This examination of the last ten years in the life of a bold, brilliant, accomplished anthropologist, political essayist, folklorist, and author is educational and tragic. The end of Hurston’s life was clouded by a sex scandal that “many believe destroyed her reputation and career” (3). Virginia Moylan attempts to fill the void surrounding Hurston’s final years, drawing upon interviews with Hurston’s contemporaries, letters, publications, and unpublished manuscripts.
Moylan begins with a brief biographical sketch of Hurston’s life and works, 1891-1948. She situates Hurston’s political views within the context of Booker T. Washington’s work ethic and the “fierce individualism” represented by Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, Florida – an all-black township created in post-Reconstruction South. She follows Hurston quickly through literary and artistic successes and failures, several rounds of folklore-collecting in Florida, the Bahamas, and New Orleans, three marriages and a love affair, public criticism by some black intellectuals, and anthropological studies in Jamaica, Haiti, Honduras, and South Carolina. Moylan ends the chapter with Hurston at 57 years in 1948, having “triumphed over the barriers of race, class, and gender to excel beyond even her wildest dreams as a writer, anthropologist, and folklorist. She held degrees from prestigious Howard University and Barnard College, where she had studied under the direction of renowned anthropologist Franz Boas…. She had staged the nation’s first authentic black folk performances…, garnered the admiration and friendship of some of the nation’s most respected wordsmiths... [and] her published works included numerous articles, an autobiography, two books on folklore, and three novels” (38). It was after remarkable success, Moylan explains, that “Hurston’s nightmare began” (39).
Moylan then turns to a description of Hurston’s 1948 arrest and public hearing in New York resulting from false accusations of molestation by three teenage boys. Although the charges were eventually dismissed, she was vilified in the press in what Moylan describes as a “public lynching” that damaged her reputation and career.
Moylan devotes a lengthy chapter to Hurston’s 1950 stay in Miami, during which she became involved in “one of the most notorious Senate campaigns in U.S. history,” provoking her to produce “some of her most spirited and controversial political and social commentary” (50). Lacking funds, Hurston had been forced into live-in domestic work. She was offered a job with room and board, ghostwriting an autobiography for the father of Congressman George Smathers, whose son was in the midst of an historic Senate race that included vigorous debate on civil rights. Hurston publicly supported the relatively conservative Smathers, advocating an individualist philosophy of self-reliance distinct from the beliefs of most of her African American contemporaries.
Moylan turns to a description of Hurston in 1950-1951, emphasizing Hurston’s friendship with Sara Creech, a member of Belle Glade, Florida’s Inter-Racial Council, and Creech’s project to produce an “anthropologically correct” black doll. At the time, besides “cheaply made Caucasian dolls that were painted brown,” the only U.S. options for African American dolls “were predominately pickaninny rag dolls, handkerchief-headed servant dolls, and grotesque Negro caricatures” (67). The decision about the color of the doll’s skin was made at a tea hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt, attended by an illustrious panel chosen by Creech and Hurston. The chapter includes excerpts from Moylan’s interview with Creech who remembered a 60-year-old Hurston as “proud, self-confident, optimistic, hardworking, and playful” (79). This chapter also includes excerpts from interviews with Hurston’s literary agent who claimed difficulty selling Hurston’s work; she believed this was because the quality of Hurston’s writing had declined as a result of “her deteriorating state of mind, health, and finances” (85). Hurston was succumbing to the stress of living from check to check, not knowing where the next would come.
Hurston devoted years to researching and writing about King Herod of Judea, who, though condemned by history deserved, she believed, vindication. The work was never published. In 1952 Hurston reported on the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman in Florida who had shot and killed her white lover. Moylan describes Hurston’s trial coverage for the Pittsburgh Courier as “lively, vivid, and colorful” (120). Meanwhile, Hurston struggled financially: “barely able to make ends meet, she grew most of her food” (104) on the land around her rented cottage in Eau Gallie, Florida, and earned a little money from a summer teaching job and scattered speaking engagements.
Hurston asserted her opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in a “provocative” letter in the Orlando Sentinel: “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix.” Preferring gradual desegregation, Moylan explains, Hurston believed “the survival of African American culture and its traditions was central to the struggle against white dominance and racism” (138). Nevertheless, Hurston’s position was criticized by black leaders and she was labeled a segregationist and race traitor. Moylan strives to enhance readers’ understanding of Hurston’s unpopular view, noting, for example, that Hurston’s claim of progress in black education was correct, and pointing out that her fears about forced desegregation were not uncommon among blacks or whites at the time: “Although Hurston failed to comprehend its ultimate political and social significance, some of her criticisms of the decision appear insightful and prophetic and reaffirm her social and political acumen, particularly when viewed through the lens of what we have learned about the effects of Brown in the last sixty years” (141). Moylan devotes several pages to defending this claim; she cites Martin Luther King’s concern about public school desegregation, staunch southern resistance, and studies on the effects of desegregation, educational “tracking,” and forced bussing (long after Hurston’s life).
Moylan’s final chapter describes Hurston’s last years in Fort Pierce, Florida, her short stints with various employments, growing health problems, and death at age 69. Moylan observes that Hurston “died with her books out of print and was buried in an unmarked grave, [yet] Hurston and her literary contributions were destined to be central to the canon of African American, American, and women’s literatures” (161).
It is difficult to read a book when you know the inevitable, sad ending. It’s not easy to contend with the too-brief life of a talented, courageous woman and intellectual who struggled to gather needed resources for her scholarship and survival, and whose work nonetheless fell into public obscurity during her lifetime. Yet perhaps it is this adversity and effort that makes such reading important. More biography than folklore, given its original interviews and sympathetic tone, this book should be of interest to Zora Neale Hurston fans as a supplement to more comprehensive biographies and analyses of her work.
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[Review length: 1080 words • Review posted on December 12, 2013]