Hurston’s feats ranged far, even to study of zombies
“Talk about the zombie just a wee little bit,” popular radio host Mary Margaret McBride coaxed Zora Neale Hurston during a 1943 interview.
That’s right: Dubbing Abraham Lincoln a vampire hunter (as a recent book and movie did) is pure fiction, but Hurston, Central Florida’s own literary star, can actually be called a zombie hunter.
Funded by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Hurston’s explorations of Haitian culture in 1937 yielded what may be the first published photo of a Haitian zombie: a woman who was reported dead in 1907 but turned up again in 1936.
The ‘living dead’
“The sight was dreadful,” Hurston wrote of the 1937 encounter. “That blank face with the dead eyes. . . . The sight of this wreckage was too much to endure for long.”
Several years later in 1943, McBride was still eager for details for her audience of millions, and Hurston indulged the New York-based host.
“The zombie is supposed to be the living dead — people who die and are resurrected but without their souls,” she told McBride.
“I do not believe they were actually dead,” she added, noting that burials in Haiti were not below ground and that bodies were not embalmed.
Hurston’s theory was that Haitian zombies had been given exotic drugs originally brought from Africa and appeared to be dead but were not. It was a huge topic, she told McBride — more than she could deal with in a few minutes.
Now, 73 years later, Hurston herself — author, folklorist, anthropologist — is a huge topic, beginning with her roots in her hometown of Eatonville, the site this week of the 27th Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities (see zorafestival.org for a full schedule).
Child of Eatonville
Hurston was actually born in the small Alabama town of Notasulga, on Jan. 7, 1891, but essentially everything she “would grow up to write, and to believe, had its genesis in Eatonville,” her biographer Valerie Boyd has written.
Founded in 1887, the Eatonville that Hurston knew in the early 20th century was “not the black back-side of an average town,” she would later write, but an all-black town — “charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all.”
As a girl she studied at the Hungerford Industrial and Normal School, a model of educational excellence that reflected the principles of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. But the life that was calling her was much bigger than the horizons offered to most women of her time, let alone a black woman.
“I had a way of life inside me and I wanted it with a want that was twisting me,” she wrote in the autobiographical “Dust Tracks in the Road.”
In 1915, Hurston struck out on her own, joining a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe to work as a maid for one of the star performers. Making her way to Washington, D.C., she started her writing career while a student at Howard University and became part of a literary crowd that included future luminaries such as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Eventually she became the pre-eminent female voice of the Harlem Renaissance.
Hurston also pioneered in the fields of folklore and anthropology. After study with Franz Boas, often called the father of anthropology in America, she undertook fieldwork that led her to that encounter with a zombie in Haiti.
Zora at 125
Celebrating the 125th anniversary of Hurston’s birth on Jan. 7, 1891, this year’s Zora festival in Eatonville festival brims with programs about the author’s life and heritage, in addition to the Outdoor Festival of the Arts (Jan. 29-31).
The festival is part of a yearlong celebration, “Zora Neale Hurston 125,” that includes a commemorative Caribbean cruise April 10-17. Titled “Tracing the Caribbean Footprints of Zora Neale Hurston,” the cruise includes stops in Grand Cayman, Mexico, Jamaica and Haiti, the site of Hurston’s zombie encounter and much more. For details, visit historiceatonville.org or call Robinson Cruise Planners at 1-866-632-8724.