Many readers know Zora Neale Hurston for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, or as one of those larger-than-life characters who embodied the Harlem Renaissance. But the Florida writer was also a groundbreaking anthropologist who collected folklore, songs, and oral histories in Black communities throughout the Southeast, and in Central Florida in particular.
The daughter of a Baptist preacher, Hurston was born in Alabama and raised in Eatonville, Florida. She studied anthropology under the “Father of American Anthropology” Franz Boas at Columbia University in New York City. Hurston’s time in New York overlapped with the Harlem Renaissance, and she moved in literary circles with Langston Hughes.
Beginning in the late 1920s, Hurston regularly journeyed South to conduct interviews and record folk stories in African American communities. In 1937, she published the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which remains her most popular work. It was inspired by her travels throughout central Florida, and her childhood memories of the region.
In 1938, Hurston moved back to Eatonville to collect folklore for the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP), a government program that employed out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. As Pamela Bordelon notes in Go Gator and Muddy the Water, Hurston’s anthropology degree made her significantly more qualified for the job than most of her peers in the Florida FWP office. Despite this, she remained in an entry level position. The FWP projected an image of New Deal idealism, but the promise of progress fell short against the harsh realities of the Jim Crow South.
Initially, the government hired FWP employees to write state guidebooks filled with historic tidbits and shades of local color. The project grew into an unprecedented anthropologic study. FWP writers traveled the backroads of America collecting oral histories and traditional music. Zora Neale Hurston interviewed turpentine workers in Dixie County. She recorded folk songs in the Everglades, and painstakingly gathered snippets of tall tales in the Black communities of Central Florida. She often packed a pistol among her notebooks. By the end of Zora Neale Hurston's tenure with the FWP, half of the material was cut from the finished guidebook. It would remain unpublished for decades.
By the 1950s, Zora Neale Hurston had slipped into obscurity, and she worked a series of odd jobs to support herself. She died in 1960, and her work fell out of print. In 1975, novelist Alice Walker wrote an article in Ms. magazine called “Looking for Zora.” In it, Walker described her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker's story revived public interest in Zora Neale Hurston. Her grave now bears a new inscription:
“Zora Neale Hurston
‘A Genius of the South’
Novelist Folklorist Anthropologist”
Today, you can find a wide array of Zora Neale Hurston’s work at Alachua County Libraries, including novels, short stories, and non-fiction. Below, you’ll find some of Ms. Hurston’s anthropological sketches of Black communities in Florida and beyond.
Mules and Men
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Mules and Men is a collection of more than 70 African American songs, sermons, and stories (both true and tall.) The book is divided into two sections: the first highlights folklore from Central Florida, while the second section moves to New Orleans, where Hurston describes her experiences with practitioners of Hoodoo, a Black folk magic tradition.
In the Florida section, Hurston is an insider playing the outsider. Much of her research was conducted in her "native village" of Eatonville. Hurston frames with stories with semi-autobiographical recollections of her homecoming.
Roy Makes a Car
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Roy Makes a Car is an illustrated retelling of a story from Zora Neale Hurston’s FWP collection. To call it a folktale doesn’t do it justice—it’s the kind of joke that grows shaggier with each retelling. Roy Tyle is the best mechanic in the state of Florida. Roy's so good that he invents a “turbocharged, floating-ride, stabilated, lubricated, banjo-axled, wing-fendered, low-compression, noncollision car” that can jump, dive, and fly.
Mary E. Lyons sets the story in Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, “somewhere west of Christmas and north of Boogy’s Corner.” Terry Widener’s illustrations, with all the gentle curves of a WPA mural, give Lyon's retelling a sense of time and place.
Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings
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This volume of Zora Neale Hurston’s FWP writings was collected and edited by Pamela Bordelon in 1999. Half of the folk stories and anthropologic sketches were previously unpublished.
Hurston covers life on a turpentine farm, folk heroes like High John the Conqueror, as well as children’s rhymes and playground games.
Editor Pamela Bordelon provides context for both Hurston's career as an anthropologist and her time with the FWP. She also explores Hurston's work in theatre and her interest in Caribbean folklore.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
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Barracoon tells the real-life story of one of the last enslaved people born in Africa. Cudjoe Lewis was born Oluale Kossola in Benin, Africa, and smuggled into Mobile, Alabama on an illegal slave ship. He died in 1935. (Since the publication of the book, scholar Hannah Durkin has identified two other survivors of the transatlantic slave trade who died in 1937 and 1940 respectively.)
Zora Neale Hurston wrote this anthropologic account early in her career at the behest of her mentor, Franz Boas. The book remained unpublished until 2018, 58 years after Hurston’s death.
Read Barracoon on your own or check out one of the book club kits and read it with a friend or ten.