Zora! Read online

FOLLOWING THE FIGHT with her stepmother, Zora's life began to gradually improve. She moved out of her home in Eatonville—this time permanently. She found better jobs. For example, she was hired to work as a doctor's receptionist. She answered the telephone and ran his office so efficiently that the doctor offered to pay for her training as a practical nurse.

  Zora was considering the offer when she received a letter from her oldest brother. Bob was studying at Meharry Medical College, a school for African Americans in Nashville, Tennessee. Married with three children, Bob wanted Zora to come live with him and his family while he finished at Meharry and established himself as a physician. In exchange for Zora helping his wife, Wilhelmina, run the household, Bob promised to send his sister to high school.

  Attending high school was something few black southerners of the early 1900s were able to do. In fact, as late as 1916 there were only about sixty publie high schools for African Americans in the entire southern United States.

  Zora lived with her brother, Robert, his wife, Wilhelmina, and their children between 1912 and 1913.

  At that time, only three of every one hundred African American youths in the South attended high school. Twenty-one-year-old Zora was past the usual high school age, but the chance to resume her education was a big reason she packed her bags and caught the train to Nashville.

  "Nothing can describe my joy," she wrote in her autobiography. "I was going to have a home again. I was going to school. I was going to be with my brother!"

  However, more disappointment awaited her in Tennessee. Shortly after Zora's arrival at her brother's home, he told her that he couldn't send her to high school right away. She was needed around the house too much for her to have time for that. But if Zora helped out for a little while, he would send her to high school as soon as possible.

  An unhappy-looking Zora with her niece and nephews.

  Zora cooked, cleaned, and helped care for the three children as Wilhelmina recovered from what seems to have been a difficult childbirth. Shortly after graduating from Meharry in 1913, Bob moved his family, including Zora, to Memphis, Tennessee, where he set up a storefront office. Zora loved her brother and his family, and she knew that he truly intended to send her to school. But as time passed and nothing changed, Zora grew resentful. She was basically working as a maid again, she realized—only without being paid.

  After living with Bob and his family for two or three years, Zora heard from a friend about a wonderful job opportunity. A young operetta singer needed a personal assistant, and the friend encouraged Zora to apply for the job.

  Wearing a new blue dress, Zora went to meet the singer. "My feet mounted up the golden stairs as I entered the stage door of that theater," Zora later wrote. "The sounds, the smells, the back-stage jumble of things were all things to bear me up into a sweeter atmosphere. I felt like dancing towards the dressing room when it was pointed out to me."

  At twenty-four, Zora was actually older than the blond, twenty-two-year-old "Miss M," as she referred to the singer in her autobiography. Perhaps this was when Zora first began to lie about her age, for she told Miss M that she was only fifteen years old. Zora looked so young that Miss M believed her.

  The two young women liked each other immediately. Miss M told Zora what the job involved. She was to help Miss M in and out of her costumes, assist with her makeup, wash her stockings, run errands, and do other odds and ends for her.

  "Well, Zora, I pay ten dollars a week and expenses," Miss M said. "You think that will do?"

  When she heard that, Zora nea rly fell over. Ten dollars in 1915 was equal to about two hundred in today's money and was probably a higher salary than Zora had received on any of her previous jobs. Zora informed her brother Bob of her good fortune and began a new life as Miss M's personal assistant.

  At the time, movies and radio were in their infancy and television did not yet exist. Plays, lectures, and musical performances were among the leading forms of entertainment. Miss M belonged to a traveling troupe of performers who presented operettas—popular "light operas" that featured romantic stories with singing and dancing. When Zora began working for Miss M, the troupe was performing Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta H.M.S. Pinafore.

  For the next year and a half, Zora worked for Miss M as the troupe moved from city to city performing in theaters in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and Maryland. Those eighteen months were the most exciting time of Zora's life so far. She loved the theater—the singing and dancing and the audience's laughter and applause. And as they shared meals, lodged in the same hotels, and traveled together in the troupe's private train car, Zora became friendly with most of the thirty members of the company. Adopting her as a kind of kid sister, the troupe continually plied her with all the ice cream, soft drinks, and sweets she could consume. They also confided their secrets to Zora. They told her about their romances and about their dreams of becoming Broadway stars—if only someone would give them a chance.

  In one town Miss M paid for Zora to take a crash course in manicuring. The troupe members then let her practice on them by trimming and polishing their nails. She became very good at manicuring nails—a skill that would prove useful for Zora a little later in life. Meanwhile, she was constantly reading. One of the male lead singers had attended Harvard University and had brought a suitcase full of books on the road with him. Noticing Zora's interest in his books, he lent some of them to her.

  Like any kid sister, Zora was teased. Most of the troupe members were from the North and had never heard expressions like those Zora routinely used. They enjoyed listening to her "call names," and would tease her just to hear her refer to someone as a "mullet-headed, mule-eared, hog-nosed, gatorfaced, goat-bellied, knock-kneed, razor-legged so and so."

