Directions: Use the websites provided to find the answers for this Web Quest.

Put your answers on a

sheet of paper.

1. When and where was Zora Neale Hurston born? Where did she move as a young girl?
Zora Neale Hurston was born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. Hurston moved with her family to
Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler.

http://zoranealehurston.com/about/index.html

2. Given your knowledge of the time and place, what kind of world did Hurston grow up in?
Given my knowledge of the time and place, the world that Hurston grow up in would be filled with segregation.
Although, segregation did exist, she grew up in a community filled with a few hundred African Americans that
had the same roles as whites found in their communities.

http://zoranealehurston.com/about/index.html

3. What was the extent of Hurstons education? Considering her gender and color, does this surprise you?
Explain.
She never finished high school even at the age of 26. No it did not surprise me, because at the time she was
born into, African Americans did not receive the same opportunities as those who were Caucasian.

http://zoranealehurston.com/about/index.html

Go to the following site for Eatonville, Florida http://townofeatonville.com/

4. When, and by whom, was Eatonville founded?

Eatonville was founded in 1887, and founded by three Union officers, Captain Josiah Eaton, Captain Lewis
Lawrence and another officer who is unknown.

5. Who was it named after?

Eatonville was named after Captain Josiah Eaton.

6. What is significant about Eatonville and African-American history?

Eatonville was what many of that time called a race colony. Rather than being pushed to the undesirable
areas of a town by whites, many blacks would establish independent communities as was evident the
creation of in Eatonville. As previously stated, Eatonville was a very superstitious town. Many of the residents
believed in hoodoo, or conjure. Likely rooting from African beliefs, black cultures believed that the communities
hoodoo doctor could use the power of roots to alter situations with magical powers.

7. What kind of achievements is Hurston noted for?

Hurston is noted as the first Black American to collect and publish African-American and Afro-Caribbean
folklore. She wrote stories, novels, anthropological folklore, and an autobiography. She could write about the
most ordinary things and make them infinitely gorgeous. Her characters appeared real and human. Her works
have increased in popularity with the passing of time. Hurston would probably consider her highest accolade to
be a festival held in her honor every year in Eatonville, the town she loved to claim as her own.
http://fcit.usf.edu/florida/lessons/hurston/hurston.htm

8. Use Google to look up The Harlem Renaissance. What was it?

Spanning the 1920s to the mid-1930s, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary, artistic, and intellectual
movement that kindled a new black cultural identity.

9. When and where did it occur?

It occurred between the 1920s-mid 1930s and the Harlem Renaissance occurred in Harlem, New York.

10. Who were some of the key participants?

The nucleus of the movement included Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Rudolf Fisher, Wallace Thurman,
Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. An older
generation of writers and intellectualsJames Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, and Charles S.
Johnsonserved as mentors.

11. Use Google to look up when (and how) Zora Neale Hurston died.
Hurston died on Jan. 28, 1960--at age 69, after suffering a stroke.

12. Look up a definition of vernacular language. Explain in your own words what the term means and how it
might be applied to the novel we are about to read, which takes place in the Deep South.
Vernacular language can be described as slang, everyday language that people use. This might be applied to
the novel in that this was a time period where African Americans might have had their own kind of slang as it
took place in the Deep South.

13. Use the following link to explore Hurstons use of Florida as a setting for African American folk life (scroll to
the bottom of page 2 of the document you find there, and read the short article called Scholarly Criticism on
the Use of Florida):

http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00076693/00001

14. Why was Hurston criticized by other African American writers at the end of her literary career?
Many critiqued Hurston because her work did not reflect the growing politicization of African American
literature.

15. According to Hurston, what role should cultural forms play in the writing of African Americans?
By utilizing traditional African American folk forms, Hurston promoted the unique history and identity associated
with African American culture.

Using the same document, scroll down to page 5 to the article Hurston and Hughes: Competing
Public Intellectualism.

16. Explain how Mule Bone was supposed to be an example of real Negro art theatre.
With Mule Bones in particular, Hughes and Hurston set out to balance folk comedy and social critique.
Hurstons familiarity with class and linguistic contexts of Eatonville provided a setting and style that contribute to
the authenticity of the play. Hughes provided a more nuanced sense of drama stylization in the actual drafting
and crafting of the play. Although the play is not a realistic replica of black life, it proves to be a humorous
satire of class pretensions and romantic love.

17. According to the article, why was it problematic?

You had to consider the issues of folk, authenticity, and translation/language. But also critical to analysis of the
rhetorical context of the controversy is gender.

18. How have African-Americans historically dealt with oppression and self-identity in this country? Offer some
reasons why.
Hughes notion of a writer as a protest figure, therefore, should consider the social conditions of his black
public, where inequities of segregation and racism must be contested. And to get that message across, it was
the function of the artist-writer to write and produce a text that could reach a diverse enough of an audience to
successfully get that message across. Such a task required the modernization of a folk tale to a staged
romantic triangle comedy; gender must be situated in a hierarchy of values, where the status of women was
subordinated to race issues. Hurston used the folk and folk traditions to transform and to strengthen the black
community intelligentsia and a white audience might respond to better. Hurston, therefore, was even more
transgressive than her contemporaries because of the way she liked to authentically maintain the folk tale and
because her notion of the folk necessarily challenged gender norms in addition to class, religion, and race.