![]() She put herself right in the middle of the community and this time, she collected first-rate folklore.Īfter that, Hurston expanded her research to New Orleans to study spiritual practices like hoodoo and voodoo. Big Sweet also kept Hurston out of trouble. She went to parties and made friends with a lady named Big Sweet who showed her the best storytellers. Mason expected the black people in Hurston’s writing to have a cloying sincerity in the way that they lived and behaved.īut with the new funding, Hurston headed south to Eatonville, Florida again. Mason’s money came with strings attached: the patron got to decide how and when Hurston’s folklore made it to the public. The artists she supported called her “Mrs. So Hurston headed back to New York, and there she found a new fan, Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy socialite and philanthropist. The stories she collected disappointed her. She failed to embed herself, and as a result, people didn’t want to share their stories. She wore a nice dress and drove a car that she calls “Sassy Susie.” Hurston later said she was speaking in “carefully accented Barnardese.” She joked that she was asking, “‘Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?'” But she had changed since she last lived there, and it wasn’t all that easy to slide back in. Her first serious fieldwork expedition was back home, in rural Florida. It wasn’t a big stretch for Hurston, who’s been aiming to do that all along. He was pushing his students to place themselves in the center of what they study. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons) Culture collectorĪt Columbia University’s anthropology department, Hurston worked with Franz Boas, sometimes called the Father of American Anthropology. Du Bois says they way Hurston wrote language made black people sound primitive-in his estimation–not a great image for black people looking to improve their standing in society. The dialogue was packed with slurs and one word ran right into the next one-and that drew criticism from some black elites. In her research, Hurston documented exactly what she heard. She worked as a secretary and by fall 1925, she earned a scholarship to Barnard, where she studied anthropology. ![]() When she stepped off the bus, she had less than $2 in her pocket, but she was a published author. Later Hurston became part of the Great Migration north. One of her short stories got published: It was about a young black girl who was filled with this boundless sense of joy-and that focus on black joy was pretty unusual in 1920s literature. She went to class in the morning, worked at a barbershop in the afternoon, and studied at night. She became a part-time student at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C. She was 27 by the time she earned her diploma–an age when most women would be marrying or settling down.įor a black woman in 1918, raised with Jim Crow laws and segregation, finishing high school was a big deal. She got a job and took night classes, then enrolled in high school. Somewhere between five and 10 years later, Hurston moved to Baltimore. But she later writes that she was “their Hurston, nevertheless.” A young writer You can almost see young Zora, a budding anthropologist, starting to find her passion.Ī smart, precocious child, who so easily stepped over the color line, Hurston’s boldness must have frightened her family and neighbors. ![]() The porch was her gallery seat, and on her boldest days, Hurston would hop down and ask the white passersby where they were headed. The only white people in Eatonville were visitors, and later Hurston wrote that, often, she sat on the front porch watching them pass by. They lived on five acres with citrus trees and chickens where young Hurston had time to play and think. She and her seven siblings lived in Eatonville, Florida, an all-black town outside of Orlando. Hurston was likely born in 1891 but throughout her life, she told tall tales about her age-especially in early life, she fibbed to expand her opportunities, get an education and stay in school for as long as possible. Hurston collected songs and folklore in Florida and Louisiana, where she embedded herself in the black communities as a participant, not just an objective observer. The celebrated novel ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ grew from fieldwork in the Black South.īefore novelist Zora Neale Hurston shook up the fiction-writing world with her 1937 classic “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” she was doing things her way in the field of anthropology.
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