15 - Zora Neale Hurston, folk performance, and the “Margarine Negro”

Summary

I'm going to sit here on this porch chair and prophesy that these are the last days of the know-nothing writers on Negro subjects.

Zora Neale Hurston, “You Don't Know Us Negroes”

We almost lost Zora to the choose-between games played with Black art.

June Jordan, “Notes Toward a Balancing Act of Love and Hatred”

“Magical Zora”

Magical Zora, our truth-telling fore-mother.

Ruth Sheffey, founder, The Zora Neale Hurston Society

When an author's work is taught in colleges, and produced for television (by Oprah Winfrey), and her face graces postage stamps, coffee mugs, calendars, notecards, and refrigerator magnets, it is a safe bet that her status, in popular culture at least, is secure. Because so many of my friends and colleagues have bought them for me, I happen to own a great many Zora Neale Hurston finger puppet refrigerator magnets - complete with floppy hat, purple dress, pearl necklace, and “Magnetic Personalities” data card. Of the four dozen or so figures marketed in the magnet's celebrity series, Hurston is the only one identified by first name alone. This is not insignificant. Hurston has become a national celebrity and a folk heroine, as Sheffey's proclamation, quoted above, attests. Her intimacy with the shared heritage of folk traditions no doubt contributes to this sense that “Zora” is our familiar, someone we can approach on a first-name basis and imagine as our own. But, as I will suggest, there are myriad ironies involved in making Hurston into a folk heroine, not least of them being her own highly complex relation to the folk traditions she documented and referenced in almost everything that she wrote. This chapter, then, returns to some of Hurston's use of the folklore she collected to rethink the ways in which we have imagined her relationship to it.