Zora Neale Hurston had an uncanny knack of meeting just the right people at exactly the moment she needed to do so. Time and again, by force of her powerful personality, her quick wit, her indefatigable unstoppability, sheer blind luck, or a combination, Hurston's life path was filled with people who stepped forth to help her, who extended themselves and made connections for her, often involving others who did not know Hurston but were related to or thought highly of people Hurston encountered. By Hurston's account, it was “fun and capers” on a random weekend at Morgan, during her days in Baltimore, with the visiting cousin of college classmates who spoke the words that were to set her path in ways she could not have imagined at the time: “Zora, you are Howard material. Why don't you come to Howard?”¹ As it turns out, the speaker of these words happened to be the daughter of a Howard professor. So the cousins at Morgan at once offered their home in Washington, D.C. to Hurston, and she made the move. Odd jobs as a manicurist and waitress helped pay the bills and tuition, but it was making the literary society, the Stylus, “limited to 19 members, two of them being faculty members,” that was to open the publishing doors.² In 1921 the literary magazine published “John Redding Goes to Sea,” a story that was reprinted five years later in Opportunity, the literary magazine of the National Urban League, after Hurston had established herself in New York.

Hurston was thirty years old when she published “John Redding Goes to Sea,” but at the time, she was passing for ten to twelve years younger. The story reflects Hurston's in-depth awareness of the flora that grows beside the St. John's River, which flows northward about 275 miles from Melbourne on the Florida Atlantic coast, up towards and dividing Jacksonville, and out to the ocean. She knew, too, that her audience—those who might read her story in the Stylus—might not know the look, feel, and smell of the area that launched her into the world: “Spring-time in Florida is not a matter of peeping violets or bursting buds merely. It is a riot of color in nature—glistening green leaves, pink, blue, purple, yellow blossoms that fairly stagger the visitor from the north. The miles of hyacinths lie like an undulating carpet on the surface of the river and divide reluctantly when the slow-moving alligators push their way log-like across. … The heavy fragrance of magnolias mingled with the delicate sweetness of jasmine and wild roses.”³ In this story, Hurston is already crafting the lyrical, sensuously rich prose that will become her trademark. She knows her geography, and she makes the reader respond to it with a heightening of all the senses. This river will appear repeatedly in Hurston's Florida fiction.

Further, she uses here the young protagonist's attraction to horizons; he dreams as a boy of going to sea, but is stifled by pressure from his mother to stay at home. His dream comes true only in death; as a young man he loses his life trying to save another's. It is his father who refuses to ask the rescuers to bring John back to shore, but to let the life-long wish be fulfilled, to let him drift, finally, out to the far horizons of the sea. The use of “horizons” as a metaphor appears prominently in other early short stories and in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Finally, Hurston herself is a dreamer of far horizons, but in this initial step into the publishing world, she plays to the tired, tried-and-true roles for men and women; men dream big and can act upon those dreams when women do not stand in their way, but rather encourage them to follow their hearts. By the time she writes her second published story, but more prominently in Their Eyes, Hurston is ready to let the seeker of far horizons be female. Janie does not have to stay home and wait, as Stella was going to do if John Redding had departed for Navy duty; Janie can travel beside her male companion, as they seek adventure beyond what they can see in front of them.

“John Redding Goes to Sea” attracted the attention of Charles Johnson, who had read Hurston's story and was interested in publishing new Negro talent in Opportunity, a journal he was preparing to launch in New York for the National Urban League. Hurston sent “Drenched in Light” for consideration in Opportunity. This story is set in the part of Florida she knows best, in the town of her childhood, though she never names it Eatonville. She does name the Apopka road, indicates the location of Eatonville by placing it on the road between Orlando and Sanford, and draws on a childhood pastime as the premise of the tale: perched on the gate post, young Isie Watts loved hailing travelers, as did young Zora, and “everybody in the country, white and colored, knew little Isis Watts, the joyful.”⁴ As in “John Redding Goes to Sea,” here too the protagonist dreams of far horizons, under the cloth of the center table: “She rode white horses with flaring pink nostrils to the horizon, for she still believed that to be land's end.”⁵ “Drenched in Light” was published in 1924, but, perhaps more importantly, a correspondence began between Editor Charles Johnson and Hurston.

Opportunity encouraged new talent by sponsoring literary contests, and Hurston entered, but by this time, because of the letter exchange, Johnson had urged her to try New York. By 1925 Hurston had relocated, was winning contests, publishing her stories, and again meeting people who would help her open doors to still greater horizons. Winners of the literary contests were invited to dinners, and here Hurston met young poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen; novelists Carl Van Vechten, Fanny Hurst, and Annie Nathan Meyer, the latter of whom will help her obtain a scholarship to Barnard. “Spunk,” Hurston's third story set in Florida, is published in Opportunity and reprinted in Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925), often acclaimed as the most influential collection in calling attention to the burgeoning talent in Negro writing.

The scholarship to Barnard opened a new door for Hurston, this one to the world of Franz Boas and anthropology, which led to the fieldwork of collecting Negro folktales in the very places Hurston had already begun to use as the settings for her fiction. This new field of study came with yet another cast of characters, among them the white patron Charlotte Mason, who would financially support Hurston's collecting work for five years (with strings attached, for Hurston's work was to be owned by Mason). While Hurston never stopped writing during these years, she expanded greatly the kind of writing she was doing to include scholarly essays for academic journals.

Folktale collecting led to Hurston's interest in dramatic onstage performance of the material, which led to meeting her first group of academic friends in Florida, key players at all-white Rollins College in Winter Park. English professor Robert Wunsch worked with Hurston to produce her show, earlier The Great Day, now From Sun to Sun, in the early 1930s. Wunsch sent “Gilded Six-Bits” to Story, where it was published in August 1933 and attracted the attention of, according to Hurston's autobiography, at least four publishers who inquired about book-length manuscripts. The letter from Bertram Lippincott was the one that captured Hurston's attention and good will: “He wrote a gentle-like letter and so I was not afraid of him. Exposing my efforts did not seem so rash to me after reading his letter. I wrote him and said that I was writing a book. Mind you, not the first word was on paper when I wrote him that letter.”⁶

Straightaway, Hurston moved to Sanford where she rented a small home and spent the next three months writing Jonah's Gourd Vine. Her account of the book's acceptance by Lippincott recounts one of the greatest joys of her life. And thus began a relationship with J. R. Lippincott publishers of Philadelphia that was to last from 1934 to 1942, through three novels, two folklore collections, and her autobiography.

Notes

1. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 673.

2. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, pp. 681-2.

3. Zora Neale Hurston, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” in The Complete Stories (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), p. 6.

4. Hurston, “Drenched in Light,” in The Complete Stories, p. 17.

5. Hurston, “Drenched in Light,” p. 19.

6. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, p. 715.