How White Academia & Publishing Tried to Colonize Zora Neale Hurston’s Career
The Dark History Behind the Posthumous Publication of “Barracoon”
In a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, Zora Neale Hurston’s granite headstone labels her as “A Genius of the South.” An appropriate title, it would seem, given that Hurston had written four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and a number of short stories and essays in her lifetime — but she died relatively penniless and forgotten in a welfare home in 1959.
The folklorist who doubled as a novelist struggled to strike a balance between the three pedestals of influence that carried her throughout her career: the historical forms of culture in the South that shaped her upbringing in Eatonville (one of the first self-governing all-black municipalities), the explosion of the Harlem Renaissance and her friendships with the likes of Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, and the academic discipline of anthropology headed by white liberals (notably, Dr. Franz Boas) at Columbia.
Each of these influences compelled her towards different mediums of production for the research she collected in the southern United States: the ethnographic monograph, the novel, the play, the anthology. Ultimately, the intellectual struggle between these different modes left her subject to the pressure of being the bridge between the so-called “high” and “low,” between the “educated” and the “illiterate” (Hemenway 1977: 102). Although her passion for preserving African-American folklore among descendants of slaves sustained her vigorous research and writing until late in her life, she was ultimately unable to stabilize herself between the three pedestals. One of the worlds would reject her, in the end, and the balancing act would come crashing down.
The question of how the resources of the author and the medium in which she conveys her research effect the anthropological merit of a work is one Hurston undoubtedly grappled with throughout her career as different voices tendered her ear. So, to what extent did these influences alter or inhibit her creative and intellectual license as an artist and an ethnographer? By asking this question, the intention is not to portray Hurston as a ‘victim’ caught between worlds, or to discredit her agency as an academic. Rather, it is to better understand the unwieldy path of an unquestionably prolific folklorist and to consider the social and cultural contexts in which she was enmeshed. A fitting case study of the intersections and contradictions of the historical forms, the Harlem Renaissance, and her academic discipline can be found in the history of Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”
In the 1930s, Hurston met with and wrote about one of the last survivors of the North-Atlantic slave trade, Cudjo Lewis, but the oral history itself was not published until many decades after her death, in 2018. In this remarkable book, published without her editorial consent, the conflict of the three intellectual wills is subtle yet somberly present between the pages. Her deeply drawn dedication to her roots and the “cosmic secrets of the world” (Hurston 1942: 174) that dwell in African folklore is bright in her narrative voice and apparent in her choice to giving Cudjo the reins with his retelling of his life. The explosive tension between content and form that dominated the Harlem Renaissance is also present: the goal that through “the most elevated of art forms” — the narrative-driven novel — the artist might articulate the ‘inarticulate’ “voices of the folk.”
But perhaps most underhanded is the “colonizing influence of Western European culture” (Hemenway 1977: 102). It is there in the sorrowful story of Cudjo himself, in the resilient life he built for himself at Magazine Point. It is there in the scientific stipulation of the writing itself, the use of dialect as data being a nod to both preserving Cudjo’s voice and a sense of academic authenticity reared in Hurston’s education. It is there, overwhelmingly, in the references to the “nice white lady from New York” (Hurston 2018: 43) that both Hurston and her interlocutor seemed to rely upon for financial support: Charlotte Mason, who is described by Hurston in the book’s dedication as
“My Godmother, and the one Mother of all the primitives, who with the Gods in Space is concerned about the hearts of the untaught.”
The pressure to appeal to a wealthy, white audience while remaining true to her historical and artistic dreams impeded the book from publication, but it was also what brought Hurston back into the literary limelight some eighty years later.
