Dark shadows cloak this part of Hurston’s history, making facts and dates difficult to decipher. What she publicly recounted about this period was vague and confusing, and, in fact, seemed contrived to conceal rather than to reveal. No other witnesses to this era of her life have emerged, so we only have Hurston’s account—and a few taciturn public records—with which to reconstruct these crucial years.
Here’s what we know: When Zora Hurston walked out of her father’s house sometime in late 1905, she realized that the wresting of her mama’s bed from her stepmother’s grasp was what folks called a hollow victory. When the kitchen door slammed behind her, echoing her exit, she didn’t feel particularly defiant or triumphant. Instead she felt orphaned and lonesome, even dispossessed.
Though her earlier prescient visions seemed to indicate that she had the gift (or burden) of foreknowledge, Zora’s powers were limited. She could not predict what the next few years would bring: the discovery that an internal ache could be just as chronic and painful as any external hardships.
“So my second vision picture came to be. I had seen myself homeless and uncared for,” she would later write. “There was a chill about that picture which used to wake me up shivering. I had always thought I would be in some lone, arctic wasteland with no one under the sound of my voice.” But Zora soon came to know that the rugged terrain she was destined to traverse was within: “I found the cold, and desolate solitude, and earless silences, but I discovered all that geography was within me. It only needed time to reveal it.”
During the next five years, 1906 to 1911, all this inner geography would make itself plain.
According to her own account, Zora went to live with relatives and friends of the family, most likely in Eatonville or nearby Sanford. John Hurston probably made these arrangements himself, believing that the only way to keep peace in his home was to have only one woman in it. And that woman, clearly, had to be his wife. He considered sending Zora back to school in Jacksonville, no doubt, understanding as he did the importance of education. But education—particularly at a good private school like Florida Baptist Academy—was expensive, and, naturally, it was more crucial for his six sons than for his two daughters. Sarah had eschewed education and stepped into womanhood rather briskly; maybe Zora would follow her example. But until she found someone to marry, her father reasoned, Zora could take a room with a good family, church members perhaps, not too far from home.
In the black community at that time, particularly in a place like Eatonville, there were few true orphans. If, for example, a child suddenly lost her parents to that early-twentieth-century scourge, tuberculosis, or to some other plague of nature, the women and men of the community would rally to help provide that child with food and shelter.
Of course, no natural disaster had left Zora looking for a place to live, but folks also understood domestic disasters. They recalled how close Zora had been to her mama, and they could only imagine what her papa’s expeditious marriage to Mattie Moge had cost her. They weren’t sure what, exactly, had made the girl walk away from her father’s five acres, but they sensed that what she needed now was a little tenderness. So some good neighbors agreed to let the teenager stay with them for a while. They knew Lucy Hurston, God rest her soul, would have done the same for any one of their children, had the situation been reversed.
Still, despite this active kindness, Zora felt “bare and bony of comfort and love.” Steeped in grief, she could only focus on absence—the absence of her mother’s guiding hand, the absence of her siblings’ laughter, the absence of books to read and time to read them. “I was miserable,” she recalled, “and no doubt made others miserable around me, because they could not see what was the matter with me, and I had no part in what interested them.”
What interested Zora was school, but since she was lacking money of her own as well as her father’s support, school became an intermittent indulgence. Public school was an option, but just barely. In the early 1900s, few black public schools in the South provided anything beyond basic agricultural and industrial training, particularly at the high school level. And conditions were often poor: 64 percent of black schools in the South were staffed by only one teacher, 19 percent by two teachers. The average public expenditure for education for a white child was $10.82; for a black child, it was $4.01.
Even if Zora could have seen past these obstacles, she still would have needed money for books and school supplies. Yet the people she lived with didn’t share her passion for book learning. Of course, education had its place, but “people who had no parents could not afford to sit around on school benches wearing out what clothes they had.”
