The 29th annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities is underway and continues through January 28.
The event is presented by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, and includes a series of presentations in a “Communities Conference” at Rollins College and in Eatonville.
Presenters at this year’s event include poet Sonia Sanchez; producer, recording artist, and actor David Banner; host of the NPR program 1A, Joshua Johnson; and Senator Bob Graham. The popular HATitude luncheon features fashion and food, and the exhibit “An Eatonville Remembrance” is at the Hurston Museum.
The three day Outdoor Festival portion of the event on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday features vendors selling original arts and crafts, food vendors with fried fish and other festival food, and musical performances throughout each day including headliners The Zapp Band, and The Motown Tribute Review.
Eatonville is the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States. Growing up in the all black town had a profound effect on Zora Neale Hurston’s attitudes about race that can be seen in her work.
“We say that Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville community are two sides of the same hand,” says N.Y. Nathiri, executive director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. “For Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville represents the quintessential cultural impact that people of African ancestry, particularly rural southern people in this country, contribute to the culture of the United States.”
In the 1930s and ‘40s, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston is best remembered for her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the story of Eatonville resident Janie Crawford and her attempts at self-realization.
“’Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is history, it’s fiction, it’s pathos, it’s tragedy, all rolled up together in one incredible literary gem,” says Florence Turcotte, literary manuscripts archivist at the University of Florida’s P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History. “Making history come alive is sort of what I like to do, and that’s what excites me about Zora, is that she fictionalized real life and said a lot about the human condition, and a lot about life in Florida during her stay here.”
Hurston’s other novels include “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” the story of an unfaithful man with an understanding wife; “Moses: Man of the Mountain,” a retelling of the biblical story of Moses; and “Seraph on the Suwanee,” Hurston’s only book that features white people as main characters. Hurston also wrote dozens of short stories, essays, and dramatic works.
Hurston’s literary career began even before she graduated from Barnard College in 1927. In 1925, her short essay “Spunk” was included in a respected anthology called “The New Negro.” While attending college in New York, Hurston worked with Harlem Renaissance contemporaries including Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman on the literary magazine “Fire!”
After earning her Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology, Hurston continued her graduate studies at Columbia University. As an anthropologist who studied under the renowned Franz Boas, Hurston published two collections of folklore. “Tell My Horse” looks at life in Haiti and Jamaica, including the practice of Voodoo. She wrote the book “Mules and Men” while living in Brevard County, in Eau Gallie.
“The book ‘Mules and Men’ was published in 1935, and was essentially a non-fiction account of Hurston’s adventures and experiences as a folklorist and anthropologist, in the late 1920s and early 1930s,” says Virginia Lynn Moylan, author of the book “Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade.” “The first section is devoted to her experiences in Eatonville collecting folklore, and includes 70 of her glorious folktales, including ‘Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men.’ The second section covers the period that she did research in New Orleans, into Hoodoo religion and practices. Today, it is still considered the preeminent collection of African American folklore.”
By the time Hurston died in 1960, she was broke, forgotten, and her books were out of print. Today, she is recognized as an important writer whose work is taught in classrooms around the world.
“Work that is truly of merit, lives,” says N.Y. Nathiri. “Today, Zora Neale Hurston’s work, her literature, her genius, is acknowledged and celebrated throughout the literary world.”
The Historic Rossetter House Museum and Gardens, 1320 Highland Ave., Eau Gallie, is hosting the presentation “Zora in Brevard,” Saturday, March 4, at 10:00 am and 2:00 pm. The $15 ticket includes a discussion about Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work, a portrayal by actress Lila Marie Hicks, and a tour of the Rossetter House. Reservations are available at 321-254-9855.
On July 9, 1951, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a letter to literary agent Jean Parker Waterbury: “Somehow, this one spot on earth feels like home to me. I have always intended to come back here. That is why I am doing so much to make a go of it.”
It would be natural to assume that Hurston was writing about her adopted hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Growing up in Eatonville, the oldest incorporated municipality in the United States entirely governed by African Americans, instilled in Hurston a fierce confidence in her abilities and a unique perspective on race. Eatonville figures prominently in much of Hurston’s work, from her powerful 1928 essay How It Feels To Be Colored Me to her acclaimed 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Since 1990, the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community has celebrated their town’s most famous citizen with the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. Hurston will forever be associated with the historic town of Eatonville.
Hurston, however, was not writing about Eatonville when she spoke of “the one spot on earth [that] feels like home to me” where she was “the happiest I have been in the last ten years” and where she wanted to “build a comfortable little new house” to live out the rest of her life.
