Although Zora had the satisfaction of knowing that she had done the right thing, during the Great Depression jobs were scarce. After weeks of unsuccessful job hunting, Zora finally found work with a new government program designed to help unemployed Americans. She was hired as a drama coach for the Harlem Unit of the Federal Theatre Project. During her six months on the job, she helped coach actors and actresses in a production called Walk Together Chillun. Although she didn't think much of the show, she needed the $23.66 weekly paycheck, especially because her niece, Zora Mack, was living with her at about this time. Ten-year-dd Zora was the daughter of Zora Neale Hurston's sister, Sarah, who had died at the age of only forty-four. Zora Mack later recalled that the aunt for whom she had been named took great care of her and bought her "gorgeous clothes" and other "beautiful things" during the few months they lived together.
In March 1936, Zora received wonderful news about a grant for which she had applied. The Guggenheim Foundation had awarded her two thousand dollars to study voodoo and other religious practices as well as the folklore of black people in the West Indies. Zora quit her job with the Federal Theatre Project and in April she departed by steamship for the islands in the Caribbean. Although she also traveled through Jamaica, Zora spent most of the next year and a half in Haiti, where voodoo had first taken root in the New World and where it was still practiced.
Among other things, Zora investigated zombies in Haiti. Zombies were said to be dead people who had been brought back to life by magical voodoo spells. Known as "the living dead," they were allegedly soulless beings with no minds of their own. As part of her research, Zora was invited by a Haitian doctor to meet an actual zombie in a government hospital. The story of this woman—Felicia Felix-Mentor—was extremely strange.
Felicia had supposedly died in 1907. Yet in 1936 she was found wandering about the countryside, muttering to herself, "This is the farm of my father. I used to live here." Her brother, the current owner of the farm, was astonished to see Felicia, for whom a death certificate had been issued twenty-nine years earlier. Zora snapped Felicia's picture—capturing the first known image of a zombie. She also wondered: How could a woman who had been pronounced dead in 1907 suddenly appear among the living, with, as Zora described it, a "blank face with dead eyes"? Was there something supernatural about it, or was there another explanation?
Zora did more investigating until she discovered the truth. Living people were made into zombies by being forced to take certain drugs. First they were given drugs to make them appear to be dead. Then they were given other drugs to revive them. In the drugging process portions of their brains were destroyed, frequently depriving them of the power of speech and the ability to make decisions. Far from being the frightening supernatural creatures portrayed in movies and horror stories, zombies such as Felicia Felix-Mentor were forced to work as slaves on plantations and farms.
While in Haiti, Zora began writing a book about zombies, voodoo, and the folklore of Haiti and Jamaica. She called it Tell My Horse. In a remarkable burst of creativity, in less than two months she also wrote her most famous book from beginning to end. Zora explained in her autobiography: "I wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it in seven weeks."
After her return from Haiti and Jamaica, Zora enjoyed demonstrating voodoo drumming for her friends.
Their Eyes, as it is known for short, is the story of a Florida girl, and then woman, named Janie Crawford and her lifelong quest for love and respect. After two failed marriages, Janie eventually finds what she is seeking in a younger man known as Tea Cake. From the first page to the last, Their Eyes is rich with realistic dialogue, poetic descriptions of Janie's feelings, and stunning depictions of nature. One of the book's most compelling passages describes Janie and Tea Cake's flight from a hurricane:
They saw other people like themselves struggling along. A house down, here and there, frightened cattle. But above all the drive of the wind and the water. And the lake. Under its multiplied roar could be heard a mighty sound of grinding rock and timber and a wail. They looked back. Saw people trying to run in raging waters and screaming when they found they couldn't. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.
"De lake is comin'!" Tea Cake gasped.
"It's comin' behind us!" Janie shuddered. "Us can't fly."
In her autobiography Zora explained that her lingering love for Percy Punter helped make Their Eyes a special book. "I tried," she wrote, "[to embody] all the tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God."
