On a Hot August day in the 1920s, an unlikely couple motored through New England, stopping at an exclusive inn in Westchester County, New York. They were Fannie Hurst and Zora Neale Hurston, both writers, both female. One was an African American from the South whose rural southern heritage was imprinted in her color, language, and dress. The other was Jewish, and her heritage was hidden beneath her color, language, and dress. One was passing, the other could not. On many of their excursions together, they had discovered that race mattered in some places and not in others. They were...

Zora Neale Hurston is a much-misunderstood historical figure. She faithfully chronicled black life—most notably the lives of working- and lower-class black women and men, especially in the rural South, but her very role as chronicler has been used to denounce her as a traitor to her race. Although her works stand among the richest documentary sources on black life, labor, and culture in the early twentieth-century South, most of the denunciation has emanated from the intellectual left, which has accused her of ignoring or minimizing the exploitation, oppression, and outright atrocities visited upon black people in the post-Reconstruction South....

For Zora Neale Hurston the presence of the past manifests itself even in the most ordinary things and the most ordinary lives. Layers of experience reside under their deceptively mute surfaces. For Hurston, everyday actions and interactions, while seemingly inconsequential, are actually set in motion by the complex interplay between the force of history and the creative efforts of those to whom Toni Morrison refers as “discredited” people. What may appear stone cold and devoid of vitality pulses with remembering. While “time and place have had their say” in the shaping of Hurston’s memories, neither has the last word in...

Fiction, as Eudora Welty reminds us in her celebrated workPlace in Fiction, requires the creation of a sense of place that renders a drama real enough to gain the reader’s complicity.¹ Welty’s observation could be applied to the works of Zora Neale Hurston and her critics, both contemporary and present-day, were it not for one major complication—the role that politics played in the production, circulation, and consumption of African American fiction during the Harlem Renaissance and the role it plays today.

When we look at the politics of Hurston’s writing we see the problem in Welty’s graceful argument:...

In the opening pages of her autobiography,Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston writes, “I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my birth, a pure Negro town—charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all. It was not the first Negro community in America, but it was the first to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America.”² Hurston’s Eatonville was a place where families lived, worked, played, fought, prayed,...

In the works of Zora Neale Hurston, as in those of Willa Cather,history lies not in official proclamations or authorized texts but “in lost hidden places that wait to be found.” “Barely accessible” to our own understandings, “frailly held together” by the shell of their own cultural logic, these places are sustained by the persistent memories of their inhabitants. Our task as careful readers is to enter these places with an open mind and a willingness to let go of our most cherished presuppositions. Only then can we attend to the memories that resound through these places and know them...

When Zora Neale Hurston arrived in Polk County, Florida, in 1928 to collect folklore in the turpentine and sawmill camps, the population was more than 90 percent black and composed of transient labor from all over the South. The phosphate mining camps were also heavily black. Records of the Everglades Cypress Company, which managed the turpentine and sawmill camps, are not available. ThePeonage Files of the U.S. Department of Justiceoffer only partial clues. Other records are sketchy and provide only fleeting references to the life of the workers or labor tensions in Polk County. For the rest of...

W.E.B. DuBois posed the classic question about the Harlem Renaissance, why it did not last. He also gave the classic answer, that the black American literary artist could not be supported by the black American public of the time. The audience for the art and its producers were both different from and socially distant from each other. African American artists thus depended on white patrons rather than on “a real Negro constituency.” Those patrons guided the art according to their own ideals, and they dropped it when their interests changed. White support for the work also distorted it, by cultivating...

The testimonies recorded in Zora Neale Hurston’s writing take us beyond traditional sources and help us understand a particular place and time. Traditional sources allow us to know the external world that I have described in Chapter 3; Hurston’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, takes us beyond that world to the inner lives of the human beings that inhabited it.

It has often been said that history repeats itself. When Hurston’s playMule Bonewas performed on Broadway in 1991, it met with the hostility of an audience unprepared for the “Negro farthest down.” Viewers ofMule Bonedisliked its...