By her own admission, Zora was not comfortable to have around. She was disconsolate—and none too humble. Thus, she often clashed with her hosts and was then shifted to another home. Zora recognized her poor attitude was contributing to her nomadic existence, but she felt powerless to change it. “A child in my place ought to realize I was lucky to have a roof over my head and anything to eat at all,” adults told Zora. “And from their point of view, they were right,” she conceded. “From mine, my stomach pains were the least of my sufferings. I wanted what they could not conceive of. I could not reveal myself for lack of expression, and then for lack of hope of understanding, even if I could have found the words.”
What Zora wanted, but could not yet express, was what she’d always wanted, from the first moment she’d picked up a book and been transported to another time and place. She wanted not only books to read, but the kind of life that could fill a book. She wanted to stride beyond the perimeters of small-town Florida and beyond the parameters of a small black life. She wanted education and excitement and adventure. She wanted a big life.
What she needed was a job. By this time, Zora was fifteen years old, considered, in those days, a young woman, not a little girl. As such, she was expected to contribute to the coffers of whatever household she occupied. After all, more than 40 percent of all black females over age ten were at work in the early 1900s (compared with 16 percent of white girls). Given this rough reality, Zora gradually began to attempt to support herself. But her youth—and her particularly youthful appearance—made even menial work hard to come by.
Standing on a potential employer’s doorstep with her arms locked behind her back in that classic pose of self-effacement, insecurity, and supplication, Zora must have looked interesting, at the very least: She was big-boned but lean from a recent dearth of second helpings. Her sandy hair tamed into a couple of thick braids, she appeared intelligent around the mouth, melancholy around the eyes. Or was it the other way around? In any case, white southerners generally were not inclined to hire a black housekeeper because she looked like she had an interesting story to tell. “Housewives would open the door at my ring and look me over,” Zora would recall. “No, they wanted some one old enough to be responsible. No, they wanted some one strong enough to do the work, and so on like that. Did my mother know I was out looking for work? Sometimes in bed at night I would ask myself that very question and wonder.”
Occasionally, one of the housewives would like Zora’s looks—the determined set of her mouth perhaps—and give her a chance at a job. Her employers were not often pleased, however, because Zora was more interested in perusing their books than in dusting and dishwashing.
Still, she managed to make a meager living out of a string of such jobs, mostly cleaning and looking after children for an average wage of about two dollars a week—the equivalent of only about thirty-seven dollars today. As the years rushed by, Zora, renting rooms from various landladies, likely moved farther away from Eatonville, back up the St. Johns River toward Jacksonville, where she still pinned her hopes for returning to school.
She also was drawn to Jacksonville because her two oldest brothers, Bob and John Cornelius, lived there. Following his ejection from his father’s home, John Cornelius had moved to Jacksonville, rented a room at a boardinghouse, and quickly advanced to foreman in a fish house. Bob had moved to the same lodging house and become a nurse at the local Negro hospital.
In her autobiography, written decades later, Hurston failed to detail specific events of this period—her “five haunted years”—but she did suggest it was a time of significant internal development. These were the years when Lucy’s baby girl became a woman. If this maturation process involved a sexual coming of age, Zora didn’t say. She did, however, recall a story that revealed her maturing capacity to behave wisely in adult situations, including sexual ones.
In one of her many jobs as a maid, Zora worked in a frowning house of unsmiling people in a town she didn’t name. The woman of the house, Mrs. Moncrief, was sick, and her husband was sick and tired of his wife and his life. He urged Zora to become his concubine and run away with him to Canada. She later admitted: “It did sound grand if he would just pay my way up there and he go some place else. … But he didn’t seem to have but one ear, and it couldn’t hear a thing but ‘yes.’ So every morning, I hated to go back to that house, but I hated more to go home at night.”
At dusk Zora would find Mr. Moncrief waiting by her door, as if he were entitled to her as he was to all the privileges of being a white man in a country run by people like him. Zora was mum about whether or not she gave in to her predator’s sexual advances, but she implied she had little choice: “Finally, I got over being timid of his being the boss and just told him not to bother me. He laughed at that. Then I said that I would tell his wife, and he laughed again. The very next night he was waiting for me.”
