A few weeks after the funeral, Fannie Hurst composed a tribute to Hurston for Yale University’s Library Gazette. The publication’s editor had invited Carl Van Vechten to write the appreciation, but Carlo deferred to Fannie, fearing that his eighty-year-old memory would not sustain him through the task. In “Zora Neale Hurston: A Personality Sketch,” Hurst called Zora “a gift to both her race and the human race.” Her shortcomings were among her most endearing qualities, Fannie declared. “Zora late, Zora sleeping through an appointment, Zora failing to meet an obligation, were actually part of a charm you dared not douse,” she wrote.
“To life, to her people, she left a bequest of good writing and the memory of an iridescent personality of many colors. Her short shelf of writings deserves to endure. Undoubtedly, her memory will in the minds and hearts of her friends. We rejoice that she passed this way so brightly but alas, too briefly.”
Fannie’s tribute to Zora made Van Vechten weep. “You make all the girl’s faults seem to be her virtues,” he told Fannie. “As a matter of fact, they were NOT faults, they were characteristics and there’s quite a difference. What it comes down to is the fact that Zora was put together entirely differently from the rest of mankind. Her reactions were always original because they were always her OWN.”
To another friend, he wrote: “I LOVED Zora and want her memory kept green.” For a time, however, it looked as if Van Vechten’s last wish for Zora would not be granted. Immediately following her death, Fate itself seemed determined to efface her memory.
In what Marjorie Silver called “a weird postlude,” Zora’s manuscripts and papers almost went up in smoke a few days after her funeral. One evening in February 1960, “around dusk-dark,” Patrick Duval, a black deputy with the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department, was driving past Zora’s old home at 1734 School Court when he noticed smoke rising from the backyard. Hurrying to a stop, he soon discovered that people hired to clean out the place were burning Hurston’s old storage trunk. Knowing who Zora was, Duval thought the contents of the trunk might be valuable. So he grabbed a garden hose and put out the fire, saving many of Hurston’s papers, including an incomplete manuscript of “The Life of Herod the Great.”
The rescued papers—many of them badly charred—were donated, as Zora intended, to the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Florida in Gainesville. The documents languished at the university for years, however, until scholar Robert E. Hemenway visited the library in the early 1970s to peruse them for a biography he was researching.
Meanwhile, a young writer named Alice Walker had become enamored of Hurston’s work. She soon wrote: “Condemned to a deserted island for life, with an allotment of ten books to see me through, I would choose, unhesitatingly, two of Zora’s: Mules and Men, because I would need to be able to pass on to younger generations the life of American blacks as legend and myth, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, because I would want to enjoy myself while identifying with the black heroine, Janie Crawford, as she acted out many roles in a variety of settings, and functioned (with spectacular results!) in romantic and sensual love. There is no book more important to me than this one.”
In August 1973, Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the novelist and anthropologist who had so inspired her own writing. Genesee Memorial Gardens, at the dead end of North Seventeenth Street, had become the Garden of Heavenly Rest. The segregated graveyard was now abandoned and overgrown by yellow-flowered weeds.
Back in 1945, Zora had foreseen the possibility of dying without money, and she’d proposed a solution that would have benefited her and countless others. Writing to W.E.B. Du Bois, “Dean of American Negro Artists,” she suggested “a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead” on a hundred acres of land in Florida. Citing practical complications, Du Bois (or “Dr. Dubious,” as Zora called him privately) wrote a curt reply discounting her persuasive argument. “Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness,” she’d urged. “We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored.”
