- I am not tragically colored.

There's no great sorrow damned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.

I do not belong to the sovereign school of Negro Hood, who hold that nature somehow has given them a low down, dirty deal.

And whose feelings are all hurt about it?

No, I do not weep at the world.

I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

- Zora Neil Hurston journeyed deep into the south with a camera and pen in hand, recording Negro folk culture.

She wrote countless books, plays and articles infused with the rhythm of her people.

Zora's fame would come from one book.

Their eyes were watching God.

But throughout her life she was legendary for her spunk.

- She was bodacious.

She was outrageous.

She enjoyed shaking things up.

- She's a southern black woman who wants to be a scholar and a writer living in a white world of letters.

- And that was one thing I liked about her, her independence.

She didn't care about you and what you thought.

- Zora could go from dialect to the most beautiful English that you could possibly Ima.

It was like music.

When she spoke, - Zora was kind of feisty and kinda raunchy.

- She could tell you to go to hell and make you enjoy the trip.

- You are listening to WEAF Radio New York.

We're broadcasting live from the top of Rockefeller Center.

It's one o'clock and time for the Mary Margaret McBride show.

Here is Mary Margaret McBride.

- Our guest today is Zora Neil Hurston and her book right now is Dust Tracks on a Road, which is the story of her own life.

- Yes, - This is my sixth book, dust - Tracks on the Road.

- Of course that just gives no idea of all the things that have happened to Zora Neil Hurston as she's going round the countryside, collecting folklore and done a beautiful job.

- Well much obliged Ms.

McBride.

Much obliged - You.

You know there was one thing you said about children that I loved what you said about the moon.

Tell us about that.

- Didn't you think the moon followed you?

Ms.

McBride?

- Yes.

- The moon is shining and you go out and you run and it'll follow you.

And I of course thought it made a special effort just to keep up with me and I, I was so shocked when I found out that it followed other people.

'cause I thought I was just something so very special.

And so it was a race for the moon to follow me.

Whichever way I'd run it would follow me just like a puffy dog.

And it sort of disillusioned me when I found out that other people were making the same claims on the moon as me.

- The Florida Village where Zora grew up was a special place that had been created by and for black people.

In 1887, Eatonville, the first incorporated negro town in America.

- A negro town, you mean the whole town without the white folks nothing but color folks who bosses it then they bosses it themselves.

- Herston makes a great deal out of growing up in an all black town, a space where she could have her creativity blossom, have free reign with her imagination.

- Eatonville was sort of the touchstone that she came back to all the time and she always came back to Eatonville.

In terms of riding - Eatonville, the city of five Lakes, three croquet Colts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, two schools and no jailhouse.

The Negro set up their hastily built shacks on St.

John's Hole.

The Negro women could be seen every day, but Sunday squat, washing clothes and fishing.

No more back bending over roads of cotton.

No more fear of the fury of reconstruction.

- Florida offered Zora's parents an easier life than they'd had in Alabama, but the promise of a world with without racism for their eight children is what kept them in Eatonville.

- Her father was three times elected mayor of the town.

So even in the 1890s, she has this anomalous experience of being able to go around and say, I'm the mayor's daughter.

- John Hurston helped write the to laws.

He was a well-known Baptist preacher and a carpenter.

He tried to warn his youngest daughter what it meant to be black in the south.

- Papa fell did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit.

He predicted the white folks were not gonna stand for my forward ways, but mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to jump at the sun - When everybody else is trying to squelch her down and hide her gleam.

Her mother is the woman who tells her to show her shine, to jump at the sun, to never say never, and that she can do everything.

- Eatonville School was modeled on Booker t Washington's ideas that children should learn skills for jobs in the trades.

But Zora, who lived in her imagination, was fascinated by words.

- Books gave me more pleasure than clothes.

Gull of travels, Grims fairytales, Rudy Kipling and his jungle books.

I loved his talking snakes As much as I did the hero in Greek and Roman myths, Hercules moved me the most.

I resolved to be like him.

- This was a A dreamer.

This was a kid who, you know, sat in the China berry tree in Eatonville, dreaming about places she could go and stories she could tell.

- But Zora never dreamed her life in Eatonville would end so suddenly when Zora was just 13, her mother died.

- Mama died at sundown and changed the world.

That owl began my wandering, not so much in geography, but in time, not so much in time as in spirit.

- At the time of her mother's death, the family disintegrates and after that she's really a woman on her own.

- I was shifted from house to house relatives and friends and found comfort.

Nowhere I was without books to read.

Most of the time I was miserable.

- Zora was sent to school in Jacksonville, but her father stopped paying her tuition adrift and uncertain for 15 years.

She wandered first to Memphis, then to Baltimore, and on to Washington DC working as a waitress, a manicurist, and a maid.

- Zora was thrust out into the world on her own, really forced to make her way into adulthood the best she could.

And I think those years were important to who she ultimately became because they really developed this kind of scrappy fighting sense of independence, which we later see throughout her life and her career.

- Zora yearned to get back into school, but as a young black woman on her own, she lacked resources and support.

She persevered.

And finally in 1919, she was accepted at Howard, one of the nation's leading black universities there.

At 28 years of age, she began to write, - I joined the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, took part in all the literary activities on the campus.

I named the student paper the Hilltop and I made the stylist the small literary Society on the hill.

Dr.

Ang Laroy Locke was the presiding genius.

- Elaine Locke was a philosopher who believed black artists were becoming a cultural class in America.

He recognized Zora's talent and sent one of her short stories to be published in opportunity, a national magazine for black writers.

He encouraged her to go where other black artists were heading to Harlem in New York City.

- So the first week of January, 1925 found me in New York with a dollar 50 cents in my pocket.

No job, no friends, and a lot of hope.

- We were all so young, oh how we y One day we could go to New York, the most wonderful places in the world.

The first thing that happened when I saw New York was I saw all of these colored people and I said to somebody, is there a parade - For Leary Hopefuls?

New York is the place to go.

It's the center, not only of publishing industries, but also the important magazines that are being born at this time.

Like the crisis, Langston Hughes said he'd rather be a lamppost than Harlem than the mayor of a town in Georgia.

It was just that compelling.

