Zora Neale Hurston An Economic Boon to Her Hometown

The legendary Harlem Renaissance figure was an economic boon to her hometown

Going to Disney World? Try Zora Neale Hurston World Instead
by Roland Laird

With exhibits like Hall of Presidents and Tomorrowland, not only is Disney World America’s premier venue for family-friendly entertainment, but it also one of the most important cultural tourism attractions in the country.

Interestingly, less than 10 miles north of Disney World is another important American cultural tourism attraction. Each January, the city of Eatonville, Florida hosts the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of Arts and Humanities.

These days the week long event attracts upwards of 50,000 people, but the attraction wasn’t always that grand.

As the birthplace of legendary Harlem Renaissance figure Zora Neale Hurston and the first African-American municipality formed after the Civil War, Eatonville had a substantial pedigree, but for decades received no significant attention from the outside world. Ironically, a few days after it celebrated the centennial of its incorporation in 1987, Eatonville learned that the county was planning on turning two-lane Kennedy Boulevard, the spine of the community, into a five-lane thoroughfare, thus demolishing the small-town character of this historic community.

Like any group of people in a bucolic setting, the people of Eatonville were leery of any change, let alone the type of change that came with hundreds of cars zooming through the middle of their town. Sensing that an appeal to their Board of County Commissioners wasn’t likely to stop the highway, the people believed Eatonville’s history had value and that the creation of a marketing tool which promoted that history could succeed where a basic appeal would fail, and The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. (P.E.C.) was formed.

The founders of P.E.C. were preservationists with a focus on education, the cultural arts, and humanities. Their task was to zero in on the significance of Eatonville from this perspective and “sell” it to the county.

The P.E.C. members also knew that Eatonville being the country’s first post Civil War black municipality wasn’t a compelling enough story to sway the county board so just as Disney World was formed on the basis of the creative output of Walt Disney, the P.E.C. based their vision on the creative output of their native daughter, Zora Neale Hurston. But while Disney’s creativity was “fun” and easily accessible, commercializing without compromising Zora Neale Hurston was more than a notion.

According to N.Y. Nathiri, the current Executive Director of P.E.C. the challenge was to “to take something that might be perceived as stodgy and make it interesting” and thus a festival to honor not only Hurston and her works, but also her ideals and ethics was born.

In using the festival format, the P.E.C. was able to provide activities including a public forum of academic discussions, workshops, and master classes; an Education Day to present age-appropriate cultural arts programming for students; a Street Festival showcasing music, dance, drama, visual arts, folk arts, and ethnic cuisines; and cultural arts events, including concerts, art exhibitions, and theater performances.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

Video of Zora Neale Hurston's Fieldwork in Florida (1928)

from HarlemWorld

African-American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, before she became a noteworthy novelist, used the loan of a camera to photograph fifteen reels of film preserving the heritage of southern African-American culture.

Of these reels, only nine are known to have survived and contain black & white, occasionally grainy footage capturing children at play, a baptism in a river, a logging camp, and footage of octogenarian Cudjo Lewis, the final survivor from The Clotilde, the last arriving slave ship to America (in 1859). No intertitles are presented with these clips, although the musical accompaniment is comprised of spirituals and bluegrass music.

Hurston’s patron was Charlotte Osgood Mason, a rich supporter of the Harlem Renaissance art movement. Mason provided Hurston with travel expenses and the 16mm camera to capture her evocative documentary footage. Although the footage photographed by Hurston was to be spliced together into a documentary, this never occurred.

Finding Tea Cake: An Imagined Black Feminist Manhood

Finding Tea Cake: An Imagined Black Feminist Manhood
by Mark Anthony Neal

Vergible Wood aka Tea Cake is one of the most endearing Black male characters in African-American literature. Tea Cake was the third husband of Janie, the heroine of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Readers identify with Tea Cake, in part because he was an everyday man—willing to put in a hard day’s work, playful, thoughtful and at times tender with Janie. I suppose there are many who saw a little of Tea Cake in their Black fathers and may even see Tea Cake in the working class men who struggle in contemporary Black America. I’d like to argue though that there was much more to Tea Cake—that perhaps Tea Cake was a metaphor, a Black folk hero really, for an imagined Black feminist manhood.