Analyzing Barracoon’s path would also help to track the ethnographic distinctions between literary anthropology and the fictional novel-form. There is little doubt that Hurston’s analysis of African-American folklore was largely autoethnographical: her first collection in 1935, Mules and Men, explores her findings from trips to her hometown, Eatonville, and familiar communities in New Orleans. The next year, she published her first novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which highlights a fictionalized version of the town in which she grew up and echoed “the real love affair of [her] life” (Hurston 1942: 255). Then, in Tell My Horse (1938), Hurston details her hands-on, emotionally-charged fieldwork on the spiritual and cultural rituals in Jamaica and voodoo in Haiti.
Barracoon is a unique posthumous work in that while it advertises itself as an oral history, it is undoubted that much of Cudjo’s personal narrative is re-constructed, even partially fictionalized. It is a blending of folklore research with literary direction, an early, unpublished bridge between the “unconscious art of the folk” with “the conscious art of the novel, the poem, the opera” (Hurston 1942: 102). It is imperfect, incomplete, and confined by its warring influences — but it is a step towards the form that Hurston would ultimately perfect in the mid-1930s.
BACKGROUND
As a young child, Hurston’s family moved to Eatonville, Florida, an all-black town. Her father was elected mayor, and later became minister of the large Baptist church. In her 1928 essay, How It Feels To Be Colored Me, Hurston describes her family’s front porch as “a gallery seat for [her].” Her favorite place “was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter,” where she could stand witness as the town breathed around her (Hurston 1928).
She picked up on the oral legacy of telling folk-stories and sensed, from an early age, that she was meant to be a narrator of her vanishing culture. Langston Hughes would go on to write in his autobiography, The Big Sea, that Hurston “was certainly the most amusing” of the Harlem Renaissance literati. “Only to reach a wider audience, need she ever write books — because she is a perfect book of entertainment in herself” (Hughes 1940: 238–239). She told stories how they were told to her growing up: using the timbre of her voice, the inflection of her expressions, the ebb and flow of long-recounted mythology.
Hurston herself would say that she inherited the folklore of her African ancestors, and she entered the academic universe to preserve it. Her greatest concern, when beginning her research as a student at Howard University and then Barnard, was of her folklore’s survival. “Hurston’s memory was overflowing with acquired narrative legacy of her race,” biographer Robert E. Hemenway notes. “[…] this was something she brought to the Renaissance” (Hemenway 1977: 79–80). She realized early in her career that the best way to ensure the longevity of the folklore she loved was to, in effect, package it for a “wider audience” — but she still wanted to remain true to the voices of her interlocutors. Her academic environment challenged her to portray the cultures she studied through a social scientist’s ‘objective’ lens, while at the same time accounting for cultural relativism and acknowledging culturally acquired norms. Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology and mentor to Hurston during her time at Barnard and beyond, encouraged her to do anthropology ‘at home’ because he believed that it was necessary to be able to speak the ‘language’ and understand the cultural conditioning of a place before studying it.
Mules and Men was her first love letter to her hometown: seventy recounted folk tale stories, detailed encounters with five hoodoo doctors, alongside an evolving portrait of herself interrupting the fables and songs. Boas himself said in the preface that she was uniquely “able to penetrate through that affected demeanor” that causes many interlocutors, particularly black communities during the 1930s, to “exclude the White observer effectively from participating in [their] true inner life” (Boas 1935: xiii). She was aware of her own transformation from an Eatonville child into a modern woman, and viewed the systematic collection of folklore as offering an alternative “to the view that the conscious artist salvaged the folklore of the race by using it for inspiration.” As a folklorist, she could immerse herself in the world of her informants just as she participated in her own childhood. She could “assimilate the behavioral process” that produced the lore, and could give representation to the traditions of her folk without risk of “aesthetic superiority” (Hemenway 1977: 82). But at the same time that she was doing her fieldwork, she was installing herself among the creative ranks of the Harlem Renaissance.
The moral dilemma thus pressed her: how could she display the collected folklore of the masses without speaking for them as the ‘artist’ and eclipsing their voices?
