They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by.

(Hurston was raised in Eatonville, Florida, which wasn’t the “black backside” of a white town, she once observed, but a place wholly inhabited and run by black people - her father was a three-term mayor.) She proved adept at the task, but, as she noted in her collection of folklore, Mules and Men, the job wasn’t always straightforward: “The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, usually underprivileged, are the shyest. He sent his student back south to interview people of African descent. Before she turned to writing novels, she’d trained as a cultural anthropologist at Barnard under the famed father of the field, Franz Boas. Six years earlier, Hurston had tried to publish another book in dialect, this one a work of nonfiction called Barracoon. The hater-in-chief was no less than Richard Wright, who recoiled as much at the book’s depiction of lush female sexuality and (supposedly) apolitical themes as its use of black dialect, “the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.” It’s been canonized by Harold Bloom - even credited for inspiring the tableau in Lemonade where Beyoncé and a clutch of other women regally occupy a wooden porch - but Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel was eviscerated by critics when it was published in 1937. Their Eyes Were Watching God is required reading in high schools and colleges and cited as a formative influence by Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou.

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