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August 10, 2003
Review: No stopping her
ZORA Neale Hurston was a truly remarkable woman. She was born in 1891 in the rural deep south of America. Her parents were not dirt poor but all four grandparents had been born into slavery and when her mother died when she was 13, things looked pretty bleak for her. For the next 13 years she was propelled from pillar to post, getting jobs here and there, ‘jumping up and down in her own foot tracks’, as she said. But then aged 26 she got herself into the education system and from then on there was no stopping her.
Her life is the embodiment of the so-called ‘American dream’: No matter how humble and lowly may be your origins, you can make it so long of course as you work hard and are determined enough. Now that America seems intent on aggressively exporting its values, including the ‘dream’ perhaps it’s time to reassess its components.
Zora Hurston’s life certainly gives pause for thought since like the many who do thrive and succeed in America; they seem to do so against tremendous odds. With so much talent, intelligence and guts did she really have to struggle so hard to achieve? Her personal life did not have a chance: She was married no less than three times and each union ended within months - marriage to her was a ‘deadly proposition’ — someone has to give up his or her life, and she could not possibly do that, she had far too much to do! As someone said of her, ‘She was the most alive person he knew.’
She spent ten years getting a thorough education which included graduating from Howard, the only all black university in America. Then in 1925 she moved to New York with a dollar and fifty cents in her purse, with as she said ‘no job, no friends and a lot of hope’. But almost immediately she was with Langston Hughes at the very centre of the Harlem Renaissance, that brilliant group of black writers who partied ‘til dawn wrote eye-catching novels and caught the attention of the glitterati.
Zora’s particular line was capturing the wonderful world of everyday ordinary country people. She affirmed black people’s values and lifestyles in her books and writings. She saw great beauty in the artful lives of common, unheralded people who just got on with their own lives. Her books celebrate this to a remarkable degree. She was able to make accurate and articulate declarations about identity, individuality and independence by translating her experience of the rural south. Her contemporaries, mostly second generation migrants to the north of the states did not write from the same perspective and were more concerned about exploring aspects of white oppression.
When the economic depression set in at the beginning of the 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance petered out. But not Zora Neale Hurston. She continued her researches of ordinary life, which included magic practices in Haiti. She wrote extensively and lived courageously right until she died in 1959 even though this was often in considerably straitened circumstances.
This biography is a marvellous retelling of the Zora Neale Hurston story. It is a detailed exploration of a woman’s journey to self-discovery which draws heavily on Zora’s own biography Dust Tracks on a Road as well as her many writings and novels. But it does leave you wondering whether the American dream can only be achieved by the really tough, relentlessly hard working and single focussed individual: That it’s only there for the quite exceptional person. And that can’t be right, can it?
Wrapped in Rainbows: The life of Zora Neale Hurston
By Valerie Boyd
Virago Press
ISBN 1860498566
528pp. £22.50
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