Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd, 2004, with an added PostScript 2016, 528 Pages

  

Zora Neale Hurston on The Reading Life

Website of Valerie Boyd

1891 Born in Alabama

1960 Dies Fort Pierce, Florida

1937 - Published Their Eyes Were Watching God - her acknowledged Master Work

Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, a master of the short story, an anthropologist, focusing mostly on the culture of African Americans in central Florida and on the influence of Voodoo on the religious and spiritual views of those in this area.  Her short stories are world class cultural treasures. She studied anthropology with Franz Boaz, mentor to Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. She was extremely well read and highly educated.  Tragically she died in poverty and obscurity.  Her work is vital to students of Florida history.

An Autodidactic Corner Selection.

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd Is everything we hope a literary biography will be.  My exposure to Hurston began with her short stories (my posts include links to a few of the stories) and so far culminates in her acknowledged by all master work Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Before I read Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston I had a vague idea of the life history of Hurston.  Boyd has brought her to life for me.  I don’t wish to repeat more of her life history than below, instead I will just talk a bit about some of the things I took away from this wonderful biography.

1891 Born in Alabama

1894 moves, with her family to Eatonville, Florida, near Orlando, which 

was one of the first self-governing municipalities in the country with a nearly all African American population. She was one of eight children.

1960 Dies Fort Pierce, Florida

1937 - Published Their Eyes Were Watching God - her acknowledged Master Work

Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, a master of the short story, an anthropologist, focusing mostly on the culture of African Americans in central Florida and on the influence of Voodoo on the religious and spiritual views of those in this area.  Her short stories are world class cultural treasures. She studied anthropology with Franz Boaz, mentor to Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. She was extremely well read and highly educated.  Tragically she died in poverty and obscurity.  Her work is vital to students of Florida history.

The story and the stories of Hurston begins in Eatonville, Florida.  Many of the characters that populate her fiction are modelled on residents of Eatonville. The speech patterns of people from the town are replicated in her work.  The standard white stereotyping of her time suggested the speech patterns are a mark of ignorance and low intelligence.  When Boyd explained that these speech patterns were learned from whites in the colonial south, not obviously brought from Africa, it opened my mind up to how much prejudice based on speech patterns still permeates American society.  

In the public mind, Hurston is somehow seen as a tragic figure with a sad life.  She did have issues, who does not, but she also had a very rich, interesting life.  Being super intelligent she intrigued white liberals who, often with quite patronising undertones, helped her with cash subsidies. From Boyd I learned of a very wealthy older white widow from New York who gave subsidies to what she saw as promising African American writers and Artists.  She insisted those she help call her “Godmother”. For years she was Hurston’s primary financial life line.  There was a catch.  She insisted Hurston do reports on the customs, religion and speech patterns of African Americans from Florida.  She also had control over what Hurston could publish. She also supported Langston Hughes, a long time friend of Hurston until a falling out.  Boyd makes even the minor figures real.  

Hurston traveled, often by herself, throughout the south in a time when few hotels would accept African American guests.

 She dealt with racial ignorance with a shrug of her shoulder.

Hurston was a contradiction.  In someways she was very independent, marrying three times in relationships that did not last. Hurston needed her freedom to work while on the other hand being very dependent on white generosity.  We see her very much begging for money from her Godmother, applying for grants for research, borrowing from friends and relatives.

It was very exciting to go along with her to Honduras to do

studies there.  She was a student of a very important anthropologist, Francis Boas, and used his methods.  We see this same pattern of dependence in this relationship.  Hurston was fascinated by Voodoo.  She took instruction from Voodoo priests in New Orleans.  She analysed the faith as a blending of Catholic beliefs with West  African.  It was wonderful when Boyd took us along to Haiti. 

Boyd goes into a good bit of detail on traditional Black colleges of The period.  Later in Life she was often the only African American in attendance at Elite colleges.

Boyd gives a very detailed account of Hurston’s publishing history, both as to content and as a business.  Hurston wanted to live from her writings and her grants but this was so hard.  Boyd shows us how the Great American Depression of the 1930s impacted Harlem, where Hurston lived on and off and how it dried up the money that funded the Harlem Renaissance.  

Hurston seemed happiest living in rural central Florida, where she often returned.  Maybe she seemed a bit lonely.  She was probably so smart she scared most people.  Maybe her troubled relationship with her father made it hard for her to enter into lasting marriages.  Her relationships with Gay men like Langston Hughes lasted much longer than her three marriages.

There is much more in this great biography.  Hurston had a powerful Joie de vivre.  (I wished so much she could have lived to become rich from movies made from her works and buy an elegant apartment in Paris and a mansion on the Suwannee River.). 

There is a tremendous amount anyone into Florida history will love in this book. I can personally vouch for the fact you did not learn this history in school.

There is a comprehensive list of her copious publications and a bibliography of related works. There are lots on interesting pictures.

Boyd does a profound job of letting us ponder the well springs of creativity that gave rise to the work Hurston.

On a side note.  I bought the Kindle edition for the extreme bargain price of $0.95 on one day only flash sale I lucked into.  It is now back up to $14.95.

This book is very well written. Boyd gives us a full person. Hurston was a deep 

reader and was educated by her travels.  Whereever she went, she always carried some books.

I liked this book very much.  All teachers of American Literature should read this, all into Florida history and really anyone who loves a fine literary biography  love this book.

Valerie Boyd is the author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and the forthcoming Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood.

She is an Associate Professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia, where she teaches magazine writing, arts reviewing and narrative nonfiction. 

She has taught creative nonfiction in the graduate writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

Valerie earned a bachelor’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1985 and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Goucher College in 1999.

An accomplished journalist and cultural critic, Valerie is the former arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and she has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines and newspapers. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, Ms. magazine, Paste, The Oxford American, Book magazine, Essence, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Creative Nonfiction, African American Review, The Scholar and Feminist Online and other publications.

She founded EightRock, a cutting-edge journal of black arts and culture, in 1990. In 1992, she co-founded HealthQuest, the first nationally distributed magazine focusing on African-American health.

Wrapped in Rainbows—the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in 25 years—was published to wide critical acclaim. It was hailed by Alice Walker as “magnificent” and “extraordinary”; by The Washington Post as  “definitive”; by the Boston Globe as “elegant and exhilarating”; and by the Denver Post as “a rich, rich read.”

For her work on Wrapped in Rainbows, Valerie received the Georgia Author of the Year Award in nonfiction as well as an American Library Association Notable Book Award. The Georgia Center for the Book named Wrapped in Rainbows one of the “25 Books That All Georgians Should Read,” and the Southern Book Critics Circle honored it with the 2003 Southern Book Award for best nonfiction of the year.

Valerie is currently finishing her next book, Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood, which will be published by Knopf. She lives in Atlanta.

From author’s website.