Their Eyes Were Watching Zora: Ellen Sebastian's The Sanctified Church honors Zora Neale Hurston. First published in Bay Area Reporter, March 31, 1988, p. 26. © Wendell Ricketts, 1988, 2003. All rights reserved.

"Ah done been in sorrow's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots."

So reflects Lucy Pearson as she lies dying in Jonah's Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, published in 1934. A Barnard- and Columbia University-trained anthropologist, folklorist, critic, and storyteller, Hurston was one of the country's leading black scholars and writers of the 30s and 40s. When she died in the St. Lucie County, Florida, Welfare Home in 1960, however—penniless, her creative powers faded, her work largely neglected—sorrow's kitchen may have seemed the appropriate metaphor for Hurston's life.

     But when Alice Walker went searching for Hurston's grave in 1973, she had an entirely different epitaph in mind. After a long drive through east central Florida, Walker discovered that Hurston lay in an unmarked plot somewhere in an abandoned "colored" cemetery in Ft. Pierce, an undifferentiated acre gone to weeds and ruin.

     Nevertheless determined to honor the woman she had come to think of as her aunt, Walker bought a tombstone and had it placed, among the high grass and snakes, on the spot that intuition told her was Hurston's likely resting place. The site is dedicated to "Zora Neale Hurston-A Genius of the South."

     But a lonely gravestone was an insufficient monument, and, in 1979, Walker brought out a Pulitzer Prize-winning anthology of Hurston's writings, a book whose title came from Hurston herself. Commenting on a series of photographs Carl Van Vechten had taken of her in the '30s, Hurston wrote to him, "I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive."

     It is "this" Zora, the southern genius, the Zora who loved herself, who is honored in The Sanctified Church, Ellen Sebastian's labor of respect and homage, opening April 5th at Life on the Water Theatre.

     Sanctified Church takes its title from the book of the same name, a collection of tall tales, spiritual beliefs, and sermons that Hurston collected in research throughout rural Florida and Louisiana. Fascinated by the influence of African religion on southern Christianity, Hurston became an avid student and practitioner of vodoun. She saw an analogy between the spiritual possession common in African-based ancestor rituals and the custom in "sanctified" black Baptist churches of "tearing" or "shouting"—a practice most whites know as "holy rolling" or "speaking in tongues." Having grown up in such a tradition (her father was a Baptist preacher) and having spent several years in the West Indies studying vodoun, Hurston was in a position to make the comparison.

     The occasion of Sebastian's Sanctified Church is the 1937 meeting between Hurston and the young white anthropologist (played by Ken Watt) who recorded Hurston's reminiscences for the Library of Congress. As Hurston speaks, she evokes scenes of her childhood in the deep South, of gospel song and almighty oratory from the sanctified church, and of vodoun rites from her travels in Haiti and Jamaica.

     Life on the Water's $90,000 production will include a gospel choir; Afro-Haitian dances choreographed by San Francisco master teacher Blanche Brown; a series of stunning visual and technical effects—and the expertise of Luisah Teish, a vodoun priestess whom Sebastian cast to play Zora Neale.

     Recalls Sebastian, "I knew of Teish from her book, Jambalaya, in which she talks about her connection to Zora. So I called her up and told her that I was auditioning for the part of Zora. And Teish said, 'Don't audition anybody else. I am Zora Neale Hurston.' She was that intense about it."

     Although Teish is not an actress by profession, Sebastian notes, "she brings a presence to the stage that no one else could. The technique of acting can be learned in six to ten weeks, but that kind of phenomenal personality comes only from a lifetime."

     Teish's and Sebastian's fascination with Hurston is by no means curious, for the details of Hurston's life are as enticing as they are incomplete. "As much as I've read about her," says Sebastian, "there's still a lot I don't know. But she was an amazing woman. In ways, I feel like I've been having an intense love affair with her for years."

     Although Hurston became the foremost authority on Negro folklore in America and was, throughout her adult life, deadly earnest about her work, she never discouraged the romantic and rather cavalier image of herself that grew out of her collecting expeditions—that of a striking woman in a beret, speeding through the back roads of the South in a Chevy coupe and bellowing bawdy drinking songs, a pearl-handled revolver at her side.

     Hurston collected stories that would, in the hands of a Bruno Bettelheim or a Joseph Campbell, have been considered the fabric of archetype and myth. Hurston's respondents simply called them "lyin' tales." But Hurston recognized them as the sustaining songs of a people downtrodden in every material way. When Hurston refused to see her tale-tellers as degraded by what critic Sterling Brown called "the shadow of poverty, disease, violence, enforced ignorance, and exploitation," however, she was accused of soft-peddling racism. But Hurston considered her work an illumination of the unblemished spirit of the people she met in the bayous and dusty towns of Florida and Louisiana, a revelation of their capacity to survive. That was not enough for her sometimes vicious detractors.

     At the same time, Hurston was profoundly affected by her interactions with a white world that often saw her as a caricature, a "happy darky," an Aunt Jemima; yet she was not averse to cultivating those misconceptions when they resulted in the fellowships and benefactions that were essential to the continuation of her work.

     Late in life she considered an essay, never completed, entitled "Do Colored People Like Colored People?". After years of being accused, by many blacks, of being a "white folks' nigger" who played the shuckin' and singin' minstrel for their entertainment, Hurston might well have answered the question in the negative.

     Hurston rode the crest tide of the Harlem Renaissance, one of the era's "New Negroes." But years later, when black was longer fashionable, she found it impossible to support herself with her writing. Near the end of her life, broke and ailing, Hurston was forced to take a job as a household maid in Miami. Her "true" identity came to light, briefly, when her employer discovered one of Zora's stories published in the Saturday Evening Post.

     But a triumphant Hurston also emerged in her work. Hurston, for example, transcended the tragedy of her mother's early death, an experience she fictionalized in both Jonah's Gourd Vine and in the novel many consider her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She was a woman of a fine and agile mind, an artist who pursued her craft with an awesome sense of purpose and an enviable experience of fulfillment.

     In short, Zora Neale Hurston was buffeted by the same vicissitudes of fate from which we each must carve an identity. Some abandon that task as too difficult and spend their lives feeling they've been fate's plaything, but that was no choice for Hurston. Instead, she sharpened up her oyster knife and got down to the task of whittling. What she made of herself didn't please everyone, but for someone of Hurston's mettle, the only course was to let the splinters fall where they may.