Janie and Tea Cake and Zora Neale Hurston

“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.” -Their Eyes Were Watching God, a Florida novel by the legendary Florida writer and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston. The only writer of the Harlem Renaissance hailing from Florida, Zora spent much of her life in Jacksonville and Saint Augustine. This coffee blend is a tribute to her.

Original artwork by Erin Kendrick, Label design by Brit Webber

A blend of sweet, light-medium roasted, single origin fair trade coffees from small family farms in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Peru.

Flavor notes: milk chocolate, blueberry, almond 

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora tells a love story about Janie and her younger lover, Tea Cake. It's also a love story to her community in Eatonville, Florida.

We developed this blend of light roasted coffees to tell a similar story. The Ethiopian and Tanzanian coffees represent Hurston’s depiction of the joyful love her characters share with the sweet and fruity flavors of these coffees. These also connote the power of her writing about African impacts on American culture. The third element comes from the La Florida estate in Peru, which brings notes of sweet pastry.

Zora was a unique character, not just for her time, but even now in reflection, she was a marvel. When she came to Jacksonville for a writing job with the WPA, she was already a celebrated author of the Harlem Renaissance and reported to the younger, white male editor, Stetson Kennedy. She wrote about it in a highly celebrated 1928 essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me."

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me."

That was the beginning of renowned Jacksonville journalist, folklorist, and activist Stetson Kennedy's friendship and longtime collaboration with Hurston. They worked together in Jacksonville for the Federal Writers' Project (WPA) in the late 1930s, collecting regional folklore and stories. Kennedy often spoke and wrote about Hurston's vibrant, unapologetic personality, recounting how she carried herself with unbothered confidence.

Because she was Black, she had to be assigned to work out of her home or segregated spaces like the Clara White Mission, however, she was scheduled to pay a "state visit" to the main, white-only editorial headquarters in Jacksonville. The state director, Dr. Carita Doggett Corse, called Stetson and the rest of the white editorial staff into her office to warn them that Hurston had been "lionized by New York literary circles" and was prone to "putting on certain airs," including smoking cigarettes in front of white people.

Because the Exchange Building was strictly segregated, Black visitors were not allowed to use the front entrance or the main elevators. True to her character, Hurston didn't let the rules bend her spirit. As Kennedy fondly recalled, "Zora came, and Zora smoked, and we made allowances." She walked right in, lit up her cigarettes, and dominated the room with her intellect and charm, leaving the staff enchanted.

Her professional relationship with Kennedy went so deep that she went undercover in the turpentine camps of Florida where indentured servitude still existed. She infiltrated the camps and their reporting on the subject made it all the way to the UN. It was in those days that Stetson brought Zora to his family home in the Switzerland/Alpine Grove neighborhood just south of Mandarin. A historic property that Stetson named after a term he learned from Zora: Beluthahatchee. 

Local writer Tim Gilmore writes about Stetson's explanation of Hurston's “Beluthahatchee” as a “Florida Shangri-La, where all unpleasantness is forgiven and forgotten.”

Zora pictured at a turpentine camp when she and Kennedy
were reporting about slave conditions in the Jim Crow South.

She lived so much life, learned and shared so much with her readers, and died in obscurity in Florida. But she didn't remain in obscurity. In 1973, The Color Purple author, Alice Walker, traveled to Fort Pierce, Florida to locate Zora's unmarked grave in the segregated Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery on Seventeenth Street. Walker placed and paid for a headstone inscribed with the epitaph: "ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST / FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960".

This coffee is our love story to Zora. Responsibly sourced and sustainably produced green coffees from small family farms in Africa and South America to be individually roasted and hand-blended in Jacksonville.

Order a bag of Janie + Tea Cake today

More reading about Zora Neale Hurston and Beluthahatchee:

Zora Neale Hurston and the WPA in Florida

Beluthahatchee, Florida Shangri-La by Tim Gilmore

Stories Stetson Kennedy Told Me by Jonathan Bosworth

The Stetson Kennedy Foundation

Beluthahatchee Park, The home of author, journalist, and activist Stetson Kennedy

Florida Frontiers “Zora Neale Hurston at the Rossetter House Museum”