♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
In spring 1940, Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated
Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist, arrived in Beaufort,
South Carolina, to study religious trances. ♪ ♪ For more than ten years, Hurston had skirted danger, traveling alone across the
American South and Caribbean, documenting
rural Black people's lives and collecting their stories. Educated at
Howard University and Barnard, during her lifetime,
Zora Neale Hurston was considered the foremost
authority on Black folklore. EVE DUNBAR:
She's interested in
all elements of Black folk. She allows
that culture to be dynamic, to have a voice in modernity. ♪ ♪ IRMA MCCLAURIN:
The research that
Zora Neale Hurston did in Beaufort, South Carolina,
represents someone who understands
that for people to trust you, you have to be in it. And that's what she does. She joins in with them. CHARLES KING:
She's playing a drum. At the time, this seemed scandalous, that you weren't
standing off to one side with your white
lab coat and your clipboard, noting down
what others were doing. MCCLAURIN:
Zora studied her own people, which is not something
that is supported in anthropology at
that moment. DAPHNE LAMOTHE:
Anthropology understood itself
to be a science. An aspect of
scientific inquiry that's really important is
to be detached and objective. She didn't play by those rules. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
From the Jazz Age through
the Great Depression, Hurston had published
her extensive research in prestigious academic journals,
popular magazines, and ethnographic books. But it was her fiction, thick with dialect,
cultural specificity, and richly drawn characters that over time would
cement her place as one of the most important
writers of the 20th century. MCCLAURIN:
She was an innovator, using stylistic conventions of literature,
but the content is rooted in the research
that she did. LEE D. BAKER:
She was driven by
her own integrity, she was driven
by her own passion, and she was driven by
her own sense of how best to collect
this folklore. KING:
Throughout her entire life, the powerful people
around her consistently thought of her
as being an outsider, less than talented,
a marginal figure. CARLA KAPLAN:
We're talking about
somebody who had an incredibly creative,
fierce mind. MARÍA COTERA:
Her independent streak
and her iconoclasm, you could say
it was both her superpower and her fatal flaw. ANNOUNCER:
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when people feel secure. That's why we exist--
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is a proud sponsor of "American Experience." ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
I was glad when somebody told
me, "You may go and collect
Negro folklore." In a way, it would not be
a new experience for me. When I pitched headforemost
into the world, I landed in
the crib of Negroism. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
As a child, Zora Neale Hurston
possessed a keen interest in the stories she heard about
people's lives and customs while lingering at
Joe Clark's general store in Eatonville, Florida, one of a handful of all-Black
towns in the United States. HURSTON (dramatized):
It was the habit of the
men folks particularly to gather on the store porch
of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath
with them at times. I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible
in order to hear more to allow whatever was being said
to hang in my ear. She's one of those children that people would say,
"Go, go away." You know, "This is grown
folks' stuff." And the more they tell her that,
the more she wants to hear it. TIFFANY PATTERSON:
Zora was nosy, pure and simple. She had questions. She, uh, wanted to see what was going on at the store. HURSTON (dramatized):
There were no discreet nuances
of life on Joe Clark's porch. There was open kindnesses, anger, hate, love, envy and its kinfolks, but all emotions were naked,
and nakedly arrived at. It was a case of
"make it and take it." MCCLAURIN:
This gathering of people, swapping lies,
telling stories, is something
that's going to attract her, because there is an innate
cultural anthropologist in her curiosity about people. BAKER:
Eatonville shaped
Zora Neale Hurston's worldview from the beginning, and what it did more than anything else is, it showed that Black lives
mattered. NARRATOR:
Hurston lived in
an eight-room house on five acres of land
with her parents, Lucy and John,
and seven siblings. Religion and education
were highly valued in a home ruled by
her preacher father. PATTERSON:
Her father was very domineering. Zora had her own ideas. She said, "No,
I'm going to do it this way. I see it this way." And it would
drive her father bananas.
(laughs) She was her mother's child. Her mother gave
her permission to dream, a permission
to ask questions, a permission to be artistic. (wildlife chittering) HURSTON (dramatized):
Mama exhorted her children
at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least
we would get off the ground. MCCLAURIN:
The idea that she would strive
to jump at the sun really puts into place
the idea that Zora is always trying to
reach someplace that may be unattainable
to the ordinary person and represents
a real challenge for her-- and a real opportunity. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
When Hurston was 13, her beloved mother
became ill and died. HURSTON (dramatized):
That hour began my wanderings. Mama died at sundown
and changed a world. PATTERSON:
That was devastating
for the young Zora. She's set adrift. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Hurston's father soon remarried and sent the shattered
young teenager to join two siblings at Florida Baptist Academy
in Jacksonville. He only paid her tuition
for a short time, leaving Hurston to
scrub the school's floors to finish out the year. And then she was on her own. HURSTON (dramatized):
The five years following my leaving the school at
Jacksonville were haunted. I was shifted from
house to house of relatives and friends
and found comfort nowhere. It seemed that
I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of
Orange County anymore. I was now
a little colored girl. I found it out
in certain ways, in my heart,
as well as in the mirror. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Hurston spent another
eight unaccounted years trying to find her way
in the world. ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
I wanted family love and peace
and a resting place. I wanted books and school. When I saw more
fortunate people of my own age on their way to and from school,
I would cry inside and be depressed for days, until I learned how to
mash down on my feelings and numb them for a spell. I felt crowded in on, and hope was beginning to waver. (car horn honking) NARRATOR:
At 26, Hurston landed
in Baltimore with education
still on her mind. She realized
by working during the day, and shaving ten years
from her age, she could attend
high school for free at night. With her academic prowess evident to
teachers and classmates, and sustained by jobs
as a waitress, maid, and manicurist, an inspired Hurston
enrolled in the elite Black college prep school
Morgan Academy in Baltimore and then Howard Academy
in Washington, D.C. By May 1919, she was
a high school graduate ready to enroll
in Howard University. KING:
It's not until she becomes an undergraduate
at Howard University that Hurston feels like the gears begin to turn again, and her life restarts. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
"You have taken me in. I am a tiny
bit of your greatness." Hurston vowed at her
first college assembly in 1919, "I swear to you that I shall never make you ashamed of me." She had initially thought that
Howard was out of her league. Chartered by
the United States Congress in the late 19th century
to educate Black students, Howard University, the nation's largest Black
institution of higher education, often was referred to as the
"Black Harvard." A part-time student secretly
years older than her classmates, Hurston formed
many close relationships and joined the theater company,
Howard Players, and the so-called brainy
sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. MCCLAURIN:
It's almost like having Eatonville
in one space again, because it's a Black space. It is this concentration of
Black knowledge and Black talent that you're not going to find
in many other places. PATTERSON:
She was rubbing elbows with the developing
political and cultural and social ideologies that
were emerging in Black thought, and it shaped her
in very important ways. BAKER:
She met Alain Locke,
who was a philosophy professor, but also the midwife,
if you will, of the so-called
New Negro Movement. DUNBAR:
Everybody is really excited
about what it might mean to be able to slough off
that Old Negro, who is the product of
enslavement. LAMOTHE:
Black people understood themselves to be creators of culture and art and literature, and make important contributions to how American society
understood, thought about, and related to Black people
in America. One of the major projects
of the New Negro Renaissance is to write about and reframe how society thinks
about Black culture. NARRATOR:
Hurston majored in English, and penned poetry, stories,
essays, and plays drawing from her life
in Eatonville. She wrote for Howard's
prestigious literary journal, "The Stylus," and in 1924,
she co-founded "The Hilltop,"
the university's newspaper. Off-campus, Hurston
found inspiration, support, and encouragement
from a literary salon frequented by devotees
of the Renaissance. HURSTON (dramatized):
I was careful to do my classwork and be worthy to stand there under the shadow of
the hovering spirit of Howard. I felt the ladder
under my feet. BAKER:
At Howard University,
Zora Neale Hurston was really
encouraged to write and really was supported,
and in some respects found her voice,
her literary voice. NARRATOR:
When Charles S. Johnson, editor of "Opportunity:
A Journal of Negro Life," the influential publication of
the National Urban League, invited Hurston in 1924 to submit work, she sent a joyful,
day-in-the-life short story that drew from
her own childhood. Hurston's translation
of rural Black experiences into literature
so impressed Johnson that he suggested that
the young woman join the flourishing literary scene
in New York. KAPLAN:
She had waited a long time to have her intellectual
gifts recognized. At Howard, she was recognized. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
After five-and-a-half years
of part-time study, Hurston left Howard
with an associate's degree and moved to Harlem. HURSTON (dramatized):
Being out of school
for lack of funds and wanting to be in New York, I decided to go there and try to get back in school
in that city. So the first week of
