This book was nearly lost to history: It was burned with other papers of Hurston’s after her death, and only rescued, remarkably, by a friend of hers (Patrick Duval), who passed by the fire and was quick enough with a garden hose to save the manuscript. How, from there, did The Life of Herod the Great come to be in your hands? What condition was the manuscript in when you first read it?
From there, Hurston’s friend and neighbor Marjorie Silver deposited the manuscript, along with other items, at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1961. The “Life of Herod the Great” manuscript was placed in the George A. Smathers Special Collections library. Over the last several years, the Zora Neale Hurston Trust has worked to publish Hurston’s unpublished materials. Once the trust was ready to go forward with the publication of the Herod manuscript, I submitted a proposal to edit it for publication.
Overall, given that the manuscript had been pulled from a fire, I’d say that the manuscript was in surprisingly good condition. Yes, sections of several concluding chapters were lost or missing or, likely, simply burned. And a good many pages were singed or burned around the edges. But a major portion of the manuscript was intact. The several hundred pages that survived were a combination of typescript and longhand drafts.
As an editor, how did you approach what was missing in the manuscript, either because of damage or because it was a work in progress?
In instances where a page was singed or burned around the edges, and a word, a part of a word or a phrase was missing, the remaining letters of a word, the remaining words of a phrase, or the context of a sentence or paragraph indicated how I should complete the word, phrase or sentence. This, I would do only if Hurston’s intention was clear.
When I could not discern Hurston’s intentionality, I used ellipses to indicate missing words. One thing I did not want to do was to insert my thoughts or ideas into her work. I wanted only Hurston’s voice to speak, throughout. Whenever extensive passages or sections of a chapter were missing, asterisks indicate missing text or pages. This was the case mainly with the concluding chapters, which are shorter by comparison.
The last chapter, which would have told of the nature and circumstances of Herod’s death, did not survive. However, Hurston wrote about Herod’s death in various letters to her editor and to friends. So I extracted the events of his death from Hurston’s letters and edited them in the epilogue. This way, the readers would have the satisfaction that comes with a clearly stated ending. And Hurston’s interpretation of the events of Herod’s death would be preserved, in her own voice.
Like his life, the fact of Herod’s death had been buried under centuries-old untruths. Hurston found that historical accounts, which echoed the account documented by Flavius Josephus, were unfounded. As she wanted to set the record straight in relation to the biblical account of Herod’s reign, she also wanted to restore his dignity in death. In the absence of her narrative rendering of Herod’s death, Hurston’s letters give us insight into Hurston’s thoughts about the end of Herod’s life, and we can then imagine what she might have written.
“Reading Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great can contribute to . . . our capacity to become conscious creators of the world we want.”
You’ve spent a great deal of time with Hurston’s writing, as the editor of Hurston’s posthumously released Barracoon (2018), and the author of several books about her (Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit, Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom). I’m curious how your relationship with her work began. How did you decide to make such a deep study of her?
My relationship with Hurston’s work began when I browsed the bookshelves in the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore in Atlanta one day and glimpsed a cover that caught my eye. The green leaves and yellow pears of a tree in the foreground and a shack of a house in the background was the cover art that graced Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I skimmed a few lines and was compelled to purchase the book.
I had never seen myself, my community, my culture captured so perfectly. I had never read the sounds we make when we talk and joke and pray and fuss rendered so true in written language before. Reading Their Eyes was like looking in a mirror. I was in grad school at Atlanta University, then. I hadn’t known about her, but she seemed to know so much about me. It was uncanny, to me, that she knew me so well. I thought the least I could do was to learn something about her. The Shrine happened to also have a copy of [Hurston’s memoir] Dust Tracks on a Road. I found in her life story so many incidents and events that accorded with my own. My interest in Dr. Hurston and her work would only intensify when I discovered that to study Hurston was to study myself, my culture, American society, the nature of humankind and Creation, Itself.
What would you say to those who might wonder how relevant Herod’s story is to contemporary readers?
Two things:
1. Many contemporary readers still subscribe to the story of Herod as told in the New Testament. As Hurston points out in her preface to the novel, there is much that Herod’s story has to teach about the 1st century B.C.E. which is especially important to understand, given that our culture was influenced by the ideas that were born then, and we’re still embodying and living those ideas now.
2. The sociopolitical dynamics at play in Herod’s day are being played out as we “speak.” Hurston’s work dramatizes the efforts of the West in the domination and control of the peoples of the East. In Herod’s day, we’re talking about Rome’s domination of Persia and Syria and Judea, among others. And today, the conflicts in the Middle East are continuing these ancient wars of domination and resistance to domination. It’s like the names—of the people and the nations—have changed, but the insatiable energy of war has continued throughout the centuries. Hurston bemoaned that history—of war, and death and destruction—continues to repeat itself. But history doesn’t so much repeat itself as it simply continues—until there is a conscious intervention and a commitment to create what we prefer. Reading Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great can contribute to our knowledge about the world that we inhabit and the worlds that inhabit us, our capacity to become conscious creators of the world we want, and our courage to live in the world authentically.
Where will your work take you next? Will you be working with more of Hurston’s writing, or could we expect another book of your own, like 2024’s Of Greed and Glory?
Well, we’ll see about “more of Hurston’s writing.” I don’t know whether there are more writings, but there is more to say about what we do have. And I know that whatever is next, even a book of my own, it will be inspired by the same ideals that I find compelling in Hurston’s work—a love of freedom, a respect for political and personal sovereignty, the evolution of humanity, and justice.
Deborah G. Plant author photo by Gloria Plant-Gilbert.
