Recovering Zora Neale Hurston's Work

Abstract

I have an image of myself at about eight years old pigtails, skinny, wearing shorts standing under sign that reads Silver Springs. During summers of my childhood, I traveled with my family to Florida, where we would visit the Bok Singing Tower and relatives and, of course, the glass-bottomed boats. As I got older and had children of my own, the trips were to Disney World or Busch Gardens and quick journey to the home of friends. Florida, for me, was amusement memories. But my attitude changed when I moved to Florida five years ago. I wanted to see what Glorfa Jahoda called the other Florida, the one that never advertises itself.1 From my youth, I remembered The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski. I returned to these writings. And, as luck would have it, I had brought with me from my work in Mississippi at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture two books Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God that came to mean more to me than all others.2 As the spell of Florida's history, literature, and people fell over me, I became even more passionately involved with the life and writings of Zora Neale Hurston, the author of those two books and of the two pieces that follow my introduction here. Zora Neale Hurston grew up (I'm not convinced it was her birthplace) in Eatonville, Florida, the oldest of about dozen all-black towns in the United States and the first to be incorporated, in 1887. Eatonville, founded by ex-slaves and their families, was town rich in black folk culture in Hurston's words, a pure Negro town, with charter,