January 1925 found me in New York
with $1.50, no job, no friends,
and a lot of hope. MCCLAURIN:
Harlem in the 1920s is a magnet. It's a satellite. It's a lightning rod. It's attracting all this great
talent and energy. ♪ ♪ PATTERSON:
It's a musical world. It's a world of jazz. It's a literary world. It's a world of politics. And she wanted to be
a part of that. LAMOTHE:
Harlem comes to symbolize this modernity, this newness, this dynamism,
this idea of change. What you see in
the Harlem Renaissance is that people are very intentional
in understanding what it means to write about
and represent culture,
and Black culture in particular. DUNBAR:
That idea of the New Negro sweeps the ethos
of the Black imaginary, the exciting condition of
Black people, who are, by virtue of
the Great Migration, moving from the rural South to urban centers-- Chicago, New York,
Philadelphia-- moving up,
and participating in the 20th-century
revolution of modernity. NARRATOR:
Just four months after
arriving with hope and a bag of stories,
newcomer Zora Neale Hurston gained a pivotal foothold
in New York at "Opportunity's"
first annual literary awards. COTERA:
The "Opportunity" awards introduce her to the Harlem literati of New York as it's kind of developing
and rising up in this mid-1920s moment. NARRATOR:
With over 300 guests
in attendance, the event was a who's who of
the Harlem Renaissance: progressive New Yorkers,
Black and White, from the worlds
of literature, arts, education, and philanthropy. Langston Hughes, the promising 24-year-old
writer from Missouri, won the first prize in poetry. But that evening,
Hurston won the most prizes-- two second-place awards
and two honorable mentions. ♪ ♪ PATTERSON:
Hurston was different
than others. She'd come from the South. She was funny. MCCLAURIN:
She is flamboyant. She is bodacious. She is outspoken. And she also likes to be
the center of attention. At that moment in time,
Harlem is also about respectability. People are wanting to move away from
the Southern culture, because it's seen as
lower-class. And Zora brings
her Southernness with her, because she's
not ashamed of it. PATTERSON:
She was smart, she had ideas,
and she was interested in other people with ideas. She fell into that world
and she fit in that world. NARRATOR:
Prize-winner Langston Hughes
later remarked, "Zora Neale Hurston is
a clever girl, isn't she? I would like to know her." KING:
It was at the prize ceremony where she first met
Langston Hughes, and that relationship
would continue to define the early part
of her literary life. NARRATOR:
By evening's end, Hurston also had met and
impressed two influential women who would support
her academic goals. Fannie Hurst, one of the nation's
most successful writers, sought out Hurston
after the event to hire her as
personal secretary. And Annie Nathan Meyer, a wealthy female founder
of Barnard, the women's college affiliated
with Columbia University, offered Hurston
admittance on the spot so that she could resume her
undergraduate studies. KAPLAN:
She was unusually adaptable. She was somebody who could function in almost any milieu. (people talking in background) MCCLAURIN:
The fact that Zora is able to finagle a scholarship
out of an event where she meets someone
for the first time speaks to her prowess as someone
who is able to engage people. (talking in background) CHOIR:
♪ There's a college on
a hilltop ♪ ♪ That's very dear to me ♪ BAKER:
When she enters Barnard,
she enters an elite world
of women's education. And as I understand,
she was the only African American woman there. CHOIR:
♪ To dear old Barnard ♪ She is what my mother would call a "fly in the buttermilk"
at Barnard. KAPLAN:
She was not only
the only Black student to be at Barnard at the time, she was pretending to be eight to ten years younger
than she was, and she was there without the privileges
and advantages that almost everybody else
at Barnard had. She did not have family
sending her money, she was working to get
every cent that she needed. HURSTON (dramatized):
I feel my race. Among the thousand
White persons, I am a dark rock,
surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all,
I remain myself. KAPLAN:
She had to make a decision about whether she was
going to try to fit in or try to play up
her difference. And in true
Zora Neale Hurston style, it appears that she did both. BAKER:
Being at Barnard
I'm sure gave her both confidence as well as
excitement that she was as smart as anyone
in the country. She's very secure in wanting to advance herself, and she will take advantage of
any opportunity to do that. KAPLAN:
When it came to needing to
be popular, or get extra things, she let the fellow students
in her class see her as special,
and even exotic. But she never allowed anybody to treat her as lesser than, or to minimize her. NARRATOR:
Something of a celebrity
on campus, Hurston later remarked
that she was "Barnard's sacred black cow." She was a published writer, friends with Fannie Hurst, and part of the ambitious
younger generation of Harlem's artists, which made progressive-minded
Barnard students eager to know her. ♪ ♪ COTERA:
She starts at Barnard
looking to become a teacher, which was the expected path of an upwardly mobile
African American woman at the time, except she has
this brilliant creativity, and a storehouse of stories
and tales from Eatonville. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
In her second semester, Hurston wrote a paper
in her anthropology class that resulted in a summons
from Franz Boas, the world-renowned founder of Columbia University's
anthropology department. It was an auspicious meeting
for the aspiring writer-teacher. COTERA:
It wasn't until she encountered anthropology at
Barnard and Columbia that she really began
to see her culture as something
that could be studied. She arrives in New York
and at Barnard at exactly the perfect time, an arrival that
is converging with transformations in
anthropology. ♪ ♪ (birds chirping) MCCLAURIN:
The idea of anthropology, the way that it was formed,
was to study the other. We were the objects of study, but we were not supposed to be
the researchers. BAKER:
Anthropology is an
old discipline. It really became a professional discipline
in the 1840s as a defense for slavery. If all men were created equal, well, we shouldn't have slavery, and so if
they weren't quite men or quite human,
we can justify slavery. Well, then
we come into the 1890s, and we have Jim Crow after
Reconstruction. Guess what? Anthropology started to
support Jim Crow segregation. ♪ ♪ Anthropology in the 1890s, before Franz Boas really
comes on the professional scene, construed people in terms of
"savage," "barbarian," and "civilized." There was
a great deal of research trying to pigeonhole people into
this evolutionary hierarchy. ♪ ♪ COTERA:
A lot of times, "anthropologists"
didn't actually even visit the places that they were
writing about, or, or know the people that they
were writing about. NARRATOR:
These scientists, later referred to as
armchair anthropologists, formed their theories
and the foundations of the discipline based on the biased writings of
colonizers-- explorers, missionaries,
travelers, and military men. Franz Boas,
a German Jewish immigrant to the United States, rejected their methods
and conclusions. BAKER:
He was one of the first people that took living with
Indigenous people seriously, and he worked with the Inuits
and other people. And when you live with
someone for a year, guess what happens? You start seeing that
they have a lot to say. COTERA:
Boas saw 19th-century
anthropology and the discourses that emerged as being biased representations
of cultural others. He really wanted to bring
more scientific accuracy in the description of
other cultures. NARRATOR:
Boas landed at
Columbia University. His methodology for disputing racial and cultural hierarchies
gained traction, and he became known as
the father of both modern and American
anthropology. Columbia's Morningside Heights
campus became a magnet for students eager
to please "Papa Franz." KING:
He was helping young people to explore a completely new
world of ideas that he was in the process
of inventing: that people don't
come prepackaged in races or ethnicities; that cultures make sense on their own terms if you spend enough time
trying to understand them. The mental characteristics
of a race are not an expression of bodily form. They are a reflection of
cultural life. KING:
For the young people who
came into his classrooms, these were revolutionary ideas. BAKER:
Zora Neale Hurston was excited to study anthropology
at Columbia, because so much of
American society and the media did not value
African American culture. Franz Boas had a good eye for talent, and he
didn't care if they were Black, White,
women, male, or the like. KING:
Around 1920 or so, Franz Boas said that a change had come over his seminar rooms
in recent years, that, as he put it, "All my best students
are women." BAKER:
Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria,
Margaret Mead, and others
became anthropologists under his guidance. Franz Boas becomes excited
with Zora Neale Hurston because there were a number
of White anthropologists that tried to understand
the African American experience, but never really got very far. NARRATOR:
With Boas's encouragement, Hurston eagerly enrolled in
more anthropology courses. KING:
Hurston signed on as a
research assistant to go to Harlem and do
some physical anthropological-- anthropometrical,
as it was called at the time-- measurements
that the Boas community and some of his students are,
are engaged in. ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
I am being trained for
anthropometry and to do measuring. Dr. Boas says if I make good, there are more jobs
in store for me, and so I must learn
as quickly as possible, and be quite accurate. Boas is eager
for me to start. MCCLAURIN:
There were theories that
the head sizes of different so-called races is something that was
going to be able to tell us more about the level of
intelligence, what kind of culture they had. PATTERSON:
As anthropology evolved, this data was then used to show the opposite: to show that Black people, White people, Indians, were human beings with
brains, eyes, ears and nose and all of that
in the same place with the same capacity. But they're
operating against a very powerful ideology of
the inferiority of populations. (people talking in background)
(cars rumbling) NARRATOR:
Hurston dutifully headed down to Lenox Avenue in Harlem to measure heads
she found interesting with what Langston Hughes
described as a "strange-looking"
anthropological device. He was amazed that
no one bawled her out. DUNBAR:
Black people understand that once they start
measuring your head, they're trying to
prove that you're not human. So to go out on
the street corners and ask Black people to let you measure their head would have been a big ask.