Unknown to most, Zora Neale Hurston called Brevard County “home” for some of the happiest and most productive years of her life.
Hurston first moved to Eau Gallie in 1929. Here she wrote the book of African American folklore Mules and Men (published in 1935), documented research she had done in Florida and New Orleans to fill an entire issue of the Journal of American Folklore, and made significant progress on some of her theatrical pieces.
After returning to New York in late 1929, Hurston came back to Eau Gallie in 1951, moving into the same cottage where she had lived previously. While living in Eau Gallie between 1951 and 1956, Hurston staged a concert at Melbourne High School (its first integrated event); worked on the project that became her passion, the manuscript for Herod the Great; covered the 1952 murder trial of Ruby McCollum (an African American woman who killed her white abuser); and wrote an editorial for the Orlando Sentinel arguing against the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Her controversial disapproval of public school integration reflected her belief in the need to preserve African American culture and communities.
While working as a librarian at the Technical Library for Pan American World Airways on Patrick Air Force Base, Hurston was unable to purchase her much loved Eau Gallie cottage, so she moved to an efficiency apartment in Cocoa. In June, 1956, Hurston moved from the apartment to a mobile home on Merritt Island. She was fired from her job in May 1957, because she was “too well-educated for the job.” She then left her happy life in Brevard County to take a job at the Chronicle in Fort Pierce, where she died three years later.
Zora Neale Hurston is remembered as a controversial figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a talented anthropologist and collector of folklore, and a beloved novelist. While she will always be closely associated with Eatonville, Brevard County is where Hurston spent some of her happiest and most productive years, in her cottage on the northeast corner of Guava Avenue and Aurora Road in Eau Gallie, just blocks from the Historic Rossetter House Museum.
Hurston returns to Eau Gallie this Saturday in the form of actress Lila Marie Hicks.
“It’s one thing to read the story of Zora Neale Hurston collecting work songs,” says Hicks, “but to hear her singing a line song as she struts onto the stage does more than any letters on a page could ever do."
The 28th annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities was held January 21-29.
The event was presented by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, and included a series of presentations called “Communities Conference: Civic Conversations Concerning 21st Century American Life in Communities of Color” in venues at Rollins College and Eatonville.
Elizabeth Van Dyke performed in “Zora Neale Hurston: A Theatrical Biography” at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, and the ZORA! Golf Tournament was held at Metro West Golf Course. There was a tour of yards and gardens in Historic Eatonville.
The three day Outdoor Festival portion of the event featured vendors selling original arts and crafts, food vendors with fried fish and other festival food, and musical performances throughout each day including headliners The Whispers, and Jonathan Butler & Friends.
Eatonville is the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States. Growing up in the all black town had a profound effect on Zora Neale Hurston’s attitudes about race that can be seen in her work.
“We say that Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville community are two sides of the same hand,” says N.Y. Nathiri, executive director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. “For Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville represents the quintessential cultural impact that people of African ancestry, particularly rural southern people in this country, contribute to the culture of the United States.”
In the 1930s and ‘40s, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston is best remembered for her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the story of Eatonville resident Janie Crawford and her attempts at self-realization.
“’Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is history, it’s fiction, it’s pathos, it’s tragedy, all rolled up together in one incredible literary gem,” says Florence Turcotte, literary manuscripts archivist at the University of Florida’s P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History. “Making history come alive is sort of what I like to do, and that’s what excites me about Zora, is that she fictionalized real life and said a lot about the human condition, and a lot about life in Florida during her stay here.”
Hurston’s other novels include “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” the story of an unfaithful man with an understanding wife; “Moses: Man of the Mountain,” a retelling of the biblical story of Moses; and “Seraph on the Suwanee,” Hurston’s only book that features white people as main characters. Hurston also wrote dozens of short stories, essays, and dramatic works.
Hurston’s literary career began even before she graduated from Barnard College in 1927. In 1925, her short essay “Spunk” was included in a respected anthology called “The New Negro.” While attending college in New York, Hurston worked with Harlem Renaissance contemporaries including Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman on the literary magazine “Fire!”
After earning her Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology, Hurston continued her graduate studies at Columbia University. As an anthropologist who studied under the renowned Franz Boas, Hurston published two collections of folklore. “Tell My Horse” looks at life in Haiti and Jamaica, including the practice of Voodoo. She wrote the book “Mules and Men” while living in Brevard County, in Eau Gallie.