In the introduction to the volume Traps: African-American Men on Gender and Sexuality, co-editor Rudolph Byrd (with Beverly Guy Sheftall), identifies High John de Conqueror, a black folklore hero, as a model for Black masculinity. Specifically Byrd is drawn to Zora Neale Hurston’s conceptualization of High John De Conquer, originally published in 1943 and collected in the book The Sanctified Church (1981). According to Byrd, High John serves as an “example of courage, hope, the regenerative powers of song, love and the spirit…a powerful figure who symbolizes the potentialities of Black people and the potentialities of a liberated and liberating Black masculinity.” (5) As Hurston describes him, “Old John, High John could beat the unbeatable. He was top-superior to the whole mess of sorrow. He could beat it all, and what made it so cool, finish it off with a laugh…Distance and the impossible had no power over High John de Conquer.” (70) High John was a mythical figure—“there is no established picture of what sort of looking-man this High John de Conquer was”—“who done teached the black folks so they knowed a hundred years ahead of time that freedom was coming.” The importance of a figure like High John de Conqueror resides in the belief, as Byrd writes, that “it is out of this rich field of Black expression that we have fashioned not only a theory of African American literary tradition (signifying) as well as a theory of Black feminism (womanism), but also many of the art forms and life-sustaining traditions of African-American culture.” (3)

Byrd’s use of folklore to highlight the contemporary crisis of black masculinity—“a progressive mode of Black masculinity is needed to counter what is nothing less than the new species of slavery that shackles so many of us”—raises the question of what other folk heroes might be recovered in the service of creating progressive models of Black masculinity. Perhaps such a figure exists—again in the work of Zora Neale Hurston—with the character of Tea Cake, a twenty-something, working-class, happy-go lucky Black man, whose literary presence takes into account the realities of working class life for many Black men.

Janie meets Tea Cake after the death of her second husband Jody Starks, a local businessman in Eatonville, Fl, who left her with a relative fortune for a Black woman in the early 20th century. Tea Cake literally drifts into Janie’s general store (left to her by her dead husband) and immediately becomes a curiosity to her despite their age difference: Janie is in her early 40s and Tea Cake is in his mid-20s. Janie and Teacake’s love affair—and how bold of Hurston capture such (Black) passion and eroticism in the 1930s—becomes a town controversy, less because of their age difference and more so because of Tea Cake’s stature, or rather, lack of social standing. Most of Janie’s friends and acquaintances dismissed Tea Cake as little more than an interloper, desiring access to Janie’s money (“Dat long-legged Tea cake ain’t got doodley squat”). But Janie saw beyond Tea Cake’s youth, lack of money and cavalier attitude (perhaps best captured by his gambling addiction or hustle, depending on your vantage), in large part because of Tea Cake’s ability to be attentive—not simply in the way that one is attentive to someone that they are attracted to—but attentive to the womanist reality that was Janie’s life. To that point there’s a simply lovely passage in the novel where Janie wakes from a nap as Tea Cake combs her hair and she ask “Whut good do combin’ mah hair do you?” and Tea Cake responds “It’s mine too…it feels jus’ lak underneath uh dove’s wing next to mah face” (103)



Tea Cake’s desire to touch Janie’s hair is in stark contrast to Janie’s second husband, Jody Starks, who saw his wife as little more than a paragon to his performance of Black Middle Class respectability. Despite her higher quality of life with Starks—relative few African-American women had the luxury of not working in the early 20th century—Janie was constrained and limited, by the gender conventions of the day. Though Tea Cake held very traditional ideas about gender—his occasional hitting of Janie is more than troubling, though Janie regularly met his force with her own, as was tragically the case at the end of the novel—his views were fluid and malleable. Tea Cake engaged Janie in activities that many deemed male pursuits such as hunting, fishing and playing checkers on the porch. It was during their first meeting that Tea Cake sat with Janie across the checker board as she quipped “De men folks treasures de game round heah. Ah just ain’t never learnt how.” (95) Tea Cake’s desire to take Janie hunting with him represented his own ambivalences about the rigid gender roles of the era. As Hurston writes, Janie “got to be a better shot than Tea Cake. They’d go out any late afternoon and come back loaded down with game” highlighting how the couple shared some of the domestic labor. (131)

It is perhaps easy to read Tea Cake’s willingness to grant Janie access to masculine spaces as a gesture towards the realization of feminist possibilities for Black women in the post World War I period. Tea Cake’s desire to cultivate meaningful intimate public and private spaces for he and Janie to share—this is ultimately what the hunting and fishing trips were about—was often undermined by his natural instinct (a product of the era that produced him) to protect Janie. The level of Tea Cake’s commitment to perform a traditional Black masculinity seemed tethered to his financial stability; when he was working the fields and making money gambling and hosting parties at the jook, he pressed Janie to stay at home and “rest.” Nevertheless Tea Cake reads as progressive in opposition to traditional gender politics within Black communities and institutions and the larger society during the era.

