Remembering Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was a rare bird. A rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno—“a rare bird on this earth, similar to a black swan,” in Juvenal’s phrase—whose larger-than-life persona was a fabulous concoction of myth and reality. Virtually from the moment she emerged from obscurity as a Southern writer and anthropologist to a published author, she was recognized as a singular talent. But, as her New York publishers and patrons soon learned, she was a talent whose mercurial energies could not easily be confined within safe, liberal channels. She had no patience for the posturing about “black consciousness” by Harlem’s literary and intellectual elite—those she dubbed the “Nigeratti.” Neither had she any compunction about calling out the often-hypocritical racism of white Northerners who pretended to be friends of the Negro.