“The book ‘Mules and Men’ was published in 1935, and was essentially a non-fiction account of Hurston’s adventures and experiences as a folklorist and anthropologist, in the late 1920s and early 1930s,” says Virginia Lynn Moylan, author of the book “Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade.” “The first section is devoted to her experiences in Eatonville collecting folklore, and includes 70 of her glorious folktales, including ‘Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men.’ The second section covers the period that she did research in New Orleans, into Hoodoo religion and practices. Today, it is still considered the preeminent collection of African American folklore.”
By the time Hurston died in 1960, she was broke, forgotten, and her books were out of print. Today, she is recognized as an important writer whose work is taught in classrooms around the world.
“Work that is truly of merit, lives,” says N.Y. Nathiri. “Today, Zora Neale Hurston’s work, her literature, her genius, is acknowledged and celebrated throughout the literary world.”
A powerful hurricane can be terrifying. The darkened skies, howling winds, and pelting rain can be harrowing.
The hurricane of 1928 was particularly devastating to residents of south Florida.
“When you talk about Florida, you have to talk about hurricanes,” says Eliot Kleinberg, author of the book “Black Cloud: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928.”
Kleinberg first heard about the hurricane of 1928 while working as a reporter for the Palm Beach Post. “In 1988, for the sixtieth anniversary of the storm, I was sent out to Belle Glade to cover a commemorative event. The more I talked to these people, I said, how is it possible that this profound hurricane happened and most of the world doesn’t know anything about it?”
The 1928 hurricane played a pivotal role in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The storm leads to tragedy for the novel’s protagonist, Janie Crawford, while she and her lover Tea Cake are living as migrant workers in the Everglades.
“People have no idea that the hurricane in Zora’s book was a real hurricane,” says Kleinberg. “She takes some literary license with the hurricane. She gives it 200 mile per hour winds and she describes a gigantic tidal wave, which isn’t exactly how it happened. It was more like a slow and steady rise, but in talking about the hurricane and its effect on black people, the migrant workers in the glades, she was spot on.”
Today, meteorologists armed with satellite imagery track every movement of a hurricane for weeks before landfall, providing multiple models of possible paths a storm might take. In 1928, storm forecasting was not as sophisticated.
“As remarkable as it is to imagine now, back then hurricanes would travel through the ocean for days before anyone knew they existed,” says Kleinberg. “In the case of this storm, a ship in the eastern Caribbean came across it, and telegraphed about the storm.”
The hurricane tore through the Caribbean islands, killing as many as 2,000 people in Puerto Rico alone. The night before the hurricane struck Florida, weather officials were saying that the storm was not going to hit the state. It made landfall near West Palm Beach on September 16.
Even if good information had been available, it might not have made a difference.
“To say that they knew or didn’t hear the hurricane warning presumes that they had a radio, which in 1928, a lot of people didn’t, and there certainly wasn’t any television,” says Kleinberg. “A newspaper is only as good as its deadline, which is 12 to 15 hours. Even if they knew, where could they go?”
The people living in isolated little towns around Lake Okeechobee had very few options as the lake swelled and flooded the surrounding area. A person would not want to head east, into the storm, and roads heading west and north were difficult to travel in good weather conditions.
“This presumes you had a car, which in 1928 wasn’t a given,” says Kleinberg. “They really, literally, had nowhere to run.”
An estimated 2,500 Floridians were killed by the 1928 hurricane, and a disproportionate number of those people were African American. After the storm, white victims and black victims were treated very differently. For health reasons, all of the bodies had to be quickly placed into mass graves.
“They took all of the white victims and they put them in a mass grave in the City Cemetery in West Palm Beach, let family members try to identify them, tag them, but 674 black victims were literally just dumped in a hole,” says Kleinberg. Black families were not given the same consideration, and many don’t know if their relatives were dumped in the mass grave or not. “The other great tragedy is that for the next 60 years, the grave was unmarked.”
The nearly 700 black victims of the hurricane were forgotten, as a road was rerouted over part of the unmarked mass grave at what is now the corner of Tamarind Avenue and 25th Street, about two miles northwest of downtown West Palm Beach.
“If this hurricane had smashed a black tie affair in Palm Beach, they’d still be talking about it,” says Kleinberg.
Last week, a conference called “Tracing the Caribbean Footprints of Zora Neale Hurston: A 125th Birthday Commemorative Cruise” was held aboard the cruise ship Freedom of the Seas, with private tours in Haiti and Jamaica.
The conference cruise was sponsored by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. That organization is dedicated to the preservation of the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States and the memory of its most famous resident, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.
Hurston visited Haiti in 1936, where she immersed herself in the local culture, including the practice and documentation of the religion of Voodoo.
