John Redding Goes to Sea

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
From Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

“A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian” (Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker)

Video: Ossie Davis on Dr. Alain Leroy Locke’s Influence (YouTube)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Drenched in Light,” Zora Neale Hurston
• “Stranger Than Fiction,” James Weldon Johnson
• “The Kiss,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Felipa,” Constance Fenimore Woolson

Buy the book
Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories
Their Eyes Were Watching God | 4 other novels | 9 stories | 1,054 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $30.00

A banana and pineapple vendor, postcard with a hand-tinted black and white photograph printed c. 1912 by the Cochrane Company, Palatka, Florida. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The original photograph (which can be seen here) was taken in 1909 by the Florida Photographic Concern of Fort Pierce, Florida, established by Henry “Harry” Emerson Hill (1865–1937), who employed numerous photographers. Hill’s home is in the background.

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Forty years ago, during the 1981–82 academic year, Howard University librarian and historian Elinor DesVerney Sinnette interviewed Ophelia Settle Egypt, a retired social worker known for her research work with sociologist Charles S. Johnson and her oral histories of formerly enslaved African Americans. While a student at Howard University in the early 1920s, Egypt had been a member of Zeta Phi Beta; founded in 1920, it was the newest of Howard’s three sororities. During one of the interviews, the women discussed Egypt’s sorority sister, Zora Neale Hurston, who spent the last years of her life in poverty and oblivion and yet had unexpectedly become a household name two decades after her death in 1960. “She was sort of a loner,” Egypt remembered. “But she was brilliant, and she was writing even then. . . . But we always thought of her as a rather odd person. She was just too brainy for us.”

In her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston recalled what Howard University meant to a young woman coming from the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, with hardly a penny to her name:

Now as everyone knows, Howard University is the capstone of Negro education in the world. There gather Negro money, beauty, and prestige. It is to the Negro what Harvard is to the whites. They say the same thing about a Howard man that they do about Harvard—you can tell a Howard man as far as you can see him, but you can’t tell him much. He listens to the doings of other Negro schools and their graduates with bored tolerance. Not only is the scholastic rating at Howard high, but tea is poured in the manner!

Hurston in Washington, D.C., 1920, when
she was a student at Howard University.
University of Florida Collection

Hurston arrived in Washington in 1918, where she worked first as a waitress and then as a manicurist in a Black-owned barber shop that served whites only. After a year in Howard’s preparatory school, she entered the college and majored in English. Her schoolmates did not realize that the nineteen-year-old student was actually twenty-nine years old (a ruse she maintained for the rest of her life), but her outsider status had more to do with her rural background and poverty than with her age. “Behold the Jimson weed putting out roots in the solarium of the orchid,” she self-deprecatingly wrote a couple of years later. In 1921 she joined the school’s literary society and her first published story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” appeared in the May issue of the club magazine The Stylus.

“The Stylus was limited to 19 members, two of them being faculty members,” Hurston wrote in her memoir. “Dr. Alain Leroy Locke was the presiding genius and we had very interesting meetings.” As Valerie Boyd notes in her recent biography of Hurston, Locke was “notorious at Howard for warning female students on the first day of class that they would likely receive Cs, regardless of their ability.” Yet Locke saw in Hurston’s work something unique that seemed to support his belief that “under the sophistications of modern style may be detected in almost all our artists a fresh distinctive note that the majority of them admit as the instinctive gift of the folk spirit.” Hurston’s incorporation of Black folk traditions in her writing represented the very esthetic of the literary renaissance he would help spearhead. Based on her work for The Stylus, Locke recommended Hurston to Charles S. Johnson, the founding editor of the literary magazine Opportunity (and the same scholar who would later work with Ophelia Egypt). Four of Hurston’s stories would appear in Opportunity during the mid-1920s, and in 1925 Locke would publish the influential anthology The New Negro, gathering works by such up-and-coming writers as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, as well as Hurston.