- Zora immediately became known around town as a very striking new talent.

She was a very flamboyant person.

She would walk in and say, queen Zora has arrived.

And everybody would say, Zora's here, Zora's here.

Let's hear some stories.

- She was very interesting.

Zora's a very interesting person.

She told wonderful stories, baby, he - Crooned What's on the rail for the lizard.

I'll tell you like the farmer told the potato, plant your nail.

Dig it.

Later - Few people realize that the Harlem Renaissance for many of its architects said its prime Movers, was about the integration of what Alene Locke once called the cultured few.

In his manifesto, the New Negro published in 1925, he said that there was a new assimilated, cosmopolitan artistic class and economic class and that these are the people who should be integrated into American society and the slow moving masses.

Another direct quote from Locke would come along much later, but in the meantime, this vanguard of the race should be allowed to assimilate.

- There are serious artistic patrons who are wanting to show that they're interested but also wanting to be involved.

This is where we get a lot of the literary contests.

Those mostly come from white patrons who have given a great deal of money so that there can be awards and big time events.

- I won a prize for a short story at the Opportunity Awards dinner.

The social register crowd soon took me up.

If you had not had lunch with me, you had not shot from Tom.

- Through the opportunity contests, Zora rubbed shoulders with New York's literary elite.

Fannie Hurst was a contest judge and also one of the country's highest paid writers.

Her 1934 novel Imitation of Life would become a popular movie.

- Zora came to work as her secretary within about a week or two, they both realized that Zora wasn't a very good secretary.

Zora didn't have the kind of personality that would you would expect of someone who was being a secretary to a famous novelist.

And so they became companions.

- Zora, tell - Us about Fannie Hurst.

Well, Ms.

Hurst as just a springtime quality that I say of liking to play dolls.

I, I suppose it's 'cause she was an only child, woman minute.

She's just a little girl playing, but with a straight face, you know.

Next minute she's Fannie Hurst again, taking herself very seriously.

She's novelist again and sometimes she be a little girl.

She call up her husband Jack, Jack, what must I do about so and so?

Of course he tell her exactly what to do.

Next minute, some publisher sorta gets out a lot and she's just like a cave woman.

When the save tooth tiger come to the saber-tooth, tiger come to the door, she grab her club and swat him all over and give him what we call down south.

A good head stomping and a straightening.

And just a moment before she, she was Jack's little girl, - Zora and Fannie traveled together.

They would stop into restaurants and Fannie Hurst would go up and say, I, I need a table for Princess Zora and myself.

And they would integrate restaurants because the assumption was that the, that Zora was an African rather than an African American - Hurston was not allowed to stay in the same places where Fannie Hurst stayed.

And on one occasion, Fannie Hurst decided that she would not stay there either showing solidarity to Hurston Hurston rejected her gesture and said to her, I can take care of myself refusing to be treated like a victim.

And I think a much of her scholarship, much of her ideas turned on rejecting victimhood.

- Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.

It merely astonishes me.

How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?

It's beyond me.

- African American literature was written primarily for a white audience to show that we weren't meant to be slaves, that nature hadn't made us inferior, et cetera, et cetera.

We knew what fork and knife to use, however you might want to think of it.

So there was always a white, idealized white reader on the black writer's shoulder as she or he went about the process of creation.

- Harlem Renaissance was known among the participants as the new Negro movement.

And they were aware that they were creating history.

They were aware that they were doing something different.

And Zora was the self-proclaimed queen of the Harlem Renaissance Queen of the ish.

That was a term that she came up with to describe these sort of educated and literary black people.

She helped to publish fire the magazine.

It was an attempt to create a new vision of black culture.

- The magazine was a frank exploration and celebration of all the things that the old girl hated.

You know, black sexuality, the scenes of juke joints and poetry that really they celebrated, you know, the black body and portraits of black women that no sort of proper black writers should describe.

- Oh them half whites.

They gets everything they gets everything everybody else wants.

The men, the jobs, everything.

The whole world's got a sign on it want it?

Light color.

- Zo Hersman actually engaged this notion of the color line and being color struck.

This was this dirty little secret in black culture, that there was this kind of privileging of very light-skinned, very European looking African-Americans.

Well she was a - Rebel.

She was an intellectual rebel.

She was a personal rebel.

She told off-color jokes in front of white people and drove her contemporaries crazy.

She - Also was one of those people who seems to act almost without a sensor and that's a very unusual thing for a black person in 1920s.

She seems to have been herself all the time and not particularly worried about the kinds of conclusions that people might draw about all black people from her particular self.

- At certain times.

I have no race, I am me.

I set my hat at a certain angle and sauntered down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City feeling as snooty as the lines in front of the 42nd Street Library.

The cosmic Zora emerges, I belong to no race nor - In 1925, Zora was awarded a scholarship to Barnard College where she would be the first black graduate.

She would find a mentor who was challenging, prevailing notions of race and culture at neighboring Columbia University.

Franz Boaz, the father of modern anthropology, - Nobody has been able to prove that the brains of different races are different in any fundamental way.

- I began to treasure the words of Dr.

Boaz, the king of kings.

When we called him papa, the saver cut on his cheek said to be God.

And Adu lifted and smiled - Of inferior quality.

- Two weeks before I graduated from Barnard, Dr.

Boez sent for me and told me he had arranged a fellowship for me.

I was to go south and collect negro folklore.

- You ought to hear Zora Neil Hurston tell the story of when she was going around the countryside collecting folklore and, and you were just outta Barnard and, and what was it you'd say?

Zora Neil.

- I was very conscious of my bonded English and my bonded education.

And I would go to some of these common people for negro folk stories.

I, I'd say, do you know any of those folk tales?

I'm searching for some folk tales.

I ain't never heard about 'em.

Maybe they heard about 'em down there in Sanford, the next county.

I ain't never heard nothing about him.

- When money from her fellowship ran out, Elaine Locke introduced Zora to a patron who funded black artists.

A wealthy Aris named Charlotte Van DeVere.

Osgood Mason, who liked to be called Godmother.

- Charlotte Mason was one of the most fascinating figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

For her, the only thing that was legitimate about black culture were the unlettered, the untutored expressions of black culture.

