Wrapped in Rainbows: the life of Zora Neale Hurston, by Valerie Boyd

A black woman who was never just a writer

The question comes eventually, if you are a writer, whether you are a "black woman writer", a "black woman who writes", or "just a writer". The latter is assumed to be the category to aim for, as if it bestows a legitimacy the others do not. This right to be "just a writer" was the aim of the African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston's entire life, but the term "black woman writer" was one she would have embraced, because she understood the term completely.

Hurston was a descendant of slaves, born in the deep South at the end of the 19th century. Being ahead of her time was to be the hallmark of her brilliant and turbulent life. Valerie Boyd energetically chronicles her emergence in the Harlem renaissance to the patronage of white benefactors, through to her explorations of black customs during the Depression and her efforts to make ends meet after she fell out of fashion in the Forties, until her death of a stroke, in a Florida nursing home, at the height of the Civil Rights movement.

Hers is the story of woman as sui generis, woman as writer. There are the squabbles with white patrons who saw her as some kind of pickaninny princess, and blacks who needed her as a role model. Through all of this, she wrote novels, plays, an autobiography, articles. She was always herself and never stopped writing.

Some of the best parts of this book are Boyd's descriptions of what Zora called "the Niggerati", that convocation of black artists who helped to push the world into the 20th century, Langston Hughes among them. Boyd, too, sheds light on that generation of "queens" like multi-millionairess A'Lelia Walker, and Ethel Waters, a dancer-singer known as "Sweet Mamma Stringbean" before she got religion. They influenced the Twenties, and their insouciance can be felt in the writings of Maya Angelou and Zadie Smith.

Zora saw her career in the same light as a white male writer would have, as natural and inevitable. It was this attitude, and not her divorces and depressions, that was used to try to destroy her. In her two masterpieces now acknowledged as part of the American canon, Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God, black language is revealed in all its musicality, its profound complexity, and its precision.

In 1945, realising she might die penniless, Zora proposed a "cemetery for the illustrious dead" on 100 acres of her beloved Florida. The great WEB DuBois told her that "no Negro celebrity must... lie in conspicuous forgetfulness". She saw this return "home" not as obscurity, but as acknowledgement. And she made this acknowledgment with laughter, courage, defiance, and with, as she wrote to one correspondent, "a flock of purple rabbits to you".

The reviewer's second novel, 'Kiss The War Babies Goodbye', will be published next year