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Zora Neale Hurston: Finding the Universal in the Local
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by Sharon Johnston, Ph.D.
Florida Virtual School
Florida
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| | Editor's Note
A favorite author in high school classrooms, Zora Neale Hurston has also appeared on both the AP English Literature and Language Exams. Their Eyes Were Watching God has been part of the list several times in the open question on the Literature Exam, and a passage from the novel has appeared as a multiple-choice selection. A passage from her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, appeared as an essay question on the English Language Exam.
In the following essay, Sharon Johnston, an experienced AP teacher and an expert in the uses of technology in education, journeys to Hurston's hometown of Eatonville, Florida, and to other sites in Florida associated with Hurston's life and memory. She not only reminds us of what a vital life Zora continues to lead in our hearts and imaginations, but she also suggests ways to engage our students in research that is neither on the Internet nor confined to the library. Authors' homes and research centers in small towns like Hurston's Eatonville (or like Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Willa Cather grew up), as well as in large cities, can bring our students face-to-face with research into primary source manuscripts and, perhaps more importantly, with the actual landscapes that form authors.
A Journey to Zora Neale Hurston's Florida
Today, I drove through the small town of Eatonville, Florida, birthplace of famed writer, Zora Neale Hurston. Where is Eatonville? To find the historic city, drive approximately 25 minutes east of Disney World on I-4 through Orlando, and an exit sign for Eatonville comes into view. Hurston lived in and wrote about what Floridians call the "Other Florida" or the "Real Florida." In areas of Eatonville, I see the front porches, the country store, the pear trees, the pine trees, and the oaks that serve as the backdrop for Hurston stories. Although dramatic physical changes have occurred with the paving of the streets, the interstate cutting through the town, and the opening of the Catherine Alexander Post Office, the traditional African American culture still exists as evidenced in the prominence of the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church where Hurston's father and brother were pastors, the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, and the vendors on street corners offering delicious pit-grilled barbecue and fried fish. Immortalized in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and some of her essays and short stories, Eatonville, the oldest surviving incorporated black municipality, is still predominantly African American.
In her 1928 essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston describes life as it was in the little southern town:
Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind the curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
At 13, she leaves Eatonville, her secure village, to attend school in Jacksonville, a big city north of Eatonville, and she "becomes colored."
I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown -- warranted not to rub nor run.
Away from the small town peopled with her kin, Zora feels her color, but she refuses to dwell on the mistreatment heaped upon her by discriminatory folks. To her, these people are the ones missing out, since they are "denying themselves the pleasure of her company." With self assuredness, she states, "I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong." She boldly announces her pleasure in being American, rejoicing in the privileges of this identity rather than lamenting the challenges of being black.
Today, teachers easily engage students in Hurston's timeless stories with their captivating images about dreams, passions, and realities of life. As they read and discuss Janie's struggle to fulfill her dream to be loved in Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, students relate to the pain she suffers from the mistreatment of her first two husbands and revel in the acceptance and love she discovers in her relationship with Teacake. Hurston's images, memorably visual, entice students to puzzle out their meaning and to connect with the characters. For example, Hurston describes Janie's love life in her marriage to Joe Stark as "pollen," going to waste, but when she meets Tea Cake she says that he "could be a bee to a blossom -- a pear tree blossom in the spring." Students recognize Hurston's recurring imagery as it gauges Janie's love life, signaling that with Joe her dream for love is empty, but that Tea Cake may be the true love of Janie's dreams.
Hurston's main characters are black, but, as she says in her essay, like her they are also "white, yellow, and red" . . . and in this they are indeed reflections of the whole human race.
Sharon Johnston has taught English for 26 years in Orlando, Florida. Currently, she is Director of Curriculum for Florida Virtual School and an AP Literature and Composition instructor. She has published articles about teaching English in English Journal and state journals, and has published articles about teaching virtually -- including "AP Online, Anytime" -- for AP Central.
When Alice Walker found out that Hurston was buried in an unmarked gravesite in Ft. Pierce, she organized a campaign for funds to purchase the tombstone (as you see in the picture). Although the stone has her birth date as 1901, Hurston had shaved 10 years off her life when she was 26, so she could be admitted to high school as a 16-year-old! Her actual birth date was 1891. Hurston delivers yet another surprise to her loving public.
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