Mr. Moncrief’s behavior, onerous as it was, was completely commonplace. No white man had to fear prosecution for sexually attacking a black woman in the South. And for any black woman doing domestic work in a white home, the threat of sexual assault—from the man of the house or his sons—was a well-known hazard of the job.
Zora did tell Mrs. Moncrief about her husband’s behavior, but to no avail. “Right then,” Hurston would recall, “I learned a lesson to carry with me through life. I’ll never tell another wife.” Mrs. Moncrief cried and poured her heart out to Zora about the anguish of being an unwanted wife. Zora was sympathetic to the white woman’s pain, but she had her own problems. The whole experience left her feeling shamed and somehow at fault (“I wanted to run out of there and hide and never let anybody see me again,” she later said), not to mention afraid for her future.
The next day Mr. Moncrief confronted her about going to his wife, but he wasn’t especially angry, just insistent that Zora accompany him northward in a few days. “He went on down the steps and I ran inside to pack up my few things,” she remembered. “In an hour I had moved. He came for me the next night, I was told, and tried to search the house to see if the landlady had tried to block him by telling a lie. He could not conceive of my not wanting to go with him.”
A few weeks later, Zora heard that Mr. Moncrief had skipped town accompanied by another young black woman, who apparently was more eager than Zora to flee the South, regardless of the cost.
Zora never went back to the house to see the wife, nor to collect her pay. She was out of a job again. She would get into and out of many more. She just wasn’t suited, it seemed, for this line of work.
During these years of “aimless wandering,” as she saw them, Zora Hurston became familiar with the blessings and burdens of solitude, intimate with every shade of loneliness, and well acquainted with the oppressive odor of poverty. “There is something about poverty that smells like death,” she would write. “Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.”
Zora surely went hungry many days, a new experience for someone who had grown up in the abundant embrace of Eatonville. But a different kind of hunger was enslaving and consuming her: “I wanted family love and peace and a resting place. I wanted books and school,” she would remember. “When I saw more fortunate people of my own age on their way to and from school, I would cry inside and be depressed for days, until I learned how to mash down on my feelings and numb them for a spell. I felt crowded in on, and hope was beginning to waver.”
Just as hopelessness poised itself to take a permanent seat in Zora’s heart, she heard from her brother Dick. He had married recently and invited Zora to come to Sanford to live with him and his wife. Zora was a bit reluctant to move back so close to Eatonville, but when Dick sent her a ticket, she became hopeful about returning to school and agreed to give Sanford a try.
Regardless of how Zora may have depicted it later, her father’s abandonment of her was not total. The Rev. John Hurston was, despite everything, a man of conscience and good will. He no doubt felt remorseful about the gaping chasm that separated him from his daughter. Then, too, he probably heard Lucy’s spirit whispering in his ear, urging him to right his relationship with Zora. So when he found out she was staying in Sanford with Dick, he insisted that Zora come home.
This was a mistake. Within a month after she moved back into her father’s house, Zora’s resentment toward her stepmother, having festered for several years, erupted.
Sigmund Freud—who had coined the term “psychoanalysis” about fifteen years before, in 1896—might have argued that Zora’s rage toward her stepmother had a deeper root: that she was actually angry with her mother for abandoning her, as orphaned children often are. Yet Zora found it inappropriate, sacrilege even, to express any outrage toward her deceased mother. In fact, in death, Lucy Hurston was elevated even more in Zora’s memory as the archetypal Good Mother. And any unreconciled anger Zora may have felt toward Lucy found a convenient target in Mattie Moge Hurston, who, in Zora’s mind, was the epitome of the Evil Stepmother.
This was the same evil stepmother who, six years before, had prompted John Hurston to strike his favorite child, Sarah, thus breaking her heart, Zora felt, and driving her into an early marriage. This was the same evil stepmother, in Zora’s view, who had encouraged cowardice to flourish in her father, causing him to drag around “like a stepped-on worm.”
