"Wrapped in Rainbows": An Appreciation

Because there is a hole in my education (one of a many), I bought a paperback edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God to fill it.

Because the novel’s setting and dialect were such a shock, I needed more help to appreciate the work than came with the paperback, a forward by Edwidge Danticat, an afterward by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and a brief bio of the author by Valerie Boyd. I therefore checked out Boyd’s full biography, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.

Published in 2003, biography was the result of nearly five years of research and writing. Boyd detailed Hurston’s life from her birth in 1891, her upbringing in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Fla., her literary activity during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and her anthropological explorations of African-American folklore, and her death in 1960 in Florida, where she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Boyd told an interviewer for the online magazine In Motion, “I wanted to give readers a sense of what it was like to be Zora, to walk in her shoes, to live inside her skin. “Because I am a Black Southern woman, I felt very close to Zora, as if I could paint a picture of her life almost from the inside out,” I was so impressed by Boyd’s biography that I was about to write her a fan letter when I read that she died on February 12, 2022 at age 58, much, much too young.

I needed help with Their Eyes Were Watching God because it took a while to adjust to Hurston’s dialogue, which is written in dialect: “You behind a plow!” says Janie Crawford’s suitor. “You ain’t got no mo’ business wid uh plow than un hog is got wit uh holiday! You ain’t got no business cuttin’ up no seed p’taters neither. A pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo’self and eat p’taters dat other folks plant just special for you.”

With Boyd’s deeply researched account of Hurston’s life, it is possible to see—or infer—the elements Hurston incorporated from personal experience in Their Eyes Were Watching God: daily life in Eatonville . . . being raised by her grandmother . . . banter by the locals on the porch of the general store . . . marrying a man younger than herself . . . following him to work in the Everglades. 

Yet Boyd points out, Janie is not Hurston. Janie “is more conventional than Hurston ever was; consequently, she seeks her identity, her selfhood, in the eyes and arms of men. Hurston, on the other hand, sought her identity in her own self, in her work in writing and speaking her mind. Not coincidentally, the capacity to know her own mind—and to speak it—is a large part of what Janie seeks in the novel, and eventually finds.”

With Boyd’s history and explication, Their Eyes Were Watching God became a much richer and satisfying. I was not fighting with Hurston over the dialect and was able to recognize what she was trying to do. And Hurston’s straight writing is marvelous.

Hurston was much more than a one-book wonder. Her life, wrapped in rainbows as it was, was full, fascinating, and ultimately heartbreaking. She was a graduate of Barnard College, a student of anthropologist Franz Boas, a student and practitioner of New Orleans hoodoo and Haitian voodoo. She became one of the most important folklore collectors of her time. She was—until a deplorable rift—a close friend of poet Langston Hughes, and was a friend of actor Ethel Waters, the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, and was briefly secretary to and continued as a friend of best-selling novelist Fannie Hurst. (And who reads Imitation of Life, Back Street, or any one of Hurst’s other seventeen novels these days?)

Wrapped in Rainbows is a superb biography and history of the Harlem Renaissance, of the Great Depression’s effect on writers and artists, and the incipient civil rights movement after WWII. It is fill with revealing anecdotes about Hurston who died in Fort Pierce. FL, in 1960.

Hurston’s writing made a profound impression on writer Alice Walker who managed to locate Hurston’s unmarked grave in 1973 and commissioned a marker for it. I cannot improve on Walker’s comment on the biography, which “will be the standard for years to come. Offering vivid splashes of Zora’s colorful humor, daring individualism, and refreshing insouciance, Boyd has done justice to a dauntless spirit and a heroic life.”