Instead, she basked in the light of the Harlem Renaissance during an era when all things Negro were "in vogue." Just two years after her explosion onto the New York literary scene, Hurston was awarded $1,400 from Carter G. Woodson, director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and from the American Folklore Society for what must have seemed like a lifelong dream come true: a six-month research project recording "the stories, superstitions, songs, dances, jokes, customs, and mannerisms of the black South."

During this time, she interviewed Cudjo Lewis, thought to be the only survivor from the Chlotilde, the last slave ship to dock in this country. What touched Hurston most about Kossola (his African name), writes Boyd, "was how much he continued to miss his people back in Nigeria" even seventy-five years later. "I lonely for my folks," he told Hurston. "It gave me something to feel about," she reflected. Hurston was a master at moving within and among very different worlds. As comfortable as she was at Barnard, she was even more so traveling to the sawmill quarters; the turpentine, phosphate, prison and railroad camps; and the black churches and juke joints of the South, where she faithfully recorded the songs, lullabies, sermons and rituals of her beloved folk.

Back in New York, Langston Hughes, who would become Hurston's dearest friend until a bitter falling out over their collaborative play Mule Bone, arranged for her to meet his patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, the wealthy widow of a prominent physician. Already in her 70s at the time, Mason was, Boyd tells us, an "amateur anthropologist" herself, who had worked "among the Indians of the Great Plains." Like Hurston, she too believed in the innately superior "cosmic energies and intuitive powers" of "primitive people."

With Alain Locke as her most trusted adviser, Mason, who was white, donated as much as $75,000 to Negro writers and artists during this time, writes Boyd. And when she hired Hurston to continue her anthropological research (their legal contract stipulated that Mason would own everything: transcripts, data, music and film recordings) at $200 a month, the arrangement, which lasted four years, was both confining and liberating for the fiercely independent Hurston.

As many scholars have noted, the letters from Hurston to her "Godmother" (as Mason insisted on being called) are often the most painful to read, signed as they are by "your little pickanniny." To picture Hurston, an accomplished and by then middle-aged woman, referring to herself as "your black gal...scratching my nappy head" would be unthinkable today.

And of course, this is one of the grand paradoxes of Hurston's legacy: the simultaneously loving but deeply race-tainted relationships she shared. While Fannie Hurst was certainly a treasured friend (upon learning of Hurston's financial struggles during her first term at Barnard, she even hired her as a personal secretary), for example, Hurston referred to her peer either as "Miss Hurst" or as "Fannie Hurst." For the celebrity author, on the other hand, Hurston remained just plain "Zora." And when the friends decided to take a road trip together, Hurston actually functioned as chauffeur for Hurst, who rode in the back seat.

From the start, white patronage was intricately interwoven with Hurston's dreams. Even as a child, her reading skills so impressed white educators that she was rewarded with "stuffed dates and candied ginger," a hundred new pennies, a hymnbook, The Swiss Family Robinson, a book of fairy tales and a box full of clothes and books--"Gulliver's Travels, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales." Later, working as a maid for the traveling Gilbert and Sullivan theater company, she was "stuffed with ice cream sodas and Coca-Cola" for making white performers laugh.

Hurston honed this skill and used it well, but it wasn't enough.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.