For a first story, “John Redding Goes to Sea” is a cut above the typical student exercise, and it has become something of a fan favorite among her readers; it is included as the opening selection in every collection of her stories. Some reviewers have dismissed it for its lack of subtlety and particularly for the dearth of the humor that makes Hurston’s later work so memorable. Other critics, however, have focused on its biographical insights, since John Redding’s dilemma pits Hurston’s own wanderlust against her anxieties about having left Florida. While literary scholar John Lowe acknowledges the apprentice nature of the tale, he also points out how it anticipates her later fiction in its portrayal of “male-female conflicts, a plethora of local-color touches, and references to conjuring and superstition” and especially for its depiction of “a warm relationship between a black father and son (which Hurston would reprise in Moses, Man of the Mountain).” Boyd similarly argues that the story should be read as a preview of what’s to come, because it “illustrates that Hurston was on the verge of an epiphany: She had begun to realize that the lives—and the language—of ordinary black country folk had enormous literary potential.”

Note: The St. John River (more familiarly, St. Johns River] flows north past Eatonville and empties out in the sea near Jacksonville.

Ophelia Settle Egypt’s statement about Hurston is from Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.

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The villagers said that John Redding was a queer child. His mother thought he was too. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Spunk

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
From Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

“Hurst and Hurston” (Kate Bolick, Tablet Magazine)

“A look at what brought Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes together. And what tore them apart.” (Lisa Page, The Washington Post)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Fire and the Cloud,” Zora Neale Hurston
• “Petrified Man,” Eudora Welty
• “The Day I Sprouted Wings,” J. Herman Banning

Buy the book
Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories
Their Eyes Were Watching God • 4 other novels • 9 stories • 1,054 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $30.00

A country store in Georgia. From “Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.,” a series of photo albums compiled and prepared by W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) for display at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Library of Congress.

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“Joe Clarke’s store was the heart and spring of the town,” recalled Zora Neale Hurston in her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road, as she reminisced about Eatonville, Florida, and the country store that was across the street from her childhood home.

Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world and the next one through their mouths. The right and the wrong, the who, when and why was passed on, and nobody doubted the conclusions. Women stood around there on Saturday nights and had it proven to the community that their husbands were good providers, put all of his money in his wife’s hands and generally glorified her. Or right there before everybody it was revealed that he was keeping some other woman by the things the other woman was allowed to buy on his account. No doubt a few men found that their wives had a brand new pair of shoes oftener than he could afford it, and wondered what she did with her time while he was off at work. Sometimes he didn’t have to wonder. There were no discreet nuances of life on Joe Clarke’s porch. There was open kindnesses, anger, hate, love, envy and its kinfolks, but all emotions were naked, and nakedly arrived at.

The town was her first stop when she did research for Mules and Men, her book on African American folklore. “I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm or danger,” she wrote in the introduction. “As a child when I was sent down to Joe Clarke’s store, I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more.”

In the essay “Hurston’s Portrait of a Community,” Johnanna L. Grimes points out that Joe Clarke’s country store serves as a setting not just in Hurston’s autobiographical writings and her folklore studies but also in her novels and stories. “Hurston preserved for her readers a portrait of a particular community in a specific time and place inhabited by characters who are linked to their milieu by specific traditions, beliefs, and verbal expressions, which have their analogues in southern rural folk culture.” A prominent community leader by the name of Joe Clarke shows up throughout Hurston’s books, usually as a shopkeeper, but also as a mayor, postmaster, or judge. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the lead character, Janie, marries a man who becomes the mayor and storeowner of the town; his name is Joe Starks.

The real Joseph E. Clark (Hurston added the “e” to his last name in her writings) and his younger, less successful brother, Isaac (Ike), were two of the 27 cofounders of the all-black town of Eatonville. Joseph’s great-granddaughters, who cowrote a recent biography, admit that “much of what we know about Joseph Clark has been derived from [Hurston’s] writings” but also note that, just as the character of Clarke changed from one of Hurston’s stories to the next, his real-life counterpart did not seem to share the traits of the “mean-spirited” incarnation of her later fiction.

