She Made a World and Lived In It

Zora Neale Hurston and the Women Who Raised Us

My mother did not quote Zora Neale Hurston in the kitchen on Sunday mornings in Columbus, Ohio. She didn’t have to because she lived her.

My mom was a Black woman who moved through the world like she had somewhere to be and the full right to be there, unapologetic in her opinions, expansive in her love, and utterly unbothered by anyone who had a problem with either.

It wasn’t until I was grown, reading Valerie Boyd’s luminous biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, that I understood what I had been watching all along. My mother was practicing a very old, very particular kind of freedom. Zora had named it first.

This International Women’s Day, I want to talk about Zora. The one who got left out of textbooks, died broke, and got buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. The one the great novelist and short story writer Alice Walker had to go find in that overgrown cemetery in 1973 and mark it with a stone that read: A Genius of the South. The one who gave us, before she was done, some of the most alive prose ever written in the English language.

So let’s talk about Zora Neale Hurston.

Valerie Boyd Went Looking and Found a Universe

Wrapped in Rainbows is not a biography in the dry, dutiful sense. Boyd spent a decade assembling Zora’s life, and what she produced reads less like scholarship and more like resurrection. She tracks Hurston from Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-Black town in America, through the roaring intellectual energy of Harlem in the 1920s, through fieldwork in the swamps of Louisiana collecting folklore that nobody else had the cultural fluency to gather, through the heartbreaks and the betrayals and the creative triumphs, all the way to that unmarked grave.

What Boyd understood, and what makes this book essential, is that Hurston cannot be reduced. She was a novelist, an anthropologist, a playwright, a memoirist, a collector of Black Southern folklore, and a woman who wore turbans and threw parties and fell in love and caused trouble and refused, at every single turn, to perform suffering for the comfort of white audiences or the approval of Black intellectuals who thought she should be angrier, more political, more respectable. Boyd doesn’t sand down those contradictions. She honors them. And in doing so, she gives us a woman who is gloriously, instructively whole.

The Town That Freedom Built

Eatonville Was Her First and Final Teacher

You cannot understand Hurston without taking a dip into Eatonville. Boyd is meticulous on this point. Growing up in a town where Black people owned the land, ran the government, told the stories, and defined the terms of daily life gave Hurston something that most Black Americans of her era were systematically denied: an interior life not organized around whiteness.

She did not grow up watching herself through the eyes of people who diminished her. She grew up on porches where the elders talked in a vernacular so rich it sounded like music, where the folklore carried the full weight of an African diasporic imagination, where being Black was simply the water you swam in, ordinary and extraordinary at once.

That is why, when Hurston later wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God during a seven weeks stretch in Haiti in 1937, the prose felt like it came from somewhere underground and specific. It did because Eatonville was embedded in every sentence.

Boyd traces how Hurston returned to that well again and again throughout her career, most explicitly in Mules and Men, her 1935 collection of Black Southern folklore. What looked to some critics like nostalgia or apolitical navel-gazing was actually radical archival work. Hurston was saying: this culture is worth saving in full. Not as evidence of oppression but of genius.

My Mother, Sunday Mornings, Columbus, Ohio

I grew up watching a Black woman operate with that same defiant wholeness, even if she never used the word.

Columbus, Ohio in the 1970s where I was raised is nothing like Eatonville. But my mother created a home space that functioned the same way: a zone where Black life was not a problem to be explained or a wound to be nursed, but a fact to be celebrated, a thing of beauty, a foundation you stood on.

She read. She had opinions. She dressed like she meant it. She corrected the grammar of my brother along with making sure we presented ourselves well in public amid the same breath. And not because she was worried about what white people thought, but because she believed in the full expression of who you were capable of being.

What Boyd gave me, reading her at middle age, was the language for what I had witnessed. My mother was practicing Hurston. The insistence on joy alongside struggle. The refusal to be only a symbol of suffering. The stubborn, gorgeous insistence on being a full human being in a world that kept offering you smaller options.

Hurston wrote in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road: “I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I’ve stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.”

My mother never quoted that. But she knew it. She lived on that mountain. She made sure I could find my way there.

The Harlem Renaissance Did Not Deserve Her

Here is where Boyd’s biography gets genuinely uncomfortable, in the best way.

The Harlem Renaissance, that magnificent explosion of Black artistic life in the 1920s and 30s, was not universally kind to Hurston.

Richard Wright savaged Their Eyes Were Watching God, calling it minstrel work, accusing her of writing for white audiences.

Langston Hughes, once her collaborator, fell into bitter silence after a dispute over their co-written play Mule Bone. The Black intellectual establishment wanted a literature of protest, of documentation, of righteous fury. Hurston gave them Janie Crawford standing in a pear tree, feeling the bee kiss the blossom, and discovering something about herself in that moment that no one could name for her.

Boyd does not adjudicate this war so much as illuminate it. Hurston was not apolitical. She was deeply, fiercely invested in Black life and Black culture. She simply refused to write as though Black people were only interesting in relation to their oppression. She wanted to write the inside of a life, not the sociological conditions surrounding it. That difference cost her dearly during her lifetime. It is precisely why her legacy endures.

What She Left Us and What It Demands

Hurston died in 1960 in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She had spent her final years in relative obscurity, her books out of print, her reputation diminished, her genius unacknowledged by most of the institutions that later claimed her.

And then Alice Walker wrote an essay. And then Their Eyes Were Watching God came back into print. And then a generation of Black women writers, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker herself, stood up and said: she was the one.

Hurston taught us that Black women’s interior lives were worthy of the full attention of literature. That there was a world inside us as complex and cosmological and worth exploring as anything in Faulkner or Fitzgerald.

Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows is the fullest reckoning with that legacy we have. It demands something from the reader: not just admiration, but application. The question Hurston’s life puts to you is not what do you think of her. The question is whether you have the audacity to take up the same amount of space she did. To refuse the smaller version of yourself that the world keeps offering. To be, as she was, too much for the world’s comfort and completely unbothered about it.

On this International Women’s Day, I am thinking about my mother in Columbus, and I am thinking about Zora on her mountain, wrapped in rainbows, harp and sword in hand.

The beauty is in viewing this image not a metaphor but as an instruction.

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