Rumor has it, Zora Neale Hurston wasn't a perfect person.
Every now and again I read she had some rather "conservative" views. I'll finish her biography one day and decide for myself.
Every now and again I read she had some rather "conservative" views. I'll finish her biography one day and decide for myself.
The thing I am sure of is this. If I'd had the chance to meet her and talk to her a few times, it's likely I never would have left her presence without something worthwhile to think about, to consider.
If you haven't read Zora Neale Hurston's book "Their Eyes Were Watching God," you're missing out on an educational piece of black art.
In this 75 year old book a piece of classic Black American Literature, Hurston lets her character Janie wander through her own story running up against and climbing over walls made up by traditional gender roles that don't leave a woman enough room to be free.
The most amazing thing about this book to me is that it expresses ideas about being a woman and being free that at least half of women aren't comfortable with now, much less in the 1937 when Hurstron published this book.
This short biography below accurately calls "Their Eyes Were Watching God" a "Protofeminist Postcard from Haiti." This excerpt from her auto-biography seems to indicate that this "Protofeminist" description is pretty accurate.
For more than a year, Hurston, a divorcee in her mid-forties, had been dating a man twenty years her junior. A graduate student at Columbia University, his name was Percival McGuire Punter. Though she would later identify him only by his initials in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston noted that he "was tall, dark brown" and "magnificently built."
But, she hastened to add: "His looks only drew my eyes in the beginning. I did not fall in love with him just for that. He had a fine mind and that intrigued me. When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous."
In short order, Hurston and Punter were immersed in an intensely passionate, mutually satisfying romance-a relationship that the thrice-married Hurston called "the real love affair of my life."
Eventually, Punter asked her to give up her career, marry him, and leave New York. The idea of giving up her career was chilling. "I really wanted to do anything he wanted me to do," Hurston wrote, "but that one thing I could not do."
"Punter did not seem to understand that Hurston's work was her sustenance. "I'm tired of seeing you work so hard," he told her. "I wouldn't want my wife to do anything but look after me."
But Zora needed to do more with her life than look after a man, no matter how wonderful he might be.
"I had things clawing inside of me that must be said," she tried to explain. "I could not see that my work should make any difference in marriage. He was all and everything else to me but that. One did not conflict with the other in my mind. But it was different with him. He felt that he did not matter to me enough. He was the master kind. All or nothing, for him."
Read More:
Zora Neale Hurston was a Wonder Woman full of black girl magic born January 7, 1891 and died January 28 1960. Yet, she has a new book coming out this year, 2018.
Entitled Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave, the book will tell the true story of the last known survivor of the slave trade. Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama in 1931 to interview Cudjo Lewis. She spent more than three months at Plateau, speaking to Lewis about his life and experiences, including his memories of Africa, of the Middle passage, and his life as a slave until the Civil War. The book is based on those interviewsRead More: https://bookriot.com/2017/12/15/barracoon-zora-neale-hurston/
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