{"id":120815,"date":"2018-01-26T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T16:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120815"},"modified":"2018-01-26T11:00:49","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T16:00:49","slug":"ghost-zora-neale-hurston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/26\/ghost-zora-neale-hurston\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ghost of Zora Neale Hurston"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 Jennifer May Reiland<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cZora!\u201d Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. \u201cI hope you don\u2019t think I\u2019m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.\u201d It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen years dead, was a mudslinging protofeminist novelist-folklorist-playwright-ethnographer, not to be crossed, and she had climbed to minor literary stardom in the thirties with her accounts of the Southern African American experience, specifically black Southern womanhood. She was, in the words of her friend Langston Hughes, \u201cthe most amusing\u201d among New York\u2019s \u201cNiggerati.\u201d She hailed herself as their queen. But Hurston was complicated. \u201cSomeone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,\u201d she once wrote. \u201cIt fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.\u201d She declined to recall a single memory of racial prejudice in her autobiography. Her sycophantic attitude toward her white patrons, Red-baiting, and eventual criticism of Brown v. Board of Education had rotted her name. \u201cShe was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different<\/em> from what one might have wished,\u201d Walker admitted. But she forgave Hurston. As Hurston herself declared, \u201cHow can<\/em> any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?\u201d<\/p>\n

And so: nearly a decade before Walker published The Color Purple, <\/em>a sister masterpiece to Their Eyes Were Watching God, <\/em>the contributing editor at Ms.<\/em> magazine stood in weeds up to her waist in Florida while sand and bugs poured into her shoes, looking for Hurston. Walker had flown from Jackson, Mississippi, to Orlando and driven to nearby Eatonville, the prideful all-black town where Hurston was raised, but not, as Walker learned from an octogenarian former classmate\u2014Mathilda Moseley, teller of \u201cwoman-is-smarter-than-man\u201d tales in Hurston\u2019s Mules and Men<\/em>\u2014where she was put under.<\/p>\n

Walker\u2019s quest took her to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast, to the dead end of Seventeenth Street, to the\u00a0Garden of Heavenly Rest.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fact, I\u2019m going to call you just one or two more times,\u201d Walker swore. Hurston was somewhere in the crummy segregated burial ground; trouble was, her grave was unmarked. \u201cZo-ra!\u201d Walker roared. And, as if Hurston had shoved her, Walker stumbled into a sunken rectangle in the heart of the yard: presumably Zora.<\/p>\n

At the local monument maker, Walker clocked a queenly headstone called Ebony Mist. It reminded her of Hurston when she was learning witchcraft at temples in Louisiana, and though Walker dearly wanted it, the issue of lucre obliged her to settle for a modest one\u2014\u201cpale and ordinary, not at all like Zora\u201d\u2014which she had cut with A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH<\/small>.<\/p>\n

I studied cultural anthropology at Orlando\u2019s liberal-arts college, where Hurston was a bona fide heroine. She herself had done her anthropology studies at Columbia University, where she along with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were prot\u00e9g\u00e9es of Franz Boas, the giant who institutionalized the vital participant-observation method. Papa Boas sent Hurston to Harlem with phrenology calipers to measure the skulls of pedestrians and give lie to the notion of Negro inferiority. She never finished her Ph.D., and turned instead to literature. When she came back down to Florida to do fieldwork, she essentially went AWOL<\/small> on Boas, though she still shipped him oranges.<\/p>\n

One summer, in what was mainly a ruse to dwell with a boyfriend in his parents\u2019 beach house, I fulfilled my chemistry requirement at the local community college. We drove by Hurston countless times\u2014we stopped to coo over manatees in waters minutes from her resting place. But until I, too, tried to look her up in Eatonville, I\u2019d had no clue Hurston was so close by.<\/p>\n

When I visited last October, the cemetery\u2019s grass was buzzed down, but the Garden of Heavenly Rest remained dumpy. I offered Hurston a pair of ripe grapefruits. People often leave her balls of citrus, which figured into her fiction. People often leave purple things, too, in recognition, I think, of the Walker connection. The plot was flush with cash, dominos, a rhinestone statement necklace, a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of sparkly red nail polish, and two bottles of Guinness.<\/p>\n

