Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. By Valerie Boyd. (New York and other cities: Scribner, c. 2003. Pp. 527. $30.00, ISBN 0-684-84230-0.)

Scholars awaiting this new life history, the first to appear since Robert E. Hemenway's fine Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana, 1977) helped usher in an unprecedented renaissance, will find more to consider about Hurston's afterlife than her temporal one. Valerie Boyd, an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, dedicates her book to Hurston "for choosing me" before plunging into a text that, by turns, imitates Hurston's voice and Hemenway's prose. Boyd stops short of claiming to channel Hurston (who died in 1960), while alleging to know the secrets she took to her grave. For example, Boyd informs readers that the childhood visions delineated in Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1942), were not mere literary devices but literal prophecies. In one, Hurston had described "a shot-gun built house that needed a new coat of white paint, [which] held torture for me." Boyd breezily interprets: "Sometime around 1914 or 1915--and probably somewhere between Memphis and Jacksonville--Zora went to this foreseen house and lived to tell about it, but never did" (p. 68). That established, Boyd spools an additional page of confident "speculation" that Hurston lived there while engaged "in a pernicious relationship with a physically or emotionally abusive man," probably in "a common-law arrangement" (pp. 68-69).

Boyd's biography is a testament to Hurston's iconic status and the fierce devotion she has inspired posthumously among her most zealous enthusiasts. Symptomatic of the devotee are Boyd's running interjections to defend Hurston against, or to dismiss outright, the myriad criticisms that assailed her. The disconcerting aspects of Hurston's character--her plagiarism, her shameless self-promotion, her falling-out with Langston Hughes over authorship of "Mule Bone," her impetuous disregard for the obligations that accompany third-party funding, and the difficulty she encountered in relationships of all stripes--are justified as warp and woof of the troublous times in which the rebellious Hurston lived. One of the more peculiar axes that Boyd has to grind is the embedded double standard she perceives in the legacies of black male writers, particularly Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, whose "imaginative" autobiographies are lauded by the same critics who chide "every so-called lie" in Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (p. 355). In an egregious display of her own imagination, Boyd attributes this prejudice to the persistence of patriarchal culture. Much as the recently televised production of Hurston's cherished novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia, 1937), depicted the protagonist Janie, Boyd's biography has rendered Hurston a besieged goddess and absolved her of her very human shortcomings.

The beneficiary of nearly thirty years of labor in all things Hurston, Boyd makes wide use of Hurston's extensive correspondence to flesh out a more tempestuous woman than did Hemenway, who allowed Boyd access to his rich archive of correspondence and interviews with Hurston's contemporaries from the early 1970s, most of whom are now deceased. To her credit, Boyd turned up new information, even though it tends to reflect Hurston's penchant for untruth. Hurston was not born in her fabled Eatonville, Florida, but moved there with her family as a baby from Notasulga, Alabama. Also, throughout her life Hurston shaved years, even decades, from her age. In January 1944, Hurston took a third husband, James Howell Pitts, a forty-five-year-old native South Carolinian and Cleveland businessman, and divorced him eight months later. At the time of this marriage, she was fifty-three but alleged that she was forty, a more tolerable exaggeration, perhaps, than the one enshrined in her 1939 marriage documents to twenty-three-year old Albert Price III. There Hurston gave her age as twenty-nine. Most provocatively, Boyd discloses only snippets of the "large" (p. 490n387) and never previously cited municipal court file documenting sodomy charges brought against Hurston in 1948 by a New York City child welfare organization on behalf of three young boys. In one hearing, the judge admonished Hurston for making a noise that he interpreted as laughter. According to Boyd, "Zora may have laughed in court that day, but she was not tickled" (p. 390). Instead, explains Boyd, the judge had displayed his ignorance about the "hundred meanings" of laughter among African Americans "who'd spent generations laughing to keep from crying" (p. 389). The charges were eventually dismissed.

No one can deny the exuberance, courage, or brilliance of Zora Neale Hurston, but a biography that reduces her travails to the conspiring forces of racism, misogyny, and jealousy dulls the luster of her struggle and accomplishment. Hurston deserves a biography that does not shirk from exploring her frailties but contextualizes them as a vivid part of her genius.

ELIZABETH ROBESON

Columbia University