X-Ray, The (her sorority annuals), two volumes.
A Young Zora Neale Hurston Makes Her Sorority Debut
Four Previously Unrecorded Texts
Hurston, Zora Neale, contributor. The Ex-Ray, Official Publication of Zeta Phi-Beta Sorority. [Brooklyn: Privately Printed], December 1925.
Together with:
The Ex-Ray, Official Publication of Zeta Phi-Beta Sorority. [Brooklyn: Privately Printed], December 1926.
2 vols., 8vo.; grey stapled wrappers; fine.
Two black sorority annuals, publishing three previously unrecorded examples of Hurston’s early creative writing. The 1925 annual prints a story, “Under The Bridge” (pp. 4-8); a short proto-feminist piece, “The Ten Commandments of Charm” (p. 22); and “Noses” (p. 22-23), a sketch of the cultural implications of that appendage. A brief biographical sketch of Hurston is also provided: “Student at Barnard, Secretary to Fannie Hurst, [and] a Prize Winner in ‘Opportunity’ Contest.” The second annual contains a two-act play entitled, “Spears” (pp. 9-12).
“Under the Bridge,” among the earliest documented Hurston stories, is a poignant thumbnail portrait of a family triangle: Luke, approaching 60, has recently married Vangie, barely 20, who falls in love with Artie, Luke’s 22-year-old son from his first marriage. Luke procures a “hand,” or, magical potion, in the hope of preventing the consummation of their desires. The story, set in Hurston’s native Florida and told in a dialect of the black rural South, explores the strength of various types of love, and comments more on generational differences than on racial concerns.
In “Spears,” as in “Under the Bridge,” Hurston explores gender and generational issues, this time in the setting of the Lualhala warrior-ruled society in Africa, on the brink of famine. The women of Lualhala have no voice and, though the warriors pride themselves on having never sold their women to an enemy, the important role the wives and daughters play in maintaining the tribe is a silent one. Ultimately the King’s daughter is allowed to speak, and she contributes significantly to the resolution of the play with her intelligence, courage and determination. Hurston’s interest in folklore, regionalism, and black history are evinced in this play, which foreshadows much of her later work on Haitian voodoo rituals. Throughout all the pieces, the amateur production level of these publications is evinced by typographical errors. These are most humorous in “Spears,” in which “Lualhala” is given several alternate spellings, and most unfortunate in this case as well: one line on page 9 has been printed twice, and at least one line, omitted.
“The Ten Commandments of Charm” is a much lighter piece, in which Hurston, tongue-in-cheek, enumerates the feminine rules of romantic survival. She explains to her audience, in biblical format, the rules they must follow to secure the happiness of their men and, it follows, the longevity of their relationships. Among the more snidely self-effacing of her commandments is the third: “Forget not the first law of conversation, which is, Thou shalt not talk about thyself; nor the last law, which is, Help every man to express himself brilliantly! Thus shalt thou be accounted a ‘fascinating conversationalist,’ though thou utterest not a single word.” Hurston also forbids women to write or call their beaux too often, lest they be labeled “Pest,” or cause a man “sentimental indigestion” as “lobster after the dessert”—she insists that “it requireth six men all very much in love to write as many letters as one damsel who is only a little in love.” She forbids “curiosity,” on the grounds that it is “a hobble on the feet of Love.” On Hurston’s “thou shall” list are the maintenance of constant cheerfulness, amusement and exhibitions of femininity.
Hurston follows the Commandments with “Noses,” a piece that deals, implicitly, with ethnicity and race. It begins with the comic scene of Mark Anthony lecturing Cleopatra: “there are noses and nosesand even you perfect one have a nose.” The paragraphs which follow recount “the uses of the nose”—which range from preventing “the lips from running up to the forehead” to “administering the snub”—and “the kinds of noses.” Among the types of noses, Hurston includes Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Jewish, before reaching her conclusion: “At last we stand before the nose of Ethiopia. No lucre loving beak is this, no conquest seeking snout; a nose that squats calmly upon its face, singing and dreaming and dreaming and singing ad infinitum.”
