![]() She was interested the Miskito Zambu, a mixed-race (African-Indigenous American) population group occupying the Caribbean coast of Central America, focused on the region of the Honduras-Nicaragua border.and Garifuna, descendants of Carib, Arawak and West African people. Perhaps it was being in a Honduras, surrounded by a culture different from her own that inspired her to write this book. Zora was noted for writing primarily about blacks in Florida yet in this book, her characters were a “cracker” couple. While in Puerto Cortés, she wrote much of Seraph on the Suwanee, a a story of two people at once deeply in love and deeply at odds, set among the community of “Florida Crackers” at the turn of the twentieth century. ![]() She travelled to Central America fuelled by the idea of locating either Mayan ruins or ruins of an undiscovered civilization. She also lived in Honduras, at the north coastal town of Puerto Cortés from October 1947 to February 1948. In 19, she traveled to Jamaica and to Haiti with support from the Guggenheim Foundation from which her anthropological work Tell My Horse published in 1938 emerged. Zora’s love for anthropology took her on some extensive trips to the Caribbean and the American South. In 1939, while Hurston was working for the WPA, she married Albert Price, a 23-year-old fellow WPA employee, and 25 years her junior, but this marriage ended after only seven months. In 1927, she married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and former classmate at Howard who would later become a physician, but the marriage ended in 1931. On a more personal note, Zora was married twice. After graduating from Barnard, Zora spent two years as a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University. She worked with the likes of Franz Boas of Columbia University, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. In 1927, at the age of 36 Zora received her B.A. Zora left Howard University in 1924 and a year later she was offered a scholarship to Barnard College, Columbia University where she was the college’s sole black student. ![]() In 1921, she wrote a short story, John Redding Goes to Sea, which qualified her to become a member of Alaine Locke’s literary club, The Stylus. While she was there, she took courses in Spanish, English, Greek and public speaking and earned an Associate’s Degree in 1920. That same year Zora began undergraduate studies at Howard University, where she became one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and co-founded The Hilltop, the university’s student newspaper. She graduated from Morgan Academy in 1918. ![]() It was at this time that the 26 year old began to claim 1901 as her date of birth possibly to qualify for a free high-school education and to reflect her literary birth. In 1917, Zora attended Morgan Academy, the high school division of the African American Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland. To survive, Zora worked as a maid to the lead singer in a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company. Eventually her father and step-mother stopped paying her tuition and she was expelled. She was sent away to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. The immediacy of this second marriage to Matte Moge caused a bit of a scandal and it was even rumored that John had relations with Matte before his first wife died. Zora and her step-mother violently quarrelled. Three years later in 1904, Zora’s mother died and her father remarried. In 1901, some northern schoolteachers visited Eatonville and gave Zora a number of books which opened her mind to literature which explains why she sometimes describes her “birth” as taking place in that year. She spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up in Eatonville in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”. It was the town where her father became the mayor and the place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. It was the place Zora felt more at home and sometimes called her birthplace. When Zora was three, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns to be incorporated in the United States. She was born and grew up in Notasulga, Alabama. Her father, John Hurston was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter and her mother, Lucy a school teacher. She is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. ![]() Dubbed “America’s favorite black conservative” and “Genius of the South”, Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. ![]()
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