One of Hurston’s early stories to feature the men congregating at the store is “Spunk,” which takes place almost entirely inside the building and on its porch. Although Joe Clarke isn’t mentioned, brother Ike shows up to light the store’s lamps at dusk. Like her debut story, “Drenched in Light” (also set in Eatonville), “Spunk” appeared in Opportunity, a literary monthly sponsored by the National Urban League. The story, short as it is, resulted in a series of remarkable and fortuitous consequences for its author.

Five months before its publication in June 1925, Hurston had arrived in New York with $1.50 to her name. She was 33 years old yet passed herself off as 23 and had been a part-time student at Howard University for the previous five years, struggling to make ends meet in multiple jobs while taking classes. In New York she quickly made friends and somehow survived until May, when her two submissions in Opportunity’s literary contest—the play Color Struck and the story “Spunk”—each won second place in their categories, giving her $70 in prize money. At the awards dinner, she met Langston Hughes (who won first prize in poetry for the collection The Weary Blues), Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, Annie Nathan Meyer (a founder of Barnard College), and other luminaries, many of whom were overawed by her vivaciousness and wit at both the ceremony and an after-hours party. Meyer subsequently saw to it that Hurston received a scholarship that fall at Barnard, where she was the only African American student. The next year “Spunk” was included by Alain Locke in The New Negro, which is still regarded as the signal anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. Within a year of her arrival, then, Hurston was well placed to launch her career as a writer.

Yet she was still broke. A month into the semester she owed over $100 for fees, books, and other school necessities and her available cash was eleven cents. Help appeared unexpectedly: at the awards ceremony earlier in the year, Fannie Hurst—well on her way to becoming one of the best-selling authors in the world—had presented Hurston with the prize for “Spunk.” Like many others at the event, she was impressed by the young author’s energy and subsequently asked Van Vechten for her address, hoping to invite her for tea. After she sent the invitation, Hurst found out from Meyer about Hurston’s dire situation; when the famous author met with the student, they both hit it off, and Hurst offered her a position as her personal secretary, with flexible hours that would allow Hurston to attend classes and complete her schoolwork.

Hurston soon moved in with her new patron, who later recalled that “her shorthand was short on legibility, her typing hit-or-miss, mostly the latter, her filing a game of find-the-thimble. Her mind ran ahead of my thoughts and she would interject with an impatient suggestion or clarification of what I wanted.” Hurston’s secretarial job lasted barely more than a month but by early December the two women had become fast friends. Hurston moved back up to Harlem and became Hurst’s social companion and intermittent chauffeur during the following months. Their friendship—and Hurst’s patronage—would last for years.

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A giant of a brown-skinned man sauntered up the one street of the Village and out into the palmetto thickets with a small pretty woman clinging lovingly to his arm. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Drenched in Light

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
From Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

“When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip” (Yuval Taylor, LongReads)

Video: The Films of Zora Neale Hurston (American Masters, PBS)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Story in Harlem Slang,” Zora Neale Hurston
• “The Bouquet,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Mr. Sakrison’s Halt,” Mildred Clingerman

Buy the book
Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories
Their Eyes Were Watching God | 4 other novels | 9 stories | 1,054 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $30.00

Zora Neale Hurston and three boys in Eatonville, Florida, 1935. Photograph taken during Lomax-Hurston-Barnicle recording expedition to Georgia, Florida, and the Bahamas. Library of Congress.

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“I was born in a Negro town,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston in her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road.

I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my birth, a pure Negro town—charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all. It was not the first Negro community in America, but it was the first to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America.

The year of her birth was 1901, she would later claim, or sometimes 1903, or even (on her second marriage license) 1910. In fact, she was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of Lucy Ann Potts and John Hurston’s eight children. Her family moved to Eatonville, five miles north of Orlando, when she was just three years old, and her father was elected mayor within three years after their arrival. The town would loom large in her life and in much of her fiction.

