[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 30 (Thursday, March 17, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 17, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           ZORA WAS HER NAME

  (Mrs. MEEK of Florida asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Mrs. MEEK of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in celebration of 
women's history month and in celebration of the life and the 
contributions of a great black woman writer and a great Floridian.
  Have you ever heard of a shooting star that lit up the night skies, 
fell to Earth--and then rose again, soaring higher and brighter than 
ever? Such a star was Zora Neale Hurston.
  Born in 1891, Zora's star flashed across the heavens during the 
1930's and 1940's in a dazzling literary display that had all the world 
taking notice. She was a writer whose everyday life revolved around her 
kin-folks and skin folks.
  She was an anthropologist, with a keen consciousness of cultural 
equity, trained to interpret one culture to another. However, contrary 
to much of the social science thinking of her day, she saw nothing 
pathological about black life in the rural south. She did not view 
black people as deviating from a white cultural norm.
  Zora once wrote:

       Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than 
     one person. That is natural. There is no single face in 
     nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from 
     its own angle. So every man's spice box seasons his own food.

  Zora was her name.
  Born in the all black town of Eatonville, FL, this pioneering role 
model--a woman who rejected sexist roles--traveled some of the roughest 
and most remote parts of the rural South with only a handgun, a $2 
dress, and suitcase full of courage. Zora was a liberated women who was 
ahead of her time. She graduated from Barnard College, and became a 
Guggenheim Fellow, a writer for the Saturday Review, the American 
Mercury, and the Saturday Evening Post, a book reviewer for the New 
York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. She had style and was 
flamboyant in an intellectual way. Zora was her name.
  Zora Neale Hurston's life was a celebration of black life--indeed, a 
celebration of life itself. She drew from the deep well of black Africa 
the spirit that nourished the roots of black America and sustained us 
all. An enigma, this accomplished black woman who, fired by her 
mother's exhortation to ``jump at de sun,'' hurdled the barriers of 
race, sex, and poverty to become an even brighter star, But her star 
faded and she died in 1960 poor and in virtual obscurity. An untethered 
spirit, however, Zora's star rose again in the 1980's and glided on 
wings of imagination, transforming the backroads of the 1920's and 
1930's South into living words of color and rhythm.
  Her work pointed out that African-American folklore expresses for 
black people the human possibilities of their particular way of life. 
She wrote that one way of life need never feel inferior to another, 
because it contains its own unique expression of a universal humanity. 
Zora was her name.
  Zora Neale Hurston: anthropologist; folklorist; novelist; impassioned 
poet--hoodoo priestess of the black South; the flamboyant Princess 
Zora, companion to novelist Fannie Hurst; contributor to the 1920's 
Harlem renaissance in arts and literature; drama instructor; 
playwright; singer; dancer--and, at times, cook, housemaid, manicurist, 
and waitress. She was a great Floridian, and indeed, a great American.
  Yes, Zora Neale Hurston was her name.

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