(laughs) But because of
her gregariousness, they comply. (people talking in background) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:,
In February 1927, after Zora Neale Hurston
had completed most of her
undergraduate coursework, she boarded a train
headed to Florida to begin six months
of fieldwork in the South. Boas had convinced pre-eminent Black scholar
Carter G. Woodson, director of the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and wealthy sociologist
and anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons
to fund her trip. DUNBAR:
There was a certain amount of
progressiveness in Boas's vision about training, in deputizing
minoritized people in order to go into
their own cultures that wasn't necessarily done. And there's a certain sense of
valuing these people for what they were
able to help to produce. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Hurston's assignment: collect data on
Black Southerners, including their practices, beliefs, dances,
and storytelling ways. COTERA:
She goes off after taking
a few classes in anthropology really intent on being this
good Boasian anthropologist-- following Boasian methods
of participant observation. Participant observation required that you kind of immerse yourself in
another culture in order to understand it from the inside out. NARRATOR:
To motor around the South, Hurston took out a car loan
in Jacksonville using Boas's name for
reference-- a surprise
he did not appreciate-- and secured a
chrome-plated pistol. Set with her two-seater
she named Sassy Susie, Hurston took off for
Eatonville. KING:
Florida in the Jim Crow era
was the heart of darkness. KAPLAN:
Here is a Black woman
traveling alone with an exposed revolver. She looks like
a Black Annie Oakley. She couldn't have drawn
more attention to herself at a time when
one of the only ways for her to be safe is
to fly underneath the radar. HURSTON (dramatized):
I hurried back to Eatonville,
because I knew that the town was full of material
and that I could get it without hurt,
harm, or danger. NARRATOR:
Collecting did not go as planned for one of the newest members of
the American Folk-Lore Society. HURSTON (dramatized):
I went about asking, in carefully
accented Barnardese, "Pardon me, but do you know any
folk tales or folk songs?" PATTERSON:
Black people are suspicious,
I think. And they're
gonna look at you, like, "What's wrong with you?" Okay? "You're
acting like White people." HURSTON (dramatized):
The men and women who had
whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores looked at me
and shook their heads. No. They had never heard of
anything like that around there. Maybe it was over in
the next county. Why didn't I try over there? I did, and got
the selfsame answer. NARRATOR:
Her reports back to
Boas failed to impress. In May,
he sent a stern critique: "I find that
what you have obtained "is largely repetition of
the kind of material that has been
collected so much." Hurston had come home, but her education
made her an outsider. She needed a methodology that would bring her
back inside. COTERA:
The assumption behind participant observation
was always that you were studying,
as the anthropologist, a different culture. When she approached the people
as an outsider, she encountered what she called
"the featherbed resistance." The idea that they'll
let you in only so far, but really you're not
going to get at the truth of what the culture holds. NARRATOR:
An unexpected encounter with Langston Hughes
in Mobile, Alabama, in July brightened Hurston's mood. She agreed to drive Hughes
back to New York, and he accompanied her on fieldwork in Alabama
and Georgia, the pair bonding over
their shared interest in rural folk culture. Hughes told her he
would put in a good word with his New York patron. In autumn,
Hurston returned north to write her reports and
face her mentor. HURSTON (dramatized):
I went back to New York with my heart
beneath my knees and my knees in
some lonesome valley. I stood before Papa Franz
and cried salty tears. He gave me a good going over. ♪ ♪ BAKER:
Historically, folklore has been an integral part of
anthropology, because people
wanted to understand individuals' worldviews. And it has been a way of
analyzing systematically how people
make sense of the world. COTERA:
It was anthropology that
really showed Hurston that she could write
about her culture and imagine a career
where that could really be the source of
her literary imagination. HURSTON (dramatized):
Folklore is not as easy to
collect as it sounds. I found out later
that it was not because I had no talents for research, but because I did not have
the right approach. KING:
Hurston had learned that if you're trying
to collect folklore, you had to get people to
trust you. NARRATOR:
Charlotte Osgood Mason, the White wealthy member of
old New York society who was Langston Hughes's
benefactor, offered Hurston
a way to resume her research. KAPLAN:
Charlotte Osgood Mason was
somebody who believed deeply that White American civilization was bankrupt and washed out, and that the key would come
from what she considered "primitive peoples," that they had
the childlike energies and the childlike insights that would reinvigorate
White American society. NARRATOR:
Mason supported other writers and artists of
the Harlem Renaissance, including Howard professor
Alain Locke. Mason, whose
grandmotherly appearance belied her imperious ways, insisted that her beneficiaries
call her Godmother. (exhales heavily) Mason, uh, was a handful. She had lots of money. She liked having
people of color around her. She first was very interested
in Native Americans. MCCLAURIN:
She is someone who believes
that she has the authentic interpretation of what
Black culture, Negro culture, is about. NARRATOR:
When Zora Neale Hurston
arrived at Mason's Park Avenue penthouse
on December 8, 1927, she was presented with
a one-year contract. The document deemed Hurston
an "independent agent" hired "to seek out and compile "and collect
all information possible, "both written and oral,
concerning the music, "poetry, folklore,
literature, Hoodoo, conjure, "manifestations of art and
kindred subjects relating to and existing among
the North American Negroes." BAKER:
Zora Neale Hurston was
an employee. She was employed to collect
for Charlotte Osgood Mason. COTERA:
She signs a contract that
she will not share any materials with anyone
or publish anything outside of Mason's approval. But she's
still connected to Boas, and she still wants to stay in
Papa Franz's good graces. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Six days after
signing with Mason, Hurston boarded a
train heading to Alabama with a guarantee
of $200 a month, money to purchase a car, and a plan for yearlong
fieldwork in the South. She also had
a motion picture camera, a rare and expensive tool
for anthropologists, that would allow her to capture
scenes of rural Black life. Hurston felt excited
and, for once, financially secure. HURSTON (dramatized):
Godmother dearest, you have given me
my first Christmas. I mean, the first Yule season
when reality met my dreams. The kind of Christmas that my
half-starved childhood painted. Thank you. (bell clanging,
train engine churning) (people talking in background) NARRATOR:
Hurston's new methodological
approach was apparent once she arrived at the
Alabama home of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last known surviving
Africans of the Clotilda, thought to be the
last American slave ship. Hurston used his African name,
Oluale Kossola, to greet the man who had
vivid memories of his capture. BAKER:
Interviewing an enslaved person
that came from Africa was compelling for her. Zora Neale Hurston was genuinely
intrigued and interested in mapping and understanding
the relationship between African traditions and African American traditions. NARRATOR:
Over several months,
she spent time with Lewis, who was in his late 80s,
in Africatown, the community he co-founded
after the Civil War with other West Africans. Hurston brought him gifts of
food and drove him to complete
errands. Though she captured 24 minutes
of Lewis with her camera, it was her extensive, detailed
notes of his memories and speech that were the
priority for Hurston and
her anthropological research. KAPLAN:
As an academically
trained anthropologist, getting Cudjo Lewis's voice
exact was very important, that ethnography should record with accuracy,
not with translation. MCCLAURIN:
He's created his own language. It's a fusion of both
Southern Negro dialect, as well as some African
words thrown in there. BAKER:
Hurston's intimacy and support of his African authenticity enabled him to open
up to her in an authentic way. (train rumbling) NARRATOR:
From Alabama, Hurston headed off
to Florida, where men worked at felling pine
trees, manning sawmill camps, boiling turpentine,
and mining phosphate. KAPLAN:
She was very interested in
documenting what she called
"the Negro farthest down." HURSTON (dramatized):
My search for knowledge of
things took me into many strange
places and adventures. My life was
in danger several times. KAPLAN:
She was often the only woman for
tens of miles around, with a camera, with her own car, with a gun on her hip,
collecting stories. HURSTON (dramatized):
If I had not learned how to
take care of myself in these circumstances, I could
have been maimed or killed on most any day of the several
years of my research work. NARRATOR:
To win the trust of the men, she made up
stories about her life. HURSTON (dramatized):
I took occasion to impress the
job with the fact that I was also a fugitive from
justice-- bootlegging. They were hot behind
me in Jacksonville, and they wanted me in Miami. So I was hiding out. That sounded reasonable. Bootleggers always have cars. I was taken in. HURSTON:
♪ Shove it over ♪ ♪ Hey, hey, hey, you,
can't you line it? ♪ ♪ Oh, shack-er-lack-er-lack-er-