All this history, this compounded fury, was lurking at the back of Zora’s throat like bile one Monday morning when she and her stepmother exchanged unpleasant words. As Zora remembered it, Mattie called her “a sassy, impudent heifer.” For Zora, this was a familiar and not altogether untrue charge, so it didn’t rankle her as much as what happened next. According to Zora’s account, Mattie then threw a bottle at her head. “The bottle came sailing slowly through the air and missed me easily,” Zora remembered. “She never should have missed.”
Zora, now twenty years old, had been practically fending for herself ever since her father had married Mattie. Given all that she’d experienced in the past few years, Zora considered herself a woman, not a child to be threatened or spanked, especially not by Mattie, who was just six years her senior. To Zora, Mattie’s misdirected bottle was the first blow in a fight between equals, between two young women with obviously irreconcilable differences.
“I didn’t have any thoughts to speak of,” Hurston would recall. “Just the fierce instinct of flesh on flesh. … Consequences be damned! If I died, let me die with my hands soaked in her blood. … That is the way I went into the fight, and that is the way I fought it.”
Zora pinned Mattie against a wall and pounded her face with unrelenting fists. Mattie fought back, but Zora’s unswerving hatred of her stepmother was an indefatigable opponent. “She scratched and clawed at me,” Zora remembered, “but I felt nothing at all. In a few seconds, she gave up. I could see her face when she realized that I meant to kill her. She spat on my dress, then, and did what she could to cover up from my renewed fury.”
John Hurston was stunned. He knew Zora had grown up fighting with boys, much to his dismay, but he was utterly incapacitated when he realized that the fight now taking place in his home was such an unequal pairing, that Mattie’s scratching and hair pulling seemed to have no effect on his maddened daughter. As Zora recalled, her father “wept and fiddled in the door and asked me to stop, while [Mattie’s] head was traveling between my fist and the wall, and I wished that my fist had weighed a ton.”
A neighbor, a friend of Mattie’s, was roused by the ruckus and tried to intervene. Zora greeted her with a hatchet flying through the air and striking a wall close to the woman’s head. This was enough to make the neighbor flee, alerting the community, in urgent yells, that Zora had gone crazy.
In a sense, Zora had gone crazy, willing to jeopardize her future by giving in to a savage smelting of outrage, desperation, and grief that she had never fully expressed. “I was so mad when I saw my adversary sagging to the floor I didn’t know what to do,” Zora recalled. “I began to scream with rage. I had not beaten more than two years out of her yet. I made up my mind to stomp her, but at last, Papa came to, and pulled me away.”
By pulling Zora away, John Hurston performed an act of heroism that would reverberate for generations. He not only saved Mattie’s life, but Zora’s as well, salvaging her for an eminent future that neither the father, the daughter, nor the battered stepmother could have fathomed in that hour of round despair.
Mattie was bruised and bloodied, as Zora had intended. Yet Zora emerged from the melee with no more than a few scratches on her arms and neck, she reported, and a wad of Mattie’s spit on her dress.
Zora had won the fight, obviously, but she had lost something, too—something like control. She had lost hold of herself in the heat of the moment, yes, but she had also lost hold of her life, such as it was. The actual loss had taken place years earlier, when Old Death had suddenly snatched away her mother. But the reality of how much her life had since spiraled out of control was no more evident than it was at that moment, as Zora’s heaving breath sought a resting place in the aftermath of this almost-fatal brawl.
In her attack on Mattie, Zora had exhibited a capacity for rage that was shocking, even to a man as world-wise as John Hurston. Certainly, there was no place for Zora in his house, and any hope of reconciliation between father and daughter had vanished.
Zora soon vanished as well, going not back to Dick’s home in Sanford, but to another unnamed town to find yet another servile job that insulted her intelligence and mocked her potential. Yet she felt compelled to get as far away from Eatonville as her scant resources would allow. “I could not bear the air for miles around,” she would recall. “It was too personal and pressing, and humid with memories of what used to be.”