Throughout the thirties, Hurston was in close contact with insular members of the Harlem literati: Pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois, philosopher Alain Locke, poet Langston Hughes, among others. Locke and Du Bois encouraged her that in order to be aware of folk origins, “one was expected to do so with the future of the race in mind.” They viewed art as “Beauty in the service of Truth, the product of the elite artist articulating for an inarticulate race” (Hemenway 1977: 39). Du Bois in particular was shameless about the function of art as propaganda, and declared in his article, “Criteria of Negro Art,” that all art must be propaganda, “despite the wailing of the purists.” Hurston, whose original aim had been to salvage a legacy of folklore, was surrounded by artists and intellectuals who wrote with a motive of indoctrination so as to “gain the right of black folk to love and enjoy.” This was deemed necessary if there was ever to be any hope to turn the tide of a white public that, until that point, had demanded that its artists exhibit a “racial prejudgment” that “deliberately distorts Truth and Justice.”
Du Bois and his contemporaries did not doubt that black art could be beautiful for the sake of being beautiful, but the point was that “until the art of the black folk compells [sic] recognition they will not be rated as human” (Du Bois 1926). The literary minds of the Harlem Renaissance did not choose to carry this burden of representation; it was simply an expectation if their art was to make any impact on a larger audience.
But the very politics of considering art as propaganda confined its creative constituents and limited writers like Hurston from portraying her subjects as she deemed most authentic. When it came to the ‘race problem,’ Hurston herself was “thoroughly sick of the subject” (Hurston 1942: 206). In The Big Sea, Hughes depicts the Harlem Renaissance as a period where white people flooded the borough, crowding out black people from their clubs and spaces while at the same time giving them patronage to create art curtailed to a white gaze. He denies, however, that black writers such as Hurston wrote solely for whites: “But I have known almost all of them, and most of the good ones have tried to be honest, write honestly, and express their world as they saw it” (Hughes 1940: 227).
Successfully selling one’s writing, however, highly depended on the tastes of the publishers, who were hyper-concerned with making the masterpieces of the Harlemites digestible for the white audiences that financially controlled the market.
Despite the greater frequency of books by black writers being published, the period still saw white writers who wrote about black people becoming more commercially successful than black writers writing about themselves. “It was the period when the Negro was in vogue” (Hughes 1940: 228), Hughes writes. But the “race problem” wasn’t solved because it had suddenly become fashionable for white audiences to consume black art. The dream that the “New Negro” would come out of the Harlem Renaissance able to “lead a new life from then on in green pastures of tolerance” was merely a utopia imagined by the likes of “Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Claude McKay, Duke Ellington, Bojangles, and Alain Locke” (Hughes 1940: 228). Ordinary, non-intellectual, non-theatric black people either did not know about the movement or did not see any considerable socioeconomic improvements to their situations.
While Hurston undoubtedly “shared in the historical and cultural forces that made the Harlem Renaissance an identifiable moment in American intellectual history” (Hemenway 1977: 36), Hughes describes her as having “great scorn” for the pretensions of academia and literary movements (Hughes 1940: 239). Her own autobiography, Dust Tracks On A Road, only affords two rushed paragraphs to her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. Certainly, Hurston saw a lot of academic and financial support for her work during the period, but in the subsequent decades, she saw her artistic vision along with the endeavors of many other Harlem literati fall out of “vogue” with the white audiences that so obsessed over them. Perhaps this is the reason for the minimal mention of the period in her writings. Perhaps, also, the movement chalked up sore memories of a time of great ambiguity and unease over her own medium.
There were the historically-attuned voices drawing her to celebrate her roots and relish in the nuances of the folk practices and rituals of the descendants of slaves. There were the academic, anthropologically-trained voices compelling her towards culturally relative research and the collection of folklore as a form of data. Then there were the voices of the Harlem Renaissance obliging her to write with a sense of racial duty to challenge the perspectives of white audiences while at the same time appealing to them.
It is little wonder, given these warring expectations, that Barracoon was not published in her lifetime.
