Harlem renaissance writer’s niece sheds light on Zora Neale Hurston at HCC talk

Though only 3-years-old when Zora Neale Hurston died in relative obscurity, Lucy Anne Hurston has over her lifetime compiled a detailed knowledge of her aunt’s life and work with a historian’s observant eye.

“One of the things people rarely bring up about Zora is that she had quite the sense of humor, in life as well as with the pen,” Lucy Hurston said about her now-famous aunt who hob-nobbed with the likes of poet Langston Hughes and singer Ethel Waters during the Harlem Renaissance era. “She always lived in a parallel universe. It allowed her to do work in literature and more importantly in anthropology.”

Lucy is author of Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. The book is an interactive, “adult pop-up” book that features a CD of Zora talking, copies of materials in Zora’s handwriting and pictures that capture the way Zora immersed herself into the lives of the people she studied and wrote about, Lucy said.

An associate sociology professor at Manchester Community College and distance learning instructor at HCC, Lucy spoke on the HCC campus as part of the college’s “The Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story” lecture series. The series concluded Dec. 11.

Zora Neale Hurston is best known for her book “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” published in 1937 and now read in high schools and colleges across the nation. Most of her career, Zora worked with the Works Project Administration Federal Writers’ Project gathering information on the black person’s experience in the United States, Haiti and Jamaica.

HCC English Professor Allia Matta said students in her class read many of Hurston’s folk-tales over the fall semester. “(Lucy’s talk) was a follow up to learn more about Zora Neale Hurston’s life and her work documenting the lives of others. She was an artist’s artist and ahead of her time.”

Although Zora published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, essays, articles and in her 30-plus year career, Lucy Hurston said her aunt considered herself more an anthropologist than a novelist.

“People refer to her as a novelist but she was an anthropologist and that formed most of her work. Things like the language of the groups under her study validated the anthropological importance of poetry” and literature, Lucy said, adding that Zora was the first black playwright for Paramount Studios and one of the founding members of the NAACP.

Lucy, whose father Everett was Zora’s youngest brother, was a consultant on Oprah Winfrey’s production of “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which starred Academy Award winner Halle Berry. Lucy said she would consult on a second Winfrey production for Zora’s “Dust Tracks on a Road.” 

Hurston said although her aunt died in relative obscurity in1960 she lived to work, not for fame or money.  “At one time she said that all she wanted was a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.”

Pictured above (left and right), HCC Professor Alia Matta with author and professor Lucy Hurston

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