Biography Unwraps `Lost Years' of Writer
Zora Neale Hurston
By Renee Graham, Globe Staff
The Boston Globe
January 6, 2003

"Wrapped in Rainbows," Valerie Boyd 's sumptuous biography of Zora Neale Hurston , is the consummate examination of the writer's flamboyant life, easily surpassing Hurston 's perplexing 1942 autobiography, "Dust Tracks on a Road," which was less a revealing memoir than a shell game of shadowy half-truths.

Generating more questions than answers, that book did little to illuminate the woman behind such works as "Jonah's Gourd Vine" and her 1937 masterpiece, "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Entertaining but enigmatic, "Dust Tracks" served up misinformation as fact, and Hurston all but ignored consideration of her literary accomplishments. Hurston historian Robert E. Hemenway criticized the book as "one of the most peculiar autobiographies in Afro-American literary history," noting its failure "to conform with either her public career or her private experience."

Throughout her life, Hurston embroidered facts and fictions in her personal history. But with equal parts scholarship and style, Boyd presents Hurston - both the writer and the woman - clear and unclouded in "Wrapped in Rainbows." She is the tirelessly curious novelist whose clever wit and presence helped fire the Harlem Renaissance. She emerges as the devoted folklorist who mined gold from the backwater tales of her native South, charmed white patrons into financing her travels, and in America became the most published black woman writer of her time.

And Hurston is also the combative, mercurial woman who poisoned friendships and died nearly forgotten and penniless.

A granddaughter of slaves, Zora Neal (she later added the "e") Lee Hurston was born in Notasulga, Ala., in 1891. Throughout her life, Hurston claimed she was born in 1901 and, more pointedly, in Eatonville, an all-black town in central Florida. It was not, as Hurston once wrote, "the black back-side of an average town, but a pure Negro town - charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all." Hurston 's family moved to Eatonville shortly after Zora's birth, but it was more than this that forever bound her to the town.

Growing up in a self-sufficient black town, Hurston saw everywhere "the evidence of black achievement," Boyd writes. It was a place of opportunity and possibility where "racism was no excuse for failure. Here, individuals could sink or swim on their own merits."

In this way, Hurston was spiritually born in Eatonville, which imbued her with a fierce independence, though her father, John, a Baptist preacher, believed his daughter too uppity for her own good. Yet it was Hurston 's hearty sense of self and cultural pride that sustained her through the racism she would often encounter away from home.

Naturally, Hurston felt comfortable in 1920s Harlem, where, as Boyd observes, "being black was not a burden but an act of beauty, not a liability but a state of grace." Hurston 's years among "the Niggerati," the name she bestowed on her literary contemporaries including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, are captured in such lush detail one can almost smell the collard greens steaming in the kitchen at rent parties or hear Fats Waller playing "Ain't Misbehavin'."

Still, Boyd 's great feat here is piecing together the most complete version yet of Hurston 's so-called "lost years," during her teens and early 20s. There are still gaps, but from Hurston 's own vague accounts, and from what Boyd calls "a few taciturn public records," she sketches a compelling portrait of Hurston 's peripatetic life drifting among relatives after a fight with her stepmother forced her from her father's home. She often worked as a maid and may have endured an abusive common-law marriage to a man who, Boyd posits, may have provided bitter inspiration for the cruel Logan Killicks in "Their Eyes Were Watching God." ( Hurston , who married not wisely but often, officially had three husbands. Writes Boyd , "Zora was afraid that matrimony would only widen her hips and narrow her life.") These years forged Hurston 's survival skills but were so sour that she never again discussed them in detail.

"Wrapped in Rainbows" concludes not with Hurston 's death from a stroke in 1960 but with the posthumous revival of interest sparked by Alice Walker's 1975 magazine essay "Looking for Zora." Walker traveled to an abandoned, segregated Fort Pierce, Fla., cemetery where Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave and placed a headstone there trumpeting Hurston as "A Genius of the South." Now, all of Hurston 's books are back in print, which was not the case when Hurston died. And recently there have been well-received collections of Hurston 's letters and her beloved Negro folk tales.

Early in this thoughtful, thorough book, Boyd writes, "There was never quite enough for Zora Neale Hurston in the world she grew up in, so she made up whatever she needed." With "Wrapped in Rainbows," Boyd delivers what Hurston , one of America's great writers, has long needed and deserved — an elegant and exhilarating biography.