lack-er-lack-er-lack-er ♪ (clears throat):
♪ Can't you move there? ♪ COTERA:
She realized that no one was
going to share songs with her or even let her into these
incredibly rich spaces where people were exchanging
stories and song and card-playing games if she didn't bring
something herself to the table. NARRATOR:
"I had to prove that I was
their kind," Hurston recalled. She sang and danced with them at
their bimonthly payday parties. In return, they told her
stories, sang work songs, and played
blues riffs on the guitar. Hurston often wrote Langston
Hughes of her work from the road;
the pair, with Mason's support, were supposed to be
collaborating on a folk opera. ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
July 10, 1928. Dear Langston, In every town, I hold one
or two storytelling contests, and at each, I begin by telling
them who you are and all, then I read
poems from "Fine Clothes." Boy, they eat it up! You are being quoted in railroad
camps, phosphate mines, turpentine stills, et cetera. Folks began to respond to her, and even repeat back verses of
Langston Hughes's poetry to her. They even began
calling it the party book, and asking for her to
bring out the party book and read something else from it. MCCLAURIN:
Not only do they like it, they pick up a guitar and
they start putting it to music. That kind of spontaneous
creativity is amazing, given the harsh conditions in
which people were working. ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
Everybody joined in. It was the strangest
and most thrilling thing. They played it well, too. You'd be surprised. One man was giving the words,
outlining them out as the preacher does a hymn, and the others
would take it up and sing. It was glorious! BAKER:
She was using this contemporary
poetry that was written up in New York, bringing it down south,
and then the, the Southern folkloric tradition would take
it, turn it up on its head,
and make it anew. And so she was documenting how
folklore and culture was actually being
created in front of her eyes. Much of the impetus
for cultural anthropology, ethnography, was
called salvage ethnography. KING:
Salvage anthropology was
the idea that one of the goals of the anthropologist was
to rush in and collect things before they were all
destroyed by modernity. On the one hand,
this was a very noble pursuit, that you wanted to grab
things before they disappeared. On the other hand, it could lead
you to believe that you were visiting so-called
primitive societies that existed in a
permanent present. That they had no past,
they had no future. BAKER:
And that was believed by a lot
of people, but Zora Neale Hurston
understood that culture was not being replaced as much as it was emerging
and on a continuum. And that was
super-sophisticated. HURSTON (dramatized):
I am getting much more material than before because I am
learning better technique. Am keeping close tab on expressions of double
meaning, too. Also compiling
lists of double words. They, to give emphasis, use the noun and put the
function of the noun before it as an adjective. Example, sitting-chair, suck-bottle,
cook-pot, hair-comb. I have about enough
for a good volume of stories. KAPLAN:
She may be our first Black female ethnographer
documentary filmmaker. She uses that expensive
and rare film equipment to document the lives of ordinary, everyday Black
children, and Black women,
and Black communities, providing for us some of the earliest footage we have of the everyday visual lives of Black Southern Americans. (people talking in background) NARRATOR:
Hurston next traveled
to New Orleans. With Mason's
support for another year, she was able
to rent a three-room house. She devoted most of
her time to fieldwork on a topic that she perceived
White folklorists to be sensationalizing
and misrepresenting-- Hoodoo and conjure: folk religion and practices
created by enslaved African Americans. LAMOTHE:
Hurston's the daughter of a
preacher. And I think that Hurston had a
strong investment in the spiritual life of Black people,
and Black women, in particular. KING:
The closest that Boas
and his students had gotten to participant observation would be to sit in on a, a ritual
or religious practice and, and watch it and
note down what happened. ♪ ♪ For Hurston, you had
to jump off the high dive. If you were going to
study Hoodoo or Voodoo, you had to
do it from the inside, and so she went through at
least four initiation rituals. NARRATOR:
One Hoodoo doctor asked her to chase down
a black cat in the night, boil it in a cauldron,
and suck on its bones. Another had her lie naked
and fasting for 69 hours, experiencing
strange and altered dreams. The ceremony ended
with the painting of a red and yellow
lightning bolt down her back. PATTERSON:
That she succeeded is
a testament to her resilience, her willingness to
do whatever she had to do to get her work done. HURSTON (dramatized):
I am getting on in the conjure
splendidly. I have been going to every one
I hear of for the sake of thoroughness. I am knee-deep in it
with a long way to go. (children chanting
and clapping) BAKER:
There was this real mismatch between the goals
of Charlotte Osgood Mason and the goals of Zora Neale
Hurston. Hurston was collecting folklore
to demonstrate the legitimacy and the sophistication
of Black vernacular, Black folk life, of African American rural
culture. Charlotte Osgood Mason was employing Zora Neale Hurston
for the opposite, because she thought
it was primitive. MCCLAURIN:
Zora is collecting what she
thinks Mason wants to see, and she's also collecting
what she wants to get. NARRATOR:
Mason found Hurston's material
promising and continued her patronage. Amidst her travels, Hurston had been collecting
love letters for a book she wanted to write
about Black love, which she hid from Mason. She discussed
her plans with Langston Hughes, imploring him
to not tell Godmother. COTERA:
There is a complex
positionality that Hurston had to adopt in order to do what she wanted
to do. So she does this, um, very, I would say, opportunistically. HURSTON (dramatized):
July 25, 1928. Dearest little mother
of the primitive world, Take care not to
overtire yourself abroad. I am attempting a volume
of work songs with music for piano and
guitar. I shall send you the first song
as soon as I get it finished to see if you like it. KAPLAN:
During the period
when she's collecting some of her
greatest anthropological and ethnographic work, Hurston is collecting material she doesn't have legal claim to. COTERA:
Charlotte Osgood Mason also controlled
Hurston's expenses. She had to list everything that
she purchased with Mason's money, down to feminine, quote-unquote
"feminine products." NARRATOR:
Hurston once confided
in Hughes how Mason's detailed oversight and periodic angry outbursts
affected her. HURSTON (dramatized):
It destroys my self-respect and utterly
demoralizes me for weeks. I do care for her deeply. That is why I can't
endure to get at odds with her. I don't want anything
but to get at my work with the least possible trouble. COTERA:
She is agreeing to certain
strictures on the Osgood Mason side, and while at the same
time reaching out to Boas and keeping those fires lit. KAPLAN:
He's a very important voice. He is the gatekeeper
of anthropology, who also is an influential and an important anti-racist. Mason was a profoundly
anti-academic person. She had these notions of
folklore that it had to be kept pure and kept away from the
academics. HURSTON (dramatized):
My dear Dr. Boas, I was very
proud to hear from you. I have wanted to write you, but a promise was exacted of me
that I would write no one. Of course, I have intended from
the very beginning to show you what I have,
but after I had returned. Thus I could keep my word and at the same time have your
guidance. The experience that I had under
you was a splendid foundation. I know where to look and how. NARRATOR:
Four months later, from a small, secluded cottage she rented in Eau Gallie,
Florida, Hurston updated Boas, that she was
"sitting down to write up" the "more than 95,000
words of story material, "collection
of children's games, and conjure and
religious material." HURSTON (dramatized):
Dear Langston, I am just beginning to hit my
stride. I not only want to
present the material with all the life
and color of my people, I want to leave no loopholes for the scientific crowd to rend
and tear us. MCCLAURIN:
Zora also wants to write
for the folk. She's thinking of how
to take this data that she's collecting as part
of her formal research and then translate it
into a form that is then going to be
accessible to the people she got
it from originally. (men singing, tools clanging) HURSTON:
A railroad rail weighs
900 pounds. And the men have to take
these lining bars and get it in shape to spike it
down. And while they're doing that,
they have a chant. They use the rhythm
to work it into place. They don't have to
look at the rail, 'cause that's the captain's
job to see when it's right. Whatever song he starts, if it's
a fast rhythm, they work fast, and if it's a slow one, well, they work, you know,
a little slower, but they get just as much work
done, it seems, somehow or another. (men singing) HURSTON:
And then the boss hollers,
"Bring on the hammer gang," and they start to spiking it
down. (playing rhythm) (men laughing) ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
Darling Godmother, at last "Barracoon"
is ready for your eyes. I pray so earnestly
that I have done something that can come somewhere
near your expectations. NARRATOR:
In 1931, with
Mason's continued support, Hurston finished a book-length
manuscript based on the interview she had
conducted three years before
with Cudjo Lewis. Hurston began submitting
"Barracoon" to publishers. MCCLAURIN:
Zora was very committed to
authenticity. She wrote that book in dialect. She tried to replicate Cudjo's own language. Publishers wanted her to
