What Zora Means to Me

When Zora Neale Hurston ’28 stepped onto Barnard’s campus in 1925, she did so as its only Black scholar. She had arrived in New York with, she wrote, “$1.50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope.”

That year, she transferred from Howard University and enrolled at Barnard. In her “Record of Freshman Interest” for the College, she wrote that she planned to earn some of her college expenses by “perhaps [selling] a manuscript or two.”

A century later, hundreds more Barnard students have been inspired by Hurston’s legacy and grit and continue to carry her torch with them throughout their lives and careers. Her influence also extends to staff and faculty who have used her novels, essays, and plays to educate the next generation of scholars.

In January, the College hosted the Zora Neale Hurston Summit, organized and led by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust. The two-day event was a celebration of Hurston’s centennial anniversary and of her ongoing cultural impact — one that was keenly observed in a 1946 Barnard Magazine profile, describing her as “one of Barnard’s most distinguished alumnae.”

To honor Hurston’s milestone anniversary and her legacy, we’ve asked members of the Barnard community — writers, artists, scholars, and more — to share with us how the writer, anthropologist, and American folklorist has informed and inspired them. —N. Jamiyla Chisholm and Nicole Anderson

 

Nina Sharma ’05, author, essayist, and humor writer

Barnard doesn’t hold her archival materials, only a few documents. I click the link marked “class photograph,” showing the Class of 1927 in front of Barnard Hall, spread across three stone pillars. I follow the direction to find her: “Back center left, partially obscured by tree.” This is funny to me. The woman who, as Alice Walker writes, walked into a room “full of her competitors” yelling the name of her play “COLOR..R. R STRUCK..K.K!”? Who wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in just seven weeks? Who was, as Margo Jefferson says, “bold enough to create new forms by honoring and violating old ones"? Who saw herself as “cosmic”? That Zora Neale Hurston? Behind a tree?

Now I see her. The lone Black woman in a “creamy sea,” as she once referred to Barnard. Her face angled slightly, a smile more thoughtful, more aware of the camera than, say, the grin of the white woman above her. I dare you: Find me. We are forever finding her.

The summer I read Their Eyes, my NYC heat meeting her Florida, I kept a file of quotes, not for any project but for pleasure. In her work, I found a compass of my own for my memoir, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown. I found the bravery of writing a love story that is also a story of self-love, of confronting anti-Black racism, of personal and collective identity, a love story that reveals love to be a complicated, beautiful, monstropolous old thing. 

Shannon Harris ’01, actor, writer, and filmmaker 

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” —Janie, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston is included in what I refer to as my “pantheon,” a group of mainly Black women — some who have passed on and some who are still with us — with whom I feel a deep affinity. Via their work or what is publicly known about their lives, women like Hurston, Ntozake Shange ’70, Toni Morrison, and Grace Jones inspire, empower, and affirm me in the way that I’ve chosen for myself: my own. What a pleasant and meaningful surprise it was to learn after attending Barnard that Hurston was its first Black alum. Kismet! By that time, I’d read Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school, yet when I reread it in my thirties, it hit me so profoundly that it was like reading it for the first time. Having also read her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, by then, I’d met kindred spirits in both Janie and Hurston: women who unapologetically and gloriously lived — valleys, and peaks, and in between — on their own terms, at times in history that were especially fraught for Black women to do so.

I am profoundly grateful for the trail that Zora Neale Hurston blazed, for the example that she set, which I proudly follow, as both a Barnard alum and a Black woman, in and of the world at large.

Nia Ashley ’16, writer, producer, and media artist

To me, Zora Neale Hurston is THE Barnard Woman.

An artist, a scholar, a pioneer, and an entrepreneur, Hurston set the standard to which all Barnard women should aspire. She applied her academic interests, as a mother of modern anthropology, to her creative pursuits and transformed American fiction. She was charismatic and bold and refused to be limited by her race or gender. She cared about her community and her heritage and used every tool at her disposal to make their voices heard.