UNDER PRESSURE
Hemenway describes the Harlem Renaissance as a period where both blacks and whites “became enmeshed in the cult of exotic primitivism.” For the white audiences, it was a vision of Harlem as an “uptown jungle;” for the black artists, it was an attempt to connect with Locke’s idea of an ‘ancestral’ past (Hemenway 1977: 75).
One of the most present and totalizing drivers of “exotic primitivism” on Hurston’s career was through the influence of her wealthy, white benefactor, Charlotte Osgood Mason. In 1927, Alain Locke introduced Hurston to Mason upon returning from a road trip with Langston Hughes. At the time, Hurston was heavily involved in the anthropology department at Columbia and in consistent contact with Franz Boas. Mason was a socialite and philanthropist who herself had lived among the Plain Indians and sympathized with the pursuit of folklore collection. Under Locke’s advice, she funded the careers of many members of the Harlem literati, including Hughes (Hemenway 1977: 104–105).
Mason thought of Hurston as an “unspoiled child of nature” and as the perfect ‘project’ to nurture (Hemenway 1977: 106). Hurston claimed that the two had “a psychic bond” between them: “She could read my mind, not only when I was in her presence, but thousands of miles away […] the thing that delighted her was the fact that I was her only Godchild who could read her thoughts at a distance” (Hurston 1942: 175–176). Mason insisted upon being referred to as “Godmother,” and sought obscurity and anonymity when it came to her financial backings. A contract was quickly drawn up that presented Hurston with $200 a month for two years as she researched African-American folklore and culture in the Deep South, Haiti, and Jamaica. As a patron, Mason expected Hurston to report back to her on “the aboriginal sincerity of rural southern black folks” (Hemenway 1977: 107).
But she was only pleased with Hurston’s findings when they satisfied her preconceived ideas about the heritage of “primitive” spirituality.
Even Hughes felt this pressure to appeal to Mason’s ‘fantasies.’ Without naming Mason in his autobiography, he describes his interactions with her as based around an imbalanced power dynamic: “She possessed the power to control people’s lives — pick them up and put them down when and where she wished” (Hughes 1940: 324).
He eventually fell out of favor with Mason because of the burden of playing along with her notions of primitive art:
She wanted me to be primitive and know and feel the intuitions of the primitive. But, unfortunately, I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging through me, and so I could not live and write as though I did. I was only an American Negro — who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa — but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem. And I was not what she wanted me to be. So, in the end it all came back very near to the old impasse of white and Negro again, white and Negro — as do most relationships in America (Hughes 1940: 325).
Hughes knew that he could not be a faithful representative of the whole of Africa, let alone of Mason’s generalizations about human nature in Africa. The metonymy disturbed him, and being contractually bound to produce work that reinforced Mason’s “intuitions of the primitive” locked him up creatively. He believed that he produced no beautiful writing during that period.
When it came to Hurston’s career, Mason’s influence was perhaps even more strange and coercive, though Hurston would be more forgiving of it in her public writing. On the whole, Mason’s “largesse” enabled Hurston “to do the basic field work that established her fame as a folklorist,” but at the cost of eventually leading to “dependency and bitterness” (Hemenway 1977: 105). As far as Hurston was concerned, the very fact that a white woman like Mason was willing to grant some amount of virtue to the voices of lower-class blacks in America was rare and commendable. From the time that Hurston first sat in Mason’s Park Avenue parlor and told her animated stories of her research, she felt that Mason validated her own interest in the inhabitants of places like Eatonville. That, on top of Mason’s apparent anthropological sensibilities and refusal to assume a public role, made it so that Mason’s “self-gratification in primitive things was subtly manifest” (Hemenway 1977: 107). Given the attitudes of society at the time, there was nothing overt about her racism.
