[jazzy music] (female announcer)
What if you could step back
in time and talk with some of Kansas
City's most historic figures, the innovators and achievers who left their mark on our town,
on our nation? What would you ask if you could
Meet the Past? This week,
Crosby sits down with folklorist, anthropologist,
and author Zora Neale Hurston, who emerged
through the Harlem Renaissance and wrote
the American literary classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I'm gonna take you back to May 1, 1925, in New York City. Charles Johnson, the editor
of Opportunity magazine, the magazine
of the Urban League, has initiated
a literary contest-- Negro-Americans
and their writing. And he invited a group
that ultimately was 316 people. And among those people were
Fannie Hurst-- probably the best-selling
novelist of the '20s and '30s-- Eugene O'Neill, Carl Van Vechten--one of the
leading novelists and critics-- and also there were
James Weldon Johnson, Paul Robeson, and of course, Langston Hughes
from Kansas City, Aaron Douglas
from Kansas City, and Claude McKay, who had gone to K-State and had to go
through Kansas City to get to K-State. [laughter] Therefore,
my contention, the origins
of the Harlem Renaissance is in Kansas City. Langston Hughes and Countee
Cullen won the poetry prizes. But the most prizes
on that day-- four prizes of the Opportunity
magazine literary contest went to a woman who
had published only one story up to that point. And, ladies and gentlemen, here she is, Zora Neale Hurston. [applause] (Williams as Hurston)
I'm here, Mr. Kemper!
I'm here! And I'm coming! (Kemper)
This is the way she came
into the after-party after the award ceremony. Whoo! (Williams as Hurston)
My mother made sure
we all read. How you doing, Mr. Kemper? May I call you Zora? Oh, certainly.
Everybody calls me Zora. Everybody, Zora. Now, I call you Mr. Crosby? Yes, ma'am. You may call me
anything you like. Okay.
Okay. This is my chair. - This is--
- How y'all doing? How's everybody? (Williams as Hurston)
Hey, everybody. Now, so--so, Zora, you know, as it's been said, you know, you are the party. But you creat--you created,
overnight, a sensation. Your stories won two prizes. Your play won a prize. And the play was... Color Struck! Color Struck. Hm. And--and--and the stories-- the stories-- the stories were Spunk
and Drenched in Sunlight. (Williams as Hurston)
Drenched in Light. Drenched in Light, sorry, yeah. And--and--
Black Death-- in Black Death-- in Black Death, a story
that won one of these prizes, you say, "The Negroes of Eatonville
know a number of things that the hustling, bustling
white man never dreams of." Now, tell me, what was
so special about Eatonville? Eatonville was your home.
It's where you grew up. Eatonville was my home, and Eatonville was
a very special place, and we knew how special we were. My father was the mayor. We had a city council.
We had good schools. So we didn't need jails. And when I got to New York... [laughter, applause] (Williams as Hurston)
So when I got to New York, I realized that those people
didn't see themselves reflected in everything around
them like we did in Eatonville. Now, there is the great story,
Drenched in Sunlight, that you wrote. There's a little girl,
Isis Watts, who's the star of this--
the protagonist of this story who seems maybe to be a lot
like you. She's pretty outgoing too. Isis is a little girl
who sits on the fence post. And I used to sit
on the fence post in front of my grandmother's
house. Well, I knew
and Isis knew that the world was bigger than what we were seeing. So we wanted to see more of it. (Kemper)
The other character that seems
to be regular in the stories and in Their Eyes Were
Watching God, the novels, but also in your--
your folklore books, uh, the folklore stories
that you tell-- we'll go into that
in a little bit-- but--are about mules. (Kemper)
There are lots of mule stories. You know, the people
who criticize me about mules, they didn't grow up
in the country. Mules, they were
very important to us. And everybody had one. If they didn't have one,
they wanted one. So I wrote about a lot of them. So you grow up in this town. It's an all-black town. And you say in
your autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, that you didn't even know
you were black. See, when you grow up in a town
where everybody looks like you, you don't think about color. You know,
you don't think about color 'cause nobody looks
any different. Now, we might have been
a few different shades. Well, I had this friend
Barbara Jean, and one time, her mama took me
on the train with them down to--down to Orlando, which was only, like,
five miles away, for real. And she took a picture, and when
I looked at the picture, I said, "Well, Barbara Jean,
we different colors." And her mother said, "Well, of course you're
different colors, Zora. You're just a nigger." Well, I got really mad at her. And I don't know if I was mad
'cause she said I was a nigger, or if I was mad
'cause she said I was just... [laughter] (Williams as Hurston)
A nigger. And I just didn't like her