What was white was lettered and educated and formal and what was black was spontaneous and exotic and passionate.

- Laugh, if you will, but there was a psychic bomb between us.

Godmother 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.

- Armed with a movie camera, a pearl handled revolver and Mason's contract for $200 a month.

Zuora set off for the South - Florida is a place that draws people.

Why?

People from all over the world and Negroes from every southern state, surely and some from the north and west.

So I knew that it was possible for me to get a cross section of the Negro south.

In the one state.

The first place I aimed to star collecting material was Eatonville Florida.

- Well it was all dirt roads and it was 26 houses.

I'd walk around Eatonville with her, hold her hand, she'd hold our hand, we'd walk swinging hands.

You know, when she was walking around through Eatonville asking a lot of questions, we didn't know what she was trying to do.

- Research has formalized curiosity.

It is poking and prying with a purpose.

It is seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.

- She recorded the games, children played the songs.

They sang the customs of a small town, what she called the boiled Down Juice of Human Living.

- And if you did anything wrong, anybody could correct you.

Not only, not only correct you verbally, but they would get a palm and they would correct you from the rear end.

- Yeah.

And send you right on - Road and send you home and tell your parents what you had done and then you would be corrected again.

Anybody could do it.

- The center of Eatonville was Joe Clark's store.

And people would sit around on the front porch of the store and they'd tell stories and Zora would hang out and listen to stories without her part of the African American oral tradition since slavery.

And she just became fascinated by the sort of social dynamic of that store porch.

- His mama was a big woman too.

It was a big woman.

Oh seven foot tall.

Tall.

- Oh, as she is collecting folklore, she writes that she wants to take some of these glint and gleams and store them away for her own use.

- Zora knew she had to move beyond her eatonville roots to dig deeper into black culture.

Zora was searching for voodoo.

- No voodoo in eatonville.

Wasn't nothing in eatonville, but moonshine drinkers and whiskey drinkers and a lot of dancing and stuff like that.

Wasn't no voodoo.

People didn't think about that kind of stuff in Eatonville.

It wasn't that many people in Eatonville.

About 26, between 26 and 30 houses who wasn't nobody there to work voodoo on - In New Orleans.

I delved into oo or sympathetic magic in order to work with these two headed doctors, I had to go through initiation.

I heard of Luke Turner, a hoodoo doctor.

He tried to shoo me away.

- She goes to Luke Turner, no, I don't wanna work with you.

No way.

She comes back, no girl.

I said, no way.

She just keeps on girl.

And slowly it dawned on him because at that time, as you know, you could be thrown into a jail for any hint of practicing voodoo and of course refusing to take no her na being gracious about it.

Zora Neal Hurston proof.

The real methodology is patience.

- I lay naked for three days and nights on a couch with my navel to a rattlesnake skin.

My finger was cut and I became blood brother to the rattlesnake.

The symbol of lightning was painted on my back.

This was to be my sign forever.

- Wow.

The anazi line that goes down her body for lightning makes her, shall we say, accept the responsibility of mastering so much spirit.

'cause lightning is a very awesome force.

- She saw that this wasn't about zombies, it wasn't about magic, it wasn't about all the lured accusations that people in the popular media were portraying voodoo as, but it was simply a very important and very rich and historical religion that people had to take seriously.

- You really see the way in which she works as a trained anthropologist without judging it and from a place that is respectful.

On the other hand, it is also clear that she is not just interested as an academic because she deeply believes in the power of hoodoo culture.

- Traveling across the deep south, Zora visited turpentine and lumber camps, collecting the folklore for people.

She began sending samples of Negro oral tradition back to Langston Hughes, her friend and the best known poet of the Harlem - Renaissance.

Langston man, I got some juke songs.

A juke is a clubhouse on these sawmills and turpentine stills.

The real Negro theater is in the Dukes.

- She and Langston Hughes were writing letters to each other almost every day.

They were extremely important to each other.

I think their relationship was a love relationship, even though it wasn't sexual or romantic.

You know, they were in some ways soulmates.

- She had a very deep connection to how black folks occurred and that's all Langston was about.

He wanted to know and be a part of and actually ultimately be appreciated by Negro people.

- Before Long Langston who had come to Harlem from the Midwest, joined Zora on her travels, learning firsthand about the bayou and backwoods of southern Negro culture.

Their travels together in the south convinced them they needed to write a real negro folk comedy, a play they'd call Mule Bone set in Eatonville.

- Although Langston hadn't written many plays at that point, he was much more sure of his sort of literary voice and she asked Langston to organize and help her write this play.

- The play was about two hunters who shot a Turkey and had a fight about who was responsible for this game.

And it goes to court and it's very dramatic play.

Eventually it evolves into a dispute over a woman.

It was based on a short story by Zora Hurston.

- It's full of all of Zora's collecting in the writing of the play.

Zora would perform a lot of it, you know, perform all the characters and this delighted Langston, - Oh, you like my features, but you don't like me, don't you like my features?

Don't you shake my tree?

Oh, well - You may go, but this will bring you back.

Who do, who do?

This will bring you back - After a good summer of work, she quickly vanishes and he is left to kind of wonder what what's going on with her - Now a theater company wanted to produce Mule Bone without telling Langston.

Zora copyrighted the play in her own name.

- Qs was understandably livid.

This was not sanctioned by him in his eyes.

The play wasn't finished and Hurston had disappeared, you know, months before and given no indication that she was finished with the play, was happy with it.

So this turn of events was something he could not have predicted.

- She has a deep sense in the thirties of intellectual property and that's where a lot of the mule bone tension is about.

It's about her sense that one's work as a writer, as a black writer, as a black woman writer is not there to be stolen by everybody in sight and she's very protective of that.

- The friendship between the two writers shattered production of Mule Bones stopped, but Zora held onto the notion that her plays could be a window into real negro culture.

Godmother agreed to finance Zora's first play a folklore concert set in a Florida railroad camp - Like, like you, - There would be work songs, there would be courtship, rituals, and Hurston performed herself.

She was one of the actors, singers, dancers.

- We are going to try to make plays on Negro life in the Negro manner.

We want to build a drama out of ourselves.