But in both Hughes’ and Hurston’s writing, Mason is described as always sitting on a “throne” in her apartment on Park Avenue when they come to visit her. The imagery suggests a relationship based on power and control, for it was from that seat high above her ‘subjects’ that Mason took upon the role of disciplinarian. In The Big Sea, Hughes recounts the traumatic moment when Mason cut off her financial support of his work in that room as like “a trap closing in, faster, and faster, the room darker and darker, until the light went out with a sudden crash in the dark” (Hughes 1940: 325). While he did not want to be tied to her and disagreed with her mystical vision to sell an ideal of ‘primitive spirituality’ to a white, upper-class audience, the disinheriting still stung because of the dependence she had consciously cultivated in him. Suddenly, supporting himself as an artist became less and less feasible.
Hughes worried about Hurston as she was still caught up in the “trap.” In their letters, the two schemed about ways to circumvent Mason’s restraints, but at the same time Hurston referred to her “Godmother” with reverence (Hemenway 1977: 109). In one particularly disturbing letter from the winter of 1929/1930, Hurston expresses her distress over Mason admonishing her for purchasing a car:
I am simply wasting away with fear. You see, I had to have a new car. Just HAD to. I had mentioned the matter to G once and she simply elploded [sic]. You can see how I felt for the insinuation was that I was extravagant or took her for a good thing. Neither was soothing to my self-respect. […] She wrote me a letter that hurt me thru and thru. She asked “Why couldnt Negroes be trusted?” But later she sent the $400 to pay for the car.
Money I ought to spend on my work is spent on the old can and keeping me strapped I just feel that she ought not to exert herself to supervise every little detail. It destroys my self-respect and utterly demoralizes me for weeks. I know you can appreciate what I mean. I do care for her deeply, don’t forget that. That is why I cant endure to get at odds with her. I don’t want anything but to get at my work with the least possible trouble (Kaplan 2003: 156).
This letter exemplifies the fraught relationship that Mason and Hurston shared: a constant, underlying “fear” that one slip-up, such as having need of a new car to transport her between field sites after the original one broke down, would be misinterpreted by the Godmother as “extravagance” and disrespect.
It is that “wasting away with fear” and sense of having one’s “self-respect” destroyed and demoralized while still defending the perpetrator that echoes patterns of abusive relationships so sinisterly.
Hurston often felt “like a rabbit at a dog convention” when asked to dinner at Mason’s apartment, because she knew what would be in store for her when she arrived: “a proper straightening” until they felt that she had “seen the light” (Hurston 1942: 176). Mason took it upon herself to discipline Hurston when she believed that her hold over the artist was loosening and that she was using her funds for “commercial purposes” (Hemenway 1977: 109). If Hurston did not stick to a strict schedule of collecting information related to written and oral African folklore, Mason would accuse her of shirking her duties. Expressing an interest in writing fiction or doing extracurricular research for Boas was not allowed, and Hurston was expressly forbidden from sharing any data or information with anyone other than Mason. Her folklore became Mason’s exclusive property — not because Mason “wanted to steal the material, but because she felt arrogantly certain that Zora Neale Hurston could not be trusted to know best what to do with it” (Hemenway 1977: 110). As Hurston recalled Mason bemoaning in her letter to Hughes, the self-described “Godmother of the primitives” herself believed that blacks could not be trusted.
It came down to a doubt on Mason’s part that Hurston, as a black woman, was capable of preserving the “soul” of her own culture without stringent guidance.
It was a racist doubt that manifested itself in powerful control over Hurston’s work for five years. “Godmother could be tender as mother-love when she felt that you had been right spiritually,” Hurston writes. “But anything in you, however clever, that felt like insincerity to her, called forth her well-known ‘That is nothing! It has no soul in it. You have broken the law!’” (Hurston 1942: 177). Eventually Hurston would accept that the “rhythms of the primitive” that Mason claimed were Hurston’s moral and legal obligations to portray were altogether impossible to fulfill. Like Hughes, she was made to fit into a caricature of black intellectualism that was based on harmful exoticism and coming from a place of white entitlement and self-gratification.