  The troupe doted on Zora because they believed her to be only fifteen or sixteen when actually she was in her midtwenties. Also, Zora was the only African American in the company. Because they were accustomed to working with people of various backgrounds, show business performers had long been known for their tolerance. As Zora later described it, the troupe members almost seemed to compete with one another over who could be friendliest to her.

  Many years later, Zora declared, "I have no race prejudice of any kind." She attributed her attitude in part to her enjoyable experiences traveling with the operetta company. During that year and a half she became convinced that white people weren't so different from her friends and relatives in Eatonville, or, as she once wrote, "I learned that skins were no measure of what was inside people."

  Sometime in 1917, Miss M informed Zora that she was planning to get married and retire from the stage. She offered Zora some sound advice. Although Zora enjoyed traveling with the troupe, in the long run, Miss M insisted, it would be best for her to continue her education. Zora knew that Miss M was right. The troupe soon arrived for an engagement in Baltimore, where Zora's sister, Sarah, lived. There Zora ended her association with the operetta company. As a parting gift, Miss M gave Zora a cash bonus. Zora then said farewell to the troupe that had been like a family to her for the past eighteen months and began a new life in Baltimore.

  The Hurston sisters were happy to be reunited and spent a lot of time together, but Zora did not move in with Sarah. Zora despised Sarah's husband, who she felt mistreated her sister. Zora once wrote that she wished him "a short sickness and a quick funeral."

  To pay for groceries and a rented room, Zora went to work as a waitress in a Baltimore restaurant. She was making plans to enroll in night high school when she became quite ill. She was told that she needed to have her appendix removed. Since she couldn't pay for an operation, Zora entered the free ward of the Maryland General Hospital.

  Emergency appendectomies were dangerous operations in those days. Just twenty-six years old, Zora realized that she might die without having achieved much in her life. She made a deal with the Almighty. If God would see her through the operation, she promised to "find the road that [she] must follow."


  Zora was very slow to awaken from the anesthetic, but she survived the operation and was quickly up and about. She obtained another job waiting tables and enrolled in Baltimore's night high school for "colored youths." On her application she claimed to be sixteen years old, this time lopping a full decade off her true age.

  Embarrassment at attending high school at the age of twenty-six wasn't the only reason she lied. According to Maryland state law, "all colored youths between six and twenty years of age" could enroll in public schools for free. If she admitted her true age, she would have had to pay for her schooling, which she could not afford.

  Zora flourished at the night high school, excelling especially in English literature. She later wrote, "[Literature is] my world, and I shall be in it, if it is the last thing I do on God's green dirt-ball."

  She did so well in high school that she decided to do something rare for a young black woman in the early 1900s. She made up her mind to attend college. In the fall of 1917 she entered Morgan Academy, the preparatory school for Morgan College in Baltimore.

  Zora remained a student for the next decade and loved nearly every moment of it. She spent two years at Morgan Academy. There were eighteen students in her class—twelve young women and six young men—and besides being the oldest, Zora was the poorest. Her classmates, who came from the wealthiest and most influential African American families on the East Coast, had gorgeous clothes and plenty of spending money. Zora's wardrobe consisted of, in her own words, "one dress, a change of underwear and one pair of tan oxfords."

  Anyone else in her position might have felt out of place at swanky Morgan Academy. Not Zora. She hadn't forgotten her deal with God, and now that she had "found the road" that she must follow, she wasn't about to let a lack of underwear stop her! The other girls liked Zora and lent her clothes. In return, Zora, whom the girls called "Old Knowledge Bug," helped them with their schoolwork. Zora was so good a student that when the English teacher was absent, she was put in charge of running the class.

  This Zora photo was found in the Howard University Library Archives. Although she looks quite young in this picture, Zora was in her late twenties when she enrolled at Howard.

  Once again, as at the Florida Baptist Academy, Zora ran short of funds. While Zora was still attending Morgan Academy, Dean William Pickens of Morgan College arranged for her to work as a caretaker for a white woman who had broken her hip. Grateful for the job, in 1917 or 1918, Zora wrote Dean Pickens a note of thanks. It is the earliest surviving letter we have of Zora's, and contains her first mention of her hopes to become a writer:

  Dear Dean,

  Forty years hence, The world will look for someone that has really known you to write your biography. To see you as a husband and father, & have you as a friend and teacher, should mean that one would go beyond the superficial. I want to do that.

  Yours Respectfully,

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Zora planned to graduate from Morgan Academy and then enroll in Morgan College. But sometime in 1918 a young woman named May Miller visited her cousins Bernice and Gwendolyn Hughes at the academy. May was the daughter of Dr. Kelly Miller, an African American author, newspaper columnist, and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University in Washington, D.C. At that time Howard was considered to be the premier center for higher education for African Americans. After spending a day with Zora, May Miller said to her, "Zora, you are Howard material. Why can't you come to Howard?"

  Because she couldn't afford it, Zora answered.

  "You can come and live at our house," said Zora's classmate Bernice Hughes, whose parents lived in Washington, D.C. "Then you won't have any room and board to pay. We'll rustle you up a job to make your tuition."

