by Alice Walker
In my mind, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form a sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in the tradition of black women singers, rather than among “the literati,” at least to me. There were the extreme highs and lows of her life, her undaunted pursuit of adventure, passionate emotional and sexual experience, and her love of freedom. Like Billie and Bessie she followed her own road, believed in her own gods, pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate herself from “common” people. It would have been nice if the three of them had had one another to turn to, in times of need. I close my eyes and imagine them: Bessie would be in charge of all the money; Zora would keep Billie’s masochistic tendencies in check and prevent her from singing embarrassing anything-for-a-man songs, thereby preventing Billie’s heroin addiction. In return, Billie could be, along with Bessie, the family that Zora felt she never had.
We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.
1979
LOOKING FOR ZORA
On January 16, 1959, Zora Neale Hurston, suffering from the effects of a stroke and writing painfully in longhand, composed a letter to the “editorial department” of Harper & Brothers inquiring if they would be interested in seeing “the book I am laboring upon at present—a life of Herod the Great.” One year and twelve days later, Zora Neale Hurston died without funds to provide for her burial, a resident of the St. Lucie County, Florida, Welfare Home. She lies today in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, a resting place generally symbolic of the black writer’s fate in America.
Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most significant unread authors in America, the author of two minor classics and four other major books.
—Robert Hemenway, “Zora Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology,”
in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered
ON AUGUST 15,1973, I wake up just as the plane is lowering over Sanford, Florida, which means I am also looking down on Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston’s birthplace. I recognize it from Zora’s description in Mules and Men: “the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse.” Of course I cannot see the guavas, but the five lakes are still there, and it is the lakes I count as the plane prepares to land in Orlando.
From the air, Florida looks completely flat, and as we near the ground this impression does not change. This is the first time I have seen the interior of the state, which Zora wrote about so well, but there are the acres of orange groves, the sand, mangrove trees, and scrub pine that I know from her books. Getting off the plane I walk through the humid air of midday into the tacky but air-conditioned airport. I search for Charlotte Hunt, my companion on the Zora Hurston expedition. She lives in Winter Park, Florida, very near Eatonville, and is writing her graduate dissertation on Zora. I see her waving—a large, pleasant-faced white woman in dark glasses. We have written to each other for several weeks, swapping our latest finds (mostly hers) on Zora, and trying to make sense out of the mass of information obtained (often erroneous or simply confusing) from Zora herself—through her stories and autobiography—and from people who wrote about her.
Eatonville has lived for such a long time in my imagination that I can hardly believe it will be found existing in its own right. But after twenty minutes on the expressway, Charlotte turns off and I see a small settlement of houses and stores set with no particular pattern in the sandy soil off the road. We stop in front of a neat gray building that has two fascinating signs: EATONVILLE POST and EATONVILLE CITY HALL.
Inside the Eatonville City Hall half of the building, a slender, dark-brown-skin woman sits looking through letters on a desk. When she hears we are searching for anyone who might have known Zora Neale Hurston, she leans back in thought. Because I don’t wish to inspire foot-dragging in people who might know something about Zora they’re not sure they should tell, I have decided on a simple, but I feel profoundly useful, lie.
“I am Miss Hurston’s niece,” I prompt the young woman, who brings her head down with a smile.
“I think Mrs. Moseley is about the only one still living who might remember her,” she says.
“Do you mean Mathilda Moseley, the woman who tells those ‘woman-is-smarter-than-man’ lies in Zora’s book?”
“Yes,” says the young woman. “Mrs. Moseley is real old now, of course. But this time of day, she should be at home.”
I stand at the counter looking down on her, the first Eatonville resident I have spoken to. Because of Zora’s books, I feel I know something about her; at least I know what the town she grew up in was like years before she was born.
“Tell me something,” I say. “Do the schools teach Zora’s books here?”
“No,” she says, “they don’t. I don’t think most people know anything about Zora Neale Hurston, or know about any of the great things she did. She was a fine lady. I’ve read all of her books myself, but I don’t think many other folks in Eatonville have.”
“Many of the church people around here, as I understand it,” says Charlotte in a murmured aside, “thought Zora was pretty loose. I don’t think they appreciated her writing about them.”
“Well,” I say to the young woman, “thank you for your help.” She clarifies her directions to Mrs. Moseley’s house and smiles as Charlotte and I turn to go.
The letter to Harper’s does not expose a publisher’s rejection of an unknown masterpiece, but it does reveal how the bright promise of the Harlem Renaissance deteriorated for many of the writers who shared in its exuberance. It also indicates the personal tragedy of Zora Neale Hurston: Barnard graduate, author of four novels, two books of folklore, one volume of autobiography, the most important collector of Afro-American folklore in America, reduced by poverty and circumstance to seek a publisher by unsolicited mail.
—Robert Hemenway
Zora Hurston was born in 1901, 1902, or 1903—depending on how old she felt herself to be at the time someone asked.