The control was so pervasive that Mason did not even allow Hurston to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology: “The ‘Angel’ is cold towards the degrees, but will put up money for further research. I have broached the subject from several angles but it got chill blains no matter how I put it” (Kaplan 2003: 190), Hurston writes in a 1930 letter to Boas. Hurston never explicitly condemned Mason for restricting her career, but by referring to her as “the key to certain phases of [Hurston’s] life,” she was implicitly acknowledging that Mason was also the lock and the door in her face (Hurston 1942: 309).
SOMETHING TO FEEL ABOUT
Hurston was first encouraged by Franz Boas to visit Cudjo Lewis, or Kossula, in Africatown, Alabama, because the last surviving victim of the African slave trade was something of a holy grail for anthropologists. This was in October 1927, just before Hurston established a working relationship with Charlotte Osgood Mason. The original fifteen-page essay she wrote was published in the Journal of Negro History and referenced specific memories, beliefs, and customs that Cudjo discussed, but it was revealed later that much of the prose and information was plagiarized from a 1914 book by Emma Langdon Roche, Historic Sketches of the Old South (Hemenway 1977: 96–97).
It is not known why Hurston plagiarized the essay, but it is possible that, as an amateur anthropologist still new to the field, she found her conversation with Cudjo to be unproductive and was desperate for material to publish. Either way, Mason, ignorant of this, got wind of the article and was impressed. She began sending money to Cudjo, and by the time they drew up their contract, Mason was set on Hurston returning to Cudjo to extend the research into a book-length oral history. In her autobiography, Hurston mentions nothing of this second journey out to Alabama, but she makes clear that Cudjo’s harrowing stories of human sorrow and kidnapped identity resonated with her: “After seventy-five years, he still had that tragic sense of loss. That yearning for blood and cultural ties. That sense of mutilation. It gave me something to feel about” (Hurston 1942: 204). But while Hurston initially connected with Cudjo’s narrative, it is unclear if she felt the same way when pressed by Mason to return to Africatown.
It wasn’t until three years after her second interview with Cudjo that Hurston began to write what would become Barracoon. Notes exchanged between Hurston and Mason in January 1931 make clear a rising pressure for Hurston to procure the “Kossula material.” Mason often harshly accused Hurston of confirming white stereotypes about the “unreliability” of black people (Panovka 2018) because of the delays in sending along the writing. Hurston wrote in letters to Hughes during this period that she felt “forlorn” and “too tired,” that she had “been working two years without rest, & behind that all [her] school life with no rest, no peace of mind” (Kaplan 2003: 149). She felt cornered into working on Mason’s dream for Barracoon rather than publishing creative work and pursuing new venues of folklore collection.
Overwhelmed, Hurston begged Mason for more time to write the book, but finally, on April 18th, she was able to pen, “Darling Godmother, At last ‘Barracoon’ is ready for your eyes” (Kaplan 2003: 217). When the manuscript did manage to fall on an editor’s desk, it was written off as “too anthropological for a ‘general audience’” because of the use of dialect (Panovka 2018). ‘General audience,’ here, is code for the white consumers of the Harlem literati. Hurston supposedly fell into a depression, and refused to make revisions despite Mason’s threat of revoking her stipend. In the end, Hurston returned to theatrical writing with Hughes (a short-lived endeavor) and lost Mason’s support. Cudjo, though, continued to receive money from Mason until he passed away in 1935.
In 2018, when Barracoon was posthumously published, it was done so without any acknowledgment in the introduction, preface, or otherwise of Mason’s antiquated agenda of primitive spirituality. Certainly, Barracoon is an accomplished work that exemplifies the significance of exploring individual stories and life experiences in ethnographies, but to what extent do the resources of the author impact our reading? If Barracoon was originally a white woman’s exoticized dream of spreading exemplars of “primitive” spirituality to a wealthy audience (and a failed dream, that is, as it was not published in Mason’s lifetime) — how are we to interpret its contents?
