Zora & Me

I had the great privilege to visit a national landmark this past week while on our honeymoon. We were in Kissimmee, FL, and traveled twenty minutes north to the small town of Eatonville (just north of Orlando) to visit the Zora Neal Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts.

I have been a fan of Hurston since high school when in English class we read her most famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. It may sound cliche, but this novel might have just changed my life. Aside from seeing black characters not simply as props, her writing depicts authentic characters and African American dialect that I grew up around my entire life living in South Carolina.

It was not until my wife and I visited the museum that I realized how much of an influence Hurston has on my writing. Honestly, I had not read the Their Eyes for 15 years, but apparently some part of me retained Hurston's allegorical writing style and her use of Southern vernacular. I did not pattern my writing after Hurston, but the dialogue and use of symbols and rural imagery clearly suggests her as one of my writing influences.


More intensely, I can see that Hurston's themes and motifs abide comfortably in the bosom of my writing. Once I became enlightened by the rest of her works at the museum, I realized that both she and I use allegory in our writing. Her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain is based on the Biblical story of Moses. Speaking of which, Hurston also used Biblical motifs unsparingly in her characters and her themes. In her first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine, the main character John Pearson becomes a preacher who struggles with the lusts of the flesh. In my upcoming novel City of David (which allegorically can be related to the Biblical giant slayer and king of Israel) the main character David Johns reaps the consequences from similar temptations as John Pearson.



Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston's autobiography

Finally, Hurston is a master at infusing her novels with autobiographical text. She illustrates the town of Eatonville, where she lived as a young girl, in several of her works, including Their Eyes Were Watching God in which she draws from a past relationship to manifest the compelling love affair of Janie and Tea Cake. She also depicts the relationship between her father and mother in Jonah's Gourd Vine. Similarly, my novel City of David exhibits elements of my experiences in college and marriage.

I was completely floored and humbly inspired when I realized these similarities existed between my writing and that of Zora Neale Hurston. She has influenced the great writers of our time such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison. Countless other authors will testify to Hurston influencing their works. I could be discouraged that someone else has already written in the style that I am attempting to now. Nonetheless, I remain encouraged that someone has already gone before me and has successfully laid a marvelous blueprint for the literary fiction I am trying to write. I can now learn from her victories and her setbacks in order to make my career as a writer a fulfilling one. I am grateful and eager to learn all I can from Hurston's life and writing. It is a wonderful thing to belong to a family tree whose branches somewhere from the roots connect Zora to me.