It turns out, Ms. Hurston is much easier to grasp “on paper” than in practice. From the beginning of my research I came upon a series of questions and half-truths.

Was she born in 1891 or 1901?

Was it Alabama, or Florida?

Had she really fallen out with her close friend Langston Hughes …over a play?

And why, if she was so famous, was she buried in a pauper’s grave?

The more I dug in the more her story began to emerge:

Zora arrived in New York with $1.50 in her purse.

Zora attended Howard University and published her first piece in Opportunity Magazine in 1924.

She won a scholarship to Barnard College and became the first Black woman to study there.

She traveled to Harlem and became part of a group of Black writers that included Langston Hughes and Richard Nugent.

Zora and her contemporaries published a literary magazine named Fire!! The magazine was discontinued after its first issue, because the premises burned down.

She worked with celebrated anthropologist Franz Boas and collected folklore stories in the South.

She got married.

She met her patron, or “Negroterian” (as Zora called white patrons of Black artists) Charlotte Mason, from whom she received $200 per month to write folk stories. She was also forced to sign over all rights to her work to Mason and call her “Godmother”.

Zora fell out with Langston Hughes over a joint play they were writing called “Mule Bone.”

Zora got divorced.

Zora won the Guggenheim fellowship to study voodoo in the West Indies.

She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks in Haiti.

Zora got a second fellowship, wrote more books, remarried (and divorced again), was falsely accused of molesting a child, moved to Florida and …worked as a maid.

And finally:

She died penniless and alone buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Most of the writers who wrote about her left out the details of her early childhood. It seemed that Hurston herself had often embellished here (especially in regard to her age), as critics of her autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road confirmed. She did not want to make hers into a story of race. Thus, it read—instead—as a somewhat fictionalized account of her life.

“That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment. That which she silences or deletes, similarly, is all that her readership would draw upon to delimit or pigeonhole her life as a synecdoche of “the race problem,” an exceptional part standing for the debased whole.

–Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Nonetheless, even though this may have been what Zora was trying to avoid, she had instead inspired others to write about her in exactly this fashion: as an exceptional person coming from a less exceptional background. Even today. Hence, it is always stressed in magazine articles and research pieces that Zora arrived in New York with $1.50 in her pocket. As if this moment, her arrival in New York, was the beginning of her life. A wonderful Horatio Alger tale, no doubt, but not—I imagined—a real life. If this “beating the odds thing” was Zora’s life, then where was the Zora that traveled and did research and wrote books full of imagery and imagination about the South? I doubted the words “Guggenheim fellowship” could sum that up.