She claimed to have taken a seven week break from her anthropological work to write her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
“I believe she did write the novel in seven weeks,” said Ruthe Sheffey, professor emerita at Morgan State University and founder of the Zora Neale Hurston Society. Sheffey explained that Hurston had just ended a personal relationship that could have inspired the fictional story of Janie and Tea Cake.
In 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica, where she continued her collection of folklore and folksongs, and the documentation of Caribbean lifeways.
Another result of Hurston’s travels in the Caribbean was perhaps her most dramatic non-fiction work, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. In the book, Hurston describes the ancient African religion of Voodoo, documenting its many gods, rituals, and songs of worship.
“Zora was not a tourist with a camera taking pictures,” said Carl-Henry François, who emigrated from Haiti in 1983, and has taught engineering at the University of Central Florida. “She was part of what she was describing. She knows the hymns that they would sing, the position of each person in that hierarchy of the Voodoo gods and worshipers. She knows exactly the names of them.”
Hurston did more than document the Voodoo religion. She immersed herself in the rituals and practices of the belief system.
“What amazed me was her engagement,” said Marie-José François, a medical doctor who emigrated from Haiti with her husband, and is president of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community.
“When I say engagement, it’s not somebody sitting there translating for her. She was a witness. She saw stuff to put it down on paper. (Hurston believed that) to tell the story you have to live the story. She was really part of it. I know about Voodoo, but not to the extent that Zora described.”
Much of Voodoo focuses on the medicinal properties of herbs and plants that can be used to both help and to harm people. Hurston spends a chapter of Tell My Horse documenting the creation of Zombies. She describes the use of potions to make a person appear to be dead, erasing their personality. The person becomes the “living dead,” easily manipulated and controlled.
“In Voodoo is like we have both hands,” says Marie-José François. “One is to cure, one hand to kill. Is like the knife of the pharmacist. You can overdose, or keep the right dose. That’s why when you look at Voodoo, people have to be very careful. We have good stuff in Voodoo, like when you talk about the medicinal plants, that’s the good part.”
Voodoo came to the Caribbean when Africans were brought there by Europeans as slave labor. By 1804, people of African descent took control of Haiti from their oppressors, establishing the oldest black republic outside of Africa. The Voodoo religion became an important part of the Haitian identity.
As Haitians and other people of African descent made their way to Florida, some of them brought their ancient religious beliefs with them.
Stetson Kennedy was Zora Neale Hurston’s supervisor when she worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Florida Writers’ Project. In his 1942 book Palmetto Country, Kennedy documented the practice of Voodoo in Key West, Miami, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee.
“Everywhere that you have populations coming from the west coast of Africa, whether they’re in Brazil, they have Macumba, in Cuba they have Santeria, and even in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, anywhere that you have any population that came from Africa, they have these practices,” says Carl-Henry François.
February is Black History Month.
A new exhibit at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa is recognizing the accomplishments of two internationally known Floridians with strong local ties.
On display are panels featuring rare photographs, letters, and information about educator, activist, and civil rights martyr Harry T. Moore; and writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. A video component produced by the Florida Historical Society includes commentary from scholars and oral history interviews with friends and relatives.
On Christmas night 1951, a bomb exploded under the Mims home of Harry T. Moore. The blast was so loud it could be heard several miles away in Titusville.
Moore died while being transported to Sanford, the closest place where a black man could be hospitalized. His wife Harriette died nine days later from injuries sustained in the blast.
The couple celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on the day of the explosion, and Harriette lived just long enough to see her husband buried.
The Moore’s daughter, Juanita Evangeline Moore, died on October 26, 2015. In a video interview included in the new exhibit, Moore remembers that she was working in Washington, D.C. in 1951, and was scheduled to come home for the holidays on December 27th, aboard a train called the Silver Meteor. She did not hear the news about her family home being bombed until she arrived.
“When I got off the train in Titusville, I knew something was very, very wrong,” Moore said. “I had not turned on radio or television, so I didn’t know a thing about it until I got off the train. I noticed that my mother and father were not in front of all my relatives to greet me and they were always there.”
Moore was given the news by her Uncle George, who was home on leave from Korea.
“We got into his car and got settled, and the first thing I asked was ‘Well, where’s Mom and Dad?’ No one said anything for a while, it was complete silence. Finally, Uncle George turned around and he said ‘Well, Van, I guess I’m the one who has to tell you. Your house was bombed Christmas night. Your Dad is dead and your Mother is in the hospital.’ That’s the way I found out,” said Moore.