Zora Neale Hurston sought the truth and was kind enough to report her findings. Over the past two years, for my project “Black at Barnard 1925-2025,” I’ve been lucky to interview many other Barnard women who live up to that standard — decades of Black alumnae whose activism, scholarship, creativity, and excellence shine in everything they do. They remind me that every path I walk was started long before I took my first step; it’s up to me to tread new ground.

Progress is a relay race. As I reach for the baton, I see 100 years of Black women running behind me, and Zora at the starting line with a pistol.

Monica L. Miller, chair of Africana Studies; Instructor: Zora Neale Hurston: A Writing Life 

The main takeaway from my class on Hurston, a sentiment that I think my students and I shared, is that Hurston was simultaneously a completely ordinary person — who experienced love, loss, joy, jealousy, anger — and also a remarkable woman who powered her way through some very difficult personal and professional situations. She was prescient, understanding before so many other people the importance of recognizing Black folk culture and expressive language, not only to preserve it but because this culture and language was living and changing, a part of the past and futurity, as Black people navigated modernity. Doing this meant that she was often on the edge of what was acceptable for a young, Black, working-class woman from the South. She handled this with more grace than not, but she was not perfect, which was difficult and heartening to see. I think so much more about Hurston’s humanity than her craft or her ambition after having read her with my students.

Ayana Byrd ’95, author, journalist, and screenwriter

Other than the pride that came from knowing we would share an alma mater, I was not significantly impacted by Zora Neale Hurston while I was a Barnard student. Yet, after I graduated, when the realities of life outside of the Morningside Heights gates set in, I often turned to her legacy when I needed an unwavering source of empowerment.

The first time I read Their Eyes Were Watching God for myself, and not for a course grade, coincided with when I was grappling with whether to leave my steady job to write a book about Black women, beauty culture, and hair — not a popular topic in 1997. Hurston’s book and my book seemed unrelated until I got to the last page of hers and sat in stunned awe of what I’d just read. It was not just the beauty in how she told the story of Janie Starks becoming her own woman. It was that I imagined that in 1937, the year the novel was published, few were encouraging Hurston to write an anthropological, folkloric, Black feminist, coming-of-age, self-love story. And yet she did. It showed me the power of doing what you want to do, even when the institutions, the systems, the critics are telling you that no one cares. “Trust your voice, trust yourself and the book,” Zora told me. And I did, as I decided what kind of storyteller I wanted to be.

I now live an ocean away from Barnard, in Lisbon, Portugal. And of the few books I shipped here, Their Eyes was one. It has remained my touchstone when I am not sure of my own voice. In my indecision, I search for Zora’s confidence. It tells me, loudly, to listen to myself.

Alice Reagan, Professor of Professional Practice, Theatre Department; Instructor: Zora Neale Hurston & Black Performance 

What’s been most exciting to me as I’ve studied and taught Zora Neale Hurston’s plays this semester has been her vision of a total theatre. Her plays include not only psychological acuity, wry humor, and poetic Black vernacular language but music, singing, and dance — so much dance! While Hurston is primarily known as a novelist and essayist, she tried for decades to get her plays in front of audiences. The anthropologist in her recognized, I think, that the most direct way to share her deep love and knowledge of Black life was to embody it — unadulterated and authentically — in front of a live audience.

Hurston intimates in many of her stage directions that she hoped the audience would participate in the musical portions of her plays. She imagined a theatre that would spill from the stage, ignite the audience, and rock the foundations of what we think of as performance divided strictly between performer and viewer. The few photos we have of Hurston herself performing folk dances show a joyous woman, unafraid to try an awkward move, smiling and encouraging those around her. I love those photos; Hurston wrote with her whole body. Most of Hurston’s plays have sadly never been produced. It’s tantalizing to think what she would have discovered and accomplished as a director of her own work. How might her ideas for the stage have grown, changed, and deepened if she had had access to resources to produce her plays?

