Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston
By Valerie Boyd
Scribner, 527 pages, $30
Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
Collected and edited by Carla Kaplan
Doubleday, 880 pages, $40
We know Zora Neale Hurston as the author of the sumptuous, classic female-coming-of-age novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and perhaps also as the colorful woman who marched through the Harlem Renaissance making declarations such as, “I am not tragically colored.” We might know of her great friendship with Langston Hughes and their famous rift over the play they collaborated on, “Mule Bone.”
But Hurston’s career taken as a whole, as Valerie Boyd offers it to us in “Wrapped in Rainbows,” contains myriad facets and phases. She was a serious anthropologist who pioneered in the field when people of color were objects of scrutiny, not the ones doing the studying. She published four novels and nearly 100 short stories and essays, including the enduring “Characteristics of Negro Expression” and “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” She put on plays and musical revues that brought the rich and vital dance and songs of the black South and Caribbean to New York and other North American audiences for the first time. She did in-depth journalistic coverage of the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a married Southern black woman who killed her white physician lover. She was on the cover of mainstream magazines such as Saturday Review and corresponded with the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois and Winston Churchill, and she also made herself welcome in Florida turpentine camps, encouraging people to share their cherished folk tales, songs and dances.
When Hurston died in 1960, she was not living in the comfortable circumstances one would especially hope a major artist who worked hard her whole life would enjoy. In 1973, writer Alice Walker famously hunted down Hurston’s unmarked, weedy grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery in Ft. Pierce, Fla., and had placed a simple tombstone that read, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.” Hurston was indeed that genius, and her life has been lovingly and carefully retold in Boyd’s biography.
Walker, in her foreword to Robert Hemenway’s fine book “Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography” (1977), characterized Hurston’s work as displaying “racial health–a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings.” Hurston inhabited her genius with a singular disregard for the approbations of others. She sometimes bowed to people she wanted something from, but her letters, which “Wrapped in Rainbows” cites, do not display desperation and often have coded significations that seem to wink at imagined readers-in-the-know. She was strategic, but she did as she pleased. Boyd, an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has a writing style that gives a continuous narrative of Hurston’s life and lets her remarkable, complete and complex voice be heard.
Many of Boyd’s copious footnotes indicate she had access to Hemenway’s personal files. Writing today, Boyd is the beneficiary of some 30 years of Hurston’s resurrected literary reputation and the attendant research and scholarship that has come along with it, as well as widely more available resources of information on black literature and culture. For example, Arnold Rampersad’s exhaustive, two-volume biography of Langston Hughes is, appropriately, one of Boyd’s oft-cited sources. So “Wrapped in Rainbows” culls from all this bounty and distills it in a felicitously readable format that will bring the general reader, and give those who have never heard of Hurston, a clear sense of her fascinating life and necessary work.
Boyd details Hurston’s dedication to the academic aspects of her work. She was a trained anthropologist, which was just about unprecedented in the early 1930s. She studied with Franz Boas at Barnard College and communicated and worked with Melville Herskovits, Alan Lomax and others as her work took her to black communities in Honduras, Jamaica, Bermuda, Florida, New Orleans and Haiti. The collected folklore and ritual she published in “Mules and Men” and “Tell My Horse” are real treasures, and it is clear that Hurston was taken deep into those communities to know their ways and philosophies.
Boyd also pieces together some of the mysteries of Hurston’s love life, about which she was famously closed-mouthed. We read of the passionate affair with Percival Punter, who inspired “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (yes, she did write it in seven weeks while nursing that broken heart, as legend has had it). “Their Eyes,” out of print just 30 years ago, is now widely taught in American high schools. It is nothing less than a 20th Century classic, a literary novel rife with vernacular riches in which a young woman returns to her hometown and tells her best friend the story of her life through travels, three marriages, great loves and great disappointments. It is no exaggeration to say that this book ravishes and astonishes in prose that is, to borrow Hurston’s own phrase, “drenched in light.”
Though Boyd laments that Hurston was a reluctant resident of a county welfare nursing home at the end of her days, she emphasizes that “because of the way she lived, Zora Neale Hurston changed the world.” And she quotes Hurston herself, from her autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road”:
“I have known the joy and pain of deep friendship. . . . I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That’s living.”