“I used to take a seat on top of the gate post and watch the world go by,” she remembered. “One way to Orlando ran past my house, so the carriages and cars would pass before me. The movement made me glad to see it. Often the white travelers would hail me, but more often I hailed them, and asked, ‘Don’t you want me to go a piece of the way with you?’ . . . My grandmother worried about my forward ways a great deal. She had known slavery and to her, my brazenness was unthinkable.” The memory of that dusty road, the obliging white travelers, and her disapproving grandmother inspired her to write “Drenched in Light,” which became the first of her stories to be published in a national publication when it appeared at the end of 1924 in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, a literary monthly sponsored by the National Urban League.

When Zora was thirteen, her mother died and the happy childhood in Eatonville was abruptly shattered. On the night of the funeral, “all of Mama’s children were assembled together for the last time on earth,” she recalled in her memoir. Zora was packed off to a boarding school in Jacksonville soon after. “I was on my way from the village, never to return to it as a real part of the town,” and she heard from her sister a few months later that her father had remarried. Her new home was a world away from the community of Eatonville; “Jacksonville made me know that I was a little colored girl.” Her tuition and expenses were often in arrears, forcing Zora to do custodial work to help pay the bill or leaving her stranded on the premises when school was not in session. For the rest of her life, Hurston blamed her stepmother for the dispersion of the family.

“Drenched in Light,” then, is a nostalgic glance back at an idyllic time that suddenly ceased to exist when its author became a teenager. It is also, as many scholars and commentators have since pointed out, a portrait of the artist as a young Black woman, whose uninhibited dancing finds a ready supporter in a well-to-do traveler passing through Eatonville on the way to the outskirts of Orlando. “Walking the thin line between fetish and agent,” notes literary scholar Ayesha K. Hardison, “Isie gets a patron for her art and the white woman gets an opportunity to absorb authentic black folk culture.”

Notes: A hasion is a mischievous or unruly child; mommuk (a variant of “mommick”) is dialect for chop up or mangle.

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“You Isie Watts! Git 'own offen dat gate post an' rake up dis yahd!" . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Fire and the Cloud

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
From Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links
Zora Neale Hurston: Folk poetry and song from her native Florida (Library of Congress)

Audio: Recordings of 19 African American folk songs performed by Hurston (Library of Congress)

Previous Story of the Week selection from Hurston
“Story in Harlem Slang”

Buy the book

Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories
Their Eyes Were Watching God • 4 other novels • 9 stories • 1,054 pages
List price: $40.00
Web Store price: $30.00

Jacket illustration for the hardcover first edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939).

For more than five years Zora Neale Hurston worked on a novel that would blend the work she had done in African American ethnography and folklore into a retelling of the life of Moses. When she finally published Moses, Man of the Mountain in 1939, she explained why the Old Testament story appealed so strongly to black Americans: “Who has the power to command God to go to a peak of a mountain and there demand of Him laws with which to govern a nation? . . . That calls for power, and that is what Africa sees in Moses to worship.” The late African American critic and editor Blyden Jackson summarizes Hurston’s novel in an introduction to the 1984 paperback edition:

Hurston is writing an allegory, telling the story, at one level of her narration, of some Hebrews caught in Egypt and their march to a promised land. . . . It does not deviate by one essential whit from the same story as it is told in the Bible. Yet, from beginning to end, her novel is also, on a second level of narration, a story about black America, not because Hurston anywhere says that it is, but because Hurston’s folklore everywhere happily transports Hurston’s reader to a position from which every Jew in Goshen is converted into an American Negro and every Egyptian in Old Pharaoh’s Egypt into a white in the America where Hurston’s folk Negroes live. . . .

. . . Moses is also satire. Both witty and profound are Hurston’s observations about black America with its, as it seemed to her, regrettably wide and deep division in loyalties among its upper class, its black bourgeoisie, and the Negro masses from whom her folklore came.

