Anyway, it was Alice Walker who went in search of Zora Neale Hurston's long-forgotten grave in the 1970s and settled on a spot in the Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida. In 1975, MS magazine published Walker's essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," the piece which greatly helped restore Hurston to her rightful place in American letters and culture.
Hurston's Fort Pierce home |
When we went to the cemetery to see the grave, we couldn't find it--the cemetery. So we asked a young man mowing his lawn where it was. He looked at us with a mixture of alarm and disdain, then pointed about twenty feet to our left. Duh. It looked like just a big open field. But once we realized where we were, we did not have trouble finding Hurston's grave. It was well marked and maintained.
Back in Hudson, I read all of Hurston's published works and the best major biography of her--Valerie Boyd's 2003 Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.
Zora's politics shifted to the right in her later years (one of the reasons she fell from favor during the Civil Rights era); The Saturday Evening Post had even featured her in a big story in 1951 (see cover).
But Zora was a talent--and quite a personality. People who knew her reported that when Zora was in the room, you noticed no one else ...
So thanks today to Alice Walker, for finding Zora, for allowing us, once again, to hear her remarkable voice.
A couple of links: http://zoranealehurston.com/
And perhaps her best known essay: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/grand-jean/hurston/chapters/how.html
Thank you for the information. I look forward to reading her essay and have yet to read, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I'm glad we ran into each other today at Starbucks and were able to exchange blog addresses.
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