50 Fun Facts About Zora Neale Hurston

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie finds her happiest years picking beans 'on the muck' in which region?

The Everglades. Kept behind a shop counter and out of the porch talk by her second husband, Janie works the bean fields beside her third and is at last part of the storytelling.

Hurston gave Eatonville, Florida, as her birthplace, but in which state was she actually born?

Alabama. She was born in Notasulga but reached Eatonville as a toddler, and it was Eatonville that she called home.

After her mother died, Hurston was sent from all-Black Eatonville to a boarding school in which Florida city?

Jacksonville. Her father soon remarried, she and her stepmother could not get on, and before long she was on her own and working for her keep.

Hurston spent 18 months touring as a singer's personal attendant in a troupe that performed whose operettas?

Gilbert and Sullivan. The company's actors lent her books, played her classical music and treated her as one of their own; she counted the months with them among her fondest memories.

Hurston's mother urged her children to 'jump at' what, saying they would at least get off the ground?

The sun. 'We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground,' Hurston recalled; her father took the opposite line and warned her against having too much spirit.

Why did the 26-year-old Hurston start passing herself off as ten years younger in 1917?

To enrol in high school. She finished within a year and went on to college, but never gave the decade back: even the headstone placed on her grave in 1973 gives her birth year as 1901.

Hurston finished high school at Morgan Academy in which city?

Baltimore. She left the touring theatre company there and waited tables to put herself through; the school is now Morgan State University.

Which school's student newspaper, The Hilltop, did Hurston co-found?

Howard. She scraped together the fees by working as a waitress and as a manicurist in a Black-owned Washington barbershop that served only white customers.

Which sorority, founded by and for Black women, did Hurston join in college?

Zeta Phi Beta. It began when a member of the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity asked Arizona Cleaver to start a sister organisation, and she invited four friends to join her.

In 1925 Hurston became the first African American admitted to which women's college?

Barnard. One of the college's founders met her at a literary awards dinner and arranged a scholarship; Hurston, its only Black student, discovered anthropology there and graduated in 1928.

Under which Columbia anthropologist did Hurston study and conduct research?

Franz Boas. Like his other students she called him 'Papa Franz', and it was he who sent her home to collect, as science, the tall tales she had grown up hearing in Eatonville.

Which white patron paid Hurston $200 a month to collect folklore in the South?

Charlotte Osgood Mason. The wealthy widow insisted that her protégés call her 'Godmother', and in return for the money she claimed control of everything Hurston collected.

What became of Fire!!, the 1926 magazine Hurston launched with Wallace Thurman and other young Harlem writers?

It folded after one issue. The magazine set out to shock the older generation of Black leaders, and many readers were duly offended; a second number never appeared.

Hurston's story 'Sweat', about the washerwoman Delia and her husband Sykes, features which animal?

A rattlesnake. Sykes hides it in the laundry basket to be rid of his wife, who is terrified of snakes, but it is Sykes who is bitten while Delia waits outside.

Which Hurston story was selected for Alain Locke's landmark 1925 anthology The New Negro?

Spunk. It had just taken second prize in Opportunity magazine's first literary contest, and her entrance at the awards dinner won her the friends who launched her career in New York.

Hurston's 1928 essay about growing up in Eatonville is titled what?

How It Feels to Be Colored Me. Refusing the sorrow readers expected, she declares 'I am not tragically colored' and says she does not weep at the world: 'I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.'

Hurston's 1935 collection of African-American folklore is titled what?

Mules and Men. To fill it she went home to Eatonville for the tales she had grown up on, which their tellers called 'lies'.

In which city did Hurston apprentice herself to hoodoo doctors in the late 1920s?

New Orleans. She went through the hoodoo doctors' initiation rites herself, which opened doors closed to other researchers, and came away with tales of the voodoo queen Marie Laveau.

What was the title of Hurston's 1934 debut novel?

Jonah's Gourd Vine. Its preacher hero and his wife are called John and Lucy, the names of Hurston's own parents, and his womanising wrecks everything he has built.

Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks, trying, she said, to work through what?

A love affair she left. She had walked away from a younger man she called the love of her life, and wrote the novel, she said, to 'embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him'.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the young Janie's awakening comes as she lies beneath which blossoming tree?

A pear tree. Stirred by the bees in its blossom, she lets a passing boy kiss her; her grandmother sees it and promptly marries her off to an older farmer.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what is the nickname of Janie's third husband, Vergible Woods?

Tea Cake. Much younger than Janie, he is the first man to treat her as an equal, teaching her to play checkers and taking her fishing at midnight.

Which real 1928 disaster strikes in Their Eyes Were Watching God?

The Okeechobee hurricane. It drove the lake over its levee and drowned more than 2,500 people, most of them migrant farm workers; the novel's title comes from the night its characters sit out the storm in the dark.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie's second husband Joe Starks is elected to what position in Eatonville?

Mayor. He buys up land, opens the town's store and is soon running the place, but when the men call for a speech from his wife he will not let her say a word.

Which African-American novelist panned Hurston's 1937 novel as carrying 'no theme, no message'?

Richard Wright. He accused her of serving white readers a 'quaint' picture of Black life; reviewing his first book a year later, she remarked that it held perhaps enough killing 'to satisfy all male black readers'.

Who played the lead in the 2005 television film of Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Halle Berry. Oprah Winfrey had held the film rights for years before her company finally made it for ABC, and she introduced the broadcast herself.