In 1934, when Dorothy West launched the new magazine Challenge, she requested a piece from Hurston. West’s biographer Cherene Sherrard-Johnson surmises that the editor of the new publication, established to further the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, was disappointed with what her friend offered: a “folksy” retelling of Moses’s death scene on Mount Nebo. Although we don’t know the precise nature of West’s reaction, Hurston did offer to withdraw the story and responded, “If you do not like this un-Negro story, why not go to ‘Story’ magazine and get permission to re-publish ‘The Gilded Six-Bits’ [a story published the previous year]?” Yet West apparently had a change of heart, since “The Fire and the Cloud” appeared in Challenge’s second issue.

This short story was Hurston’s first stab at the ending for her novel. The final scene of the book version, however, retains little from the original story other than the basic elements: Moses’s grave, his rod, the talking lizard, and the swarms of flies. Here, readers have the opportunity to read an alternate ending, a different vision of the death of Moses—one that presents a more comic portrait of the exhausted and resigned leader of the Israelites.

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Moses sat upon his new-made grave on Mount Nebo. His back stooped wearily, but his strong gaze leaped the Jordan and travelled over the land of Canaan. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Story in Harlem Slang

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
From Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links
The Hurston: The Zora Neale Hurston Museum of Fine Arts (Eatonville, FL)

Scholars Rediscover Three Forgotten Stories by Zora Neale Hurston (Reader’s Almanac)

Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928 (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous New York stories from Story of the Week
• “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers," Stephen Crane
• “The Duel,” O. Henry
• “Horsefeathers Swathed in Mink,” A. J. Liebling

Buy the book
Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories
Their Eyes Were Watching God • 4 other novels • 9 stories • 1,054 pages
List price: $40.00
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Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, 1938, by American photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection.

In 1942 Zora Neal Hurston published her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road and enjoyed a brief period of mainstream success. The book sold well, “most critics liked it, and it won the Saturday Review’s $1,000 Anisfield-Wolf Award for its contribution to the field of ‘race relations,’” writes biographer Robert Hemenway. “More than at any point in her life, Zora became a black spokesperson, whose opinions were sought by a white reading public.”

During the next three years she published seven pieces in national magazines, including “Story in Harlem Slang,” which appeared in American Mercury in July 1942. Yet Hurston had to make a number of compromises to achieve that fame; her memoir had been seriously watered down to make it palatable and inoffensive to white audiences—and she was criticized for selling out. Arna Bontemps, another writer prominent during Harlem Renaissance, wrote pointedly in his review of Dust Tracks, “Miss Hurston deals very simply with the more serious aspects of Negro life in America—she ignores them.”

Hurston would never again achieve the kind of recognition she enjoyed during the early 1940s; she died in 1960 in relative obscurity and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her works were largely forgotten until the late 1970s, when a number of scholars and writers began rescuing them from oblivion after Alice Walker published an appreciation in Ms. magazine. The Library of America published the restored and unexpurgated text of Dust Tracks on a Road in 1995.

In “Story in Harlem Slang”—the only piece of fiction she published during her brief period in the limelight—Hurston uses her career as a folklorist to celebrate the community’s linguistic expression. For her non-Harlem (and mostly white) audience, she included an appendix at the end of the story, reprinted as the last three pages of the selection below. In an anthology published in 1990, Alan Dundes remarks on “how a good many of the slang items are still current” and notes that one reason is that it has often taken decades for slang from Harlem to reach “middle-class white Americans.” Since the emphasis is on wordplay and banter, the story’s plot is simple: a man named Marvel (nicknamed Jelly), originally from Alabama, runs into his friend Sweet Back, and the two boast and joke around a bit before encountering a young woman from Georgia. One theme of the story, notes Hemenway, recurs in much of Hurston’s writing: “that the North was no utopia, just as the South was not necessarily hell.”

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Wait till I light up my coal-pot and I'll tell you about this Zigaboo called Jelly. Well, all right now. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.