There is a peculiar kind of courage required to live as if you are already free. Not the freedom promised by legislators or granted by institutions, but the bone-deep, self-possessed sovereignty of a person who has decided, without apology, that their life belongs to them.
Black American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston lived that courage. She was born into a country that had codified her subjugation and came of age in a culture that expected her silence.
Zora chose neither subjugation nor silence. She chose herself. And in doing so, she left behind a body of work and a way of being that speaks with urgent force to anyone asking the oldest human question: how does a person live well, freely, and on their own terms?
That question, it turns out, was also the central preoccupation of the ancient Taoist sages. Lao Tzu, writing in the Tao Te Ching in the sixth century BCE, did not begin with politics or policy. He began with the nature of things—with the Way, the Tao, the great current of life that flows through all beings when they are not obstructed by force, fear, or the compulsive need to control.
The convergence between Hurston's lived philosophy and Taoist wisdom is not incidental. It is a testament to what becomes possible when a human being stops performing compliance and starts living in alignment with their deepest nature.
A Childhood That Refused to Apologize
Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, and raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated all-Black municipalities in the United States.
This detail is central to her story. It is the soil from which her entire philosophy grew. Eatonville was a community that governed itself, solving its own problems through the creativity and cooperation of its residents rather than through the dictates of distant authorities. It had its own mayor, its own marshal, its own norms of civic life.
Young Zora absorbed this as a foundational truth: that people were fully capable of building the conditions of their own flourishing, without waiting for permission.
Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 60
Eatonville was that small fish, governed with a light and knowing hand. Its vitality came not from the force of external mandate but from the natural cooperation of people who trusted one another and respected each other's lives.
Hurston's mother, Lucy Ann, told her young daughter to “jump at the sun.” This instruction was not a metaphor for modest ambition. It was a declaration of boundless possibility, a rejection of inherited limitation, a vision of the self as an agent rather than a subject. The Tao Te Ching would have recognized it immediately: “To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”
The Harlem Renaissance and the Cost of Authenticity
By the 1920s, Hurston had made her way to New York, earning an anthropology degree at Barnard College under the legendary Franz Boas. She arrived at the center of the Harlem Renaissance not as a supplicant but as a force.
Funny, fierce, theatrical, and intellectually formidable, she distinguished herself immediately by refusing to frame Black life primarily through the lens of White oppression. While much of the Renaissance was engaged in proving Black humanity to a skeptical White audience, Hurston was interested in something different: documenting and celebrating Black life as it actually was, in all its complexity, humor, beauty, and interior richness.
This was not popular. Richard Wright dismissed her masterwork Their Eyes Were Watching God as lacking in social protest. Hurston's response was that she did not revise her vision to satisfy her critics.
The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi wrote of this exact pressure in his parable of the butterfly: to awaken and ask whether you are a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man is to understand that identity is not fixed by the expectations of observers. Hurston refused to let others' categories define the edges of her selfhood.
He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33
The pressure to shape your life and your voice in response to the expectations of others, however well-intentioned they may be, is a form of control. Resistance to that pressure is not selfishness. It is what the Taoists called te, the virtue or inner power that arises when a being acts in full accordance with its own nature. Hurston's integrity was her te.
Voluntary Cooperation and the Living Tao of Community
Hurston's anthropological collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938) were acts of deep democratic attention. She traveled through the American South and the Caribbean, sitting on porches, recording songs and rituals and the entire living architecture of communal knowledge that formal institutions had ignored.
What she documented was what Taoist thinkers have long described as the natural order that emerges when force steps aside and people are free to find their own equilibrium.
When the Tao is present in the universe, the horses haul manure. When the Tao is absent, war horses are bred outside the city. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 46
The folk communities Hurston documented did not wait for bureaucratic permission to organize their lives. They created their own ethical codes, their own dispute resolution, their own modes of celebration and mourning, their own economies of care.
This is wu wei, non-coercive action, in its most human expression. Wu wei is not passive. It is the art of acting in harmony with the grain of things rather than against it, of building communities the way water carves canyons: through persistent, patient, voluntary force. Hurston recognized this vitality as civilization. She honored it as such, and in honoring it, she challenged the assumption that social order must be imposed from above to be real.
