FORT PIERCE — Deputy Sheriff Pat Duval went to see why smoke from a trash fire was rising over northwestern Fort Pierce in February 1960. If he had not been so diligent, the literary world would have suffered a grievous loss.

“It was against the law to burn without a permit,” explained Duval, 89, now a retired captain of the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department. “It was in the city, but I went anyway.”

Duval asked the man tending the fire what he was burning. He replied, “stuff out of the former home of Zora Neale Hurston.” She had died on Jan. 28.

Fate had placed the right man in the right place at the right time.

Duval was one of the handful of people in St. Lucie County who appreciated Hurston.

“I had read a book by her in the library at Lincoln Park Academy, where she taught,” recalled Duval. “And I had been introduced to her at Bethune-Cookman College, where our choir had gone to sing, by Dr. Mary McCloud Bethune. I knew who she was and why she was important.”

Duval quickly pulled the papers out of the trash pile, extinguished the blaze and took them for safe keeping.

“They were her manuscripts,” said Duval.

He gave them to Dr. Clem Benton, who had befriended a destitute Hurston. Benton turned them over to Hurston’s family.

The singed documents have come a long way since then.

On Jan. 26, those and other papers were the subject of an international panel at the University of Central Florida, titled: “Exploring the global legacy of Zora Neale Hurston: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the research and writing of the anthropologist, folklorist and novelist.” Four scholars from universities in Florida and Russia took part.

This week, the Fort Pierce community celebrates the life and times of Hurston during Zora Fest. It includes a graveside service Thursday and birthday party on Saturday.

In Eatonville, near Orlando, where Hurston grew up, there are festivities under way similar those on the Treasure Coast.

Hurston was once acclaimed as the leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, when black artists of all sorts flowered. She was a contemporary of the anthropologist Margaret Meade, held degrees from Howard University and Barnard College, and wrote eight books and innumerable magazine articles and fiction stories.

Hurston’s fame faded in part because she was a conservative Republican.

“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all,” she wrote in one article. That attitude caused her to lose favor in the eyes of rising leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in segregation days.

A spurious charge that she had sexually abused a 10-year-old boy also damaged her reputation. She later proved she was not even in the country when the alleged incident took place.

But she was reduced to taking jobs as a maid until C.E. Bolen, publisher of The Chronicle, Fort Pierce’s African-American newspaper, found her working in a library at Cape Canaveral. He brought her to Fort Pierce to write for the paper and she taught at Lincoln Park Academy, until ill health forced her into the hospital and then to a nursing home, where she died on Jan. 28, 1960.

Theodore Pratt, author of “Barefoot Mailman” and other books, attended Hurston’s funeral and reported to The Miami Herald that there were only 25 people present and they could not raise enough money to pay for a headstone for her grave.

In 1973, another black author, Alice Walker, was able to get the grave in Sarah’s Memorial Garden properly marked.

ZORA FEST

Honoring author Zora Neale Hurston, who was born Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Ala., and died Jan. 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce.

Thursday, 4 p.m.: 50th Anniversary Remembrance Ceremony at her grave in Sarah’s Memorial Garden, North 17th Street just north of Avenue Q in Fort Pierce.

Saturday, noon-3 p.m.: Birthday Celebration at the Hurston Library, 3009 Avenue D, Fort Pierce.

Joe Crankshaw