The novel would eventually become a bestseller, but unfortunately for Zora, that wouldn't happen for about half a century.
11. "I Shall Keep Trying"
ZORA RETURNED TO THE STATES in late September 1937. Her timing was superb. She had mailed the manuscript of Their Eyes Were Watching God from Haiti. Her editors had seen need for only a small number of changes, and Lippincott had published the book just a few days before her arrival in New York. Still "scared to death of reviews," Zora combed newspapers and magazines to see what the critics thought of her second novel.
Their Eyes received mostly outstanding reviews. The New York Times called it "a perfect story ... simple and beautiful and shining with humor." Other reviewers agreed. Although the praise was gratifying, Zora was stung by a few negative reviews that came from her fellow black writers.
For one thing, they criticized Zora for writing a love story at a time when black Americans were suffering from discrimination. Wouldn't it be a better use of her talent for Zora to write a novel about how her people were mistreated? Furthermore, why did she have her characters say things like "Us can't fly"? Such dialogue made it appear that black people couldn't speak proper English.
Zora was wounded by the criticism. She had grown up in Florida and had modeled her dialogue after the way people she knew really spoke. And who ordained that black authors should write only protest novels? What was wrong with a love story with black characters?
The criticism that hurt Zora the most came from her old professor, Alain Locke, who commented in Opportunity magazine that she would be better off writing about social issues. As she had done in her quarrel with Langston Hughes, Zora quickly went from feeling insulted to feeling enraged. She wrote a criticism of Locke's criticism, which she sent to Opportunity. Ripping into Locke like a lioness protecting her cub, Zora called Locke's review "an example of rank dishonesty" and "a fraud." "[He] knows nothing about Negroes," she continued, and "has not produced one single idea or suggestion of an idea that he can call his own." In fact, Zora added, Locke was so ignorant about their people that she offered to "send [her] toenails to debate him on what he knows about Negroes and Negro life."
Fortunately, Opportunity chose not to print Zora's hateful essay about Locke. Otherwise her friendship with the man who had helped her along in her career probably would have been shattered, as had happened with Langston Hughes seven years earlier. Zora also badmouthed Locke to their mutual friends. She wrote to James Weldon Johnson, "Alain Leroy Locke is a malicious, spiteful little snot that thinks he ought to be the leading Negro because of his degrees."
After promoting Their Eyes Were Watching God for a few weeks, Zora returned to Florida, where she worked on Tell My Horse, her folklore book about Haiti and Jamaica. Published in October 1938, Tell My Horse was criticized for lacking organization. This time Zora admitted that the criticism was deserved.
Their Eyes and Tell My Horse had one thing in common. During Zora's life' time each book sold only a few thousand copies. Although she wasn't happy about the lack of sales, Zora didn't dwell on it. By the time Tell My Horse came out she had begun her next project: a novel called Moses, Man of the Mountain about the biblical hero.
Zora's Guggenheim Foundation grant had expired, so once again she needed to find a job while she wrote. In April 1938 she was hired by the Federal Writers' P
roject (FWP), a government program that employed needy writers. During her year and a half with the FWP, she was assigned to collect and edit material for The Florida Negro, a book that was intended to chronicle black life in her home state. Although she was paid only sixty-three dollars a month—less than what white FWP writers with virtually no experience earned—the job was perfect for Zora in several ways.
For one thing, she was able to base herself in Eatonville, making only periodic visits to Florida FWP headquarters in Jacksonville. For another, she was able to use folklore she had already collected over the years for The Florida Negro. The job also allowed her what she craved: lots of time to herself. She needed to work on her new novel about Moses, and to care for her nieces Wilhelmina and Winifred Hurston, who lived with her for several months during this period. The girls had come to stay with Aunt Zora following the death of their father, Dr. Bob Hurston, in Memphis, Tennessee.
