Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

by Valerie Boyd

I did not give up the idea of my journey. I was merely lonesome for someone brave enough to undertake it with me.”

“She seemed to herself to be coming home. This was where she was meant to be.”

“I always wanted to go. I would wander off in the woods all alone, following some inside urge to go places.

“What seems race achievement is the work of individuals.”

“Jump at de sun,” Lucy dared her children. “We might not land on the sun,” Zora remembered her mother saying, “but at least we would get off the ground.”

her novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston has one of her characters, a former slave, delivering an impassioned speech about honoring black children: “We black folks don’t love our chillun. We couldn’t do it when we wuz in slavery. We borned ’em but dat didn’t make ’em ourn. Dey b’longed tuh old Massa. ’Twan’t no use in treasurin’ other folkses property. It wuz liable tuh be took away any day. But we’s free folks now. De big bell done rung! Us chillun is ourn. Ah doan know, mebbe hit’ll take some of us generations, but us got tuh ’gin tuh practise on treasurin’ our younguns. … Ah don’t want ’em knocked and ’buked.”

Zora became a bit of a loner, comfortable with her own company. “I was driven inward,” she would recall. “I lived an exciting life unseen.”

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.”

“For a long time I gloated over the happy secret that when I played outdoors in the moonlight, the moon followed me, whichever way I ran,” she would recall. “The moon was so happy when I came out to play that it ran shining and shouting after me like a pretty puppy dog. The other children didn’t count.”

but all emotions were naked, and nakedly arrived at.”

“But I knew there was no shrinking. These things had to be.”

There is something about poverty that smells like death,” she would write. “Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.”

‘No matter about the difficulties past and present, step on it!’”

did not do well in mathematics,” she admitted. “Why should A minus B? Who the devil was X anyway? I could not even imagine.”

I have a heart with room for every joy.”

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

“I shall hold on,” Zora vowed as her summer caesura approached, “but every time I see a cat slinking in an alley—fearing to walk upright lest again she is crushed back into her slink—I shall go to her and acknowledge the sisterhood in spite of the skin.”

“She always knew when you were and always did something about it. Not just food, but anything that you might be hungry for.”

“Negro stock is going up,” Harlem writer and physician Rudolph Fisher declared, “and everybody’s buying.”

sexually versatile.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against,” Zora acknowledged, “but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It’s beyond me.”

Thus, hoodoo was an alternative form of power for people who might otherwise feel powerless. And when employed conscientiously, it was a restorative power, not a destructive one. Several practitioners Hurston met, for instance, adamantly refused to use conjure to kill, under any circumstances.

It makes me sick to see how these cheap white folks are grabbing our stuff and ruining it,” Hurston vented to Hughes. “My one consolation being that they never do it right and so there is still a chance for us.”

“For I not only want to present the material with all the life and color of my people. I want to leave no loop-holes for the scientific crowd to rend and tear us.”

Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do to cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear.”

Since I don’t compose well at the typewriter, I prepare my manuscript in long hand, revise and revise, and then type it. ‘Hunt and peck’ is my system on a portable machine.”

“The writer thinks that he has been brave in following the groove of the Race Champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.”

dethroning Aaron, an officer who is more concerned about his appearance than his people, Moses tells him: “You didn’t think about service half as much as you did about getting served, Aaron. Your tiny horizon never did get no bigger, so you mistook a spotlight for the sun.”

“Literary secret: I am getting fat just where a cow does—under the tail,”

believers wore red kerchiefs as a sign that Ogoun—the warrior god, the deity of fire—was protecting them.

Her days had nothing in them now but hours. … Like raw, bony, homeless dogs, they took to hanging around her doorway. They were there when she got up in the morning, and still whimpering and whining of their emptiness when she went to bed at night.”

The spirit is willing but the flesh is lazy as hell.”

“We struggled so hard to make our big dreams come true, didn’t we? The world has gotten some benefits from us, though we had a swell time too. We lived!”

But integration was costly. Black communities lost a great deal—particularly in terms of self-respect and self-sufficiency—in the process. In fact, some contemporary black intellectuals go so far as to say that integration was one of the biggest tactical mistakes in African-American history.

You are alive, aren’t you? Well, so long as you have no grave you are covered by the sky. No limit to your possibilities. The distance to heaven is the same everywhere.”

“I wish I had as much sense as you have.” She replied: “You got more sense. I’m a genius; I can do only one thing. You’re smart. You can make a living.”

I have known the joy and pain of deep friendship,” she once wrote. “I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That’s living.”

Through her tenacious efforts, and her very real sacrifices, she made it possible for black women to write about their interior lives and to have such work taken seriously. Her success—in her lifetime and posthumously—legitimized the kinds of intimate narratives that are now taken for granted in African-American literature.

God balances the sheet in time.”

Howard