Personal Responsibility as Liberation, Not Burden
Hurston's most controversial positions were rooted in her belief that personal responsibility was not a burden placed on the oppressed but a form of power available to them. She was a vocal critic of institutional dependency, not from indifference to suffering but from a conviction that managed helplessness was itself a kind of unfreedom.
She wrote in 1945 that the most dangerous word in the English language was “the,” arguing that when Black people were categorized as “the Negro” rather than encountered as individuals, they were diminished by the very framing meant to defend them.
Zhuangzi, the great second sage of Taoism, made a parallel observation in his story of Prince Hui's cook, who carved an ox not by hacking against its structure but by following its natural lines, his knife finding only empty space.
The bureaucratic mind hacks. It forces. It organizes people into categories and then administers the categories. The free mind, by contrast, moves with the grain of the person in front of it, recognizing the individual rather than the type. Hurston's insistence on being seen as an individual was not vanity. It was philosophy.
If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 16
Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Portrait of Self-Governance in Practice
No text illuminates Hurston's philosophy more fully than Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. The novel follows Janie Crawford across three marriages and several decades of life in the rural South. It is fundamentally a story about the discovery and defense of selfhood.
Janie begins the novel under the authority of her grandmother, who has absorbed the trauma of slavery and insists that security is the highest good a Black woman can pursue. She ends the novel having chosen love, loss, adventure, and authentic self-expression over security, over approval, over the safe diminishments that others called protection.
Janie's journey is a Taoist one, even if Hurston never named it as such. She moves from a state of forced alignment, bending herself to the shape others demand, toward a state of natural alignment, living in accordance with her own deepest nature.
The Tao Te Ching describes this arc with precision: “In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.” Janie drops, over the course of the novel, every false self she has been assigned. What remains is the person she actually is.
Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33
Solutions from Below: The Creative Power of Free People
Hurston's entire body of work constitutes an implicit argument for bottom-up social organization. The solutions she documented in Black folk communities were not the products of policy design. They were the spontaneous creations of people using their intelligence, their relationships, their cultural inheritance, and their freedom to address the problems in front of them.
The porch in Eatonville was not a government program. The storytelling circle was not a bureaucratic initiative. The mutual care networks were not administered by anyone. They worked because free people, respecting one another's dignity, built them.
Lao Tzu described the ideal leader as one whose people barely know he exists, one who facilitates rather than commands, who trusts the natural organizing intelligence of a free community. “The Tao never does anything, yet through it all things are done.”
This is not a call to chaos. It is a call to trust, to the recognition that human beings, when not coerced, when genuinely respected in their persons and their property and their choices, tend toward cooperation and mutual flourishing.
Hurston spent her life documenting that tendency. She called it culture. The Taoists would have called it the Tao in action.
The best leaders are those the people hardly know exist. The next best is a leader who is loved and praised. Next comes the one who is feared. The worst one is the leader that is despised. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 17
What Zora and the Tao Ask of Us
To read Zora Neale Hurston carefully is to be invited into a particular kind of critical thinking. It begins with this question: what would I choose for myself if I were fully free, and what am I currently allowing others to choose for me under the name of necessity, protection, or belonging?
It continues by asking what communities I am building through voluntary association, through genuine respect for others, their property, and their choices. The Taoist framing adds another layer of depth: is what I am doing aligned with my nature, or am I forcing, performing, straining against the grain of who I actually am?
Hurston died in 1960 in relative obscurity and poverty, buried in an unmarked grave until Alice Walker restored her name to it in 1973. The arc of her biography contains real tragedy. But the shape of her choices, the consistent prioritization of authenticity over approval, of freedom over comfort, of genuine community over institutional management, constitutes one of the most coherent and demanding visions of human happiness in American letters. And it resonates with a wisdom tradition thousands of years older than America itself.
She did not believe that happiness was a condition bestowed. She believed it was a practice, cultivated through honest labor, voluntary relationship, personal responsibility, and the refusal to let any institution stand between a person and the full exercise of their humanity.
The Tao Te Ching would agree: “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” Zora did not hurry either. She simply, stubbornly, joyfully, insisted on living in alignment with her own deepest Tao. That is the invitation she extends to every reader, across every era. Not: what will they do for me? But: what will I build with my freedom, and with whom, and why?