This episode celebrates the conviction of Zora Neale Hurston in holding to her principles in spite of pressure from both the literary world and leaders within the Harlem Renaissance to write in a fashion that was both palatable and expressive of the black grief and pain of American racism.

Though Zora acknowledged that Black Americans experienced hardships associated with prejudice, she did not believe it was the predominant experience that should be expressed in literature. For Zora, Black people were joy and beauty, intelligence and love and in no great measure were we robbed of presence and prestige because of the divisions of segregation. Therefore, her writings in the 1920’s and 30’s were a deviation from the harsher realities portrayed by other authors such as Richard Wright.

Additionally, as an anthropologist, Zora held to the dialect and vernacular of the subjects she interviewed despite urgings to make the text ‘tidier’ for the reader. Rather, Zora chronicled the accounts of her subjects unchanged from how they were delivered to her.

These choices unfortunately had a deleterious impact on her work and though she saw great success with ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’, she subsequently found it impossible to get published and ultimately had to return to menial labor and living in housing for the poor.

Fortunately many years after her death, some of her work was resurrected and published, like Barracoon completed in 1931, published 87 years later in 2018.

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