While living with her aunt Zora, twenty-year-old Wilhelmina fell in love with a local orange grove worker and married him. Winifred, who was two years younger than Wilhelmina, later recalled what life with her aunt was like. Zora, she explained, liked to do things on the spur of the moment. She once asked Winifred to accompany her on a trip to Jacksonville. Assuming that her aunt intended to go in a few days, Winifred accepted the invitation. "Let's go!" Zora said, and the two of them jumped into the car and drove off to jack' sonville, 135 miles away, then and there. Winifred also told relatives that she didn't think her aunt was the marrying kind: "Aunt Zora doesn't have any business with a husband. She doesn't have time for that. 'Cause she likes to go when she gets ready. She [doesn't] want anyone to tell her 'don't go, don't do,' or something like that."
But on one of her trips to Jacksonville, Zora met Albert Price III, a twenty' three-year-old college student who at the time was employed by a government program as a playground worker. Zora and Albert were married outside Jacksonville on June 27, 1939. On their marriage license, Zora set her personal record for lying about her age. Although she was actually forty-eight years old, she claimed that she was born in 1910 and was only twenty-nine!
Zora should have listened to her niece Winifred. As with her marriage to Herbert Sheen, her marriage to Albert Price III was a failure. Zora soon left her young husband. Among her complaints was her claim that Albert used foul language and threatened to beat her up. She also objected to his expectation that she live with him at his mother's house. Living with a mother-in-law who may have actually been younger than she was did not appeal to Zora. Albert had his own complaints: He said that Zora had a ferocious temper and threatened to harm him with the "voodooism" that she had learned in Haiti. Her friends thought that Zora had married Albert only because he reminded her of her true love, Percy Punter. In any event, the couple separated after just six weeks and later divorced.
The Florida Negro project was another disappointment to Zora. The two-hundred-page book was to feature black Floridians' music, folklore, and expressions, as well as narratives of former slaves. The following is one of the "lies" Zora planned to include:
They have strong winds on the Florida west coast. One day the wind blowed so hard till it blowed a well out of the ground. Then one day it blowed so hard till it blowed a crooked road straight. Another time it blowed and blowed and scattered the days of the week so bad till Sunday didn't come until late Tuesday evening.
For reasons that are not clear, the book was not published.
Around the time that she left Albert Price III, Zora also quit her job with the Federal Writers' Project. She wasn't unemployed for long. By October, Zora had been hired to head the Drama Department of North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. At first the school's president and founder, Dr. James E. Shepard, was pleased to have the widely published author teaching drama to his students. Zora was happy with the job, especially since it gave her time to write.
Zora had been teaching at the college only a few weeks when Lippincott published Moses, Man of the Mountain. One of the most unusual pieces of writing of Zora's career, the novel featured a Moses who was a black man. Like Their Eyes Were Watching God, her new novel was ripped into by Alain Locke and a few other black authors, who insisted that Zora should write about contemporary problems.
Although Zora disagreed with Locke, she did feel that she could have done a better job writing the novel. "I don't think it achieved all that I set out to do," she admitted to a friend. "I thought that in this book I would achieve my ideal, but it seems that I have not reached it yet but I shall keep trying." Zora took comfort in the thought that her career was a work in progress and that her best books lay in the future.
Within a few months, Zora was at odds with the college president. Shepard expected his female faculty members to live on campus, but Zora insisted on living in a log cabin in the woods, where she had nothing to distract her from her writing. She accused the college of failing to offer its students classes in playwriting and theater production while expecting her to somehow have the students present plays. In March 1940, after about half a year at the college, Zora resigned.
For the next few years, she worked at one job after another, none of them lasting for more than a year. The anthropologist Jane Belo hired Zora to assist her in a study of African American churches in South Carolina. Zora went out to California, where she was hired by the Hollywood movie studio Paramount to work as a writer. Paramount paid her $100 a week—equivalent to $1,500 today and the highest salary Zora would ever earn. However, Zora objected to the way black actors mostly played servants, cooks, and wisecracking clowns in Hollywood movies. Besides, she wasn't able to persuade the studio to film any of her books. Despite the hefty salary, Zora resigned from Paramount after only two months.
