Happy birthday to the literary icon, Zora Neale Hurston.
In 1929, the author Zora Neale Hurston wrote a letter to her then-friend and literary collaborator, Langston Hughes, proposing an artistic oasis of sorts: a colony for Black creatives on the Indian River in southeastern Florida. The author had a clear vision, but she needed financial support to make it a reality.
So I find myself now, maybe more than ever, focused on the subject of cultural inheritance while exploring the legacy of radical Black literary foremothers and stewards of women’s creativity. Vicksburg, Mississippi, the daughter of the first self-made woman millionaire and one of the first Black millionaires, Madame CJ Walker, the first free-born child of six, who later ascended from a washerwoman to found a hair care empire.
“When Zora was there, she was the party,” recalled Sterling Brown, Hurston’s Harlem Renaissance literary counterpart reminisced when describing her spirit, vivacity, and complex but endearing persona. It’s a bold statement considering how intense Walker's parties already were. As Langston Hughes recalled, they “were as crowded as the New York subway at the rush hour — entrance, lobby, steps, hallway, and apartment a milling crush of guests, with everybody seeming to enjoy the crowding.
She organized her celebrations in the aftermath of African-American troops returning from World War One to encounter amplified hostility in the South which led to a Great Migration to northern cities in search of jobs and freedom.
While the case was dropped after Hurston proved that she was out of the country during the purported assault, publc opinion of Hurston nosedived, and she struggled to find work afterward. When she passed away, it was with little fanfare.Hurston embodied the multidimensional complexity of the Black women characters she wrote into the world. Rejecting the confines of expected affiliations and respectability politics, she was unafraid to stand alone in her opinions.
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