Zora had a big problem with recounting her life story. How could she create her autobiography without revealing that she was much older than she claimed? In the end she did it by providing few dates and by skipping over certain periods of her life. She also lied about some key facts. For example, Zora claimed to have been born in Eatonville, Florida, when she knew very well that her birthplace was Notasulga, Alabama. She also omitted episodes in her life that had turned out unpleasantly, such as her friendship and dispute with Langston Hughes.
Zora published her first Saturday Evening Post article about a black Florida landowner in September 1942.
When it came out in November 1942, Dust Tracks received mostly good reviews. It even won the Anisfield-Wolf Award as "the best book of the year concerned with racial problems in the field of creative literature," which came with a prize of a thousand dollars. But in later years, biographers researching her life discovered Zora's misleading information and falsehoods, prompting an onslaught of criticism, especially from other black authors. For instance, Alice Walker, a great Hurston fan, blasted Dust Tracks as "the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote," adding, "After the first several chapters, it rings false." Others have sarcastically referred to Dust Tracks as one of Zora Neale Hurston's best works of fiction.
Yet most people agree that the first few chapters of Dust Tracks—relating to Zora's childhood and youth—are beautifully written and basically accurate. And some people, such as the author Valerie Boyd, passionately argue that while portions of the book may be unreliable regarding dates and places, Dust Tracks does an outstanding job of describing Zora's feelings at various stages of her life. Like everything else about Zora Neale Hurston, her autobiography remains controversial and stirs up strong feelings in its readers to this day.
What Zora really wanted was to sell another novel to Lippincott, but in this she failed repeatedly. By September 1945 she had written two-thirds of a novel titled Mrs. Doctor, about wealthy African Americans. Lippincott turned it down. Next she began a novel set in Eatonville about a young man who is kicked out of town and experiences a series of adventures before returning seven years later. Lippincott rejected this would'be novel also.
Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, spearheaded the revival of Zora Neale Hurston's books. In this photo Ms. Walker is signing books at one of Eatonville's annual Zora Neale Hurston Festivals of the Arts and Humanities.
Amid all these rejections, Zora became involved in what today seems like a crackpot scheme. In the mid-1940s an Englishman named Reginald Brett and his wife visited Zora. For several years, Brett had been in the Central American country of Honduras, mining gold. He had read Tell My Horse, Brett informed Zora, and so he knew that she was a noted folklorist. There was a treasury of folklore among the people of Honduras, Brett explained. Furthermore, he said that he had been the first non-Indian to see the ruins of an ancient Mayan city in Honduras. The lost city would be a wonderful topic for Zora to write about, and it might even contain buried treasure, Brett claimed.
One thing that comes to mind is that Brett was a con man who planned to swindle Zora. But this seems unlikely, because Zora didn't have much of anything to be swindled out of. Perhaps Brett really had glimpsed some Mayan ruins and believed he had seen a lost city. Anyway, Zora fully believed him. She was so excited by his story that for about three years she tried in vain to raise money for an expedition to Honduras.
While trying to finance the lost city expedition, Zora also worked on Seraph on the Suwanee. This new novel was about another Florida woman searching for love, only this time the character was white.
It was beginning to dawn on Zora that Lippincott was no longer eager to publish her works, perhaps because they didn't sell very well. Since the early 1940s Zora had been friendly on and off with her fellow Florida author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, whose novel The Yearling had won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize. On one occasion Miss Rawlings spent a week with Zora aboard the Wanago. Miss Rawlings had an outstanding publisher, Scribner, where she worked with the nation's most prominent book editor, Maxwell Perkins. Known for his ability to prod authors to write and rewrite a manuscript until it was the best it could be, Perkins had edited books by such famous writers as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In early 1947, Miss Rawlings spoke to Perkins and persuaded him to consider taking on Zora Neale Hurston as a new author.
That April, Zora met at least twice with Maxwell Perkins in his New York office. The editor was excited by Zora's description of Seraph on the Suwanee, and he probably read at least a few pages of her novel-in-progress. He was so confident of the novel's potential that after the second interview he offered Zora a contract including a five-hundred-dollar advance.
After fourteen years of being published by Lippincott, Zora was thrilled to switch to Scribner and to work with an editor who had faith in her. At the age of fifty-six, she felt that her writing career was about to be reborn under Maxwell Perkins.
Almost immediately upon receiving her advance, Zora spent a chunk of it on a ticket to travel to Honduras by ocean liner. Her plan was to find a quiet spot to finish Seraph on the Suwanee and then search for the lost city that Reginald Brett had described. Zora sailed to Honduras in early May. After visiting the capital city of Tegucigalpa, she settled in a hotel in the town of Puerto Cortes along the Caribbean Sea.
Zora had been steadfastly working on her novel for a month when on June 21, 1947, she wrote a letter to her friend Carl Van Vechten saying, "I feel lucky to be under Max Perkins." She hadn't yet been informed that Perkins had died just four days earlier. His death was a blow to all the authors who worked with him, but especially to Zora, who was about to do her first book with him. Soon Zora heard from her new editor at Scribner, Burroughs Mitchell, who sent her an additional five hundred dollars, which she had requested, along with a note saying, "I hope that tells you we have great confidence in this new book of yours."