—Librarian, Beinecke Library, Yale University
The Moseley house is small and white and snug, its tiny yard nearly swallowed up by oleanders and hibiscus bushes. Charlotte and I knock on the door. I call out. But there is no answer. This strikes us as peculiar. We have had time to figure out an age for Mrs. Moseley—not dates or a number, just old. I am thinking of a quivery, bedridden invalid when we hear the car. We look behind us to see an old black-and-white Buick—paint peeling and grillwork rusty—pulling into the drive. A neat old lady in a purple dress and with white hair is straining at the wheel. She is frowning because Charlotte’s car is in the way.
Mrs. Moseley looks at us suspiciously. “Yes, I knew Zora Neale,” she says, unsmilingly and with a rather cold stare at Charlotte (who, I imagine, feels very white at that moment), “but that was a long time ago, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I murmur, bringing all my sympathy to bear on the situation.
“Not only that,” Mrs. Moseley continues, “I’ve been sick. Been in the hospital for an operation. Ruptured artery. The doctors didn’t believe I was going to live, but you see me alive, don’t you?”
“Looking well, too,” I comment.
Mrs. Moseley is out of her car A thin, sprightly woman with nice gold-studded false teeth, uppers and lowers. I like her because she stands there straight beside her car, with a hand on her hip and her straw pocketbook on her arm. She wears white T-strap shoes with heels that show off her well-shaped legs.
“I’m eighty-two years old, you know,” she says. “And I just can’t remember things the way I used to. Anyhow, Zora Neale left here to go to school and she never really came back to live. She’d come here for material for her books, but that was all. She spent most of her time down in South Florida.”
“You know,
Mrs. Moseley, I saw your name in one of Zora’s books.”
“You did?” She looks at me with only slightly more interest. “I read some of her books a long time ago, but then people got to borrowing and borrowing and they borrowed them all away.”
“I could send you a copy of everything that’s been reprinted,” I offer. “Would you like me to do that?”
“No,” says Mrs. Moseley promptly. “I don’t read much any more. Besides, all of that was so long ago… .”
Charlotte and I settle back against the car in the sun. Mrs. Moseley tells us at length and with exact recall every step in her recent operation, ending with: “What those doctors didn’t know—when they were expecting me to die (and they didn’t even think I’d live long enough for them to have to take out my stitches!)—is that Jesus is the best doctor, and if He says for you to get well, that’s all that counts.”
With this philosophy, Charlotte and I murmur quick assent: being Southerners and church bred, we have heard that belief before. But what we learn from Mrs. Moseley is that she does not remember much beyond the year 1938. She shows us a picture of her father and mother and says that her father was Joe Clarke’s brother. Joe Clarke, as every Zora Hurston reader knows, was the first mayor of Eatonville; his fictional counterpart is Jody Starks of Their Eyes Were Watching God. We also get directions to where Joe Clarke’s store was—where Club Eaton is now. Club Eaton, a long orange-beige nightspot we had seen on the main road, is apparently famous for the good times in it regularly had by all. It is, perhaps, the modern equivalent of the store porch, where all the men of Zora’s childhood came to tell “lies,” that is, black folk tales, that were “made and used on the spot,” to take a line from Zora. As for Zora’s exact birthplace, Mrs. Moseley has no idea.
After I have commented on the healthy growth of her hibiscus bushes, she becomes more talkative. She mentions how much she loved to dance, when she was a young woman, and talks about how good her husband was. When he was alive, she says, she was completely happy because he allowed her to be completely free. “I was so free I had to pinch myself sometimes to tell if I was a married woman.”
Relaxed now, she tells us about going to school with Zora. “Zora and I went to the same school. It’s called Hungerford High now. It was only to the eighth grade. But our teachers were so good that by the time you left you knew college subjects. When I went to Morris Brown in Atlanta, the teachers there were just teaching me the same things I had already learned right in Eatonville. I wrote Mama and told her I was going to come home and help her with her babies. I wasn’t learning anything new.”
“Tell me something, Mrs. Moseley,” I ask. “Why do you suppose Zora was against integration? I read somewhere that she was against school desegregation because she felt it was an insult to black teachers.”
“Oh, one of them [white people] came around asking me about integration. One day I was doing my shopping. I heard ’em over there talking about it in the store, about the schools. And I got on out of the way because I knew if they asked me, they wouldn’t like what I was going to tell ’em. But they came up and asked me anyhow. ‘What do you think about this integration?’ one of them said. I acted like I thought I had heard wrong. ‘You’re asking me what I think about integration?’ I said. ‘Well, as you can see, I’m just an old colored woman’—I was seventy-five or seventy-six then—‘and this is the first time anybody ever asked me about integration. And nobody asked my grandmother what she thought, either, but her daddy was one of you all.’” Mrs. Moseley seems satisfied with this memory of her rejoinder. She looks at Charlotte. “I have the blood of three races in my veins,” she says belligerently, “white, black, and Indian, and nobody asked me anything before.”
“Do you think living in Eatonville made integration less appealing to you?”