translate it for White readers into Standard English,
and she refused. BAKER:
That was the authenticity, that was scientifically
valid and genuine, and she did not
want to go against that. I think that was
an important form of resistance. MCCLAURIN:
That speaks to her belief that there was value
in the way that Cudjo had created his own
form of communication. That value did
not need to be diluted or translated
for a White audience. (seagulls squawking) NARRATOR:
Hurston had
other publishing successes. Her ethnographic writing
debuted the previous year in "The Journal
of American Folk-Lore." With Godmother's approval, she had submitted "Dance Songs
and Tales from the Bahamas," based on three months
of fieldwork in the country. ♪ ♪ MAN:
How do you learn most of your
songs? HURSTON:
I learn 'em, I just get in the
crowd with the people, and if they're singing,
then I listen as best I can and I start to joining in with
a phrase or two, and then finally, I get so I can
sing a verse and then I keep
on till I learn all the songs and all the verses, then I sing 'em back
to the people until they tell me that I can sing 'em just like
them, and then I take part and I try it out on
different people who already know the song
until they are quite satisfied that I know it, and
then I carry it in my memory. (man singing indistinctly) NARRATOR:
In 1931, the "Journal" printed Hurston's 100-page article "Hoodoo in America," which began cementing
her as the American authority on the topic. When she wasn't trying
to find a home for "Barracoon," Hurston spent
much of 1931 focused on theater, including her play
"The Great Day." It was a showcase of
Black culture that incorporated her Bahamian
ethnographic research. Mason very reluctantly
supported the production, and the stakes
for Hurston were high. KAPLAN:
Most of the great artists of the
Harlem Renaissance had their money in Black
fiction. Hurston believed deeply that it was going to be Black
drama brought to wide audiences that
was going to do more to counter
racism than anything else. HURSTON (clapping): ♪ Oh, Mama,
come see that crow ♪ ♪ See how he fly, oh ♪ BAKER: Zora Neale Hurston really believed that you could
not just read the folklore on the page. She believed
that you had to perform it, that you had to see it, you had to hear it,
you had to feel it. All your senses need
to be engaged in this beautiful creation. HURSTON:
But what they're talking about
is what we know in the United States as a
buzzard. And the buzzard comes to get
something to eat. And they are talking about
it and they dance it. KAPLAN:
She was running up
incredible debt. Everybody was opposed
to what she was trying to do. (audience murmuring) NARRATOR:
On January 10, 1932, "The Great Day" premiered on
Broadway at the John Golden Theatre. HURSTON:
♪ You may leave and go to
Halimuh Fack ♪ ♪ But my slow drag will
bring you back ♪ NARRATOR:
"The New York Herald Tribune"
praised her production as "the real thing;
unadulterated and not fixed and fussed up
for the purposes of commerce." HURSTON:
♪ Oh, Mama, come see that crow ♪ Caw! (audience cheering) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Despite the show's promising
reviews, no producer picked it up. KAPLAN:
It was an enormous
disappointment for her, one of
the heartbreaks of her life. She thought it was going to be
the artistic production that told people who she was. NARRATOR:
Sick, exhausted, and bankrupt, in April, Hurston reached
out to Mason for financial help as she packed up to
relocate to Eatonville. HURSTON (dramatized):
One other item of expense,
Godmother. I really need a pair of shoes. You remember that we discussed
the matter in the fall and agreed that I should
own only one pair at a time. I bought a pair in mid-December
and they have held up until now. My big toe is about
to burst out of my right shoe and so I must
do something about it. NARRATOR:
Hurston's relationship with
Mason, almost five years of support,
had soured over time. Mason paid
Hurston's theater bills and came through with
six dollars for the new shoes, money for a one-way ticket,
and $75 in spending money. KAPLAN:
Charlotte Osgood Mason was
unable to control Zora Neale Hurston. It would be like trying to
get a shooting star into a Mason jar. And Charlotte Osgood Mason
could not be controlled by Zora Neale Hurston. NARRATOR:
Hurston's last check from Mason
arrived in October 1932, just as the nation was heading
toward record unemployment. The Great Depression had dashed
the dreams of many Americans. Hurston had hoped for a teaching
position in Florida that did not materialize. Income from periodic
writings never secured her enough money on which to live. KAPLAN:
It wasn't just that Zora Neale
Hurston lost a meal ticket. She honestly did lose
somebody she saw as a kind of spiritual mother. NARRATOR:
Hurston had not just lost her
relationship with Mason. A year earlier, her friendship with
Langston Hughes had ended on very bad terms, in part over
their collaboration "Mule Bone," a comedic play based on one of
Hurston's unpublished Eatonville tales. KAPLAN:
He and Zora Neale Hurston were enormously important to one
another in every sense: emotionally, aesthetically,
intellectually. And when
their relationship exploded, they were both
profoundly wounded by it. (ship horn blows) NARRATOR:
When Hurston's mentors at
Columbia failed to facilitate
funding for her research, she turned to
the Guggenheim Foundation. On July 25, 1933, Hurston
submitted an application for a fellowship
focused on anthropology to continue the work she had
begun in New Orleans. HURSTON (dramatized):
My ultimate purpose as a student is to increase the general
knowledge concerning my people, to advance science and the
musical arts among my people, but in the Negro way and
away from the White man's way. DUNBAR:
"The Negro way" means
in a way that is respectful, that is set on
debunking Black inferiority. I think it speaks to her,
again, desire to participate in the knowledge
production of anthropology. KING:
Hurston is an early
practitioner of what would later come to be
called native anthropology. That is to say, she's someone
from the communities that she is studying. NARRATOR:
Hurston chose
long-time mentor and "Journal of American
Folk-Lore" editor Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, and three others-- people she felt
supported her goals-- to submit recommendations. KAPLAN:
Most of the letters in her file
are extremely problematic. NARRATOR:
Papa Franz wrote, "On the whole, her methods
are more journalistic "than scientific, "and I am not
under the impression "that she is just the right
caliber for a Guggenheim Fellowship." Benedict assessed that Hurston
had "neither the temperament "nor the training to present
this material "in an orderly manner when it is
gathered, nor to draw valid
historical conclusions from it." And added in a separate letter, "I don't think
she is Guggenheim material." DUNBAR:
Basically, you send her to go in
and collect, but have somebody who's
trained write up the material. Trained, meaning credentialized. And I think that's
probably the hardest hurdle that she has to get over: that she's not just a vessel
for the academy to get into these specific cultures. KAPLAN:
She does not yet
have the academic credentials that are considered
appropriate for Guggenheim. Which is not to say
the Guggenheims only go to people with
doctorates, but it remains an issue to this
day: What kinds of credentials are
assumed to have to go along
with that kind of recognition? Did Franz Boas consider her lack
of a PhD an issue? Probably. BAKER:
Even as liberal and as important and empowering as Franz Boas and, and some of
the professors were, there was still some
implicit bias that there was not equality
of intellectual engagement, if you will. DUNBAR:
That doesn't mean whatever
relationship they had was inauthentic, but I don't think that the
academy imagined Hurston as ever being part
of the knowledge it produced, or a knowledge
producer in her own sake. MCCLAURIN:
At the moment that Zora is claiming her space as an
anthropologist, anthropology doesn't
know what to do with Black folk. They didn't
know what to do with Zora, and I think it was
a level of gatekeeping. KAPLAN:
She was remarkably forbearing, much more forbearing than most
people could be in the circumstances she faced as a Black woman in mostly White society, in mostly sexist society,
in mostly racist society, in mostly
Northern and urban society. NARRATOR:
Zora Neale Hurston was
determined to have a career. "I shall wrassle me up a
future or die trying," she had once written
to Mason. KAPLAN:
Hurston worked across
many different disciplines, many different fields, many
different kinds of artistry. She worked in drama; she worked in writing; she worked in academia;
she worked in teaching. Often she was
working on her own. She was not
somebody who could work well for very long for anybody else. MCCLAURIN:
She alienated a lot of people. Zora is the kind of
person, you either love her, or you hate her. KING:
She could be insufferable. The truth was, she was in many
ways undisciplined. NARRATOR:
She had once written to her
friend the poet Countee Cullen, complaining about the
"regular grind at Barnard," "Don't be surprised to hear "that I have suddenly taken to
the woods. I hate routine." KAPLAN:
Once she was done with
something, or someone, often she was completely done
and she couldn't look back. NARRATOR:
No longer beholden to
Godmother, or "the Park Avenue dragon," as she once referred
to Mason in a letter, Hurston could
freely pursue fiction. ♪ ♪ She had been sketching
out a story loosely based on the lives and experiences
of her parents in Eatonville. HURSTON:
I didn't even have a typewriter
then. I got $20 from, uh, "Story"
magazine for this short story. And so on the strength of that, I decided to
sit down and write a novel. Took me about seven or
eight weeks to write the book. NARRATOR:
Hurston's instincts paid off. In May 1934, that novel,
"Jonah's Gourd Vine," was published to good reviews. "Miss Hurston has
made the study of Negro folklore "her special province. "This may very well account for
the brilliantly authentic "flavor of her novel and for her
excellent rendition of Negro dialect," gushed "The
New York Times Book Review." The title was
immediately selected for the Book of the Month Club. ♪ ♪ Also that year, White wealthy
shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, a regular fixture in Harlem
society, published "Negro Anthology," an extensive, groundbreaking
collection of music, poetry, historical studies,
and examinations of racism. The book featured seven of
Hurston's ethnographic writings. MCCLAURIN:
Those pieces
are evidence of her theorizing. She's really articulating a
theory of how she views Negro culture
at that moment in time. HURSTON (dramatized):
The Negro is a very original
being. While he lives and moves in
the midst of White civilization, everything that he touches is
reinterpreted for his own use. He has modified the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine,
and most certainly the religion of his new country. NARRATOR:
That summer, Hurston wrote Boas
about her manuscript for "Mules and Men," a book about her
early anthropological forays into the South. She hoped that he would like
the ethnographic-focused work, despite her publisher's request
to add additional material to appeal to
a more general audience. The revisions resulted in Hurston weaving the folklore
stories into a first-person narrative. BAKER:
She wanted a much more
comprehensive and much more
scientific sort of tone, including a lot of religion,
and the children's games, and sort of
almost an encyclopedia. HURSTON (dramatized):
Dear Dr. Boas, I am full of tremors, lest you decide
that you do not want to write the introduction
to my "Mules and Men." I have inserted
the between-story conversation and business because
when I offered it without it, every publisher said
it was too monotonous. Now three houses
want to publish it. So I hope that the unscientific
matter that must be there will not keep you from
writing the introduction. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Hurston headed to Chicago
in October 1934 to stage a version of
her production of "A Great Day," now titled "Singing Steel." Her arrival was met with a blur of invitations to dinners
and speaking engagements. The "Daily News" advised, "The fascinating
Zora Neale Hurston is too good to miss." Hurston received an early
Christmas present when her production
so impressed the Rosenwald Fund that the philanthropic
organization, focused on
African American education, offered her a scholarship
to pursue a PhD. ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
Dear Dr. Boas, Great news! I have wanted the training
very keenly and tried very hard to get
Mrs. Mason to do it for me. She would give money
for everything else but that. I realize that this is going
to call for rigorous routine and discipline, which everybody
seems to feel that I need. So be it. I want to do it. NARRATOR:
The Rosenwald Fund
had agreed to provide $3,000 over two years to
support Hurston's doctorate. "The major problem,
as I see it," Hurston wrote in her
application, "is the collection
of Negro folk material "in as thorough
a manner as possible, "as soon as possible. "In order to see it objectively,
one must have great preparation, "that is if
to be able to analyze, to evaluate what is before one." For the first
time since childhood, Hurston would be able
to focus on being a student. PATTERSON:
There was rarely a moment that she didn't have
to worry about money, that she didn't have to borrow or work more than two or three
jobs. HURSTON (dramatized):
I have been on my own since
14 years old, and went to high school, college, and everything
progressive that I have done because I wanted to. I have had people say to me, "Why don't you go and
take a master's "or a doctor's degree in
anthropology, since you love it so much?" They never seem to realize
that it takes money to do that. MCCLAURIN:
Columbia at that moment has organized all of
its courses around salvaging information about Indigenous Native Americans. What Zora wants to do is
create what I call an independent PhD
in Negro studies. We would call it Black studies. She convinces
Boas that she should do this independent PhD. He agrees. NARRATOR:
But just one month after awarding Hurston the
fellowship, the Rosenwald Fund
rejected the long-term plan that she and Boas
developed for her study, and informed her that they would
only support one semester for a total of $700. Frustrated and stressed,
she lodged a soft appeal. HURSTON (dramatized):
This is not to over-persuade you in the matter
of the two-year plan. I am not being
trained to do a routine job. I am being trained to
do what has not been done and that which cries out to be
done. MCCLAURIN:
They decide, and this is the
language that is in some of the
correspondence, that "Zora Neale Hurston
is like a rough piece of iron that needs to be honed
into a fine piece of steel." And they want to insist that she follow the curriculum
at Columbia, which has absolutely nothing to
do with what she wants to study. BAKER:
This is after she had already
been a novelist and had been a member of the
American Folk-Lore Society, and the American Anthropological
Association. And she had published for
the American Folk-Lore Society. NARRATOR:
Hurston agreed to the new terms, enrolled, and
began attending classes, but after a few months,
she reconsidered. BAKER:
Zora Neale Hurston did not want to be in another
relationship dependent like, um, Charlotte
Osgood Mason, so she was, like, "Peace out." Like, "We're not going to do
this, because I've been there before." MCCLAURIN:
They have already decided what
she can and can't do. And she resist, as she has resisted most of
her life against the conventions of gender and race,
and now intellectuality. It would have been easy. She could have gone, studied
those courses and everything, and gotten a PhD. She chose not to. ♪ ♪ COTERA:
She was never
going to be the nice and silent and acquiescent Black woman,
ever. This is not who she was. DUNBAR:
It is an unwillingness
to be disciplined in the sense of academic
disciplines-- anthropology-- and disciplined in the sense
that she won't be contained. KAPLAN:
There were
very few Black women with doctorates of
any kind in the 1930s. And it would have drawn even
more attention to her, and mostly positive attention. COTERA:
Benedict and Boas
went out of their way to ensure that Margaret Mead
was able to get a PhD. So we have to ask ourselves, what other aspects of her difference played into this lack of support? NARRATOR:
Hurston, who was likely
44 years old by then, decided to
stop attending classes and focus on
her own writing instead. Her book "Mules and Men"
would soon be published. "Working like
a slave and liking it," she wrote a friend in Florida. "But I have lost all
my zest for a doctorate." PEOPLE:
♪ Catch this guy ♪ ♪ Never comin' back till
the Fourth of July ♪ ♪ Yeah, Lord,
come pay the money ♪ NARRATOR:
Hurston headed south
mid-June 1935 to the Georgia Sea Islands,
Eatonville, and the Everglades on a job to collect folklore. Her latest travels
were to facilitate the work of two White folklorists
recording Negro folk songs for the Library of Congress, but it wasn't easy. Sensitive to Black stereotyping, at one point Hurston adamantly
stopped one of her colleagues from photographing
a young boy eating a watermelon. And, due to segregation laws
in Southern towns, Hurston frequently slept in her
car while her colleagues rested in a motel. HURSTON:
♪ Bluebird, bluebird ♪ ♪ Through my window ♪ ♪ Bluebird, bluebird ♪ NARRATOR:
Sometimes the researchers
captured Hurston's own singing. HURSTON:
♪ Bluebird, bluebird,
through my window ♪ ♪ Oh, honey, I'm tired ♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
That fall, "Mules and Men" hit
the stands. Hurston opened
her story explaining how she had known
folklore since she was a child. HURSTON (dramatized):
But it was fitting me like a
tight chemise. I couldn't
see it for wearing it. It was only
when I was off in college, away from my
native surroundings, that I could see
myself like somebody else, and stand off and
look at my garment. Then I had to have the spyglass
of anthropology to look through at that. MCCLAURIN:
It is Zora's first formal
collection of stories, folklore, and it cements her as a native
anthropologist. DUNBAR:
Why a text like "Mules and Men"
is so important is that she resists the simple
extraction, cultural extraction. It becomes an opportunity for
her to tell what she feels to be a more
authentic story of that Black experience. KING:
Hurston is reporting on a set of
experiences that she had,
using the first person. Whether it's a juke joint or a turpentine camp or a lumber mill or a Hoodoo
initiation ritual, she's taking you as a reader into a society that she,
as a scientist, is desperately
trying to understand. HURSTON (dramatized):
I went outside to join the
woofers, since I seemed to have
no standing among the dancers. I stood there awkwardly, knowing that the too-ready
laughter and aimless talk was a window-dressing for
my benefit. His laugh has a hundred
meanings. MCCLAURIN:
Part of what she's trying to
tell us is that your very
presence changes the dynamic, and so you have to account for your presence in the data that you're collecting, as well. This idea that you're
objective, when you go and observe and
participate in these cultures, is really a misnomer. KING:
And that is a way of doing
social science that we now
take as kind of normal. At the time, this
was a revolutionary and, as Ruth Benedict
would have put it, an "undisciplined" way
of doing social science. NARRATOR:
Boas, declining
