Jump at the Sun

Zora Neale Hurston. One of my first literary heroines.

I read her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God  at university and loved it. When I then found that she was not only a fine novelist but a folklorist and anthropologist, I realised that I had met with someone utterly unique.

This was a black woman in the 1930s!

Her intense interest in black folk culture of her native Florida and the Caribbean led her to investigate black magic in Jamaica and Haiti.

I became intrigued by the idea that this woman, whose photographs depicted her as elegantly attired in tea dresses, suits and cloche hats, tramped around the tropical interiors of these islands, notebook and Kodak in hand, consulting obeah and bokor for folk remedies, rituals and - one of their most notorious secrets - zombis.

Hers are not the books that appear on the shelves of your average bookshop - at least not here in the UK. It took a couple of decades, and the dictates of my own research, before I finally ordered my own copy of Tell My Horse, which reveals what she found on her travels through Jamaica and Haiti.

I was not disappointed. She entered into her investigation with relish, attending feasts, ceremonies, nine-day wakes and even an excruciating and dangerous wild-hog hunt.

I was also left with the sense that Wade Davis, in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow , perhaps did not give her the credit she deserved. For she clearly states her belief that zombis are not risen from the dead - rather revived from "suspended animation".

Have a listen yourself: Zora Neal Hurston Interview.

Reacquainting myself with Ms Hurston moved me to revisit my copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God, complete with hectic pencil-written annotations from my undergraduate seminars.

It opens with sassy, sexy, black woman Janey, who has suddenly reappeared after an absence and is subsequently the hot topic of local gossip. Her conversations with her best friend are written as verbatim black Florida dialect. It brings life and veracity to the story. These days, a reader doesn't think twice about encountering vernacular dialogue in a novel, yet Hurston's Harlem Renaissance contemporary, Richard Wright, regarded this as a backward step - he considered it Uncle-Tomism pandering to racial stereotypes. To me that's like accusing Emily Bronte of pastiching Northerners by reproducing Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights.

Several decades lapsed before Zora Neale Hurston took her rightful place in the American literary pantheon when writers such as Alice Walker (The Color Purple) and Toni Morrison (Beloved) took up the literary torch to celebrate "racial health" rather than continue an embittered diatribe. It was a vindication of Hurston's remarkable life and work that in 1973 Alice Walker erected a gravestone in memory of an extraordinary woman who had languished in such obscurity in her final days as to have been buried in an unmarked grave.

Why did the author of stunning literary works, essays - and even two musicals - simply disappear from the public eye, in her lifetime? How could this happen?

In his afterword to Tell My Horse, Henry Louis Gates Junior suggests that perhaps it was the more popular contemporary ideologies, championed by writers such as Wright, that pushed Hurston out of the popular sphere.

The "not so well-digested Marxism" as Alice Walker puts it.

The visceral social realism of Wright's novel, Native Son, couldn't contrast more starkly with the lyrical celebration of black lives in Hurston's work. Her instinct for seeing and portraying humanity and love transcended the historical and social circumstances of her people's plight; defied the body politic of the male-dominated Harlem Renaissance.

Zora Neale Hurston's work was obscured by a curtain of contemporary racial politics, but once the idealogical fog began to dissipate, her words became visible once again: poetic; joyful.

In an interview, Alice Walker reflects on how Hurston's work is imbued with a wisdom that was sadly ignored in her lifetime, but still rings true today: "Joy in your life is a great victory."


An unmarked grave seems so pitiful, so tragic. But that was not the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston!

It was her mother, Lucy, who always urged her to, "jump at the sun!" And, boy, did she ever.

Like a tree falling in the forest, just because there was no one to hear the great, echoing crash of her departure from our world, doesn't mean she didn't leave an impact, and in doing so pulled back a tangle of branches to shed glorious light on what was once a dark place.