Eatonville, Florida and that was the home she remembers and writes about in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” When her mother died in 1904 Zora and her siblings were split up, sent to live in boarding schools and when that money ran out they were sent to live with family. She didn’t get along with her stepmother, and it wasn’t long until Zora left for the north to get her high school education. She went to Barnard College, worked with Anthropology professor Franz Boaz, and became immersed in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was a strong willed woman who didn’t seem to care much about people’s opinions, and was not always a darling of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston and Langston Hughes wrote the play Mule Bone which became a point of contention, each author claimed rights to the script, and it ended their friendship. Richard Wright and other black writers criticized her work for not dealing more with racial issues, as well as her having white patrons like Charlotte Mason (who actually held the rights to Hurston’s work). At the end of her life Hurston was working as a maid and school teacher, dying poor and alone in a state home for the elderly. The biography on her official website said that a collection actually had to be taken up by the community to bury Hurston; her grave was unmarked until Alice Walker found it, lost among the weeds, and bought Hurston a proper headstone.

Hurston’s revival in the 1970s was what led me to believe she had been favored among her peers. It wasn’t until I had done the research that I had learned about how she was shunned by her peers for not wanting to engage the color issues of the times. With that in mind I thought it interesting that her short essay be placed next to Wright’s “The Library Card” in my World Literature course, it truly showed how different they were in mindset. Hurston’s essays completely exude her spunk and I think that she should be admired for not letting the racial tensions of her time hinder her love for life. Despite this I wonder if she is a caricature of herself at times, utilizing at times the “minstrel technique” that Wright accused her of. She talks in “How It Feels…” about her “gallery seat” of a front porch, and how she perched atop the front gate and talked to strangers. At one point she even acknowledges how the other people in her town didn’t appreciate her southern hospitality. “The colored people gave no dimes,” she wrote, “They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless.” The same could be said for her place in Harlem: she sat atop the gate and while her peers didn’t encourage her antics, they couldn’t disown her completely.

It’s easy, after reading the articles on her, to dismiss Hurston as a suck-up, as a traitor to her race, a white-lover. In her essay she wrote: “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.” To me this proves that in Hurston’s eyes, race did not matter, it was the self that mattered. As a child she talked to anyone because she saw no color lines, and as an adult she was exactly the same. In Mary Crow Dog’s piece “Civilize Them With A Stick,” she wrote that “racism breeds racism in reverse,” racism breeds suspicion not only of others but of one another. Hurston embraced people, it seemed, no matter their color. She transcended the hate that hate breeds, while her peers fell into the pit. She loved life, no matter what the colors.

I’m torn apart by Zora Neale Hurston. On one hand, I crown her the Queen of Forward Motion. She wrote that “slavery was the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.” At the same time I guess I can’t help but wonder how she can so easily shrug off her plight. That’s when I remind myself of her spirit. Wright wrote in “The Library Card” that reading got him down, that he “felt trapped,” and that feeling would halt his reading. I think we all understand this feeling, but it takes a special person to overcome that feeling, to take in what they read and then put it to use. Wright was obviously special, but I love Hurston more because she was able to move past the hard feelings and lead a life. She died poor but at least she made her life worth it.

Copyright Katie Cibort 2009