to write a major introduction, submitted just three paragraphs. KAPLAN:
He didn't write
a full-scale introduction and treat her work with
that kind of seriousness. NARRATOR:
The inclusion of Boas's text nevertheless helped the
publisher promote
the critically acclaimed book. HURSTON: ♪ Cap'n got a mule ♪ ♪ Mule on the mount,
called him Jerry ♪ (exhales heavily) BAKER:
I think it's
really both endearing but also telling
that Zora Neale Hurston, in "Mules and Men,"
begins to blend her fiction with her science and
her science with her fiction. And I think
"Mules and Men" is one of the best examples and the first examples of that. HURSTON:
♪ I out had told her ♪ ♪ Must be
the hellfire captain ♪
(exhales heavily) ♪ He had blue eyes ♪ ♪ Lawd, Lawd, he had blue eyes ♪ ♪ Oh, don't you hear them,
a... ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
March 7, 1936. I think I must be God's
left-hand mule, because I have to work so hard. The press of new things plus the press of old
things yet unfinished keep me on the treadmill all the
time. HURSTON:
♪ I got a rainbow ♪ ♪ Wrapped and tied
around my shoulder ♪
(exhales heavily) ♪ I got a rainbow ♪ ♪ Wrapped and tied around my
shoulder ♪ ♪ It look like rain ♪ ♪ Lawd, Lawd,
it look like rain ♪ NARRATOR:
With the success of her books, Hurston streamlined her focus, deciding that her
life work was literature. But she remained
committed to exploring and documenting Black lives. PATTERSON:
She said, "I have to keep going and answer
the questions about my people." And to her, she's talking about
the diaspora. She's talking about Black
culture not just in the United States,
but in the Caribbean, as well. NARRATOR:
Hurston again looked to the
Guggenheim Foundation for support. In this new application, she indicated
a unique description of her field of learning,
literary science. And this time, she only asked
one anthropologist to serve as a recommender. Melville Herskovits, a prominent former
student of Boas, wrote, "I think it is not
saying too much to state "that Miss Hurston probably
has more intimate knowledge of Negro folk life than
anyone in this country." Hurston won a Guggenheim
in March-- the first of two. And by the next month, she was
off to Jamaica and Haiti. FILM ANNOUNCER:
Join a cult whose roots go back
to darkest Africa. Exotic, barbaric:
the cult of Voodoo! DUNBAR:
She wants to remedy
to a certain extent the sensationalism
that Americans are consuming, Haitian culture and Voodoo. She feels like she can
go in and tell a story about that
religion that is
free of the sensationalism. (drums pounding) NARRATOR:
Zombies existed in the minds of
Western society as part of a forbidding, sexual, and mysterious
culture associated with Haiti. LAMOTHE:
When it comes to Haiti
and Jamaica, the Caribbean space,
she is very much an outsider. MCCLAURIN:
It's where Zora steps into the traditional
anthropology, where she's studying the other. She is not
a member of that society. She doesn't belong,
so she has to figure out how to get inside of it. LAMOTHE:
I think that Hurston had an
understanding that at the root of it, whether people in Haiti thought
about and talked about zombies as a kind of folklore, or a phenomenon
that actually existed, that at the heart of it, this kind of fascination with
the zombie is really about free will. KING:
She's saying that if
you need a category for someone who is both living
and dead at the same time, that is deeply revealing about
the society that you're from. And for Hurston herself, having grown up in Jim Crow
Florida, she knew what that category
meant. For someone to be fully, wholly
alive but socially dead, socially invisible to the people
she was surrounded by. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Months of fieldwork
in the Caribbean had distracted Hurston from an intense romantic
relationship with a younger man. But she could no
longer ignore the narrative that had been
welling up inside her. Hurston mixed memory, history,
personal experience, fiction, and research into a story told
through the eyes of a Southern Black American
girl-turned-woman named Janie Crawford, who lives part of
her life in Eatonville. MCCLAURIN:
It's now what we call
autoethnography, because it's rooted in some
of what she has lived herself, but also what she's
researched in her own community. NARRATOR:
In September 1937, her book
"Their Eyes Were Watching God" was on its way to becoming
a mainstream critical success. It is a "lovely book," stated a review in
"The New York Herald Tribune," praising Hurston as
"an author that writes with her head and her heart." MCCLAURIN:
That book is a great illustration of Zora blending
her literary skills and talent as a writer and also her skills and talent as an anthropologist
and ethnographer. DUNBAR:
Janie's a storyteller. She has this
full life experience. She's a survivor
in a variety of ways, and she goes home
to tell her girlfriend. ♪ ♪ MCCLAURIN:
Zora is doing a gender analysis. She's really telling us about
the conditions of Black women and what they have to
confront against social norms, against a patriarchal society. HURSTON (dramatized):
"A woman by herself is a pitiful
thing," she was told over and again. Besides, she liked
being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men
didn't represent a thing she wanted to know about. LAMOTHE:
There are scenes
where some of the very stories that she collected when
she was doing fieldwork in Eatonville are
incorporated into the plot. MCCLAURIN:
She's also depicting the ways in which people
interact. That's what anthropologists do--
they observe social interaction and document
that. And so the novel
is rich with how people gossip, and how they make judgments
about things. The language is so rich. ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
The sun was gone, but he had left
his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting
on porches beside the road. It was the time to
hear things and talk. These sitters
had been tongueless, earless, eyeless
conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes
had occupied their skins. But now, the sun
and the bossman were gone, so the skins
felt powerful and human. They became lords of
sounds and lesser things. They passed nations
through their mouths. They sat in judgment. ♪ ♪ BAKER:
We call it in anthropology
"thick description," which is throughout
"Their Eyes Were Watching God." ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized):
All night now the jooks clanged
and clamored. Pianos living
three lifetimes in one. Blues made and
used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting,
singing, crying, laughing, winning and
losing love every hour. Work all day for money,
fight all night for love. The rich black earth
clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants. BAKER:
"Mules and Men"
was science informed by fiction, and "Their Eyes Were Watching
God" was fiction informed by science, because there's very little
distinction between the signifying
happening on Joe Starks' porch and Joe Clark's porch. They're the same thing. COTERA:
"Their Eyes Were Watching God"
is to me to be the most personal of
all of her books. I think she's
really laying it out there. I feel like she knows it's
going to be an important book. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Despite her publisher's robust
promotional campaign and rave reviews in national
publications, "Their Eyes Were Watching God"
did not sell well. What surely did not
foster African American support were negative reviews from Hurston's Black male
contemporaries. Writer Richard Wright
attacked Hurston's book, stating that it "carries no
theme, no message, no thought," and continued what
he described as "the minstrel technique that
makes the 'White folks' laugh." And Alain Locke's critique in
a one-paragraph review suggested that she was drawing
on old literary traditions. Hurston was livid, and she wrote
that Locke knew "less about Negro life than
anyone in America." "I will send
my toenails to debate him "and I will come
personally to debate him on what he knows about
literature on the subject." Her scathing response
was never published. COTERA:
The critical reception of her
work by the Black intelligentsia is extremely disappointing, and does smack of sexism. When the novel is dismissed
as a romance or a love story, or even worse, as a kind
of dialect novel in some cases, what I think is lost there is the incredibly complex vision of power and oppression and racism that is presented in
that novel. LAMOTHE:
The '30s was really understood
to be the protest era, where the fiction was much more explicit in
addressing questions of interracial conflict,
of racism, and their impact on Black
people. By the time
"Their Eyes Were Watching God" was published in 1937, the Harlem Renaissance had
really kind of reached its peak and was on the wane. (birds chirping) (people talking in background) NARRATOR:
For "Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti
and Jamaica," published the next year, Hurston drew on
the material she had collected during her back-to-back
Guggenheim fellowships. She filled this second
ethnographic book with photographs, lists, music,
and essays exploring religion, history,
politics, and culture of
Black people in both countries. ♪ ♪ LAMOTHE:
The most compelling
parts of it are the sections where she's writing about
Haitian Voodoo: its rituals, its cultures, its meaning in the
lives of the people who are practitioners. The political
commentary that she provides, the social commentary is much more problematic. Her Americanness
really comes through in how she writes that work. There are so many sections
of it that don't really center Haitian
perspectives about their own culture in the way
that she does with her ethnographies that are centered
in the American South. BAKER:
I just don't think the American
reading public was interested