Was it Mason’s intention or Hurston’s that shared human stories such as Cudjo’s render us “full of trembling awe before the altar of the past?” (Hurston 2018: 60).
The question is one that can be posed against the contexts and positions of many ethnographers, folklorists, and social investigators. Their own lenses shape how their audiences perceive the cultures they are studying. But whose lens was focused in Barracoon?
Without Hurston here to tell us, it’s quite impossible to know. Barracoon was abandoned in part because of the gaze of the contemporary white audiences, but also in part because Hurston was confined by form and technique in representing the folk process. At the same time as being pulled between the vocational commitment of anthropology and the aesthetic articulations of the Harlem Renaissance, she had to, under contract, write with the aim of inspiring an ‘elevated,’ white audience.
At the beginning of her career, “she had made a choice to subordinate art to science” (Hemenway 1977: 82), but as time went on and she felt increasingly laden by Mason’s constraints, she yearned for more literary forms. She wanted to write artistically not to create propaganda aimed at white people, but to “realize the literary potential in the life of southern black country folk” (Hemenway 1977: 66). She came to realize, in part due to the momentum of the Harlem Renaissance, that her own aesthetic sensibility and subjective voice in tandem with folklore research was just as successful in affirming black culture despite white cultural imperialism as any anthology. The trick was to write stories about the people of Eatonville and other Deep South communities without seeking to prove the “genius of the folk” to a white audience (Hemenway 1977: 102). Rather, the genius inherent in the fictionalized narrative would speak for itself, and give the subjects agency.
Perhaps, if not for Mason’s interference, the world today would have more ethnographic publications from Hurston. But it is likely that, especially after Barracoon’s failure, Hurston “had begun to identify scientific publication of her collections with Mrs. Mason’s stricture against publication without prior approval, and she was beginning to wonder if there might not be a better medium for the material” (Hemenway 1977: 115) Poetry, operas, and fictional stories of the folk appealed more and more to her creative license.
She never shook her “formalized curiosity” with research, but in the last few decades of her life, she struggled to travel and find the motivation to tackle the same volume of projects on the road (Hurston 1942: 174). The wheels of the Harlem Renaissance had ceased turning, the contact with Columbia academics had died off, and the financial support for the work she was producing went dry.
The three pillars of her career, that forced her to bridge the socially-constructed gap between “high” and “low” culture, had fallen, and she was left with all the wisdom and none of the resources to continue.
Though she had solved the “dilemma of cultural imperialism” (Hemenway 1977: 102) for herself during the writing process of works of fiction such as Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, and, notably, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she received very little recognition for them when they were originally published.
In telling the story of Zora Neale Hurston as a folklorist, as an ethnographer, and as a novelist, it is important to recognize the sociocultural and artistic contexts in which she was involved.
The true history of Hurston’s career is absent in the 2018 edition of Barracoon. Future editions should take note of these contexts and give the full picture of why the book was not published earlier: not simply because of a white audience incapable of digesting the vernacular and dialect used to illustrate Cudjo’s voice, but because of the pressures of form, of research, and of authorship.
It is our job as academics looking back not to dismiss these pressures, for they are what shaped modern literary and anthropological movements in America, particularly for academics and artists of color.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Du Bois, W.E.B. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290–97.
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. N.p.: University of Illinois,1977.
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 2nd ed. New York, USA: Hill and Wang, 1968.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018.
— — — . Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. 2nd ed. N.p.: University of Illinois, 1984.
— — — . Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1935.
— — — . Tell My Horse. Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981.
— — — . Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Perennial Library, 1990.
Kaplan, Carla, comp. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York, NY: Anchor Books,2002.
Panovka, Rebecca. “A Different Backstory for Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon.’” LA Review of Books, July 7, 2018. Accessed December 6, 2019. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/different-backstory-for-zora-neale-hurstons-barracoon/.
