The Flamboyant, Flawed Life of Writer
Zora Neale Hurston
By Greg Johnson
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
December 27, 2002

The Verdict: The definitive account of a remarkable life.

In her well-known 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston struck a characteristic note when describing her racial self-awareness:

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. . . . Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

The flamboyant, self-confident Hurston, bolstered by this healthy ego, achieved one of the most notable careers in 20th-century American letters. A novelist, short story writer and folklorist, Hurston became, according to her biographer Valerie Boyd, "the most published black woman writer in America" in her time, a figure important in her own right but also notable for her influence on such later writers as Alice Walker (who helped rediscover Hurston's work for a contemporary audience) and Toni Morrison.

Growing up in the all-black town of Eatonville, Fla., Hurston had little awareness of racial difference and discrimination. That would come later, after her strong personality had already been nurtured and fully formed. After she moved to New York, where she became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hurston found a home that supported both her blackness and her literary aspirations.

"Harlem in 1925 was a place where being black was not a burden but an act of beauty," Boyd writes, quoting another typical Hurston remark: "At certain times I have no race, I am me. . . . When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance."

With her characteristic irreverence, Hurston coined a nickname for herself and her fellow black Renaissance writers, calling them "the Niggerati."

Boyd's comprehensive biography of Hurston, "Wrapped in Rainbows," illuminates the character of a woman who, for all her bravado, battled financial and personal problems --- many of them exacerbated by the white literary establishment --- throughout her unusually busy and peripatetic life.

Hurston was an obsessive traveler who gathered African-American folklore throughout the Southern states and in such countries as Haiti and Jamaica; she also made a notable contribution to black theater, using material she gathered in her travels. What is perhaps most impressive about her constantly unsettled life is that she found time to write a classic American novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937), in addition to several highly regarded short stories focused on African-American experience.

"Wrapped in Rainbows" provides excellent discussion of Hurston's most important work while also delineating the author's complex, often troubled personal relationships. Though she tried marriage several times, Hurston found matrimony too confining to her rebellious spirit. As Boyd succinctly writes, "Zora was desperately afraid that matrimony would only widen her hips and narrow her life."

Hurston was also constrained by her relationships with well-meaning but often condescending white people who provided financial assistance and moral support for the writer's many projects. Hurston called these people --- who included the best-selling novelist Fannie Hurst and the philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason --- "the Negrotarians," and she was often forced, when strapped for cash, to write fawning letters to patrons like the temperamental Mason, whom Hurston ironically dubbed her "godmother."

Hurston also suffered notable conflicts with some of her black contemporaries. Her friendship with Langston Hughes, a fellow Harlem Renaissance author and supporter of Hurston's work, was torn apart after the two collaborated on a play called "Mule Bone" and then argued over ownership of the property.

"Before all was said and done," Boyd writes, "they would make shrill accusations and counteraccusations that dishonored and undermined their long and loving friendship."

Another major African-American writer, Richard Wright, criticized Hurston for allegedly ignoring social issues in her writing, but as Boyd makes clear, Hurston resisted confinement in her work just as she did in her personal life:

Black writers should have the same freedom as white writers, she declared. They should not feel obligated to write about "the race problem" or other social ills, but should claim the same liberty that white writers enjoyed. Namely, the right --- and the responsibility --- to write about anything at all.

For all her admiration of Hurston, Boyd --- arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution --- does not avoid discussing the writer's sometimes flawed behavior. Hurston could be ill-tempered, as when she launched an all-out physical assault against her stepmother. And at least once in her career, while writing up the results of her folklore research, she stooped to a degree of "borrowing" from other sources that today would constitute plagiarism.

Boyd stresses, however, the poignance of Hurston's ultimate fate. Late in her life, her literary powers waning, the once-esteemed author worked as a cleaning lady, and she would never know in her lifetime the critical and commercial success that her work now enjoys.

Hurston has been fortunate, at least, in her biographer, since Boyd's meticulously detailed, beautifully written account will no doubt stand as the definitive biography of Zora Neale Hurston for decades to come.

Greg Johnson is the author of "Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates" and the novel "Sticky Kisses." A new collection of stories, "Last Encounters," will be published next fall