anymore after that. But then I did come to realize
that people are different, and that lady made sure
that I knew that. You read a lot of mythology
books, which is interesting. (Kemper)
You read a lot of mythology, and you talked
about Hercules' oath and about his having
to make a decision between committing his life to duty or pleasure. And for a young girl, you liked his choice, the choice of duty. That sense of duty
and taking care of folks, that was kind
of inbred in me. And my mother
was very special to me. One time, Mr. Kemper,
she called me, and she says, "Zora, honey, I need you to do something
for me." (Williams as Hurston)
She said,
"I'm getting ready to pass from this life to the next." She said, "Zora, I want you
to promise me something. "Now, when those ladies
from your daddy's church "come to help me pass, "promise me that you won't let
them pull the pillow out "from under my head, "that you won't let them
cover the clock, and that you won't let them
cover the mirror." Now, and I thought about
that real hard for awhile. Because if they pulled the
pillow out from under her head, then when her soul
left her body, it would have
a smooth transition. And if you covered the clock, then time would stand still
for my mother. And if part of the mirror
was exposed, then when my mama's soul
flew past it, part of it would stick
to the mirror. And she'd always be here
to take care of me. Well, one day I was sitting out
in the yard, and I was playing with my doll,
Miss Corn Shuck, and I saw the ladies from
my daddy's church coming. And I looked inside, and the ladies were pulling
and tugging and trying to get that pillow
out from under my mama's head, and one had covered the clock, and the other had covered
the mirror. So I ran in there, and I grabbed
that cover off that clock. And I screamed,
and I screamed, and I screamed, and when I was about
at the height of my screaming, I looked up,
and I saw my daddy in the door. And I was almost relieved. 'Cause, see, I know my daddy had
relations with other women, but I thought
he loved my mother enough that he would help me
keep my promise to her. Well, I guess he didn't, 'cause he scooped me up
from the base of that bed and carried me out of that room, grief, self-despisement,
and all. And he deposited me
on the other side of the door. Your daddy got another mama,
stepmama. - He did.
- Very fast. (Williams as Hurston)
Real fast. Didn't work too well for you. He married a woman that didn't
like my mama's children, and we didn't like her neither, but he chose her,
not us. And you told the story
in Dust Tracks, you almost killed her. (Williams as Hurston)
I tried to. Tried to. [laughter] And so you left home
at a very young age and, again-- He put me on a train
and sent me away. I'm not 100% sure how old you
were when you left. - But about 13, maybe.
- I was 9, sir. And you probably embellishing
my age. (Kemper)
We're gonna have this problem,
I can tell. But you go through a lot,
some schooling here and there, but you're basically
supporting yourself, so you're working various jobs, including ultimately
a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. That was fun. (Kemper)
And that takes you to Baltimore. And finally, you enroll
in the Morgan Academy in Baltimore, which is part of a--
is related to Morgan State, the historically black
university in Baltimore. And you do pretty well there. I did great. My mama made sure
that we all loved to learn. But when I got
to Morgan Academy, I wanted to finish high school. So I went there,
then I went to Howard Prep, and then I went
to Howard University. Howard University, and--and--
but maybe more than that, there was around in-- we're talking
about the early 1920s-- a literary salon that includes some of the most famous names
in African-American-- or Afro-American,
as they said at that point-- literature. You got to know
W. Burghardt DuBois-- was frequently there. James Weldon Johnson,
the author of The Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man. - Yes.
- God's Trombones. - Yes.
- Uh... And--and maybe most importantly
at that point, Alain Locke. (Williams as Hurston)
Yes. Well, not always that important
to you, obviously. But you got--you became
a part of this group called "The Saturday Nighters," which was the literary salon and got--went to work for the--
for the literary magazine at Howard, published a story
in The Stylus, and which got the attention
of some of those folks and some of the folks
in New York. Stylus was actually
what got me started. 'Cause when Alain Locke
started that, you had--he had to see-- and the man who worked with him in putting that organization
together, which had some kind
of writing potential, so just being in it helped. Well, it ended up
that they published my work. They liked my work.
I won prizes. I got money.
I was happy. They got published. (Kemper)
And money--money would be
a pretty important thing, because while, you know,
you're on your own. I mean, you've got no help-- you've got no help from home and no help
from pretty much anybody. - That's right.
