Had it not been for the successful and widespread popularity of Alice Walker's 1982 novel The Color Purple, Hurston might still be a popular figure only among small groups of female professors who year after year would dedicate themselves to teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God. But Walker wrote The Color Purple, and it won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Steven Spielberg made it into a movie, and Walker was interviewed widely on television and in the newspapers. She was a literary sensation—articulate and attractive—and people listened to what she had to say. One of her messages—loud and clear in Ms. magazine articles in the late 1970s and then republished in her collected essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1984)—was that Hurston was a genius and that there was no book more important to Walker than Their Eyes Were Watching God. People listened; her support attracted the masses. And once the masses found themselves agreeing with Walker about this novel, they turned to the rest of what could be called the lost books of Zora Neale Hurston. Even today, though, readers often come to Hurston first through Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Though Hurston took only seven weeks to write Their Eyes Were Watching God, she clearly had the idea for the book in her mind well before the actual writing that took place in Haiti in November and December of 1936. In what has to be among the earliest mentions of Their Eyes Were Watching God, in an unpublished letter to William Stanley Hoole of Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama, on 7 March 1936, Hurston explains the concept of the novel that was then in her mind:

My next book is to be a novel about a woman who was from childhood hungry for life and the earth, but because she had beautiful hair, was always being skotched upon a flag-pole by the men who loved her and forced to sit there. At forty she got her chance at mud. Mud, lush and fecund with a buck Negro called Teacake. He took her down into the Everglades where people worked and sweated and loved and died violently, where no such thing as flag-poles for women existed. Since I narrate mostly in dialogue, I can give you no feeling in these few lines of the life of this brown woman with her plentiful hair. But this is the barest statement of the story.

Another eight months was to pass before she was able to make the time, in the midst of folklore collecting, to write the book. Once the book was finished and sent to Lippincott in Philadelphia, it was another nine months before the book was ready for purchase, review, and, sadly, in Hurston's own lifetime, neglect. Hurston did not appear to linger over any of her books. In the 1930s, finishing one book meant rapid movement toward the next. She floated freely and comfortably among genres: from novel to folklore to novel to folklore to novel to autobiography to novel. Among the seven books that are her legacy, she interspersed the writing of short stories, editorials, newspaper columns, magazine articles, and plays. She seemed unconfined by genre and ignited by ideas and language. While all of her work is in print today and her place in the literary canon is secure, the popularity of her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, leads her corpus in changing the way history has come to view its author.

Hurston did hear news of several of her books being translated during the 1940s in European countries, with Their Eyes leading the list. This novel is on the surface, after all, a romantic love story, which would understandably attract more popular attention than a retelling of Moses or an insecure poor woman, Arvay Meserve, who does not appear to be very bright or exactly know how to defend herself. For the rest of Hurston's books to be readily available, readers had to wait until the decade of the 1990s when HarperCollins Publishers would commit to releasing all seven books plus Mule Bone—the play Hurston wrote with Langston Hughes, not staged until the 1990s, and the source of a feud which ended their friendship—and her Complete Stories. Her letters, edited by Carla Kaplan and available in fall 2002, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, is likely to be as big a publishing event as the 1979 collection of Flannery O'Connor's collected letters, The Habit of Being.

Beginning in 1989, the town of Eatonville began sponsoring a Zora Neale Hurston Festival. To date, these annual gatherings, held in late January of each year, have attracted people in growing numbers from all over the world. Their Eyes Were Watching God has brought new life and energy to Hurston's beloved community of her youth, Janie and Joe Starks's home of twenty years, and the place to which Janie returns alone after Tea Cake's death. When Hurston died in January 1960, money had to be collected to get her body into the ground at a cemetery in Fort Pierce. For thirteen years, no one bothered to note the whereabouts of this author until Alice Walker made the pilgrimage and placed the marker—because a people ought not to forget its geniuses. Another sixteen years would pass before Eatonville would celebrate its leading citizen. An artistic rendering of Hurston's face was added to the cafeteria wall of the local elementary school. She was placed above the food tray-return area. It would be possible to ignore the early mayors of Eatonville on the wall to the right walking away from the tray-return, but not Z. N. Hurston!

When the eleventh annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival was held, the “ZORA! 2000” program booklet proclaimed in an article by Alice Grant, “The Timeliness, the Timelessness of Zora Neale Hurston,” that preschoolers, elementary school children, high school students, and adults all know who Zora is. Grant tributes Hurston with the awakening of a new spirit about and within the black community: “Because of Zora Neale Hurston, we have awakened to the significance of black communities, to recognizing the importance of preserving the structures and institutions that African Americans have built and are working to insure that black communities not only survive but thrive.”¹ In the late 1930s, what Hurston was slammed for by black male writers because they perceived her writing as both minstrelsy and too folkloric, is today the cause of celebration. Her name resonates, claims Grant, “not just because of her charismatic personality, or because of the quality of her writings, but because the values she espoused of pride in self, pride in one's ethnic heritage, pride in one's community are both timely and timeless.”² Eatonville has come at last to recognize this prophet in her own homeland. As the Orlando Sentinel, one of the sponsors of the ZORA! 2000 Festival, claims in its program ad: “In a perfect world, talent would always be recognized. Sadly, neither is the case. Too often, as with Zora Neale Hurston, true greatness comes and goes before the world perceives its magnitude. Learning late or not at all.”³ Thankfully, Eatonville learned late.

When Hurston lived, she, in so many ways, belonged to Eatonville. She was a product of this small historical community, but in her lifetime her books were not taught in the local schools and many residents expressed displeasure at being named in her books. (Hurston made little effort to change names to protect the innocent.) Today, proudly, Hurston, in addition to the festival, is honored by a memorial—a huge rock atop a brick area with benches, dedicated in 1990. The plaque reads: “Zora Neale Hurston / Eatonville's Daughter / 1890-1960 / Anthropologist Folklorist Writer / ‘She Jumped at the Sun.’” The old Sinclair gas station and local garage, called Mack's Auto Repair during Hurston's day, has been transformed into the headquarters for the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, and serves also as the home of the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts. Hurston scholars from across the country's academic institutions now join local enthusiasts to serve on the planning committee for future ZORA! festivals. Hurston, at one time, was Eatonville's own; now she belongs to the world.

Notes

1. Alice Morgan Grant, “The Timeliness, the Timelessness of Zora Neale Hurston,” in Zora! 2000 (Eatonville: Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, 2000): 9.

2. Grant, p. 9.

3. Orlando Sentinel ad, in Zora! 2000, p. 1.