Our drama must be like us or it doesn't exist.

- She felt that this kind of expression of black life was really at home on the stage, even more so than on the page in some ways.

And so that was part of why this idea of, you know, getting together a trooper, performers going to different communities to dramatize black cultural really appeal to her.

- This is the greatest wealth of the continent.

This stuff won't be around long.

And I aim to show the world the beauty and appeal that is in genuine negro material.

- She does write, I was glad when somebody told me I could go and collect Negro folklore.

What she doesn't say is, of course they also told me it wouldn't belong to me, that it would belong to my my patron.

- Well, Mrs.

Mason was a very rich woman and people of wealth have an entourage around them, including lawyers.

She was being advised, if you're gonna support this young black artist or Neil Hurston, you need to make sure that she understands her responsibility.

And there came to be a kind of assumption of a commercial relationship that Zora was collecting folklore on contract with Mrs.

Mason.

- Mrs.

Mason can tell her, well, no, no you can't.

You can't talk about the conjure material.

You can't talk about hoodoop.

That's too precious.

That can only go in the book.

You can't use that in your focal concerts.

It's mine.

- During the five years that Hurston is working as Mason's agent, she does lots of work on the side and lots of work that she doesn't even want Mason to know about because she rightly considers it her own and she doesn't want Mason interfering.

- She walked a very, very fine line.

There's a very fine line between saying what white white folks want to hear, particularly at that time and being proudly independent on your own.

In the end, I think Hurston managed that trickster role pretty well.

- My darling godmother, you are God's flower.

May I on your birthday sing My most pure and up rushing love darling flower Devotedly, your pickaninny Zora.

- If she were to materialize right here, right now, I would want to ask her why in the world you'd sign a letter to your patron, your favorite pickaninny.

Maybe there's a subtext I don't understand, but on the face of it, it seems offensive to me.

- She's been severely criticized for pandering to these patrons for, for, for taking their money and manipulating white people.

The people who were criticizing her for that in her own time were also taking money from the same white people and they have not been criticized in quite the same way.

- For five years, Mason supported Zora's collecting in the south.

In 1932, her support ended finally free of Mason and her ban on publishing.

Zora moved back to Florida with a suitcase full of folk tales.

- There was a time when you'd just written some short stories and then suddenly out of the blue come about five letters from New York publishers saying they'd like to publish a book by you.

- Well, yes sir, Mr.

Living Cut.

He wrote a nice soft letter indeed kept on writing me every week.

Sort of a gentle line.

Yes, I was afraid of the rest of 'em.

I had never gotten face to face with a publisher before.

You see?

But he wrote so, so soft and gentle like so then I started to write Jonas Go Vine.

My first book, - Jonas Go Vine.

Yes.

Now you had some trouble though, didn't you?

Didn't your landlady sort of put you out?

Yes.

Didn't she like the typewriter or - What?

No, I didn't even have a typewriter that I wanted to, but I didn't have one.

You see, I hired this house and there was no electricity there and I promised the people a dollar and a half week rent, but I just didn't seem to have the money.

So I started to write the book as fast as I could.

It took me about seven, eight weeks to write the book and I sent it out on November 3rd.

Then it started to nudge me pretty hard about the rent.

And November 16th when I was put out of the house, I got an acceptance wire from Liping Cot.

They offered me $200 advanced royalty.

I dashed to the telegraph office and sent off a wire.

Terms accepted.

I'm singing on my silver singing trumpet.

That's wonderful.

- Jonas Govin is really a novel about her father, the black preacher who proved every Sunday morning that he was an artist, that he was a poet.

Zora understood the way that black ministers were poets.

There were, there were people who came inspired when they began speaking and the sermons that they created were very much an artistic production.

- I heard the whistle of the damn nation train that pulled out from Garden of Eden loaded with cargo going to hell.

Jesus stood out on her track like a rough back mountain and she threw her cow catcher in his side and his blood ditched a train.

He died foul sins.

- Her father was a jack leg minister and he liked life liberty in the happiness of pursuit.

He pursued women and our mother used to have to whip his head once every three weeks according to her own stories.

- Papa and Mama were really in love in spite of his wanderings.

Maybe he was just born before his time.

They didn't have these zippers on pants in those days and button up flies were tricky In betraying, - She created worlds, worlds like we know in our neighborhoods, which really bothered many of her contemporaries because they wanted an official Negro to be represented.

Refined African American who didn't gamble and didn't engage in extramarital sex and didn't tell lies and signify.

- What I had wanted to tell was the story of a man and from what I had read and heard, Negroes was supposed to write about the race problem.

I am thoroughly sick of the subject.

My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such and such regardless of color.

- Part of the genius of Hurston is that she uses her community as a laboratory.

You cannot really understand her wonderful literary production without connecting that to her ethnographic work.

- Zora's next book, mules and Men was fueled by her anthropological research.

It included stories from Joe Clark's porch in Edenvale and Zora's Adventures in a juke joint full of love and Danger.

- Mules A Men is a nonfiction book, but a sort of stylized nonfiction where she sort of created herself as this character who's taking you on this journey through the south and is totally rooted in her anthropological research.

- There is a passage where a guy's flirting with her and he says, if you stay with me, what make it so cool?

I wouldn't let you make me breakfast.

I get up and make it for you.

Set it aside over the burner just for you baby.

What make it so cool?

What make it so generous?

What make it so, so suave, so socially ingratiating.

She caught because her ear for black speech was impeccable.

She caught the yes quality wrapped in this supreme black metaphor and she documented it in context in the process of being flirted with.

And that's what, that's what makes Zora.

She will not date because her pages are really scenarios.

They're films.

- Rural country folks have what she called a psychic savings bank.

They could draw from these cultural tales.

And she wanted to share that these folks that were otherwise seen as stupid, lazy, ignorant, that were not at all.

They were very smart, hardworking, hard loving, hard fighting.

And above all, they used this folklore as a way to really figure out social relations.

- Mules and men was praised by critics and scholars.

Hurston had shed light on what many thought was a backward way of life.

She had given the world a new way to look at the south.

- Northern intellectuals saw a south determined solely by horror, the horrors of lynching, the horrors of economic deprivation, the horrors of Jim Crow.

