Zora Neale Hurston Is for Everyone

They felt otherworldly, my morning runs in the early days of the pandemic in March 2020. They felt almost like the aftertimes. There were hardly any signs of life in Washington, D.C., as I ran in the same area where Zora Neale Hurston had started her literary run a century ago.

Most known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston, a product of rural central Florida who emerged in the 1920s as one of the lights of the Harlem Renaissance, is now considered one of the greatest American creators of the 20th century. A folklorist, an anthropologist, a short-story writer, a filmmaker, a novelist, and an essayist—in many ways she captured the many ways of life. She captured signs of everyday Black life brazenly thrusting forth in love and joy despite the murderous and miserable shadows of racism cast over Black lives a century ago.

“I am not tragically colored,” Hurston wrote in 1928. “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.”

Is this why whenever