Whether this<\/em> corpse in this sandy earth belonged to Hurston is still uncertain. What\u2019s more, the gravestone is wrong: it reads \u201c1901\u20131960.\u201d Zora had fibbed on her age and was born a full decade earlier, in 1891. She returned to Fort Pierce at the end of her life, in 1957. Her options had evaporated and she had scraped by, twice divorced, as a chambermaid, office clerk, substitute teacher, a journalist on a murder trial, and, if one of Walker\u2019s sources had it right, a horoscope columnist. She was at work on an uncontracted biography of Herod the Great\u2014a project fourteen years in the pipe\u2014when she had a stroke and passed away in a county welfare home on January 28.<\/p>\n

After my visit, I itched to read Hurston again. Her first published story was a ghost story, and when I spotted it collected among Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872\u20131926<\/a><\/em>\u2014branded \u201cfeminist, turn-of-the-century American supernatural literature\u201d\u2014#MeToo was stirring and the timing seemed right. But I accidentally shipped the book to my parents\u2019 address in Florida, then had the parcel rerouted to New York City.\u00a0Once I had it in hand, I put off\u00a0cracking it open.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, I packed Restless Spirits<\/em> when I left for Paris during the cyclone bomb. Lo: the plane flew without luggage; my bag did not surface for weeks. As a result, I began leafing the 1996 anthology of twenty-two ghost stories by Hurston, Kate Chopin, Hildegarde Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and others on the first anniversary of the Women\u2019s March, which, in Paris, was pissed on by bitter weather and not well-advertised. Near the Eiffel Tower, a crowd of approximately a\u00a0hundred people carried banners such as ENCORE F\u00c9MINISTES<\/small>\u00a0and exhorted American expats to vote absentee in the midterms.<\/p>\n

Reading this literature has been no comfort\u2014your spine won\u2019t shiver but your hands will wring. It ran in popular magazines such as Harper\u2019s<\/em>, Vogue<\/em>, and The\u00a0Atlantic<\/em> over a fifty-year period during which, as the book\u2019s editor remarks, the industrial revolution bent ideologies about the nature and role of being female to more brutal degrees. The short stories are organized into themes: matrimony, motherhood, sexuality, madness, widowhood, and spinsterhood. In them, fearful, enraged, desirous, pained, and restless American women have been made so by a culture we can still recognize today. The editor notes in her introduction that the supernatural was a safe way for the authors to confront their dissatisfaction via allegory. When they wrote about their world, she asks, is it any wonder that the ghosts they conjured, and those who saw, heard, and were able to listen to them were chiefly women?<\/p>\n

In fact, \u201cSpunk\u201d (1925), Hurston\u2019s Eatonville-set story about possession, supplies the anthology\u2019s rare male ghost. In it, a gutless hubby manages to comes back to kill his wife Lena\u2019s lover, who had killed him first. Only Lena survives the love triangle. It is pure woman-on-top Hurston, as she lived and breathed: the force who tripped Alice Walker in the cemetery when she dared to shout, \u201cAre you out there?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chantel Tattoli is a freelance journalist. She\u2019s contributed to\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>VanityFair.com<\/a>, the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>Orion, and\u00a0is at work on a cultural biography of Copenhagen\u2019s statue of the Little Mermaid.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Jennifer May Reiland<\/a>, who contributed the art to this piece,\u00a0has shown her work in New York and elsewhere, including at Romeo Gallery, the Fondation des \u00c9tats-Unis, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u201cZora!\u201d Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. \u201cI hope you don\u2019t think I\u2019m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.\u201d It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen years dead, was a mudslinging protofeminist novelist-folklorist-playwright-ethnographer, not to be crossed, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[32709,782,7449,1886,32705,3296,32706,32708,32707,32710,6181,3844],"class_list":["post-120815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-1872-1926","tag-alice-walker","tag-columbia-university","tag-florida","tag-franz-boas","tag-langston-hughes","tag-margaret-mead","tag-restless-spirits-ghost-stories-by-american-women","tag-ruth-benedict","tag-the-color-purple","tag-their-eyes-were-watching-god","tag-zora-neale-hurston"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Ghost of Zora Neale Hurston<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"At Hurston\u2019s tombstone, in a 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