Scribner provided this publicity photo for Zora's Seraph on the Suwanee, which they published in 1948.
Zora wound up spending about six months in her hotel room completing the first draft and then rewriting Seraph on the Suwanee. Around November 1 she sent the manuscript to New York. Zora then set out for the rainforests of what is called the Mosquito Coast of northeastern Honduras. She didn't find any lost city, and soon returned to Puerto Cortes, apparently because of the heavy rains. The rains continued— "18 inches here in three days" she informed Burroughs Mitchell—which prevented her from heading back to the Mosquito Coast to resume her search.
Zora was still waiting for the rain to stop when Burroughs Mitchell sent her a message requesting that she come to New York to work with him on revising Seraph on the Suwanee. Determined to one day return to Honduras to make a more thorough search for the lost city, Zora sailed for New York in February 1948. She had spent more than nine months in Honduras, writing her book, exploring, and waiting for the rain to stop.
Back in New York, Zora worked with Mitchell on the revisions for her novel, which was published in the fall. Perhaps with Maxwell Perkins editing it, Seraph on the Suwanee would have been a rousing success. As it was, the novel received some poor reviews, including one from the New York Times that called its characters "half-human puppets." Reviews like this limited the novel's sales to 4,600 copies.
By this time, though, Zora was working on new projects that she felt had more potential than any of her previous work. She still believed that a glorious future awaited her.
Zora couldn't have known it, but she would never publish another book in her lifetime, and returning to search for the lost city would remain only a dream.
12. "I Had Exactly Four Pennies"
WHEN SERAPH ON THE SUWANEE APPEARED in October 1948, it was Zora's seventh published book. It might be expected that with four novels, two books of folklore, and an autobiography to her credit, Zora would have a tidy sum of money in the bank. Instead she had no savings and very little income. She was even reduced to leaving her typewriter
in a pawnshop in exchange for a little cash, and asking friends to help her out.
"Please help me," Zora wrote to Fannie Hurst on February 10, 1949, while in New York. "You know that I would not cry out for help unless I was really desperate. What I must have now is enough to keep me alive for two weeks. I owe room rent now and other things. I have used up every available resource before appealing to you—even to pawning my typewriter. I have counted up and find that I must get hold of 76.00 at once." Upon receiving Zora's plea, Fannie Hurst sent her a check, as did other old friends and acquaintances.
Things brightened up a little for Zora in June 1949 when she sold a short story to the Saturday Evening Post. "The Conscience of the Court" was about a black servant who proves her loyalty to the white woman for whom she works. The Saturday Evening Post paid Zora nine hundred dollars for the story—enough to help get her through the summer. By then she had begun a new novel, The Lives of Barney Turk, chronicling the adventures of a Florida farmboy who visits Honduras, joins the military, and eventually winds up in Hollywood.
In late 1949 Zora returned to Florida. With few exceptions, she would remain in her favorite state for the rest of her life, living at different times in Miami, Belle Glade, Eau Gallie, Merritt Island, and Fort Pierce. Early in 1950 the fifty-nine-year-old author was hired as a maid by the Burritt family in the Miami suburb of Rivo Alto Island. Although Zora told the newspaper reporter that she liked "to cook and keep house," evidently at her age she found the job exhausting. As a result, she was slow to make the revisions on Barney Turk that Burroughs Mitchell requested. After newspapers ran stories with such headlines as "SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR WORKING AS A MAID," Zora left that job. With the money she had saved working for the Burritts—and now with the time and the energy to work again on her book—she at long last revised Barney Turk.
Despite the revisions, in October 1950 Burroughs Mitchell rejected Zora's newest novel, saying that Barney Turk was below her usual level of writing. Perhaps the problem was that Zora wasn't as comfortable writing about white people as she was at describing those she knew best—African Americans. We will never know for sure, because the manuscript for The Lives of Barney Turk no longer exists.
The 1950 publication of "The Conscience of the Court" by the Saturday Evening Post was, Zora said, "One slam of a publicity do-dad." However, it cost her the job as a maid that she really needed at the time.
Zora was especially upset by the rejection because she had spent an entire year writing and rewriting Barney Turk. She must have realized that she was best at writing about her own people, though, for she chose a famous African American as the subject for her next novel. Her name was Sarah Breedlove Walker. Born in Louisiana to exclaves, "Madame C. J. Walker," as she was known, founded a company that made hair products for black women. Her business was so successful that Mrs. Walker became the first female black millionaire. By January 1951 Zora was writing a novel called The Golden Bench of God based on Madame C. J. Walker's life.
She had to overcome severe hardships to complete the project. Right before she received a one-hundred-dollar check for an article she had written, her financial situation was grim: "I had exactly four pennies," Zora wrote to a friend on March 18, 1951. Six days later Zora was found nearly unconscious at the house where she was staying in Belle Glade, Florida. She was rushed to a hospital, where doctors said she was suffering from influenza with complications. She was hospitalized for fifteen days, and even after returning home she had trouble concentrating on her work.