Hurston saw the south as home as a place where people lived and what she foregrounded in her ethnography and her literary work were the everyday lives of black folk and provides a window on to people as human beings as she was so fond of saying as individuals.

- She loved her own roots and she loved her people, you know, and just the way they were.

She wasn't feeling as many of the people in the Harlem Renaissance felt that they had to be changed and they had to be, you know, refashioned, reshaped into something that was presentable to whoever.

You know, she felt like they were, you know, great in all of their - Messiness.

So she presented their humor in this raw form.

She presented their gender relations in their unconventional form.

She didn't want to wash off and clean up the unwashed masses.

She wanted to present them as they were.

- You know, some of your words I love, do you remember how you say friended with, - Yes.

Making verbs outta nouns.

- We do that a lot.

She was friended with, what's that one about?

Putting your foot up, putting your foot up.

- When you get ready to really play the dozens of somebody, lay 'em out, you see - Play the dozens, you - Go to their house and you put your foot up on the step you see, and with one hand on your hip, you tell 'em what you really think about 'em and all that.

Folks were way back for five or six generations, like maybe their old man was a double hump camera and their mama was a mule.

Now that's putting your foot up on 'em.

You intend to be very emphatic when you put your foot up.

What's specifying?

Oh, well that's given all the details.

They use that sort of loosely.

Sometimes a person is talking a lot, giving the details, you know, no rating you in front of the public and they saying, ain't she specifying telling all about 'em.

- Person wants to talk about language, for example, of she would talk about how people would say, you know, I killed him dead then if you were really angry, you might say, I killed him.

Cemetery dead right?

That there was something about the language that was invented that was created.

And this is at a time when the common belief is that black people could not speak English correctly.

Hurston argues, not only could black people speak English differently, but the way they spoke English had been so influential that it changed the way Southern white people spoke.

- Every white boy, every white girl goes around saying Uhuh.

Now their Anglo-Saxon ancestors said, yay and nay and yes and no, but none that is African Uhuh.

The most dramatic africanism in the speech of Americans, - West Africans in Senegal called Du the Sweet Language.

The sweet language was a language dependent entirely upon tone and even the the lengthening out of a word.

So if you spoke, if I spoke the sweet language to you in the South, instead of saying, hi there, how are you?

I'd say, Hey, how you doing?

Well, I never heard white folks use sweet language and I heard black people use it all the time.

- In 1935, Zora began working for the Library of Congress, the pioneering musicologist.

John Lomax and his son Allen were creating a repository for America's folk songs.

Their work documenting black music had been limited to southern prisons.

- She was a of the senior Lomax less so of the sun.

She was fascinated with the work they were doing with Leadbelly.

Goodnight - Dar Goodnight.

I find Lead Belly, you'll find Songster.

I've never heard so many good negro songs.

Thank you for both - Zora and 20-year-old college student.

Alan Lomax recorded more than 200 songs as a journeyed from the Sea Islands of Georgia to the shores of Lake Okeechobee.

Their work included a stop in Eatonville.

- She kept being involved in circumstances in which her actual boss for folklore collecting who was sending her back in some cases to literally her very own hometown, knew much, much less than she did, but had all of the social authority and the economic power to direct the project.

- She convinced us, Alan Lomax to blacken up that he would never be accepted in this black town unless he blackened his face.

He did it.

He blackened up.

Now, there was no way that a white man could blacken up his face and walk into a black community and not be noticed.

And she would do things like that.

And I think these antics on her part were also ways in which she expressed her displeasure with the racial structure.

- This song, I got Athan Florida, which is a railroad center in the northern part of Florida.

I in Florida, I let shake it, ah, let's break it.

A railroad rail weighs 900 pounds and the men have to take these lining bars and get it and shape to spike it down.

And while they're doing that, while they have a chance and also some songs that they use the rhythm to wake it into place.

And then the boss hollers, bring up a hammer gang and then start to spiking it down.

- She really wants to understand black people's cultural expressions.

And so many people don't even want to acknowledge them.

Think there is nothing to understand.

Even the people who wanna celebrate wanna say, well, you know, they just know how to sing and dance and she wants to say no.

There are very profound principles - No matter where you go, you can find verses of Uncle Bud and it's the typical Negro pattern.

The same line repeated three times a sort of flip line on the end.

- Blue singers from different places had different sounds.

The Brazos guys sounded like this, baby, I want you to know, I just don't want you, man.

The guys in from the ba, from the Delta sang like this, please don't go.

Well, he's acting that they please don't go.

It was so beautiful.

Goodness.

- In 1936, Zora won a Guggenheim grant to go to Haiti to research a book on voodoo, leaving behind a relationship with a much younger man.

The failed to Affair inspired her most famous novel - I wrote, their eyes were watching God in Haiti.

It was damned up in me and I wrote it under internal pressure.

In seven weeks, the force from somewhere in space, which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice.

You take up a pen when you are told and write what is commanded.

There is no agony like barren, an untold story inside of you.

- Their eyes were watching.

God is a story of Janie Crawford discovering herself through her relationships with three very different men.

Logan Killick, her first husband, her second husband, Jodi Starks, and then her third husband, tea Cake, who really encourages her to accept and love herself as she is.

- A friend of mine gave me a copy of their eyes, were watching God, and I read it in a sitting and absolutely loved it.

- It's a novel that it can be laugh out, loud, funny.

And Hurston is a very gifted comic writer.

And for some readers it's a love story and that's a very unusual thing in the African American tradition.

So in 1937, we don't have many love stories, - But there's another way to read it, which is it's a novel about the capacity of the African American vernacular to narrate a novel, to tell a story.

- You start reading it and you think you won't be able to understand it, and then you realize that you understand it perfectly and that not only that it's very funny and so it's almost, it gives you the pleasure of learning a new skill.

In a way, - The Mons Polus beast had left his bed.

The 200 miles an hour wind had loosed his chains.

The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

The lake is coming, cake gasped, it's coming behind us.

Janie shut it.

Us can't fly, but we still can run T cake.

Shut it.

And they ran.

The gushing water ran faster.