She went on the lecture circuit—speaking at black colleges about her books. She taught literature at Florida Normal and Industrial College in St. Augustine. That job didn't last either, because, as usual, Zora didn't get along with the school's officials. During World War II, Zora served in Florida's Recreation in War program, which was created to entertain soldiers who were stationed at bases throughout the state. She probably read to the troops from her books and amused them by singing folk songs while playing her guitar. For a time Zora also was a paid political worker for a congressional candidate in Harlem.
Zora had moved around so often that she changed addresses dozens of times over the course of her life. In 1943 she found a way to take her home with her as she traveled. She bought a houseboat, which she named the Wanago. Zora lived on that vessel and on a later boat called the Sun Tan for four years during the 1940s. She became a skilled captain, taking her floating home up and down Florida waterways. On one occasion she piloted the Wanago all the way from Florida to New York City—a voyage of some 1,500 miles. Zora loved to fish from her houseboats and, as she told author Mar Jorie Kinnan Rawlings, the vessels provided her with "that solitude that I love."
Yet Zora also suffered from loneliness during the 1940s. She didn't have many close friends in Florida, and neither did she have as many friends to visit on her periodic trips to New York as she once had. The Harlem Renaissance had ended by the late 1930s, and many of her old friends had departed from the scene. Wallace Thurman of the shortlived Fire!! magazine had died in 1934. Four years later James Weldon Johnson died in an automobile-train collision—much like Zora's own father. "Papa Franz" Boas, her anthropology professor at Columbia, died in 1942, and the poet Countee Cullen's death occurred in 1946. Ill and unable to write letters or receive many visitors, "God' mother" Charlotte Mason spent her last thirteen years at New York Hospital, where she died in 1946 at the age of ninety-one. And of course Zora was no longer close to several New York friends, including Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, whom she had once fondly called "Old Cabbage."
Loneliness was undoubtedly a big reason why Zora decided to try marriage one more time. On January 18, 1944—just two months after her divorce from Albert Price III was finalized—Zora married again. Her new husband w
as James Howell Pitts, a forty-five-year-old businessman from Cleveland, Ohio. Although Zora had celebrated her fifty-third birthday three days before the wedding, she claimed on the marriage license to be only forty years old. Zora and James were married in the vicinity of Daytona Beach, Florida, where she docked the Wanago.
James and Zora did not get along after being married. He may have objected to living on a houseboat. Certainly Zora wasn't about to give up her floating home just because her new husband preferred to live on land. In any case, Winifred's pronouncement "Aunt Zora doesn't have any business with a husband" soon proved true once again. Zora and James were divorced on Halloween 1944, just nine months after they had exchanged their wedding vows. Zora's third marriage was so brief that many people who knew her never realized that she and James Howell Pitts had ever been husband and wife.
Between 1940 and 1948, while Zora went from job to job and divorced two husbands, there was one constant in her life: her writing. She was producing as much or more than she had in her younger years. She wrote book reviews for magazines and newspapers. She was hired to write encyclopedia entries relating to African Americans. She sold articles to the Saturday Evening Post and other major magazines. Zora also worked on book proposals and manuscripts that she sent to Lippincott. After publishing Moses, Man of the Mountain in 1939, however, the firm turned down several of Zora's proposals and partially written books.
In the early 1940s Bertram Lippincott made a suggestion to Zora. Why not write her life story? Zora objected, saying that she was still in her prime and that autobiographies were for authors who were old and unable to write regular books anymore. But, failing to interest Bertram Lippincott in any of her other ideas, Zora reluctantly agreed to write her autobiography. "I did not want to do it now, but my publisher wanted it very much," Zora told a friend. She wrote her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, over the period of about a year and a half in 1941–1942.
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