Read Spunk Program - California Shakespeare Theater

THREE ENCOUNTERS WITH
WHEN
Zora Neale Hurston
started writing in the
1920s, she wanted to
represent how rural societies lived, how they felt and loved
and sought revenge. She set her short story, “Spunk”—a
tale of lust, killing, and supernatural vengeance—in the
Deep South. The basic premise of the story is that a
man desires the wife of another man, and kills him so
as to marry her. Published in 1925, Spunk was awarded
second place in an event staged by Opportunity magazine,
a publication founded three years earlier to support the
work of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists who gave
visibility to black culture, exposing its complications rather
than seeking to eradicate them. Hurston was 34 at the
time, and she would, over a 30-year career, publish four
novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous
short stories, and several essays, articles, and plays.
“Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of
fear,” was the call to action from Hurston, herself a
striking presence in any room, being assertive, funny,
and verbally dexterous. She did grab the broom, and the
dust it stirred up fl ew right out into the faces not just of
white people who discounted black voices, but also of
those who wanted to depict blackness as victimhood.
The picture she painted of black rural society, some felt,
was inappropriately discourteous about social ethics and
behavior, and disdainful in its use of colloquial dialect.
This woman—who’d gone back to school at the age of 26,
claiming to be, and passing for, a 16 year-old(!), and had
earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree—was, they
BY RESIDENT DRAMATURG PHILIPPA KELLY
felt, condescending to her less fortunate rural brothers and
sisters. But Hurston weathered this criticism and thrived
on the controversy, establishing an academy for black
performance, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, working
with anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict,
and writing extensively on voodoo through what she called
“the spy-glass of anthropology.” She researched songs,
dances, tales, and sayings, and much of her focus was on
slavery and the time period immediately following it.
Despite, or perhaps because of, Hurston’s success, in the
1940s she had to face the horror of a false accusation (of
molesting three young boys) made by a supposed friend.
Although she was cleared, Hurston never fully recovered
from the effects of this betrayal and scandal. In 1950, at
the age of 60, she took a job as a maid until she could
afford to begin writing seriously again. But she suffered two
strokes, and in 1959 she died of congestive heart failure
at age 69.
One of the reasons that Hurston didn’t “live on” during the
decades after her death was that she didn’t write in explicitly
political terms in the “protest tradition,” as did Ralph Ellison,
for example, or Richard Wright; and because her controversial
views—such as her belief that segregation is positive because
it sustains black values in a way that integrated classrooms do
not—refused “progressive” models of race and equality.
ALICE WALKER REDISCOVERS ZORA
It wasn’t until 1975, 15 years after her death, that she
reemerged on the public stage, thanks to Alice Walker’s
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