- That uses a a literary device, a well-known literary device called Free Indirect Discourse.

When the the voice of the narrator and the voice of a character merge into a third voice, the narrator becomes educated by the black vernacular characters.

- Joel Stalks was the name been working for white folks all his life when he heard all about him making a town all outta colored folks, he know that was the place he wanted to be.

He'd always wanted to be a big boss, but the white folks had all the say so.

That was right too.

The man that built things on the boss let colored folks build things if they wants to crew over something.

- That novel will continue to be read as one of the most sophisticated uses of free and direct discourse, which after all, Flo Barry used and Henry James and Virginia Wolfen, 1,001 other people, but none ever did it in a collective way to capture the collective voice of an entire community in the way that Zael Hurston did.

Zael Hurston established herself as a genius with that accomplishment alone, the mainstream press ka it as a very exciting literary event.

The times the mainstream newspapers and magazines all gave their eyes were watching God excellent reviews.

Simultaneously, the black literary establishment all trashed Hurston's work.

- The thing that struck me most and that I could not understand was how people just completely didn't see the love.

They completely ignored it.

And this is a real problem because it means that the people who read it had so little love for themselves ancestrally, you know, they, they really had no patience for the ancestors, thought that they were just, you know, outdated, outmoded folk and however they sound, it was wrong.

- Even Elaine Locke Zora's longtime mentor, criticized the book labeling her character's pseudo primitives.

He pressed Zora to mature as a writer by tackling social issues in her work.

- Allain Locke is a malicious little snot.

I get tired of the envious picking on me.

One who lives by quotations, trying to criticize people who live by life.

I will send my toenails to debate him on what he knows about Negroes and Negro life.

- Zora's harshest critic was Richard Wright.

In 1940, Wright would become America's first popular black protest writer with his bestselling novel Native son - Richard Wright.

Trash it.

He said.

It was about a bunch of darkies making love and playing the banjo down on the muck in the Everglades.

Wright felt black art was about the dramatization of white racism.

SSON wrote a book that's not about white racism at all, or not certainly primarily white people.

White racism occur off stage.

- Oh, don't tell me about Richard.

I couldn't stand him.

I couldn't stand him.

Don't ask me about Richard Bry.

Oh my God, oh God.

He didn't like how white people, he didn't like color people or whatever.

He might have been a little bit jealous of Z.

- She was the healthy side of black life that was pretty much absent from Richard Wright, whom I also love very deeply.

But to me they're polar opposites because she is a very vibrant, self-loving spirit.

- This book is such a strong feminist book.

What makes Janie Crawford stand out is that she's not a victim.

This is not a woman who is sorry, who is pitiful, who's asking for our forgiveness or our sympathy or our pity.

She's just telling her story.

- And I think what women love about that book is that she is at that place where she's in her own space.

She's very happy with herself and she's basically contemplating life and being very grateful for life.

But she's not grasping for anything.

She's not feeling she needs anybody, and that's a very good place to be.

- In 1940, Zora was at the height of her career with five books and six years, including her new novel Moses Man of the Mountain and her book on Voodoo.

Tell My Horse, she spoke at college campuses, gave lectures on drama and was interviewed on the radio.

She drove her red convertible from Ohio to Florida and in Beaufort, South Carolina, she became involved with the roadside church group, the Commandment Keeper, church of the Living God.

- The Church of God seems to be a more African form of expression, a protest against the stereotype form of churches among literate Negroes.

Its keynote is Rhythm.

- Zora was interested in recording the music they played in their services.

Her colleagues from Barnard helped her secure funding from anthropologist Margaret Mead.

- I was asked to film and record what was going on in a Baptist church in Beaufort, South Carolina, part of Dr.

Margaret Mead's program on religious ecstasies.

And Zora prepared all that in advance.

That was one thing we could say about Zorra.

She was a pretty good organizer.

- Her camera crew took my picture and I remember her laughing, but when she spoke to her crew, she had that authority voice, that girl walking down the street, that was me - When we met them and told them that we were going to make motion picture film, they explained that in the Bible.

It says, thou shalt not make a grave, an image of the Lord.

And they wouldn't let us do it.

And Zora knew exactly what was going on.

I found her very persistent.

- The person that was playing the tambourine, that was me.

Music seemed to take away the evil spirits, I would say.

And then we, when you get into it, then you, you notice it's the rhythm.

It's the rhythm and the spirit come in with the rhythm.

- During the ceremony, Julia Jones goes first into ecstasy that a trance after which she sometimes utters prophecies to the whole congregation.

Her eyes are half closed and her movements are like a sleepwalker.

She honored one time.

I feel hate to hear hate.

There's the suggestion of the African witch doctor smelling out evil doers.

At this phase, - Zora had lived a life, few could have imagined an anthropologist and a novelist.

Her publisher thought her adventures would interest readers and asked her for an autobiography.

She reluctantly agreed and titled it Dust Tracks on a Road.

- Most important thing to remember about an autobiography is that the author starts with the person that they wished to define here and now.

Then they look backward at their life and justify everything from their birth in their lives.

To this point in time, people misrepresent themselves in order to justify who they were.

And Zor Neal unfortunately did the same thing - She had written that black people did not reveal that which the soul lives by.

And I think writing an autobiography must have been extraordinarily difficult because she wasn't gonna reveal that which her soul lived by.

And so there are lots of misrepresentations of fact about her life.

She claims to have been born in Eatonville.

She's very careful not to say when - Zora was a master of disguising her birthdate throughout her life.

She would give completely phony dates for when she was born.

There's been a lot of controversy about this, but we now know for sure.

She was born in 1891 and interestingly, she wasn't born in Eatonville, although she always claimed to be born in Eatonville.

She was born in Nga, Alabama.

- Oh, she lied a little.

As you know, she lied about her age.

Maybe she was 10 years older than she told me she was.

But I mean, we can forgive her.

That - Zora, whose classic novel centered around a woman with three husbands, would never publicly acknowledge her own three marriages.

She met her first husband, Herbert Sheen at Howard University and married him in 1927.

- I don't know why she married that man.

Never saw Herman, nobody else.

She didn't marry him.

I mean they, she really didn't marry him.