in the critical assessment of Caribbean history and history
of dictatorship and colonialism. Although they were
interested in the zombies. NARRATOR:
Though her publisher promoted
the most sensationalistic
aspects of her research, Hurston's "Tell My Horse"
was not a commercial success. Most reviews
were mixed or negative. One very positive review must
have warmed Hurston's heart: "The judges who select
the recipients "of Guggenheim fellowships
honored themselves "and the purpose of
the foundation they serve "when they subsidized
Zora Hurston's visit to Haiti. "I hope the American reading
public "will encourage
her further wanderings. She ought not
to be allowed to rest." Back in Florida, Hurston continued writing for
herself and for others, including a position with the federal Works Progress
Administration's Florida Writers Project. In 1939, she released
another novel and took a job teaching theater at North Carolina College for
Negroes. The next year, her friend, anthropologist
Jane Belo, asked her to conduct research on
religious trances in Beaufort, South Carolina. Hurston eagerly quit teaching mid-semester to get back into
the field. At Hurston's insistence, a camera crew
documented the services. (people exclaiming
and murmuring) (playing rhythmic song) BAKER: That image of her playing the drum, you feel like she's
coming around full circle. You can see her as
a vivid participant-observer. You can see that she is
at home at this church. (singing) MCCLAURIN:
The research that Zora Neale Hurston did in
Beaufort, South Carolina, represents the culmination of her work as
an authentic anthropologist. ♪ ♪ (sawing through wood) NARRATOR:
"We have been shooting,
shooting, and shooting," the film crew reported. "If the gods "of anthropological
investigators are with us, "we have some
swell photos and films. Without Zora, most of
it would have been impossible." HURSTON (dramatized):
What will be the end? That is not for me to know. Life poses questions,
and that two-headed spirit that rules the beginning
and end of things called Death has all the answers. NARRATOR:
At first, Hurston resisted her
publisher's desire for her to
write an autobiography. PATTERSON:
I think she said, "It is difficult to
discuss what the soul lives by." I'm not sure she wanted
to do that, was ready to do it, but she needed to write
something, because
that's how she made money. NARRATOR:
In 1942, "Dust Tracks on a Road" was published to great fanfare. Hurston promoted the work, which helped establish her as
a prominent literary figure. MCCLAURIN:
Zora's autobiography is
complex. There are those who argue that she wasn't authentic, that she didn't tell everything because the notion
of an autobiography is that it traces the life
from the beginning to the end. There's a lot
of behind-the-scenes stuff that we really
don't have access to. HURSTON (dramatized):
I am supposed to have
some private business to myself. Whatever I do know, I have no intention of putting
but so much in the public ears. BAKER:
Zora Neale Hurston's
autobiography is itself featherbed resistance, she's wearing a mask, it's a pack of lies. On the other hand,
it is the truth as she saw it. It is a memoir. You get her spirit, you get
the feeling of her life. COTERA:
What I find really
fascinating about that book is her admissions--
they're very stealthy-- that some of
the folklore she collected she collected actually
when she was seven years old, nine years old, when she was a child
growing up in Eatonville, immersed in this culture
that she later collected. BAKER:
"Dust Tracks on a Road" is
highly edited. She had some biting
lines about the United States and the role of freedom abroad versus freedom here. But the editors, they took it
out, and I guess Zora was looking forward to that
royalty check and didn't want to fight for it. NARRATOR:
The book, with
its strong sales, validated the significance of
her anthropological study, but success did not translate into funding for
her continued fieldwork. Though she never
stopped writing articles, reviews, and opinion pieces, she would get by working at a
variety of jobs, sometimes as a teacher, librarian, and journalist. ♪ ♪ PATTERSON:
She still has a lot she wants
to do. I think
Hurston had a lot of courage to put her ideas out there,
but she was also getting older. MCCLAURIN:
It's also the period of time
where she's falsely accused of having improper relations
with a minor. People abandoned
Zora Neale Hurston. That accusation is dropped. It turns out that the woman
had a vendetta against Zora. But the people who abandoned her never really come back into her
life. NARRATOR:
When it was discovered in 1950 that she was serving as a maid, Hurston played it as if the work
was just part of her research. LAMOTHE:
She's having a really difficult
time finding people who are
interested in publishing her work. DUNBAR:
She's an aging Black woman, with no children and no husband. The Negro is no longer in vogue. And so you just watch what happens to Black women who almost always live in precarity in this society. PATTERSON:
By the last ten years of her
life, she has all of the ailments
of older Black women. High blood pressure, gaining weight. She's still desperately trying
to get enough money to continue her work, and it's slipping
through her fingers. NARRATOR:
Hurston's tendency to speak her
mind entangled her in the emerging
national civil rights debates. Her opinion on the Supreme
Court's 1954 ruling that ended legalized racial
discrimination in schools put her at
odds with many Americans. HURSTON (dramatized):
How much satisfaction
can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with
me who does not wish me near them? DUNBAR:
People cite her letter
to the editor where she disparages Brown
v. the Board of Education as retrograde, as anti-Black. But she understood
that just having proximity to White people did not
make Black people smarter, better, more valuable. We needed equality and equity and financial support. HURSTON (dramatized):
It is a contradiction in terms
to scream, "Race pride and equality,"
while at the same time spurning Negro
teachers and self-association. DUNBAR:
She was articulating
something where her investment in a particular version
of Blackness was not valued. PATTERSON:
She ends up back in
the community of Black people. KAPLAN:
The Fort Pierce
community in which she lived loved and adored her. But her struggles as a woman and her struggles as
a Black person in racist society were profound. NARRATOR:
Zora Neale Hurston died from
heart disease after a stroke
on January 28, 1960, shortly after her 69th birthday, in a segregated nursing home in
Fort Pierce, Florida. She was working on at
least one novel at the time. At her funeral,
over 100 people, the vast majority
African American, attended. One of the ministers remarked, "The Miami paper said
she died poor. "She died rich. She did something." Zora Neale Hurston was
buried in an unmarked grave. MCCLAURIN:
As the story goes, when you die in a poor house,
they burn your stuff. And a Black deputy
sheriff comes along and he remembers
that this woman was someone. And he literally
snatches materials, her belongings, out of
the fire and hangs on to them. KING:
She had thrown herself
into the world to try to rescue,
redeem the things that were held by outsiders to be unimportant
about marginal societies, and it was somehow fitting that the last act of her papers, her own legacy,
was itself an act of rescue. NARRATOR:
Zora Neale Hurston fell into
obscurity until the 1970s. After writer Alice Walker read
"Their Eyes Were Watching God," she began a journey
into Hurston's life, work, and death that catalyzed
another Hurston rescue, this one led by literary
scholars-- Black women. ♪ ♪ MCCLAURIN:
I think anthropology
hasn't acknowledged her enough. Not only for her writing style,
but also the fact that she put herself into that
ethnographic landscape. How she impacts,
how she's impacted, how people see her, as well as what she's
collecting. And that's unique. DUNBAR:
That is what she modeled very early, and what the
discipline at that point wasn't ready for. I think it gives a lot
of minoritized people access and legitimacy to
the work that they most value, which is to go into
their own communities. BAKER:
One of the few anthropologists that were doing work in the '20s that would sort of hold up to
the integrity and the ethics of contemporary anthropology
is Zora Neale Hurston. COTERA:
People are invested in saying
she was a Black anthropologist, but another part of me
wants to disinvite anthropology from her
recuperation, because there were so many moments when folks worked behind
the scenes not to support her, and so that is very painful. KAPLAN:
She's somebody who succeeded
against all the odds and whose life
was marred by lack of resources, who could have done five
times as much if she had had the financial
wherewithal she so richly deserved. KING:
We now recognize
her as being not only critical to the canon
of American literature, but a figure
whose work as a prose writer, as a social scientist, is closer to what
we would now think of as good, self-aware,
self-critical social science. ♪ ♪ BAKER:
Sometimes when
you're ahead of your time, you're also an outlier. You are marginalized and seen
as sometimes a little crazy, but in many respects, people that are ahead of their
time are geniuses, and indeed she was a genius. PATTERSON:
Hurston left us beautiful
novels. She left us her vision
of the legitimacy of Black people as a people,
as a culture. She fought
for us in her writing. She fought for Black
women in her writing and her anthropology. She believed in our worth, and she said so
over and over again. She jumped at the sun. HURSTON (dramatized):
Negro reality is a hundred times
more imaginative and entertaining
than anything that has been
hatched up over a typewriter. Go hard or go home. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