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida—the self-governing all-black town which would serve as the setting for the conclusion of Their Eyes Were Watching God, her fictional masterpiece—in 1901. She was one of eight children born to manual laborers, and she worked as a field hand from a young age. After her mother’s death in 1904 (described movingly in Hurston’s memoir Dust Tracks on a Road), Hurston lived with various relatives and supported herself by taking menial jobs. She attended high school and put herself through two years at Howard University (1918-19), where she studied with Alain Locke and had her first short fiction published in the campus literary magazine—and where she joined the Howard chapter of Zeta Phi Beta.
In January 1925 Hurston moved to New York, where she was befriended by several black literary notables and acquired what patronage she could through best-selling writer Fannie Hurst and philanthropist Mrs. Charlotte Louis Vandervere Quick Mason. Captivated by the intricacies and daily rituals of black American urban life, Hurston expanded her writing to include non-fiction, initiating a life-long study of black folklore and anthropology. She briefly attended Barnard College and then entered the Ph.D. program in anthropology at Columbia, where her work came to the attention of Franz Boas. In 1928 Hurston was awarded the first of several Guggenheim Fellowships, which allowed her to tour the American south collecting Negro folklore and oral histories. Follow-up funds (from Guggenheim, from the Rosenwald fund, and from the ever steady Mrs. Mason) allowed her to travel to the black West Indies, to Jamaica, and to Haiti, where she lived from September 1936 till March 1937 and studied obeah, “black magic.”
The yearlong sojourn in Haiti was an energizing and productive stretch for Hurston, who simultaneously conducted anthropological investigations, took notes for a book on magic practices, and conceptualized, began and completed the manuscript for Their Eyes Were Watching God. Never again would she create at so dynamic a pace. When she returned to the United States in 1937 Hurston was discouraged by the poor reviews of Their Eyes (published September 18, 1937) and with the lack of job opportunities. She dropped out of the doctoral program at Columbia for lack of funds, but did complete her written study of obeah, published under the title Tell My Horse in 1938; her final piece of academic writing, The Florida Negro, partially funded by Hurston’s work for the 1938 Federal Writer’s Project, has never been published.
After Columbia, Hurston lead an unsettled and nomadic life. Twice married and divorced, she lived primarily alone in the American rural south, making ends meet as a teacher, a librarian, and eventually as a maid (she was working as a live-in housekeeper when her last book appeared). Her later literary efforts included her 1939 work Moses, Man of the Mountain, a re-telling of the Moses myth in the black vernacular; her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road; and her “white” novel (so labeled because it was set entirely in a non-black community), Seraph on the Sewanee. Just one month prior to Sewanee’s publication in October 1948, Hurston underwent a harrowing experience when she was publicly (and apparently falsely) charged with molesting a 10-year-old boy, the son of an acquaintance.
Although the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, the stigma of the scandal—during which she was briefly jailed, and which was widely, and sensationally, reported in the black press—stayed with her always. Hurston retreated from the literary life, moved back to Eatonville, Florida, and spent her last years in poverty and disgrace. She died in a South Florida welfare home in January 1960.
Hurston’s books stayed out of print from the time of their original publication until the late 1970s, when interest in her by influential forces in women’s and black studies (Alice Walker, The Feminist Press, critics Mary Helen Washington and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) encouraged various small presses to reprint her works. The Feminist Press’s collected edition of Hurston’s short writings, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing (first published in 1979), has been reissued so often that it is, to this day, the publisher’s best-selling title. There is a severe dearth of relevant materials documenting Hurston’s formative years and literary development, though she has come almost single-handedly to represent the modern-day renaissance in black and feminist literary scholarship. These two annuals were procured by a New York collector of African-Americana, Wyatt Day, who discovered them among a trove of Black fraternity and sorority material, he reports, “mostly associated with Howard University, dating from about 1921 to 1930.” They contribute significantly to our understanding of Hurston’s canon, providing examples of the seriousness with which she dealt with issues of race and gender at the earliest point of her career, and offering glimpses of her satiric wit, as well. To date, no other copies of either issue are known.
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