Tell My Horse (1938) documents Hurston's research on rituals in Jamaica and which other country?

Haiti. She studied Vodou there at close quarters and photographed Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman whose family said she had died and been buried thirty years earlier.

Which foundation funded Hurston's 1936–37 Caribbean research?

Guggenheim. She spent seven weeks of the fellowship writing a novel rather than field notes, and the foundation renewed it for a second year all the same.

Hurston's 1939 novel retells which biblical book from an African-American perspective?

Exodus. In Moses, Man of the Mountain the Hebrews talk in Black Southern speech, and Pharaoh takes Moses for a hoodoo man rather than a messenger of God.

Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), the last novel Hurston published in her lifetime, is unusual for featuring mainly what?

White characters. Its heroine is a poor white Florida woman, and Hurston said she wanted to show that a Black author could write white lives as well.

From 1947 to 1948 Hurston lived in which Central American country, hoping to find Mayan ruins?

Honduras. She settled in the port of Puerto Cortés and never found her lost city; what she brought back instead was most of the manuscript of her next novel.

Hurston's 1942 autobiography is titled what?

Dust Tracks on a Road. Its facts are famously unreliable, beginning with her own birthplace, and her publisher made her cut a long attack on American imperialism in Asia.

With whom did Hurston write the 1930 play Mule Bone, ending their friendship?

Langston Hughes. They fell out over who deserved the credit for the comedy, built on a folktale Hurston had collected, and it went unperformed for sixty years.

Which Supreme Court ruling did Hurston attack in a 1955 letter to the Orlando Sentinel?

Brown v. Board of Education. She asked what satisfaction there was in a court order forcing people to associate with her, and feared that integration would mean the end of Black schools and Black teachers.

In 1927 Hurston interviewed Cudjoe Lewis, one of the last survivors of which illegal slave ship?

Clotilda. The schooner slipped into Mobile under cover of night in 1860, half a century after the United States outlawed the trade; its wreck was found in the Mobile River and confirmed in 2019.

Viking Press offered to publish Hurston's Barracoon in 1931 if she would change what?

Its dialect. She had set down Cudjoe Lewis's story in his own speech and refused to rewrite it 'in language rather than dialect', so the book waited until 2018 for a publisher.

The title of Hurston's Barracoon is a word for what kind of place?

A holding pen for captives. The word comes from the Spanish barracón, a big hut; Cudjoe Lewis was kept in one at the port of Ouidah for three weeks before the Atlantic crossing.

Cudjoe Lewis lived in which Gulf Coast community founded by survivors of his slave ship?

Africatown. Freed in 1865, the shipmates tried to save for the passage home; when the money fell short they bought land near Mobile and built a town of their own instead.

In 1938–39 Hurston collected Florida's folk songs and stories on the payroll of which New Deal agency?

Works Progress Administration. Its Federal Writers' Project hired her as a folklorist, and she later put lines from those field notes into the mouths of characters in a novel.

In 1952 the Pittsburgh Courier sent Hurston to Live Oak, Florida, to cover what?

A murder trial. Ruby McCollum, a Black woman, had shot a prominent white doctor who she said had abused her for years and fathered her child; Hurston found a town that would not talk.

Around 1950, with seven books behind her, Hurston took a job on Miami Beach's Rivo Alto Island as what?

A maid. She took such work whenever the money ran out and went on writing all the while: her essays and stories were still appearing in national magazines.

Hurston died in 1960 in which Florida city, where she is buried?

Fort Pierce. She died in the county welfare home, friends took up a collection to pay for the funeral, and her grave lay unmarked for thirteen years.

After Hurston's death in 1960, a passing law officer who knew her saved her papers from what?

A bonfire. Workers clearing her house were burning her belongings when Patrick DuVal stopped and put the flames out; the partly charred manuscripts he rescued are now at the University of Florida.

Which writer's 1975 Ms. magazine article revived interest in Hurston's work?

Alice Walker. Two years earlier she had travelled to Florida, picked out what she believed was Hurston's unmarked grave in an overgrown cemetery, and paid for a headstone.

The headstone placed on Hurston's grave in 1973 quotes 'A Genius of the South' from whose poem?

Jean Toomer. The phrase comes from 'Georgia Dusk', a poem in his 1923 book Cane; the admirer who had it carved could only guess which unmarked grave in the cemetery was Hurston's.

Hurston's folktale manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess was found in which archive?

Smithsonian. The typescript had sat unnoticed in another anthropologist's files for half a century, first in a Columbia University basement and then in Washington, before it was recognised in the 1990s.

Hurston's unfinished novel about which ancient ruler was finally published in 2025?

Herod the Great. Hurston recast the New Testament's villain as a gifted and maligned king, and at least three publishers turned the book down in her lifetime.

In 1934 Hurston founded a school of dramatic arts at which Florida college?

Bethune-Cookman. She wanted the school to be 'based on pure Negro expression' and taught drama at the Daytona Beach college for about a year; in 1956 it honoured her for her work in education and human relations.

What was Hurston's political affiliation?

Republican. In 1946 she worked in the campaign office of the Republican running against Harlem's congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and in 1952 she backed Senator Robert Taft for president.

Hurston taught drama in 1939–40 at the North Carolina College for Negroes, now NC Central University, in which city?

Durham. She arrived in the autumn of 1939 only months after her wedding; within a year she had separated from her husband and left the job.