Article on Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras available in Alabama Heritage magazine

In early October of 2023, my book on Zora Neale Hurston’s sojourn in Honduras in the late 1940s will be published. Hurston is best known for being a core member of the Harlem Renaissance, a prolific creative period for black intellectuals, artists and writers. Hurston is also distinguished for being Barnard’s first African American graduate and collector of folklore in the South and Caribbean. She received training at Columbia University as an anthropologist. The knowledge she obtained was often shared with a wider public via her creative pursuits.

While her bestselling 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is well read even today, the Alabama-native died in relative obscurity in 1960.

Prior to her infamously working as a housekeeper on Miami Beach in 1950, she longed to find a Maya ruin on Honduras’s east coast. There is scant evidence about her progress after she arrived in the country, which she said, “has given me back myself,” in May 1947. She stayed eight months.

During this period, she wrote the first draft of Seraph on the Suwanee, her seventh and last book to be published in her lifetime before her departure for New York. There, she faced an accusation that nearly led her to commit suicide. Her passport proved she was in Honduras when the alleged act was said to have occurred. After the charges were dropped, she headed south once more, hoping to return to Honduras. She never made it.

The circumstances under which she traveled to Honduras are offered in my forthcoming book. To preorder this publication, visit websites for Amazon or Johns Hopkins University Press.

Meanwhile, see a preview of the book in an article I wrote for Alabama Heritage magazine’s Spring 2023 issue.

It is with great pride I share this story. I am a native of Florida, the state that Hurston loved. Born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891, she grew up in Eatonville, outside Orlando, the country’s first black township. But via my book and now, this article, I attempt to reclaim Hurston for Alabama, as was done in an interview last year with the Girl Scouts of West Central Alabama.

To buy the Spring 2023 issue, which features my article, go to this website. You may consider purchasing a year’s subscription for a publication that shares the richness of this state.

Stay up to date on my readings and events tied to this book’s publication via my website.

See a video mash up on Hurston’s 1940s trip to Honduras for a talk at Tuscaloosa’s Holt High School in 2022. In it, I invoke rapper-singer Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who, like Hurston, sought emotional refuge in Honduras. Lopes perished in a car accident there in 2002.

The music of Solange Knowles and Nina Simone, which also poses tensions with Hurston’s strength and grief, is also part of the mash up.