King Herod in Florida
Isabelle Dupuy
The Life of Herod The Great is Zora Neale Hurston’s last, unfinished novel. When the author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God died in Fort Pierce, Florida in 1960 at the age of sixty-nine, her neighbours paid for her funeral. She was buried with no headstone. The Life of Herod the Great ended up in a pile of rubbish outside her small, cinder block house and the cleaning crew set it on fire. The deputy sheriff Patrick Duval saw the smoke and rushed to the scene and, with the help of a garden hose, saved the manuscript.
‘Silence has many personalities. This profound absence of sound was filled with the hysteria of hope, for the people gathered here had been hastily summoned by Antipater, the most powerful citizen of Judea …’
Thus begins Hurston’s take on the biblical tale. It’s a thrilling read. Hurston wrote that she’d been ‘burning to write this story’ since 1945 and I couldn’t stop thinking about how this deeply researched, thought-out novel by one of America’s most celebrated writers was so nearly and casually lost. Although born in Alabama, Zora Neale Hurston grew up and spent most of her life in Florida. The past, as they say, is a different country but I happened to be in Miami visiting relatives and so, a few days before Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president, I decided to rent a car and discover the land that made Hurston and inspired this book.
It’s two hundred and fifty miles north from our place in South Miami to the Zora Neale Hurston Museum in Eatonville. I listened to the audio version of The Life of Herod the Great as I took US Route 27, the country road that cuts through the middle of the panhandle far from both coasts, through the Everglades and sugar cane country to Orlando. The humid air and the flat, monotonous landscape jarred with Blair Underwood’s rich, engrossing delivery and the dry fragrant but troubled hills of Galilee:
‘And then at last he saw Hezekiah himself not far away, fighting a savage rearguard action to escape to the safety of the caves far above. Herod grasped his spear and yelled to the bandit leader…The bandit wheeled and snarled at Herod, exposing his rotting front teeth.’
Gripped by the story, I ignored the fact that the only other vehicles on the road were roaring Mack trucks until I noticed one then another overturned car on the side of the road. The Florida sun pierced through the morning clouds and I remembered Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film Duel. Just like travelling salesman David Mann, I was alone in my small rental with monster trucks behind and ahead of me, their front radiators like barred teeth in my rear-view mirror.
Hurston describes the Judea of 35 BC as a society at a crossroads between a traditional and, in many ways, bankrupt religious leadership and the modern values of Rome as embraced by Herod and his military background. Herod is impossibly handsome, wealthy, virtuous – a man gifted with both character and intelligence – a superhero, to put it in American terms. His nemesis is the high priest Hyrcanus, a devious and weak man who murders Antipater, Herod’s beloved father. Jerusalem is ruled by Herod’s older brother Phasaelus, who is prone to jealousy. These stock characters come alive with the passion and humour of a good sermon. Hurston explains that she went back to the ‘memories … that came out of the material that went to make me.’ She, like most African Americans of her day, was born and raised in the church. Her father had not only been the mayor of Eatonville, the first incorporated Black city in the United States, he had also been a reverend.
She wrote this novel here, I thought, as I saw distant farms, white fences and Trump flags but no people. I came across a petrol station with a cafe next to it, under the shade of local oak trees. It looked friendly and I needed to stop. I paused the audiobook and stepped out of my car. There was not a human being in sight. I filled the tank using my credit card directly at the pump and went towards the cafe and the bathroom. There was a sign asking patrons not to openly carry firearms or shoot them. I rushed into the unisex bathroom and fumbled as I slid the metal lock across the edge of the door and into the wall. I went to the toilet and somehow emptied my bladder in record time.