- No scholarships, et cetera. 'Cause you, in fact,
put yourself through Howard working as a manicurist. - Yes.
- A waitress. Yes. And, you know,
it's-- And maid sometimes. A maid. So you're working hard, and still you have time
to write and do these things. And you come to the attention
with the story, Drenched in Sunlight, that we've talked about. - Isis Watts.
- Mm-hmm. (Kemper)
And so you become a part
of the Harlem Renaissance. And they're kind
of these factions at this point in the '20s
in Harlem and in Negro literature
at this point. Dr. DuBois runs
The Crisis Magazine, which is a magazine
of the NAACP. And Opportunity
is the Urban League magazine. (Kemper)
And Opportunity's the Urban
League and Charles Johnson. But there's this kind of-- there's this distinction,
even though DuBois is in here, between what DuBois wants to do, which is advance the race, and then what Locke and Johnson,
at that point, and others want to do, which is really,
advance the literature and the aesthetics. And where did you come down
on all that? I came down right smack
where they should have been. [laughter] 'Cause I knew that in order
to advance the race, you had to know the race. And so somebody had
to save those stories. Now, me and Langston Hughes
in particular, we decided that we wanted
to tell the story of the folk. So that's where I was. I wanted them to see that we had to save the stories. So real, real Negro life is--
was your watchword at that point, and you're in New York, but you've got something else you've got to do
at the same time, which is finish your education. You show up with $1.50
in your pocket. I had $1.50, no friends,
no relatives, no place to stay, no food. And now I'm here talking
to R. Crosby Kemper III. [laughter] [cheers and applause] I want to say,
pretty special for me to be talking
to Zora Neale Hurston. But so you enroll
as the first black person to matriculate and graduate
Barnard College, the women's part
of Columbia University. Yes. Thank you, thank you. (Williams as Hurston)
And that's because
I had friends. I had friends along the line-- Mr. Kemper-- I had Miss Annie Nathan Meyer, who was one of the founders
of Barnard College, and she was a good friend
of mine. We met at a party. She liked me. Everybody liked me. And she made
a scholarship possible. Now, you--you were--
and, actually, most of your life,
you had to work very hard. You never had a lot
of money. And but you had these patrons-- not only Annie Nathan Meyer, but Fannie Hurst herself Mm-hmm. (Williams as Hurston)
Wonderful woman. (Kemper)
Really, the most problematic one
is Charlotte Mason, whom you called "godmother." And she provided money to you
during the course of this. And you actually signed
a contract with her. She provided money to you, and you said she could-- the contract said she could
control your writing. (Kemper)
So you couldn't publish anything
without her permission. That's an extraordinary thing. She did.
She gave me money. She gave me $200 a month. Also, she owned my work, so it was important that I gather my stories and write stories, but also, it was important to me
that she not get everything. [laughter] (Kemper)
Right. Well, you had an interesting
term for these patrons, and the white women,
in particular, patrons of black writers. You talking about
my Negrotarians. (Kemper)
The Negrotarians, yeah. That's pretty good. And then you had another term. You invented all these terms that everybody else
likes to use-- I love words
and the way they feel. You also had a term for
the black writers themselves. They were the Literati. And occasionally,
I would call them the Niggerati. [laughter] So you're hanging out
with the Literati of Harlem, and at the same time, you're getting this education
from Franz Boas, a great anthropologist. And you begin
to get these grants. You're about, I think,
the first person ever to get
two Guggenheim grants, and you go off to the South
to study folklore, which, really,
you're studying, in a way, where you came from, of course, so you're the perfect person
to do it. - Thank you.
- Yeah. I'm glad they recognized it too. They gave me the money. (Kemper)
It eventually becomes
Mules and Men. There are the mules again,
by the way. (Williams as Hurston)
Mules are important. (Kemper)
You go after the story
of Marie Laveau, who's the queen of conjurers and hoodoo. I studied to be
the last voodoo queen. And I had to have voodoo. 'Cause that was
my mama's religion. And she's the one
who supported me, and I thought that
if I had voodoo, then that would keep me
close to her. Now, you've mentioned--
we've mentioned-- we've talked a little bit about Kansas City's own Langston
Hughes, who was-- (Williams as Hurston)
Yes. In many ways,
your closest friend in New York. At least in the 1920s. From the moment in 1925, when you're both winning
these prizes in the Opportunity
literary contests-- So you're very close
to Langston Hughes. You have a great relationship. In one
of these folklore explorations, you go off with him, you spend about two
or three months coming back from Mobile
to New York, just wandering around
the country with him. I ran into Langston in Mobile, and the problem with Langston
is that he didn't drive. So he needed a ride
back to New York, and I was going back
to New York, so it was supposed to take us
three days, and it took us three months. And I love that man. [laughter] So you had this great
relationship with him-- you know, I mean, you are,
ultimately-- let's just say it,
for the record-- that the two of you-- Zora Neale Hurston
and Langston Hughes-- are the two great figures that come out
of the Harlem Renaissance. Thank you, sir!
