So, I abandoned my quest for truth. I figured if I was going to get to know Zora, I would have to get to know her personally. And the best way I knew how to do that was to talk to her face to face. But since Zora was dead and all, I had to find the next best thing that would put me in contact with her: a video. This being the 21st, I imagined that there must be some footage of Zora talking about her life somewhere. An interview with a radio show host, or a “celebrity from the Harlem Renaissance”—someone like Oprah—or …something. I did not realize how millennially brainwashed I had become until I wound up on YouTube, with no results coming up, save for a Kansas City Public Library enactment of a would-be interview with Zora titled Meet the Past. The actress that played Zora was great, but definitely not her.
**This is a kind reminder to all you other brainwashed millennials: we’ve had it very, very easy.
So, I delved deeper, going “old-school”. I looked up all of the institutions that housed Zora’s papers and found a great collection at The Library of Congress. It was not the most comprehensive in terms of photographs and letters, but it did have over 20 audio files of Zora talking. Or—as I discovered— singing. I clicked on a file called Mule on the Mount, which I soon learned was “America’s most widely distributed work song,” according to Ms.Hurston. It was clearly one of her folk recordings from her anthropological research. She explains in the tape how she had gotten this version of the song from a man named George Thomas in her hometown of Eatonville but that there are many different versions of it sung all over the country. I was captivated.
Zora’s voice is full, with a thick Southern twang and a pleasant drawl that kind of takes a bite off some of the vowels. Her singing voice is more high-pitched than her speaking voice but still has the same feeling of joy and languish to it. Hearing Zora’s voice brought Zora into the present for me. She was no longer a mythical character who wrote books and won awards and fellowships. She was a human. As human as the workers and the women that she sang about. Hurston made many more recordings of Southern folk songs: Uncle Bud, Dat Old Black Gal, Tilly Lend Me Your Pigeon, each one with the same level of passion and care in documentation that I had seen in Mule on the Mount. I’m sure I would have found even more recordings housed in her other institutions, had I chosen to keep digging into her fieldwork.
Listening to Zora’s anthropological recordings and going over her papers showed me what a serious documenter of Southern life she had been. She is always commended for her anthropological writing, but until I looked over (and heard) the work myself, I had assumed that “anthropological writing” was just a fancy way of saying that she wrote about different cultures that were not very mainstream at the time. But no, Zora had taken her work very seriously. Perhaps more so than even writing, this may have been her calling.
“Only to a wider audience, need she ever write books—because she is a perfect book of entertainment in herself… Almost nobody else could stop the average Harlemite on Lenox Avenue and measure his head with a strange-looking, anthropological device and not get bawled at for the attempt, except Zora, who used to stop anyone whose head looked interesting and measure it.”
–Langston Hughes in “The Big Sea”
Zora beating hountar (Mama drum) 
Bill Tatnall playing guitar
Photos from Zora’s recording expeditions
I wasn’t sure where to go next. I figured if I was trying to “meet” Zora, I really ought to read more of her work. I had come across a couple of her essays and short stories at the beginning of my research—one called Sweat in Fire!! and one as a standalone -originally published in The World Tomorrow- titled How it Feels to be Colored Me. Both of which I had found to be very rich and revealing. In their structure, in their language, as well as in their observations about race and womanhood. However, I felt like I needed more of an insider’s view into Zora’s life, perhaps that of someone who had known her. As those are not exactly easy to come by anymore— many of them being dead— and as I was doing most of this work remotely (and mostly for a class project), I settled instead on those who had done extensive research about her life and interviewed many of her contemporaries: Robert Hemenway, Valerie Boyd… and Alice Walker.
Alice Walker
Both Hemenway and Boyd had written biographies on Hurston, but it was actually Alice Walker’s work that gripped me the most, for the personal element it was infused with. Discovering Hurston late in life, Walker felt a kinship to Hurston, whom she identifies with strongly and establishes as a foremother—one who is pivotal to Black culture and to the founding of a Black matrilineage. Walker explains that Hurston’s work—which is written in the Black vernacular—kept alive the Black tradition of oral storytelling and the stories of their ancestors, reminding her of her own upbringing and the stories handed down to her by her mother.
“No book is more important to me than this one,” Walker says of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. If she were marooned on an island with only 10 books, it would “undoubtedly be one of them”. It is thanks to Alice Walker and the connection she felt to Hurston and her work that Hurston’s novels were all reprinted en masse in the late 1970s and “revived” after practically disappearing from the scene.
In her 1975 essay titled Looking for Zora, Walker recounts the story of how she went searching for Zora in Zora’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida –the oldest Black-incorporated municipality in the United States. She wanted to pay homage to her predecessor, as well as honour her by placing a headstone on her grave. But mostly— I think— she just wanted to find out more about Zora and why she had met such an unforeseen end.
After following Zora to Fort Pierce—where she was actually buried—and making her way through weeds filled with snakes, Walker does indeed find Zora’s grave, marking it:
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
“A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH”
1901- – – 1960
NOVELIST, FOLKLORIST, ANTHROPOLOGIST
She did not end up getting her birthdate right—a final trick of Zora’s, I would say—but, she managed to uncover something way more important. In an interview with a man named Dr. Benton—a friend of Zora’s and an M.D in Fort Pierce—she learned that Zora had not in fact been given “a pauper’s funeral,” but that she had been an essential part of Fort Pierce’s community; she had died loved.
