♪ ♪
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.
♪ ♪
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.
♪ ♪