Thank you! (Kemper)
And you had this very close
relationship, but then you write a play
together. (Williams as Hurston)
Yes. - Mule Bone.
- Yes. Oops, there's the mule again. (Williams as Hurston)
Langston knew how to write
plays, but I knew folklore. So we decided to put
our talents together and write this play. Well, somewhere along the line, Louise Patterson, who was a good friend of ours, was supposed to be
typing the play. Well, I don't know how
somehow that got shifted, because Langston then decided
he wanted to give her a third of the credit
for writing the play. (Kemper)
A third for typing it? (Williams as Hurston)
That's what I said. Nobody gives the typist credit
for the play. So I told him to support
his girlfriends on his own talent. He wouldn't do it on mine. And so you're fighting
over this, and ultimately,
somehow, the play makes it, actually, to
a theater company in Cleveland. The Gilpin Players,
they had it all staged. Well, Langston was sick, so I really wanted to go see him
'cause his mother was there, and then I also wanted to make
up to him about the play. 'Cause I did not put
just my name on that play. I sent the play
to Carl Van Vechten to see what he thought about it. Well, he liked it,
so he pushed it on. But Langston thought I did it, and I didn't do that. I was being fair. So I went to go apologize, and we worked it out
about Louise and that she really
wasn't his girlfriend 'cause she was married
to Wallace Thurman. But when I was leaving
Langston's house, she was coming up the sidewalk, so that was it, 'cause he was lying to me again,
so. - No play.
- Okay. There's also, you know,
a debate among the biographers
and historians and literary critics about whether it really ended
your relationship with Langston Hughes. (Williams as Hurston)
Oh, no.
It didn't end. We had a lot of space between us
for awhile, but, you know, there was a time
when I was living in New York, and I lived in this apartment
building. And the woman who was the
landlady who ran the building had a little son, and the little boy was crazy. Well, I go to Honduras, and while I'm gone, the little boy says
I molested him. When I get off the plane
in New York, the arrested me. And people were turning
against me, and they were saying things
about me, and they were quoting my work, saying that that shows
that I did it. But Langston wrote a letter
in support of me and said that he knew I didn't
do anything like that. It was supposed to be sealed.
It wasn't supposed to be-- And they seemed so eager to want
to believe that story. (Kemper)
Yeah, give you headlines--
and untrue-- it was thrown out of court. Yes, it was a lie. So there's a story
about how you got to write your first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, um, you're doing
your anthropology, your folklore, and you're running out of money. Your story Gilded Six-Bits--
great short story-- has been shown to a publisher
in New York, the Lippencotts. Mm-hmm. (Kemper)
And so you're--you're being
tossed out of your room. And you go
and pick up your mail-- I mean, tell--
the story-- you go pick up your mail, and you didn't open the mail
on the day you were thrown out. But inside... Was a check. (Kemper)
For $200. A lot of money
to Zora Neale Hurston. A whole lot of money
to me. And--which was an advance
on a novel... - Yes.
- That you then wrote... - Yes.
- In six weeks. I was in a hurry. I needed the rest of the money. [laughter] (Kemper)
You become--
You get great reviews, and you're pretty well-known
for Jonah's Gourd Vine, your first novel. Then you go back
to the folklore, you go off to Haiti. And you get sick, and there's also
the story you tell about maybe a love affair. (Kemper)
Again, in Haiti, you sit down, and in seven weeks, you write one
of the great American novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Williams as Hurston)
Thank you, sir. I was in love,
and I had a great love. And I knew
if I never had another one, I had to tell people
about that one. So I went to Haiti, and I sat down, and I wrote out the story
in a few weeks. (Kemper)
So in the--in the 1930s, you--it's a miraculous
decade for-- you write five books. - Yes.
