Zora Neale Hurston was a trailblazing American writer, anthropologist and folklorist, renowned for her authentic and groundbreaking work of African American life in the early 20th century. A key player in the Harlem Renaissance movement, she’s best known for her critically acclaimed 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
Hurston’s own life was fascinating and daring — she was a Black woman who not only defied social norms, but relentlessly pursued her passion for storytelling of the Black experience.
It’s not so shocking then that Hurston was willing to take on the telling of one of history’s most vilified men, Herod the Great. But when she died in Fort Pierce, Florida, on Jan. 28, 1960, all her work on Herod was thought to have been lost.
Manuscripts, notes, letters and versions of her work managed to be saved from her home following her death, including a truck containing the literary pieces that would soon go into the recently published historical fiction that we have today — “The Life of Herod the Great.”
It appears that for years Hurston had been researching and writing about Herod during his time as the king of Judaea from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. It was Hurston’s belief that the man who had been villainized and accused of mass atrocities by the New Testament, was in fact, not at all the monster history had made him out to be.
Deborah G. Plant is an African American Literature and Africana Studies Independent Scholar and literary critic who specializes in the life and works of Hurston. In 2018, Plant edited the author’s previous posthumously published work, “Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo,” and now again with Hurston’s “The Life of Herod the Great,” which published Jan. 7 on what would have been the author’s 134th birthday.
Plant spoke exclusively with HuffPost about the editing process for “The Life of Herod the Great” and the depth of Hurston’s research. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:
The preface and the introduction written by Hurston for “The Life of Herod the Great,” is strangely so timely and relevant even for today’s world. Did you feel that way as well? If Hurston were to write this today, how different would it be? Yes, I felt the same way. There were several prefaces of several versions, and what we have in this publication is a synthesis of her ideas. It's uncanny how she talks about ongoing patterns humanity creates, and particularly in terms of our longstanding contentions.
A full 2,000 years later and we have the same dynamic happening. She’s writing this in 1959, and we see the same issues in the 21st century. The same dynamics are happening. We have the West looking at the East, we have these battles and wars going on, and she's saying to us, “Look at what we're doing, look at our history,” and to not just look at it, but let us learn from it, or else this continues to repeat.
I think it's true that we understand the metaphor of history repeating itself, but history doesn't really repeat. It simply continues until we go in a different direction. And the only way we can do that is to honestly look at our history. We can't do that if we're not telling the truth about it. We can't do that if we're erasing it. We can't do that if we denigrate it. If we're not getting the fullness of our humanity, or history, then we don't get the fullness of our capacity to change things as we need to. And that was so important to her, the truth.
Hurston’s father was a preacher, so she knew the story of Herod from a Biblical context. But then as her education continued, she expanded her understanding of these stories as a folklorist and anthropologist. But why did she write and focus on Herod specifically?
Well, in the outset, she wasn't focusing on Herod. She was focusing more broadly on the Jewish people in their struggles, as she put it. She wrote a letter to a friend in 1945, and she wrote, “The story I am burning to write is the story of the 3,000 year struggle of the Jewish people from Sinai to the birth of Christ.”
But over time, as she is researching and she's looking at how they move from one place to the other, from one political status to the other, she sees Herod in the mix. And the more she learned about Herod, the more she was excited about who he was and what he represented in terms of the struggles of Jewish people.
He stood out for her because he was a figure from the Bible that she was taught a certain way about as a Protestant Christian. And there’s this idea he's just this demon, just a vile, evil, wicked man who imposed himself on people, and worse was that he attempted to murder Jesus Christ. This is the story. But this story was actually fiction, that became, over time, perceived as the truth. And in spite of the fact that there's no evidence for any of it, this became part of Christian doctrine.
What was her process for researching Herod? I imagine in the 1950s it was even more difficult to prove Herod wasn’t the villain, to separate the Biblical lore from the facts. How do you prove Herod isn’t the villain that committed mass murder and more specifically the “Massacre of the Innocents”?
Hurston looked at the works of Flavius Josephus as well as Nicolaus of Damascus, who was Herod’s biographer. She looks at Plutarch. She looks at the works of Strabo. She studied the works of the “Christian fathers,” those like Eusebius and Saint Augustine, and she read and researched the various Egyptian and Roman histories of the period. And her research was continuous. She never stopped researching. And everywhere she looked, there was no evidence of this so-called slaughter of the innocents.
And she spoke with her contemporaries, historians and academics who were in relevant disciplines, as well as the theologians of the time.
She speaks specifically in one of her letters about a bishop, whom she brought her research to and he advised her to be “a good Christian and be as a good Catholic,” to not say anything about this. Leave this alone. And her response to that was if she should do Herod this disservice in order to protect the feast of the innocents, which is based on his demonization?
Historians of this time period of the 21st century, they say exactly what she says. And what they also say is that for historians, for a long period of time, that Herod was a taboo subject. He was an untouchable in historiography of the ancient period. He was like persona non grata.
How difficult would it have been for her to have gotten this book published in her time? She would have been up against so many barriers to begin with.
Even after [Hurston] changed her approach from biographical to historical fiction, and she submitted it again to her editor, Boris Mitchell at Scribner's, he rejected the manuscript. She’d believed that Scribner's was just too timid to publish this work. She believed that Scribner's was afraid of coming into opposition with the Catholic Church. She wrote that. So we know that she believed that this story was a story that many didn't want to be told.
Have you gotten any pushback today or any barriers to publishing it today?
Well, I haven't yet, and I've been asked about that: “What are you going to do when people push back against this?” Well, then they have to push back against history. And I'm not saying it, but Hurston’s not making up something, she's giving us history. And not only is this history that she researched, but these contemporary historians, that I alluded to earlier, are saying the same thing.
There’s usually a dialog, a back and forth, a conversation between the writer and the editor, but you edited this well after Hurston’s passing. How did it feel to edit this book, did you feel like you were having a conversation with Hurston through your own understanding and study of her? How was this editing process for you?
I had that discussion with myself. You know, I was like, “How do I edit you?” Because that's what I'm doing. And, I mean, I'm a writer too. And so I have an editor. But because I wanted to make sure that Hurston's voice is all we would hear in this novel, I wanted to edit it myself.
This was also a work in progress. It's not like she had completed it. So I had to do what I believe is what she would want me to do in terms of presenting a manuscript that will give her the glory, that represents her in a way that is her authentic voice and stylistically expressive of her genius.
This story and interview was written by HuffPost Books contributor Emily Southard-Bond exclusively for HuffPost.
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