“I’ve never gotten over it. It was unbelievable.”
Moore and his wife were killed 12 years before Medgar Evers, 14 years before Malcolm X, and 17 years before Martin Luther King, Jr., making them the first martyrs of the contemporary civil rights movement.
On July 9, 1951, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a letter to Florida historian Jean Parker Waterbury: “Somehow, this one spot on earth feels like home to me. I have always intended to come back here. That is why I am doing so much to make a go of it.”
It would be natural to assume that Hurston was writing about her adopted hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Growing up in Eatonville, the oldest incorporated municipality in the United States entirely governed by African Americans, instilled in Hurston a fierce confidence in her abilities and a unique perspective on race. Eatonville figures prominently in much of Hurston’s work, from her powerful 1928 essay How It Feels To Be Colored Me to her acclaimed 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston, however, was not writing about Eatonville when she spoke of “the one spot on earth [that] feels like home to me” where she was “the happiest I have been in the last ten years” and where she wanted to “build a comfortable little new house” to live out the rest of her life.
Zora Neale Hurston called Brevard County “home” for some of the most fulfilling and productive years of her life, first in 1929, and again for most of the 1950s. It was here that she wrote her most important collection of folklore, Mules and Men.
To find out more about the lives and accomplishments of Harry T. Moore and Zora Neale Hurston, visit the Black History Month exhibit at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa. Museum hours are 10am to 5pm, Wednesday through Saturday.
On July 9, 1951, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a letter to Florida historian Jean Parker Waterbury: “Somehow, this one spot on earth feels like home to me. I have always intended to come back here. That is why I am doing so much to make a go of it.”
It would be natural to assume that Hurston was writing about her adopted hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Growing up in Eatonville, the oldest incorporated municipality in the United States entirely governed by African Americans, instilled in Hurston a fierce confidence in her abilities and a unique perspective on race. Eatonville figures prominently in much of Hurston’s work, from her powerful 1928 essay How It Feels To Be Colored Me to her acclaimed 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Since 1990, the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community (P.E.C.) has celebrated their town’s most famous citizen with the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. Hurston will forever be associated with the historic town of Eatonville.
Hurston, however, was not writing about Eatonville when she spoke of “the one spot on earth [that] feels like home to me” where she was “the happiest I have been in the last ten years” and where she wanted to “build a comfortable little new house” to live out the rest of her life.
Unknown to most, Zora Neale Hurston called Brevard County “home” for some of the happiest and most productive years of her life.
Hurston first moved to Eau Gallie in 1929. Here she wrote the book of African American folklore Mules and Men (published in 1935), documented research she had done in Florida and New Orleans to fill an entire issue of the Journal of American Folklore, and made significant progress on some of her theatrical pieces.
After returning to New York in late 1929, Hurston came back to Eau Gallie in 1951, moving into the same cottage where she had lived previously. While living in Eau Gallie between 1951 and 1956, Hurston staged a concert at Melbourne High School (its first integrated event); worked on the project that became her passion, the manuscript for Herod the Great; covered the 1952 murder trial of Ruby McCollum (an African American woman who killed her white lover); and wrote an editorial for the Orlando Sentinel arguing against the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Her controversial disapproval of public school integration reflected her belief in the need to preserve African American culture and communities.
While working as a librarian at the Technical Library for Pan American World Airways on Patrick Air Force Base, Hurston was unable to purchase her much loved Eau Gallie cottage, so she moved to an efficiency apartment in Cocoa. In June, 1956, Hurston moved from the apartment to a mobile home on Merritt Island. She was fired from her job in May 1957, because she was “too well-educated for the job.” She then left her happy life in Brevard County to take a job at the Chronicle in Fort Pierce, where she died three years later.
Zora Neale Hurston is remembered as a controversial figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a talented anthropologist and collector of folklore, and a beloved novelist. While she will always be closely associated with her adopted hometown of Eatonville, Brevard County is where Hurston spent some of her happiest and most productive years, in her cottage on the northeast corner of what is now the intersection of Guava Avenue and Aurora Road in Eau Gallie.
More information about Zora Neale Hurston’s time in Brevard County can be found in the book Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade by Virginia Lynn Moylan and the television documentary The Lost Years of Zora Neale Hurston airing on WUCF TV, Friday, February 7 at 10:30 pm and Sunday, February 9 at 1:30 pm.
Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is producer and host of
“Florida Frontiers: The Weekly Radio Magazine of the Florida Historical Society,”
broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30
and Sunday afternoons at 4:00,
and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00.
