STAGE : Reclaiming Zora’s Spirit...

If spirits kin fight, there’s a powerful tussle goin’ on somewhere ovah Jordan . . .

--from “Spunk,” by Zora Neale Hurston

“Spunk” tells a supernatural tale of African-American folklife, the story of a “fearless, fightin’ and hard-livin’ man, who rides the circle saw at the local sawmill.” He boldly steals Lena from her weak husband, Joe, and dares him to do something about it. When the town locals humiliate Joe, he goes after Spunk with his knife, only to be shot by the cunning fighter. As Spunk prepares to marry Lena, Joe’s spirit haunts him--first in the form of a black cat, and later as an invisible force that pushes Spunk to his death on the circle saw. With his last words, Spunk cusses Joe and threatens revenge in the afterlife. The story ends with the promise of continuance.

The story, with its fearless protagonist, is almost a metaphor for Hurston’s life. Joe represents the underclass subject matter of her work. Lena symbolizes the praised power and reward of publication. Hurston, perhaps more than any other African-American writer, has “tussled” with the portrayals of her race and the common “Joe.” A few years after the publication of “Spunk,” in a letter to her patron, Hurston stated: “I shall wrassle me up a future or die trying.” In the last few years of her life much of her work was already out of print and many of her ideas were out of favor.

By the early 1950s, Hurston was so broke she returned to an early occupation as a maid. When her employer discovered that “her girl” was a well-known writer, she leaked the information to the press. Hurston tried to cover her poverty by saying she was doing the work as research for a story about domestics, but later admitted: “All I wanted was a little spending change when I took this job but it certainly has turned out to be one slam of a publicity do-dad.”

In 1957, in a letter to her ex-husband Herbert Sheen, she prophesied her own ending. “I am not materialistic. If I happen to die without money somebody will bury me, though I do not wish it to be that way.”

Hurston continued writing until she died, impoverished, in 1960 at the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Florida. She was buried in a segregated cemetery, the Garden of Heavenly Rest, in an unmarked grave. Her ending could represent a human tragedy, but Hurston would not have us belong to the “sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.”

Since her death she has indeed “wrassled up a future.” In the last seven years, there has been renewed attention to her life and work. My own discovery of Zora came through an interest in African-American spiritualism, in particular voodoo. Hurston was not only a respected writer and folklorist, but also a trained cultural anthropologist. She was one of the first writers, to my knowledge, to connect voodoo and Black Southern Christianity by acknowledging that African-Americans have always retained their heritage while mimicking and reinterpreting European traditions.

Hurston understood that one of the basic premises of Voodoo is the duality of the material and non-material and how the moment of death is the separation of the body from the non-material force. Through posthumous rituals called the “rites of reclamation,” a powerful spirit may achieve the status of a Loa, a divinity that represents moral principals or actions.

The recent proliferation of articles, new editions of her work and dramatization of her stories are our rituals to reclaim Hurston. Coinciding with the Zora revival has been an increased interest in spiritualism and the supernatural. Hurston acts as a Loa for those of us needing to validate and understand our value and place in everyday life. Many of us have become “possessed” by her stories and life. We are integrating her into our art forms to inspire, comfort, reassure and counsel us as cultural creators and advisers for “the community.”

Her research and writing uplifted a people who were economically oppressed and culturally persecuted. In such works as “Mules and Men” and “The Sanctified Church,” she legitimizes the culture of a people whose bodies were bought and sold but whose spirits could not be. Hurston demonstrates the invisible wealth of a community and an individual. Wealth that cannot be defined by material goods, but such riches as stories, songs, dance and the importance of human interaction.

Hurston’s power has come of age in a decade of accelerated change--decaying economies and governments, revived racism,

and the shakin’ down of civil liberties. In times of immense upheaval people tend to turn to the past, become conservative or turn inward. Alive today, she would be in the forefront of such debates as Afrocentrism, affirmative-action quotas, multiculturalism and censorship. She illustrates the diversity, contradictions and the “autonomous imagination” that can be contained in an individual.