But there she was there and, and we never saw him.

- There's a lot of evidence that she had the kind of love for Sheen she had for her lifelong friends.

And Hurston was both an incredible lover and she was an incredible hater.

When she hated, she was really good at it.

And she was a little scary.

The other two husbands, both marriages that lasted well under a year, and both marriages again where she barely lives with him.

As far as we can tell the Albert Price marriage is the one that's most startling because of the amazing age difference between them.

It's a 25 year age difference.

He's 23, she's 48.

- She said she was afraid that marriage would only widen her hips and narrow her life.

Her work was her master and she followed its commands.

And you know, she loved these men, but they were mere men.

- She liked freedom.

I asked her why she didn't stay with her husband.

She said she, they board her after a certain time.

They board her.

So she just left or they broke up because she didn't like confinement.

She didn't like to be anybody's prisoner.

- Zora's autobiography, dust Tracks on a Road was published in 1942.

It sold well, but it was not the book Zora had intended to publish Bush - As World War II began.

There was sort of a climate in this country that discouraged speaking out against the government, much like the climate we have today.

And she wrote some political views that her publisher said, you know, these cannot go.

So she, those were just cut out of the book.

- The unpublished portions of her autobiography were radical there.

She connects the US interest to the interest of Col colonizers.

She's very critical about World War ii.

She raises the question of what's happening in Africa, Asia and what and what's happening to people under colonized regimes.

And of course the publishers would not publish it.

- Bitter tears are being shed over the fate of Holland, Belgium, France, and England.

I must confess to being a little dry around the eyes, president Roosevelt could extend his four freedoms to some people right here in America before.

He takes it all abroad.

He can call names across the ocean, but he evidently has not the courage to speak even softly at home.

I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

- During the war, Zora owned a houseboat.

She liked being able to live and write in solitude and on the water.

She was free from Jim Crow laws.

- One time she even took a trip from New York to Daytona Beach.

It was very romantic lifestyle, very fiercely independent, which is the way Zora was.

And she had a pretty productive time.

She wrote a lot of journalistic articles during the, the war on that - Houseboat Hurston in early 1943 was interviewed and reportedly said something, the effect that conditions in the South were not as bad as they were portrayed in the North and was alleged to have said that Jim Crow works.

- I was misquoted.

I said The colored people in the South had their own places of amusement and social gatherings and had no more desire to associate with the whites than the whites had to associate with them.

My stand is that the South is wrong in segregation, but the north is not guiltless.

It's only a matter of degree.

Harlem is a segregated neighborhood, just like any in the South.

- Hurston received a lot of criticism for the political positions that she took.

She became so fiercely independent and so fiercely focused on what black people had accomplished without any political help that she really kind of fell out a step with where black politics were.

And Hurston drifted very much into the Republican camp.

She wrote an article for the Saturday evening post about Robert Taft, who was considering running for the presidency on the Republican ticket.

- Zora backed political candidates who opposed welfare.

She thought special treatment of minorities would make them complacent.

Too much dependence upon government.

She argued paves the way for a dictatorship or even worse, communism.

And Zora hated communists.

Her ideas kept her name before the public, but her publisher still rejected three novels over five years.

- So she's writing a great deal.

However, she's finding it increasingly hard to get published.

And her frustration in the 1940s about what publishers want from black writers is building to a point that it really starts to impact her own writing.

- Well, Sarah found the Suwanee published in 1948.

I think most people feel is her poorest book.

It's a novel in which she really kind of turns away from the African American environment and deals with a Florida cracker environment.

The novels mostly about white people.

It's really like no other book that she ever wrote.

- She was trying to get away from the straight jacket.

Black writers were in, you must write about black culture.

You must have an angry social protest voice.

You must write about urban poverty.

Your story should ideally start with an alarm clock and a large rat.

You must write right?

I mean, you know, it's the Richard White Wright Trap and she was very much trying to get away from that.

- Maybe the lack of success for that book is the fact that it was published very in a very short period of time after she was accused of, of frankly molesting a child.

- I am charged with meeting this boy at four 30 Saturday afternoon in the basement of a house where I have never been the very time when I was out of the country.

I swear by all our whole sacred that not one word of this vow charge is true.

- Absolutely false charge was thrown out of court.

But the story of the charge got into the Baltimore newspapers and the New York newspapers that served the African American community.

And Hurston was just devastated by this.

As a matter of fact, she wrote a letter saying, I'm seriously considering suicide.

I just don't see how I'm my reputation's ever going to survive this.

- My race has seemed fit to destroy me without reason.

Please do not forget that this thing was not done in the South, but in the so-called liberal north, no acquittal will persuade some people that I am innocent.

I have resolved to die.

- They were able to show that the times that supposedly these acts of molestation had occurred, there were times that she was out of the country.

The charges were thrown out.

The district attorney said, there's simply not enough evidence here to argue for the charge, and I don't believe she's guilty.

- She went back to Florida, she never returns to New York again to live.

She remains a public person.

She remains a professional writer.

But that incredible laughter that was part of the public person she crafted basically from that point on is gone - See you, your trouble.

See you.

Like I see trouble.

You mistreat me.

Marvelous girl.

- She wanted to come to some place where she could kind of just lick her wounds and feel better.

And she came here.

She settled among people who didn't require anything of her really, except to just come and have some fish with them every now and then.

And not be too dressed up, but kind of relax and just be herself.

- Oh, - Zora moved to Bell Glade, Florida and joined an interracial group, entertaining her new friends with stories and songs - Going to fly tonight.

- She just sat there and just lovingly told stories and everybody was just fascinated with her.

And she was not a beautiful woman, but she would just hold you so that your attention was directly on her.

- She had on a red dress that just was slinky right along with her body, right down to her ankles.

And she would do the railroad songs.

And when she did that, or when she was dancing, Zora went with that costume she was wearing and her whole body participated in whatever she was saying.

- Zora moved to Miami and lived on a friend's boat while she struggled to raise funds for an anthropological expedition.

Then at the age of 61, she took a job as a maid.

When her identity was discovered, her employer called the Press.

- Zer said, well, I'm just here because I'm thinking about doing a novel about domestic workers and this is a good way for me to learn to, to do research for my novel.

