Revered Writer Becomes Girl Detective

Reimagining Zora Neale Hurston.

By FELICIA R. LEE

Published: November 1, 2010

Tanya Simon, a literary agent, asked herself that question while pregnant with her daughter, now 4. She answered by reaching back in time to Zora Neale Hurston, a canonical Harlem Renaissance writer, and imagining her as a girl detective. Ms. Simon and her close friend Victoria Bond put flesh on that idea with “Zora and Me,” an evocative mystery published last month by Candlewick Press.

The novel depicts Hurston as a bright, imaginative fourth grader, living with her family and friends in an all-black Florida town, around 1900. Zora, Carrie (the first-person narrator) and their friend Teddy try to figure out what happened when a man’s headless body is discovered by the railroad tracks.

 Erin Baiano for The New York Times

Lucy Anne Hurston, center, with the authors Victoria Bond, left, and T. R. Simon, who both wrote "Zora and Me."

“Fictionalizing Zora gave us creative freedom,” said Ms. Bond, a 31-year-old lecturer in composition and classics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who has an M.F.A. in creative writing.

Added Ms. Simon, 44, who writes under the name T. R. Simon: “We wanted to write a book that would help people fall in love with Zora. I wanted them to be able to see that bridge from childhood intellectual curiosity to adult production.”

“Zora and Me” is the first book not written by Hurston that has been endorsed by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust, created in 2002 to manage the business of bringing Hurston’s work to a widening audience. (Some 500,000 copies of her books are sold each year, according to the trust.) The buzz so far has been good: Kirkus Reviews called the 192-page mystery “absolutely outstanding.”

Victoria Sanders, the agent for the book and the literary representative for the trust, said the endorsement helped the authors obtain a six-figure advance and a deal with Candlewick to produce two sequels. Ms. Simon even subsequently joined Ms. Sanders’s literary agency.

In Hurston the writers have a heroine whose life story had enough adventure to fill many more novels.

Courtesy of American Philosophical Society Producer: Thirteen/WNET New York

The Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston.

 

Born in 1891, Hurston wrote four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays and essays, the most famous being her 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” about a woman’s lifelong struggle to be true to herself amid family and social pressures. Beyond the novels, Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard College, received a Guggenheim Fellowship to observe West Indian spiritual practices, and collected black folk tales in the South.

While she died in poverty and obscurity in 1960, she entered the literary canon in the 1980s after the 1978 reissue of “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The rerelease was due largely to Alice Walker, the author of “The Color Purple,” who credited Hurston as a huge influence on her own writing, and to Robert E. Hemenway’s revelatory Hurston biography in 1977.

Oprah Winfrey brought Hurston to an even bigger stage in 2005 with the ABC television movie of “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” starring Halle Berry.

At a recent fish-and-chips dinner in New York, Lucy Anne Hurston, a niece of Hurston’s and another of her biographers, grew teary-eyed as she talked with Ms. Bond and Ms. Simon about the new project. “This was the most reverent representation of Zora I’d ever seen,” said Ms. Hurston, an associate professor of sociology at Manchester Community College in Connecticut, and one of the trustees of the estate.

While the trust has created a Hurston Web site with HarperCollins (which publishes Hurston’s books), ZoraNealeHurston.com, and supports efforts like literary awards programs, most of the projects that have come its way over the years have fallen short, Ms. Hurston said.

Many overtures were shoddy proposals for theatrical productions and films, Ms. Sanders said. Here, she added, was a project that deeply appealed to her.

“Zora and Me” is set in Hurston’s real hometown, Eatonville, Fla., which bills itself as the country’s oldest incorporated black township. Its main characters — Zora, who tells outrageous stories (including one about a murderous human-gator creature); Carrie, an observant tomboy; and Teddy, a sweet farm boy — are best friends. In solving the murder of a stranger named Ivory they confront adult secrets and grapple with the meaning of death.

Mostly, “Zora and Me” evokes a world of un-self-conscious blackness and children steeped in games and fantasy in a moral, tightknit community. Although Zora, Carrie and Teddy remain unscarred by the racial politics of the Jim Crow era (there is a subplot about passing), their parents sometimes disappoint them. And there is the inevitable gaggle of mean girls.

“I tried to stick to how she perceived herself as a kid,” Ms. Bond said of the book’s depiction of a young Hurston. “She loved herself, but not in a cloying, narcissistic way.”

Ms. Bond, who lives in Manhattan, and Ms. Simon, who lives in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., finished their novel in a year. They traded revised drafts and researched Hurston’s life by reading her work, biographies and her 1942 autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road.” Their book includes a timeline of Hurston’s life and a bibliography of the children’s folk tales collected by Hurston that have been adapted by various authors.

Lisa Von Drasek, the children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan, said “Zora and Me” had generated excitement. “I’ve got 50 kids reading it,” Ms. Von Drasek said. “I think it’s exquisite. It’s everything we want from historical fiction — that sense of place and time.”

The book is especially welcome because of the paucity of black characters in quality children’s literature, said Kathleen T. Horning, director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. According to the center’s statistics, about 5,000 children’s books were published in the United States in 2009, and 157 featured major black characters.

Numbers aside, Ms. Simon and Ms. Bond said that their biggest hope was to have woven a good tale, one starring black children who are as bright and brave as Zora Neale Hurston herself.

“We are the ultimate plucky heroines!” Ms. Simon said. “Black girls!”