“Wrapped in Rainbows” lays bare for us Hurston’s struggles to live the artist’s life, a struggle made more complicated by her sex and race. During the years of Hurston’s literary ascent, not another black woman was making her living as a writer, and scarcely any black men. Despite Hughes’ fame, his life as it paralleled Hurston’s was also characterized by constant generation of work and nary a penny to show for that insistent industry. Hurston and Hughes were faced with white publishers who loved them when they were writing what made those publishers racially comfortable and who censured them when they crossed some invisible line of outspokenness.
Both writers received the patronage of a wealthy white widow, Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason, whom they called “Godmother.” Boyd details the indignities of Mason’s patronage: All of Hurston’s work, by contract, became Mason’s property. Mason would dictate when and what Hurston could publish and what “dirty words” should be “toned down” from her manuscripts. Hurston did an intricate tango of placating Godmother, keeping to herself and managing to publish some works that expressed her true voice and intent.
One methodological aspect of Boyd’s approach is problematic. She is clearly trying to write a continuous narrative–“to make Zora Neale Hurston’s voice manifest”–and in this she succeeds. But such an approach smooths over crucial distinctions in the kinds of sources she is culling. Boyd has consulted letters, census data, interviews, archives and so forth–the expected range that a careful biographer would research. But in the first chapters especially, which focus on Hurston’s early life, Boyd narrates as fact using largely one source: Hurston’s autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road.”
Autobiography is notoriously unreliable in that the writer is always picking, choosing, embellishing and contending with the distorting forces of memory. Further, “Dust Tracks on a Road” is notable because Hurston’s publishers as much as censored many of its chapters, and numerous literary critics have documented ways the published version is explicitly compromised. In her foreword to Hemenway’s book, Walker called “Dust Tracks” “the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote.” Boyd might have said more about the methodological challenges of writing an early life with so little information available, or let the reader know more explicitly that she was quoting from the autobiography, or discussed the issues with the autobiography. As it stands, it is frustrating to read as fact chapters of a childhood and then find out in the footnotes that the material is restated from a controversial autobiography.
Readers interested in Hurston should not miss a more scholarly new release, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters,” collected and edited by Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan, a professor of English at the University of Southern California. This collection includes letters from Hurston’s adult life, clearly organized with a thorough, concise summary of her life, decade by decade. You get more of Hurston’s voice here: irreverent, scabrous, flirtatious, insightful, profound. There were no sacred cows in Hurston’s life, though it is also vexing (yet perversely compelling) to see her sign off to a white benefactor early in her career as “your humble and obedient little ‘pick’ ” (for pickaninny). This sort of thing understandably turns some people off from Hurston. Indeed, the likes of Sterling Brown and Richard Wright felt she showed white people too much of the laughter and not enough of the danger and pain of black life in the South dur ing the Depression. Is she winking, if only at someone imagined and off-camera, when she writes such words? Or is she stooping low to get what she needs? Hurston was invariably determined to resist categorization, and these wholly original letters demonstrate that she was constitutionally incapable of fitting into any box at all. She modeled herself on herself.
Hurston did not always get on with so-called Negro Establishment figures. Her vitality and forthrightness were sometimes taken as irreverent and unbecoming the race. She had a keen pretension meter and at one point called Du Bois a ” ‘goateed, egotistic, wishy-washy . . . haughty aristocrat.’ ” But that didn’t stop her from writing to him in 1945 with a wild and wonderful idea. “As Dean of American Negro Artists,” she writes, “[w]hy do you not propose a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead? Something like Pere la Chaise in Paris.” She envisions it on lush Florida terrain and suggests that “Negro sculptors and painters decorate it with scenes from our own literature and life. Mythology and all.” She concludes her argument, “Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness.”
Those are haunting words when you think about Hurston’s own demise 15 years later and Walker’s posthumous honoring of this great genius. Together these two books offer readers a fulsome look at one of the 20th Century’s most significant writers, and a truly remarkable spirit.