In her essay “Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Howard University Professor Jennifer Jordan writes, “Ultimately, Janie’s quest for excitement and pleasure in the Florida Everglades does not lead to an independent, self-fulfilled womanhood. She never learns to shape her destiny by making her own choices…she is dependent upon [Tea Cake] for those things she craves—adventure, play, and erotic love.” (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 1988) Readers never get the opportunity to find out how Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship would develop as Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog late in the novel (as he tries to save Janie from drowning) and was well on his way to dying from the affliction, when Janie shoots him in an act of self-defense. The rabid dog becomes a useful metaphor for the challenges of realizing a progressive Black manhood, in light of the realities of anti-Black racism, poverty and white supremacy. But, as Jordan argues, “Tea Cake’s death allows Janie to hold on to her paradise and to dream of a perfect love. She can choose to remember the passion and the good times rather than sickness, death, the return of racism.” (110) In this regard, Tea Cake exist as a literal fantasy of the possibilities—unrealized in Hurston’s novel—of a Black Feminist Manhood.

As a folk hero, Tea Cake was a product of Hurston’s imagination (and the communities that produced her) and ultimately shaped by the gender dynamics of the era that produced Their Eyes Were Watching God. There was simply no language to describe the potential of a Black Feminist Manhood in the social and political world that Hurston and many Black writers navigated at the time. Indeed Hurston, who died in 1960, might not have been able to imagine the generations of Black Feminists (Womanists) who came after her like Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and the women who comprised the Combahee River Collective. Certainly she could have never imagined Black male feminist such as Gary L. Lemons, Kevin Powell, David Ikard, Michael Awkward, Byron Hurt, Quentin Walcott and Eric Darnell Pritchard.



Hurston’s gestures towards a progressive Black gender politics, in concert with the lack of available language for her to fully represent a Black feminist manhood, makes the character of Tea Cake a useful vessel for us to dare imagine or dream what that Black feminist manhood might look like today. Critical to having Tea Cake serve this role is understanding that his allusions to a Black feminist manhood were unnamed and unspoken—there was no Black feminist discourse (in the way that we’ve recognized that discourse since the late 1960s) that Tea Cake or Hurston could have claimed. Thus Tea Cake’s Black feminist manhood is organic and implicit, not unlike the everyday Black feminist behavior that Aaronette White examines in her new edited volume African Americans Doing Feminism: Putting Theory into Everyday Practice (2010). A professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, White writes in the book’s introduction about a feminism that is “practical” and “recognizes that there is an imbalance of power between men and women in our society and acts publicly and privately in ways to correct that imbalance.” (1). As White further queries, “How can we make feminism work in our lives?”

Tea Cake would have never called himself a feminist, but Tea Cake embodied the possibilities of a Black feminist manhood, one that time and maturity might have allowed him to fully embrace. Tea Cake clearly didn’t look the part, but how many Tea Cakes are walking the streets of our communities today, who would never call themselves feminist and might not even know how the word has meaning to their own lives, but in their everyday practices—from parenting, supporting the women in their lives and community involvement—gesture towards a Black Feminist Manhood?

Wither Black History?

John Hope Franklin @ the University of Rochester in 1953

from The Loop

Black History is More Important Than Ever
by Mark Anthony Neal

he election of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President has accelerated conversations in this country about the significance of race. For those who thought that the country had already made significant racial gains, President Obama’s election was just confirmation. For many others, the election of the first Black president means little to those who lack the opportunity and privilege that President Obama was afforded.

As the debates rage on with regards to whether or not we live in a post-race society, it is perhaps legitimate to wonder about the significance of Black History, as we celebrate the first Black History Month in this country after the election of the first Black head of state.

According to a logic that suggests the country has transcended the limitations of race, it would seem there should be no use for the study of Black History and by extension, institutions such as African-American Studies departments and black cultural centers.

But that logic largely works only for those who never viewed the study of Black History as a serious enterprise and only as a feel-good endeavor designed to enhance the self-esteem of African-American youth. And while there is great pride to be taken in the learning of so many black “firsts,” Black History and the field of African-American/Black Studies is so much more than that.

Read the Full Essay @