Hurston grew up in the “pure Negrotown” of Eatonville, Fla.--”the first to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America.” In her formative years, she was nurtured with black traditions, reared to be independent and sheltered from racial prejudice. Lucy, her mother, insisted that all her children “jump at de sun” and in particular to Zora she said she “didn’t want to squinch her spirit.” After Lucy died, when Zora was only 9 years old, she went from one relative to another, hiring herself out as a domestic and eventually began her “higher” education at the age of 15. Her early childhood helped develop her strong sense of individualism, self-reliance and spunk.

As an anthropologist and folklorist, her childhood experiences were validated in the academic world. She once said: “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Franz Boas, her professor, strongly encouraged her because “informants would be more natural with a member of their own race.” Hurston was placed in the dual role of participant and impartial observer of her own race. As she describes it: “From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known Brer Rabbit and Squinch Owl. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment.”

Her expeditions led her to study blacks in Harlem and the South, Haitians and even the Indians of Honduras. After 1935 she would have very little interest in the academic method: “It is almost useless to collect material to lie upon the shelves of scientific societies. . . . Negro material is eminently suited to drama and music . . . it is drama and music and the world and America in particular needs what this folk material holds.” Hurston remained true to this fierce commitment to the portrayal of the distinctiveness of black folkways.

Hurston may have been independent and fierce in spirit but she had to compromise throughout her life due to her financial instability and lack of material wealth. She was highly criticized by some fellow black artists and writers as being an “opportunist cutting the fool for white folks in order to get her tuition paid and her stories sold.” Even her friend and colleague, Langston Hughes, was critical of her relationship with Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, a patron they shared in common. “In her youth she was always getting scholarships and things from wealthy white people, some of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the Negro race for them,” Hughes wrote. Mason was a highly controlling patron who retained exclusive ownership of the folklore Hurston collected.

In 1948, she was wrongly accused of sodomy with a 10-year-old-boy. The fabricated charges against her were presented by the boy’s mother who held a grudge. What undid Hurston more than the false morals charges was the betrayal by a fellow black person, the court employee, who peddled the story to the press. “My country has failed me utterly. My race has seen fit to destroy me without reason, and with the vilest tools conceived of by man so far. . . . All that I have believed in has failed me. I have resolved to die,” Hurston wrote to her friend Carl Van Vechten. Although she recovered from her depression and regained her enthusiasm for life and work, she became more conservative and reclusive.

Most writers of conscience take a stand on political issues. At times, Hurston’s desires to succeed and be true to “the folk” rigidified her political perspective. In a 1950s campaign, Zora worked for Grant Reynolds, the Republican candidate running against Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. At the same time, she organized a “block mothers” plan, a community day-care program. She said: “It’s the old idea . . . of helping people to help themselves . . . the only salvation of the Negro in this country.”

This attitude of focusing on individual strength and self-determination would surface again when she vocally opposed the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision. She believed it implied that “just like mules being led by a white mare, black students had to be led by white pupils’ teachers.” Why should the government have to force white people to sit next to her?

As the politics of the day accelerated, Hurston’s cultural approach appeared behind the times. Then in the late ‘60s, much of her thinking resurfaced in the black nationalist movement.

In an essay titled “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” she wrote: “Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of any company? It’s beyond me.” Similarly her anti-Communist sentiments during the McCarthy era reflected her fear that blacks would be the losers in either plan. This line of thinking was directly related to her lifelong repudiation of “pathological stereotypes.” Her positive Eatonville childhood with strong black institutions allowed her to comment on social issues through cultural perceptions rather than political circumstances.

How can one explain the moments, the fragments of a life? When viewed at a distance Hurston could be seen as a chain of opposites, but upon closer inspection the links would be strong and meaningful. She was very human after all. Perhaps through the “reclamation rituals,” Hurston can teach us to be more tolerant of the individual and not to judge one another so quickly based on one action or word.

Perhaps if we can learn from the struggle of an entire life we might be more willing to struggle together as a community of people that need each other for our survival as the human race. And as “Spunk” shows us, long after the body has decayed, the spirit can survive and be infused with power.