Zora Neale Hurston: Making It Up
by Joel Savishinsky

She had to become someone else to be herself,
and may have lost her self along the way.
But in the process, she found that language was the way
to be someone of distinction. Although she never
published much poetry, it was when she heard
her high school teacher read “Kubla Khan” out loud
that she understood, for the first time, how words can take
the most marginal of people and leave them “drenched in light.”

First, however, she had to put her hometown and
her age behind her. Child and granddaughter
of ex-slaves, her mother saw her intelligence,
her ambition, and told Zora to make and take
her own opportunities, “to jump at the sun.”
The leap came earlier than either could have known.
At 13, Hurston’s mother died, and her father sent her away.
A de facto orphan, she left Eatonville, Florida, one of
America’s few incorporated all-Black communities,
to face what she later called “the haunted years.”
She cleaned houses, worked as a domestic, then found
sponsors and mentors, forged a path to an education,
and crafted a career as writer, anthropologist, playwright
and performer. Claiming to be a decade younger helped her
seem especially precocious and accomplished as she drew
on Haiti, voodoo, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the American South
– Eatonville included – for the novels, essays, dramas and books
that made her “Queen” of the Harlem Renaissance.

Whether it was New York, Florida, the deep South or the Caribbean,
she had learned to follow the advice voiced by one of her characters,
who says “you got to get there to know there.” Hurston’s approach to
both folklore and fiction was intimate and disarming.
“Just squat down awhile” among the people, she once
explained to a friend, “and after that things begin to happen.”

Her life was so enmeshed with that of others – subjects and lovers,
teachers and funders, family and neighbors – that all became characters
in both her facts and her novels. She blurred the line between research
and art, science and literature, feeling that she had to become and
perform as someone who her patrons and professors, her peers and her public,
needed her to be – the great chronicler of Black American life.
Along the way, she spent her energy re-discovering, re-searching, and re-writing
herself as well. But when it came to penning her autobiography,
her method was subtraction: she continued to deduct ten years from her age,
omitted marriages, and skipped over entire chapters of her history.
We cannot know how she would have treated what she herself
could not have foreseen: how, in the last years remaining to her,
poverty and obscurity would once again haunt her, this time
all the way to her death at 69, and burial in an unmarked grave.

                                        *
Maybe Zora never looked in the mirror when hearing Nietzsche tell
whoever was in the room that we are only ourselves when wearing a mask.
Yet she knew the music and muscle whose chords make a prayer,
even when the backers, teachers, lovers and others who claimed
and edited her life would tell her write this or, perhaps, don’t say that.
Instead, her own voice insistently urged her to use your dutiful talent,
dance in beauty, write the way she felt is right, and
whatever the cost, “go hard or go home.”

Perhaps a standing tree, sure of its place in the soil, of its season
in the work-life of time, can afford a soul such as hers, a pride that
was itself a “miracle of rare device.” But a tree and a woman can both
be cut down – even the tall palms and pines that grew near Eatonville –
for each can be made a victim of its strength, a sacrifice to its size,
a reminder that strong roots still need rain sometimes, and
that reaching for heaven can bring you down to earth.



 

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