Asali Solomon ’95, professor, author, and novelist 

I first became acquainted with Zora Neale Hurston in a West Philadelphia kitchen in the 1980s. There, during a hair washing and detangling session, my mother told me the entire story of Their Eyes Were Watching God as if it were an important historical event or crucial family lore. I have a visceral memory of my head hanging over the kitchen sink as I listened, rapt, to a tale that had everything: romance, hurricanes, rabies, the best deathbed dressing-down scene ever written. When I later read the book as a teenager, it was coming home to my kitchen, where, I should mention, we had a framed clipping of Zora captioned with her cheeky explanation to a police officer who’d apprehended her for jaywalking — she claimed to cross on red because white people were crossing on green.

Despite Zora’s Solomon family bona fides, my 11th grade English teacher ruled Hurston out as a research paper topic, saying, “I don’t know that she’s outstanding enough.” I knew he was wrong, but it took me years to understand that my mother’s canon — which also included Morrison, Walker (who championed Zora and brought her back from literary obscurity), Bambara, Sanchez, Clifton — was not the canon. But Zora Neale Hurston, writer, humorist, anthropologist, traveler, world-class s**t talker, was always her own canon. She has always been and continues to be my favorite boast about Barnard and the original star in a galaxy of Black women writer alums (Shange, Danticat, Gumbs, and many more) bathing us in warm and sharp light, making stories good enough to share in the kitchen. 

Sharon D. Johnson ’85, screenwriter, depth psychologist, dream educator, and scholar

There is a version of an African proverb that tells us, “As long as you speak my name, I shall live forever.”

In August 1973, Alice Walker stood in the segregated Fort Pierce, Florida, cemetery Garden of Heavenly Rest, determined to intuit the unmarked place where Zora Neale Hurston’s body was buried. She called out, “Zora!” Since that day, Black women in particular have been speaking Hurston’s name. The first time I spoke it was in the Barnard library during my senior year. It was Black History Month, and at the checkout counter, I found bookmarks imprinted with names of Black women writers. I was familiar with all of the names except for one: Zora Neale Hurston. I immediately searched for any of her books in the Columbia University bookstore, where I was working at the time. I found, and purchased, the only two in stock: Dust Tracks on a Road and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Forty years later, I am still reading, discovering, rereading, writing, and speaking about Zora. Speaking her name.

Author Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall, in her book Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston: Beyond the Literary Icon, examines the concept of “Hurstonism,” the “mass attention given to Zora Neale Hurston.” This attention, she proposes, overshadows Zora’s work as an anthropologist. However, Zora was clear about the primacy of her fiction writing and the subsequence of her anthropological work in service to it. Fiction alchemizes the time- and place-bound qualia of anthropology into timeless mythopoesis. Zora considered her own existence this way, writing, “The cosmic Zora emerges.... I am the eternal feminine.”

Each time we follow Alice Walker’s example and call Zora’s name, we say to her: You shall not die again! 

Zora! I continue to speak your name.

Martha Tenney, director of Barnard Archives & Special Collections 

Researchers are sometimes disappointed that there is relatively little at the Barnard Archives that relates directly to Hurston, and this impacts my work in two major ways: First, in teaching and working with researchers, I try to talk honestly about the lack of records here, to productively discuss archival absences, and to place this gap within the context of Barnard’s discriminatory history and the lack of care that Barnard’s administration showed for Hurston’s legacy until Alice Walker revived interest in her career. Second, this historical lack of care for Hurston motivates me to make repair in the work that we do in the Archives, by dedicating resources to Black students and alumnae who want to share their records and tell their own stories — as with Nia Ashley’s project and acquisitions of Ntozake Shange’s archive — and supporting scholars of Barnard’s incredible Black history, such as Corinth Jackson ’20 and her “Black at Barnard” project, in producing valuable research.

One thing I’ve understood from scholarship on Hurston’s work as an anthropologist is that her decision to go back to a place she was from for fieldwork, and to negotiate her insider/outsider relationship to her subjects, was groundbreaking at the time. Trusting in her own expertise and valuing her familiarity challenged dominant modes of research at the time, and there’s something to be learned here about archives, too. Students can and should bring their own experiences to archival research, to documenting their own lives, and to the archival work they do, whether that’s in their own families and communities or for an institution like Barnard.