Soon, I was back in my car, driving deeper into middle Florida. A river sometimes appeared at a bend, presaged by bald cypress trees, their multiple roots stretching into the water. Mark Antony and Cleopatra enter Herod’s life after the death of Caesar. Antony puts to death Herod’s local enemies in Judea in a show of friendship. Herod, ‘tried to analyse his emotions. These men had come there to destroy him; had Antony decreed his death they would have celebrated it as a triumph. Yet he felt indignation at the cruel and cynical manner with which Antony had treated them.’ Herod keeps his heart pure in the face of mounting temptations and blows. Cleopatra tries unsuccessfully to seduce him. Hurston raises the stakes: The woman he loves turns on him.
I’ve entered an agglomeration. There are businesses, auto repair shops, dollar stores and, finally, people. Human beings walk on both sides of the road. They’re all Black. A fifties-style sign in cursive print welcomes me to the City of Belle Glade. Later, I discover it is the heart of the Florida sugar cane industry, a place replete with migrants and bosses and machetes and shotguns. It is one of the most violent places in Florida. At the time, I happily pull into a Walgreens to buy some water, crisps and a phone charger, having stupidly left without one. There is nobody inside the well-lit store, not even behind the till, and every single product bar chewing gum is behind lock and key. ‘Hello!’ ‘Hello!’ I shout into the empty aisles.
I had paused the book when a shattered Herod confronts Mariamne, the wife he loves and the mother of his five children, with her crimes and hatred. She is later convicted of attempting to murder her husband and condemned to death. As she is escorted to the gallows, Herod ‘wept without control as she went by […] But now that loneliness that surrounds every human at the point of death was upon her.’
After a moment, an employee comes from the back of the store with a set of keys. She unlocks the charger I want to buy and after I pay, she disappears to the back of the store. Clutching my bag, I step into my car. I see a man hopping on one leg wave at me but I lock my door and start the engine.
Two hours later, my GPS tells me I’m barely two miles from Eatonville and the Zora Neale Hurston Museum. I’m driving through a sunny, prosperous suburb with sub-developments, chain restaurants and other cars on the road. It feels safe and familiar as if I were back in Miami.
In his life, Herod transformed Jerusalem into a beautiful and peaceful city. I turn left on a pretty road called Kennedy Boulevard that follows the slope of a hill and I find myself in Eatonville, today a part of Greater Orlando. There is an arch at the entrance of the main street declaring Eatonville the oldest incorporated African-American town in the USA. I drive past a Baptist church and see the ‘The Hurston’: ‘The Zora Neale Hurston Museum of Fine Arts’, which shares a building with a barbershop. An enthusiastic volunteer welcomes me inside. One corner of the small museum is a gift shop, selling Hurston’s books as well as T-shirts, posters and tote bags. There’s a picture of Hurston with a brief biography on the wall.
‘She looks like Queen Latifa doesn’t she?’ the volunteer beams.
The rest of the one-room museum is a dedicated art space. This year, the artist in residence is Atlanta-based Jerushia Graham with Placemaking: Evidence of Care. This humble and vibrant museum hosts festivals and events throughout the year, making it an important contributor to the cultural life of Orlando.
The Israelites before King Herod were a vulnerable community, plagued by ignorance and superstition, squeezed between great competing powers to the West (Rome) and the East (Parthia). Walking through the heart of Eatonville, with its dollar store and empty parking lot, I imagine how isolated and precarious life must have been for the African Americans trying to build a community here in the days of Jim Crow. Hurston would have been well-placed to witness the particular kind of infighting and backstabbing that happens to people when despair kills their sense of solidarity.
Hurston writes well about trapped societies. In her Foreword, she tells us she is writing The Life of Herod the Great to rehabilitate the reputation of the New Testament’s ‘villain of the obscurite’. What shines through in this unfinished work is a heartbreaking tale of the psychological legacies of slavery. Intimacy is impossible. Acts of love and generosity provoke fear and alienation. Herod’s life illuminates the trauma of those closest to him. Their trust in their own humanity is too low, their view of destiny too bleak to see Herod’s rise as anything other than an abomination.
https://www.zoranealehurston.com/books/the-life-of-herod-the-great/