As if impelled by Hurston’s nearly thirty-year-old words, Walker bravely entered the weed-choked, snake-infested cemetery where Zora’s remains had been laid to rest. The intrepid young author soon stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she determined to be Zora’s grave. Unable to afford the marker she wanted—a tall, majestic black stone called “Ebony Mist”—Walker chose a plain gray headstone instead. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”
Walker wrote a moving essay about her Fort Pierce pilgrimage in Ms. magazine in 1975, and her act of reclamation spurred a renewed interest in Hurston and her work. Then, in 1977, Hemenway published Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, which further propelled the Zora revival. In time, all of Hurston’s out-of-print books were reissued and Their Eyes Were Watching God—once hastily Xeroxed in college English departments and passed from hand to hand—secured a permanent place on university syllabi across the country. At last count, it was required reading for eighteen courses at Yale.
As enthusiasm for Hurston swelled during the 1980s, one particular photograph became especially popular. It is an image of a young black woman wearing a loose dress, a wide-brimmed hat, and a big smile that has transformed her eyes into slits of merriment. Printed on T-shirts, postcards, and even on the covers of some books, this image, ironically, is not Zora Neale Hurston. The photograph was taken by Alan Lomax during the summer of 1935, when he, Hurston, and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle traveled the South together collecting folk songs for the Library of Congress. The picture apparently became mixed up with the library’s collection of Hurston photographs, causing archivists to assume it was a shot of Zora. Once it was published as such, scholars continued to perpetuate the error—despite Lomax’s notifying the Library of Congress, in 1993, that the photo was not of Hurston.
In some realm of the cosmos, wherever the most bodacious spirits dwell, Zora is no doubt smiling mischievously at the mix-up. In fact, it seems a fitting tribute to a writer who dedicated much of her career to honoring ordinary black folk—people just like the peasant woman with the toothy grin who has been misidentified so often as the acclaimed author. Because of Zora, this unknown, uncelebrated woman’s face has become famous.
Meanwhile, Hurston’s books continue to sell well in the United States: more than a million copies of Their Eyes Were Watching God were in print as the twenty-first century dawned. Her titles also do a lively foreign business, with books in print in Spain, Italy, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
In Eatonville, the Preserve Eatonville Community hosts an annual festival each January in Zora’s honor that combines an academic conference with a rollicking street fair. Started in 1989, the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities has received national media coverage on such popular television shows as Good Morning America and CBS Sunday Morning. Many of the people who travel to Eatonville for the festival also make it a point to drive the hour and a half to Fort Pierce to visit Zora’s now-well-tended grave.
In addition to being triply canonized—in the black, the American, and the feminist literary traditions—Hurston is on the verge of becoming a pop-culture icon. Magazines like Interview and Vibe have introduced her to younger readers as an interminably hip blast from the past. Further, Mule Bone, the folk comedy Hurston cowrote with Langston Hughes, was given a full-blown Broadway production in 1991. And her play Polk County was staged, to favorable reviews, in 2002 at Washington’s Arena Stage. Her life has been the subject of numerous stage plays, and at least two popular novelists—both Connie May Fowler in Before Women Had Wings and Terry McMillan in Disappearing Acts—have named characters after Zora.
As these examples attest, Hurston has deeply influenced at least two generations of writers and readers of all colors and cultures. For these people—Zora’s literary children and grandchildren—her legacy is not tragic. It is, to the contrary, one of fierce independence and literary excellence. For black women writers, specifically, Hurston has bequeathed a priceless gift. Through her tenacious efforts, and her very real sacrifices, she made it possible for black women to write about their interior lives and to have such work taken seriously. Her success—in her lifetime and posthumously—legitimized the kinds of intimate narratives that are now taken for granted in African-American literature. Yet if Hurston had not created a Janie and a Phoeby, for example, it might not have been possible for Toni Morrison to produce a Sula and a Nel, or for Alice Walker to create a Celie and a Shug. In other words, because Hurston wrote what she wrote, and published the books she published, American literature was altered for the good.
In this regard, Hurston’s death hardly matters. Everyone, after all, has to die. But because of the way she lived, Zora Neale Hurston irrevocably changed the world. And now, at last, she is getting the acclaim she has long deserved. Remarkably, Hurston never seemed to doubt she would one day receive the recognition she was due. As she put it: “God balances the sheet in time.”