  In June 1918, Zora withdrew from Morgan Academy and moved forty miles from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., presumably to live with the Hughes family as Bernice had offered. Two months after arriving in the nation's capital, Zora received some bad news. Her father, John Hurston, had been in Memphis, Tennessee, when the car he was driving was struck by a train, killing him. Zora refused to attend her father's funeral. Even in death, his youngest daughter didn't forgive him for marrying Mattie Moge and breaking up the Hurston family.

  In the fall of 1919, at the age of twenty-eight, Zora enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

  Howard University officials didn't think Zora was quite ready for college, so for her first year in Washington she attended Howard Academy, finally earning her high school diploma in May 1919 at the age of twenty-eight. That fall she entered Howard University, becoming a member of an elite group. At the time, the total black population in the United States was over ten million, of whom only about two thousand were enrolled in college.

  Meanwhile, to help pay for her tuition, Zora had found work in the nation's capital. First she worked as a waitress at the Cosmos Club, an exclusive "white men only" club in downtown Washington. Over the years, the men who gathered at the Cosmos Club to socialize, order drinks, and play billiards included Theodore Roosevelt, who had been president of the United States from 1901 to 1909, Rudyard Kipling, an English author whose stories Zora had long admired, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Judging by how little she said about the experience in her autobiography, Zora didn't seem to have been much impressed by the rich and famous men she served there.

  After her brief stint at the Cosmos Club, Zora put her training as a manicurist to good use. She was hired to trim nails in a men's barbershop on G Street. Knowing that she was a college student, her boss allowed her to work from three thirty in the afternoon to eight thirty in the evening, which left her time for her university classes in the morning and for homework at night.

  Zora waitressed at the Washington, D.C., Cosmos Club to help pay her tuition at Howard University.

  An event that she witnessed in the barbershop haunted Zora for the rest of her life. Zora's employer, George Robinson, was a black man who owned a string of barbershops in Washington. As was the custom in those days, Mr. Robinson's barbershops were segregated. Although all fifteen of its employees were black, only white men were allowed in as customers at the G Street shop. Mr. Robinson operated another barbershop, on U Street, for black customers.

  One afternoon an African American man entered the G Street barbershop and sat down in an empty chair. "Haircut and shave!" he called out. None of the barbers paid attention to him. He then began talking about the Constitution and his rights as an American citizen. The barbers advised him to go to the U Street shop, but since he wouldn't budge, they picked him up and carried him out the door.

  That night as she lay in bed, Zora thought about the afternoon's events. She knew that the black man had been right. The other employees had known it, too, she was certain. Why hadn't a single one of them taken the young man's side? Why, at the moment of truth, had Zora secretly been relieved that he was being thrown out of the shop?

  The answer, she concluded, was that tending to the young black man would have provoked complaints from the other customers, perhaps costing the shop's employees their jobs. This was what had flashed through her own mind. But more than twenty years later when she wrote about the incident, Zora still felt guilty about having been afraid to do the right thing.

  Although Zora had always been an excellent student, she did rather poorly academically at Howard. Her grades in English were good, but she received Cs and Ds in some other classes, and she even flunked Spanish and physical education. She was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up her studies while working. To make matters worse, she often lacked the money to pay her tuition. As a result, in the five years between 1919 and 1924 Zora completed only a year and a half of course work.

  Yet in several ways her years at Howard were very fruitful. In 1920 she met a twenty-three-year-old fellow student named Herbert Sheen. Six years younger than Zora, Herbert was working his way through Howard as a waiter in t
he hope of one day becoming a doctor. He and Zora fell in love. "For the first time since my mother's death, there was someone who felt really close and warm to me," Zora later wrote. The couple would marry—but not for another seven years.

  Zora married medical student Herbert Sheen on May 19, 1927, then almost immediately set out on her folklore-documenting expedition. They divorced four years later, but remained friends throughout Zora's life.

  Howard University was also where Zora began to write. "Home," a poem she wrote in 1919 about Eatonville, is one of her earliest known creations:

  I know a place that is full of light,

  That is full of dreams and visions bright;

  Where pleasing fancy loves to roam

  And picture me once more at home.

  There nothing comes to mar my days,

  And dim for me the sun's loved rays;

  To shake my faith in things divine,

  and bare the cruelty of mankind.

  Oh! that I to that spot might flee!

  That peace and love might dwell with me

  And brush away the somber shrouds,

  And show the lining of the clouds!

  Zora submitted writing samples to the Howard University philosophy professor Dr. Alain Locke, who headed the school's literary club. Educated at Harvard University, and then at colleges in England, Germany, and France, Locke was one of the best-educated people in the United States. Even though, as a black man, he had experienced prejudice, Professor Locke reputedly had a bias of his own. He had such a low opinion of female students—so it was said—that on the first day of school he would offer the young women in his classes automatic Cs if they would not come to his lectures. But Zora was accepted into the literary group and joined her acquaintance May Miller on the staff of the school's literary magazine, the Stylus.