Zora Neale Hurston

Folklore and Music

Folklore is the boiled-down juice of human living. It does not belong to any special time, place, nor people. No country is so primitive that it has no lore, no country has yet become so civilized that no folklore is being made within its boundaries. Folklore in Florida is still in the making. Folk tunes, tales, and characters are still emerging from the lush glades of primitive imagination before they can be finally drained by formal education and mechanical inventions.

from Herod the Great

Starting in the 1940s, Hurston began work on a novel about Herod the Great, the man who supposedly ordered the deaths of many children in an effort to kill the Christ-child, as the Gospel of Matthew records. Hurston considered the New Testament version of the story to be a blatant distortion of Herod’s personal character, religious orientation, and political philosophy. Therefore, in her Herod novel, she wanted to give readers a more accurate picture of the historical Herod, which would correct the New Testament. In this Introduction to her Herod novel, Hurston explains why her project would not only shed more accurate light on the actual religious, cultural, and political environment of Herod, but also illuminate the religious politics of the twentieth-century West, a politics that had its origin in the Christian anti-Semitism that led to the demonization of Herod.

Florida's Migrant Farm Labor

You, the favored inhabitants of the Sun Gods Golden Land of pearl-made beaches, conversing palms, persuasive breezes, of little giggling waves which, surprising you on the seashore seeking amusement, steal up and deposit gifts of tinted shells and pebbles at your feet, then dance away to gather more for you; you for whom the more than stately pleasure domes that far surpass the most extravagant dreams of Kubla Khan in Xanadu have been built how aware are you of the subterranean force which flows beneath your fabulous mansions? Who knows? Perhaps it is symbolic that the area in Florida which is world famous for its display of extreme wealth, glamour and pleasurepursuit, is also the area where Floridas greatest industry agriculture reaches a very high peak. And under the states

Mules and Men

475,863,000 agricultural take at farm level of 1957 flows the plankton-rich stream of migrant labor. This nameless, faceless force makes possible Floridas new approach to its burgeoning agriculture. Only when the unusual occurs like destructive freezes of the past season, is public attention called to this underground flow which nevertheless, affects powerfully the economics of, and everybody who, lives in this green-and-gold hot-house of the nation.