The building almost sunk into itself under the weight of old age. I don’t think anybody really knew where she was.”Ī week later when Walker and Hunt pulled up to the Lee-Peek mortuary in Fort Pierce, the sight was ghastly. “She was buried down in South Florida somewhere. “The reason she doesn’t have a stone is because she wasn’t buried here,” Moseley said. She asked Moseley, “Why is it that 13 years after Zora’s death, no marker has been put on her grave?” Once Walker mentioned Moseley’s hibiscus bushes, along the edge of the drive, Moseley softened, and a wealth of story followed. Walker knew the name from Hurston’s books, but to learn that the character was not only real but alive became the first meaningful line of inquiry in her own search for Hurston.Īfter the two tracked Moseley down in her driveway, Walker set to gaining her trust and uncovering any morsel about Hurston and the Eatonville of her lifetime. The woman thought Walker and Hunt might like to see about Mathilda Moseley - a lady in town old enough to have known Hurston. “I am Miss Hurston’s niece,” she told the young woman sitting behind a desk strewn with letters. Twenty minutes out from baggage claim, the two walked into Eatonville’s City Hall armed with what Walker deemed a “simple, but I feel profoundly useful lie.” Her first biographer, Robert Hemenway, wrote in 1977, “Why did her body lie in wait for subscriptions to pay for a funeral? The answers are as simple and as complicated as her art, as paradoxical as her person, as simple as the fact that she lived in a country that fails to honor its black artists.” Beneath the tall grass and span of time, Hurston’s legacy grew dim a catalog of myths grew like weeds all around her. The bluestem and muhly grass grew thick, and because the grave bore no marker and the cemetery was left unattended, Hurston’s grave disappeared. Spring turned to summer, and the rains came. The Lincoln Park Academy choir sang “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” as the light softened.Īfter everyone left that evening, the sun fell away over the Gulf of Mexico. “The Miami paper said she died poor, but she died rich. “They said she couldn’t become a writer recognized by the world, but she did it,” he said in his eulogy. Paul AME explained how the newspapers described her as poor when she died, but he believed the hundred-plus people standing there suggested otherwise. Two pastors spoke that evening, one Baptist, one Methodist. He pointed to her tenacity, her ability to deliver. He noted how she didn’t care for anyone’s perception of her. In total, $661.87 came to the fore, the equivalent of nearly $6,000 today.Īs the crowd hemmed in the grave, her editor at the Fort Pierce Chronicle, C.E. Margaret Paige, an administrative assistant, made the arrangements. The principal, Leroy Floyd Sr., was a pallbearer. The students of Lincoln Park Academy, where Hurston was a substitute teacher, held a benefit concert. The funeral home donated the casket, and the cemetery waived the burial fee. Her friends Fannie Hurst and Carl Van Vechten did, too. Lippincott and Scribner’s, sent $100 each. Her friend, Marjorie Silver, wrote a piece in the Miami Herald, explaining the need to raise money for the funeral, and in turn, a slow drip of donations arrived piece by piece from all over America. While Hurston died without much to her name and with debts unpaid, her friends raised the money to lay her to rest. The hearse turned west out of the drive, pushed down Avenue D nine blocks before hooking north onto 17th Street and following it to where it fell off into Taylor Creek, passing columns of mango and guava trees, hedges of ixora and bundles of palmetto.Īt the end of the road, nine flower girls led the way into the Genesee Memorial Gardens Cemetery, where Hurston was interred that evening. It was Sunday afternoon, February 7, when six pallbearers carried Hurston’s body out of the Peek Funeral Chapel.
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