“Well, I can tell you this: I have lived in Eatonville all my life, and I’ve been in the governing of this town. I’ve been everything but mayor and I’ve been assistant mayor. Eatonville was and is an all-black town. We have our own police department, post office, and town hall. Our own school and good teachers. Do I need integration?
“They took over Goldsboro, because the black people who lived there never incorporated, like we did. And now I don’t even know if any black folks live there. They built big houses up there around the lakes. But we didn’t let that happen in Eatonville, and we don’t sell land to just anybody. And you see, we’re still here.”
When we leave, Mrs. Moseley is standing by her car, waving. I think of the letter Roy Wilkins wrote to a black newspaper blasting Zora Neale for her lack of enthusiasm about the integration of schools. I wonder if he knew the experience of Eatonville she was coming from. Not many black people in America have come from a self-contained, all-black community where loyalty and unity are taken for granted. A place where black pride is nothing new.
There is, however, one thing Mrs. Moseley said that bothered me.
“Tell me, Mrs. Moseley,” I had asked, “why is it that thirteen years after Zora’s death, no marker has been put on her grave?”
And Mrs. Moseley answered: “The reason she doesn’t have a stone is because she wasn’t buried here. She was buried down in South Florida somewhere. I don’t think anybody really knew where she was.”
Only to reach a wider audience, need she ever write books—because she is a perfect book of entertainment in herself. In her youth she was always getting scholarships and things from wealthy white people, some of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the Negro race for them, she did it in such a racy fashion. She was full of sidesplitting anecdotes, humorous tales, and tragicomic stories, remembered out of her life in the South as a daughter of a traveling minister of God. She could make you laugh one minute and cry the next. To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect “darkie,” in the nice meaning they give the term—that is, a naïve, childlike, sweet, humorous, and highly colored Negro.
But Miss Hurston was clever, too—a student who didn’t let college give her a broad “a” and who had great scorn for all pretensions, academic or otherwise. That is why she was such a fine folklore collector, able to go among the people and never act as if she had been to school at all. Almost nobody else could stop the average Harlemite on Lenox Avenue and measure his head with a strange-looking, anthropological device and not get bawled out for the attempt, except Zora, who used to stop anyone whose head looked interesting, and measure it.
—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea
What does it matter what white folks must have thought about her?
—Student, black women writers class, Wellesley College
Mrs. Sarah Peek Patterson is a handsome, red-haired woman in her late forties, wearing orange slacks and gold earrings. She is the director of Lee-Peek Mortuary in Fort Pierce, the establishment that handled Zora’s burial. Unlike most black funeral homes in Southern towns that sit like palaces among the general poverty, Lee-Peek has a run-down, small look. Perhaps this is because it is painted purple and white, as are its Cadillac chariots. These colors do not age well. The rooms are cluttered and grimy, and the bathroom is a tiny, stale-smelling prison, with a bottle of black hair dye (apparently used to touch up the hair of the corpses) dripping into the face bowl. Two pine burial boxes are resting in the bathtub. Mrs. Patterson herself is pleasant and helpful.
“As I told you over the phone, Mrs. Patterson,” I begin, shaking her hand and looking into her penny-brown eyes, “I am Zora Neale Hurston's niece, and I would like to have a marker put on her grave. You said, when I called you last week, that you could tell me where the grave is.”
By this time I am, of course, completely into being Zora’s niece, and the lie comes with perfect naturalness to my lips. Besides, as far as I’m concerned, she is my aunt—and that of all black people as well.
“She was buried in 1960,” exclaims Mrs. Patterson. “That was when my father was running this funeral home. He’s sick now or I’d let you talk to him.
But I know where she’s buried. She’s in the old cemetery, the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, on Seventeenth Street. Just when you go in the gate there’s a circle, and she’s buried right in the middle of it. Hers is the only grave in that circle—because people don’t bury in that cemetery any more.”
She turns to a stocky, black-skinned woman in her thirties, wearing a green polo shirt and white jeans cut off at the knee. “This lady will show you where it is,” she says.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this,” I say to Mrs. Patterson, as I rise to go. “And could you tell me something else? You see, I never met my aunt. When she died, I was still a junior in high school. But could you tell me what she died of, and what kind of funeral she had?”
“I don’t know exactly what she died of,” Mrs. Patterson says. “I know she didn’t have any money. Folks took up a collection to bury her. … I believe she died of malnutrition.”
“Malnutrition?”
Outside, in the blistering sun, I lean my head against Charlotte’s even more blistering car top. The sting of the hot metal only intensifies my anger. “Malnutrition,” I manage to mutter. “Hell, our condition hasn’t changed any since Phillis Wheatley’s time. She died of malnutrition!”
“Really?” says Charlotte. “I didn’t know that.”
One cannot overemphasize the extent of her commitment. It was so great that her marriage in the spring of 1927 to Herbert Sheen was short-lived. Although divorce did not come officially until 1931, the two separated amicably after only a few months, Hurston to continue her collecting, Sheen to attend Medical School. Hurston never married again.