And that's, that's what I'm doing.

And, and as you know, I'm a famous writer and, and this is the way I'm spending my time right now.

- Miami is certainly hurst and conscious.

I have office to do some ghost writing.

All I wanted was a little spending change when I took this job, but it has turned out to be one slam of a publicity.

New dad - Magazines started to contact her and say, oh, we didn't know you were still around writing.

Why don't you write a story for for us?

So she was able to use that media attention to her own advantage.

And so she quit working as mate immediately after this story appeared.

- But Zora's depiction of Southern Life was out of step with the Times.

The South was now the focus of a historic civil rights movement.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregated schools in America across the south.

Whites were angry and so was Zora Neil Hurston.

- The whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people.

How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them.

If there are adequate Negro schools and prepared instructors and instructions, then there's nothing different except the presence of white people.

For this reason, I regard the ruling of the United States Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race.

- She's absolutely anti segregation.

She's anti economic segregation.

She is profoundly anti, Jim Crow writes about it at many different times, but she's also anti insult.

- This was a woman who had grown up in Eatonville in an all black community and felt that she had received everything she needed and that she didn't need to sit next to white kids in school.

To be as educated, as intelligent, as productive, - Hurston was very critical of the decision because she felt a slighted black institutions, which had been built behind the walls of segregation and had done a superlative job of educating our people against horrible circumstances.

Her view - Is, you folks, white America, you're lucky to get us.

And the idea that they would have to be legislated forced into those riches seems to her insulting and patently absurd.

- Unfortunately, for Hurston, she decided to enunciate this through the Republican Party a precisely at the time of the great boom in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s.

Well, these people couldn't afford to allow this kind of criticism to go unanswered, and so they scorned Hurston.

They thought Hurston was hopelessly out of touch, and in some ways she was.

- Zora worked odd jobs while living in a trailer.

Her queries for books and articles were rejected.

Then in 1958, she was offered a job writing a column for a black newspaper in Fort Pierce.

- I had never heard of Zara, but Marjorie called me one day and she said, this wonderful woman has moved to town.

She's a wonderful author.

Marjorie had been in the New York at the time of the Harlem Renaissance, and while I don't think she ever met Zora, she knew who she was and was very impressed that someone like that should be here in Fort Pierce.

- She had lots of friends, she did a lot of visiting.

She loved to eat ice cream, and she loved to talk while she was eating it, and she told stories until she couldn't and you know, fished and walked around Florida and you know, she had a life.

- She's living in a small two room house in Fort Pierce.

She's writing a column for the local paper.

She's writing novels and she couldn't get anybody to take them, and there's really, really angry letters to her agents.

Her last years were a struggle.

She starts having really terrible health problems.

She was looked after by people from her community, her neighbors, and their children who loved her very much.

- We sometimes think of her life as this rags to richest to rags story.

Well, the truth is she never had the richest, you know, she just, she did her work.

She understood the enduring value of her work, and she also understood that it wasn't work that necessarily paid well, but she was okay with that as long as she got into Chronicle and celebrate the lives of the ordinary black folk who had influenced her from the beginning of her life.

In Eatonville, - Zora died on January 28th, 1960.

She was 69, but the papers listed other ages 57 and even younger.

She was buried in an unmarked grave at the time.

All of her books were - Outta print.

She died working on a novel when she had her stroke, she was working on Harriet the Great and there are letters.

One of the saddest things I've I've seen are a series of letters in which she is writing to publishers trying to get her novel published, and it is clear from the change in the handwriting that she is ill and they are sad.

It's a sad ending to a, a brilliant life.

- When she died, there was just this trunk of manuscripts and they actually took the mountain, started to burn them, and the local deputy sheriff said, I remember Ms.

Hurston was a great writer.

Maybe we shouldn't be burning these manuscripts, and they got a garden hose and put them out.

- When I read Robert Hemingway's biography, I realized that she was somewhere.

Nobody knew where, and I felt I really needed to find her and to pay my respects.

It was very simple, you know, just to pay my respects and to leave a marker so that people would know that this is someone you know who had done great things - For more than 20 years.

Zora was forgotten.

Then one by one, her books came back into print.

Her films and plays turned up in vaults and libraries and a new generation of readers discovered the legacy of Zora.

Neil Hurston, the woman who had consistently been on the wrong side of history, is now embraced by the world as a leading figure in American literature - And this revival she triumphs.

I think she's made us all stronger, bolder, and much more willing to experiment, I think, and trusting that if you tell the story in your voice, others will have to learn that if you tell it in your language, they'll have to learn that language.

- A man, a man like this, you can't get a woman.

- I guess she could have done better financially with her books, but she didn't push for that.

She just won enough to live on.

She was content.

Now, I can criticize her for that, but she didn't care.

She wasn't worshiping money.

She would've liked for you to have her books and read 'em free if necessary.

She didn't care what you buy, like see, she, she was a free spirit.

A free spirit - Uncle, boy, man, a man in bull, nothing down like a George Bull.

Uncle Boy, uncle Bud, uncle Bud, uncle Bud, uncle Bud.

- I think most of us are pretty predictable.

We don't take big chances.

Zora wasn't predictable.

She took big chances and lived life to the fullest every single day.

- Oh, little cat, big cat playing in the sand.

Little cat far like a natural man.

Uncle Bud.

Uncle Bud, uncle Bud, uncle Bud, uncle Bud got G long and tall and the rock bear hips like a can un bowl.

Uncle Bud.

Uncle Bud.

Uncle Bud.

Uncle Bud.

- I was listening to National Public Radio and they were talking about their book club and they said, our book for this month is their eyes were watching God, and I was thinking, Lord, Lord, Lord, lord, Lord.

Zo could look down and see that that would totally blow her mind.

- Uncle Bug got - Respectable, ladies - Never.

It's one of those Jook songs and the woman that they sing, uncle Bud in front of is a Jook woman.

Yes, I heard from her.

- Well, that is the way things stand up to now.

I can look back and see sharp shadows, highlights, and smudgy in betweens.

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots.

Then I have stood on the Peaky Mountain, wrapping in rainbows with a hawk and a sword in my hands.