A new collection of Zola Neale Hurston’s nonfiction reveals a writer who cannot be easily construed as a champion of race pride, Lauren Michele Jackson writes.
“You are my idea of the world’s worst secretary,” the white woman once told the Black woman. But today she was saying, “Come on, Zora, with your car and let’s you and I go on a trip.” So Miss Fannie Hurst and Missleft the confines of Hurst’s West Sixty-seventh Street duplex and went driving.
This is mild compared with what Hurston had to say about Brown v. Board of Education or the ongoing question of segregation. It was rumored that, near the end of her life, Hurston had upset some folks in her Florida community for supporting, with vigor, a certain segregationist politician. I suspect that politician was Spessard L. Holland, whom she praises in one essay, circa 1958, that was never published in its time.
Reading these essays requires letting go of the agonizing business of saving Hurston from her politics, as though the writer we credit with knowing so much of her own Negro mind just so happened to forget herself on occasions where the takes haven’t aged as well as we’d prefer. The journalist and scholar Valerie Boyd, who died this past weekend, rightly wrote, in her Hurston biography, “,” that “Hurston’s individualist stance . . . did not nullify her identity as one of the folk.
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