SOURCE: Champion, Laurie. “Socioeconomics in Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston.” In Southern Quarterly 40, no. 1 (fall 2001): 79-92.

In the following essay, Champion asserts that Hurston depicts strong women in her stories who “develop independence in spite of oppressive social conditions, particularly those influenced by a politics of gender- and ethnic-biased economics.”

Zora Neale Hurston sets most of her work in or near the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida,¹ which she uses to portray lifestyles of rural African Americans by showing folk customs and beliefs, communal attitudes, and voodoo practices.² Hurston's choice of Eatonville as setting reflects one of her major artistic philosophies, central to which is her need to celebrate African American culture. As she explains in her well-known essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she realized that she was black when she was thirteen and left Eatonville to attend school in Jacksonville. Even so...