Zora finally managed to complete The Golden Bench of God and send it to Burroughs Mitchell. With a fascinating subject such as Madame C. J. Walker, Zora expected The Golden Bench to be snapped up by Scribner and perhaps be made into a Hollywood movie. She was once again deeply disappointed when in July 1951 Mitchell rejected her manuscript, saying "We can't feel that this novel comes close to success." We will never know how good The Golden Bench was either, because like Barney Turk, it has disappeared.
Scribner's rejection of her novels meant that Zora still had to find other jobs at an age when many people were retiring. In fact, she had some of her most unusual jobs later in life. After leaving the Burritts', Zora worked in the campaign office of George Smathers, who ran for a U.S. Senate seat from Florida in 1950. During the campaign, George Smathers's father, the retired judge Frank Smathers, made Zora an offer. The judge wanted to write his autobiography. However, he was an elderly man for whom writing was difficult. Would Zora ghostwrite the story of his life for him?
Zora agreed to serve as the judge's ghostwriter—meaning that for a fee she would write his book while he received all the credit as the author. She spent long hours listening to the judge's life story, taking notes, and starting to write the book. The problem was, Judge Smathers was used to bossing everyone around. Zora wrote to her editor Burroughs Mitchell that the "old cuss" constantly bullied his wife as well as his son George, who was about to become a U.S. senator. When judge Smathers tried to browbeat Zora into writing his autobiography exactly as he said it, she pointed out that she was his ghostwriter, not his secretary. There was another issue. As Zora informed her editor, "He could not accept the reality that a descendant of slaves could do something in an intellectual way that he could not."
Judge Smathers had a habit of sticking his fingers in his ears whenever anyone said something he disagreed with. When he pulled this stunt with Zora, she reached over and yanked his fingers out of his ears, then finished talking. "We fought like tigers, from day to day," Zora told her editor, "and I came to see that he loved it." But while the judge enjoyed matching wits with her, Zora disliked his bullying ways and the frequent battles. She quit as his ghost-writer before the book was completed. Frank Smathers's autobiography was eventually published in 1958, but how much of Zora's material made it into the final version is not known.
Zora also worked as a newspaper reporter in her later years. In August 1952 an African American woman named Ruby McCollum shot a white doctor to death in the town of Live Oak, Florida. Ruby McCollum was charged with murder, and when it was revealed that she had been the doctor's girl' friend, her trial drew a nationwide following. Zora was asked to cover the story for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most popular black newspapers.
Zora went to Live Oak and sat through weeks of testimony at the trial. She also interviewed Ruby and her friends and relatives. The result was a ten-part series for the Courier titled "The Life Story of Mrs. Ruby J. McCollum!" Zora's series was one of the most sympathetic portraits written about Ruby McCollum, who was originally sentenced to die in the electric chair. Many people credit Zora with helping to overturn the death sentence for McCollum, who instead of being executed was placed in a mental institution. Some of Zora's writings on the case were included in the 1956 book Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail by the journalist William Bradford Huie.
But Zora was still determined to sell a book of her own to a publisher. For many years she had wanted to write a book about Jewish history, possibly because a number of people who helped her early in her career were jewish, including Annie Nathan Meyer, Fannie Hurst, and Franz Boas. Back in 1945 Zora had written to Carl Van Vechten, "The story I am burning to write is ... the story of the 3000 years struggle of the Jewish people for democracy and the rights of man." Zora spent most of the 1950s researching, writing, and rewriting a manuscript about ancient Jewish history. She worked at this project, Herod the Great, longer and more intensely than she had for any other book in her life. In October 1953 she wrote to Burroughs Mitchell that she was "under the spell of a great obsession. The life story of HEROD THE GREAT. You have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man."
Creating Herod the Great may have been the most heroic accomplishment of Zora's life. During the writing of this book she suffered at various times from intestinal trouble, ulcers, a gall bladder infection, a tropical virus she had picked up from drinking polluted water in Honduras, and high blood pressure. Now that she was m
ore than sixty years old and afflicted by all these conditions, she had far less energy than she had formerly possessed. Yet, writing steadily, she completed half the manuscript by the middle of 1954 and nearly the whole book by June 1955. With her usual high hopes, a short time later Zora sent Herod the Great to Burroughs Mitchell at Scribner.
The verdict arrived in Zora's mail in late July. Mitchell reported that he was "truly sorry" to say that he had found Herod the Great "difficult" to read and disappointing. Scribner turned down Zora's manuscript.
Considering that she had spent a decade planning and writing this book, Zora was remarkably calm about the rejection. "Naturally, I am sorry that you found HEROD THE GREAT disappointing, but do not feel concerned about the refusal upon me," she wrote to Burroughs Mitchell. "I am my old self and can take it easily."
Zora handled the rejection well because she felt confident that she would sell Herod the Great elsewhere. She spent the rest of her life revising the manuscript. Periodically she sent her new versions to a few publishers, but they rejected it as Scribner had. From the portions of the manuscript that survive, it is apparent that Herod the Great is not nearly up to the quality of Zora's earlier books and that as she aged her writing ability declined along with her health.
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