- And all well-reviewed. 'Cause I'm not in love. But most--a lot of love. Most of them sell well, and then you make it out--
in 1941, '42, you make it out to Hollywood
for awhile. The only time you're well-paid
in your life. And they look at all your books
to maybe make a movie, but it takes us awhile
to actually get to make a movie of yours. (Kemper)
But you write
your great autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, while you're in Hollywood. But it's also the moment-- it's such
an interesting moment-- World War II has started
by the time-- Pearl Harbor's happened by the
time they come to publish it. And so they have to take a lot
of--three chapters, actually-- out, because you're kind of
critical of the United States. I'm more critical of-- of the politics
of the United States. So I wrote all of this
before the war. You know, in all fairness, I never would have said
those things had we already been at war. 'Cause then,
you then write some things that are very supportive
of the war, and, in fact, after the war, you become
maybe one of the leading, if not the leading, spokesman
for the Republican side. I mean, you start to support-- you support this guy
Grant Reynolds who runs against Adam Clayton
Powell in 1946. Well, you know, I am a conservative Republican. And people don't believe
that about Negro people. But I couldn't support
Adam Clayton Powell because he reminded me
too much of my daddy. [laughter] (Williams as Hurston)
The man was a preacher.
My daddy was a preacher. The man was biracial.
My daddy was mulatto. The man was a womanizer.
My daddy was a womanizer. I could not support him. And, you know,
in this period, the mid '40s, you reach the height, really,
of your fame. (Kemper)
You published your autobiography
to great reviews, Dust Tracks. You win a lot of awards. You win these Guggenheims
and whatnot. You get the Anisfield Award
for-- for civil rights. And you are on the cover
of Saturday Review. (Williams as Hurston)
Yes. (Kemper)
You're at the top of not just
black American literature, but American literature
in 1943, 1940. And your career kind of stalls. (Kemper)
You write magazine articles
for the Saturday Reviews, Saturday Evening Post. You're a regular reviewer
for the New York Herald Tribune, book reviewer. But you write novels that you
keep sending to Scribner's, and they keep sending them back, asking you to work on them, which you do. But nothing works. No, and they even said
that it's not my writing. One time they accused me
of having a ghostwriter. So I don't know what was wrong
with those folks at Scribner, but they wouldn't take it. Knopf wouldn't take it. So I'm writing, and I'm trying
to get Herod the Great published, and I'm working
on that book. I'm polishing it. I'm doing everything to it. And you got these sort
of obsessive quests going on from the Herod book and the novels that never get
published and whatnot. And you're not getting advances
anymore. You're living kind of
a hand-to-mouth existence. In fact, at one point,
you're living in Miami. You're near Miami. But you became a maid. You actually took a job
as a maid. I did.
I was doing research for a book. (Kemper)
Oh, your research. [laughter] (Kemper)
And at one point, your employer is reading
the Saturday Review, and there's a story by her maid
in the Saturday Review. But through all this, you're maintaining,
as is obvious, your sense of humor. And at one point, you write a little essay called
"Negroes Without Self-Pity." And it seems to me
that the story of your life through this--particularly
through this last decade, where you're taking all
these relatively menial jobs, you refused charity
from your own family. You're a true independent woman without any sense of self-pity. - And--
- Thank you. (Kemper)
Yeah. I'm broke, Mr. Kemper. And I knew that, but I also know that
if I don't have any money when my time comes, they will bury me
by subscription. People will pitch
in enough money. They'll put their pennies
and their nickels and their quarters together until they get enough
to bury me, so I don't really worry about
that end-of-life stuff yet. I have to have my art. (Kemper)
You said as you--
you know, you were-- you went to
the St. Lucie Welfare Home-- and after a stoke-- and said, "You're alive,
aren't you?" You wrote--this is a note
to yourself-- "Well, so long as you have
no grave, "you are covered by the sky. "No limit to your possibilities. The distance to Heaven
is the same everywhere." That's right. (Kemper)
So ladies and gentlemen, I want to end by quoting Zora, Miss Hurston, from Their Eyes
Were Watching God. She says, "She pulled in her horizon
like a great fishnet, "draped it over her shoulder. (Kemper)
"So much of life
in its meshes. She called her soul
to come and see." And so Zora calls all of us
to come and see. Ladies and gentlemen,
Zora Neale Hurston. [cheers and applause] Zora did not have an easy life, but she was a survivor. And she was strong, and she was one of the early
feminists. She made her own way in life. And she did whatever she had
to do to get an education. She valued books.
She valued reading. She valued her art. And she valued being a woman
and an individual. And I hope that my audience, especially the young girls, take that away.
