Go Hard or Go Home

On folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who passed away sixty-five years ago today.

“I’m going to sit right here on this porch chair and prophesy that these are the last days of the know-nothing writers on Negro subjects. Both editors and readers are clamoring for something that makes their side meat taste like ham, for to tell the truth, Negro reality is a hundred times more imaginative and entertaining than anything that has ever been hatched up over a typewriter. From now on, the writers must back their rubbish with something more substantial than the lay figure of the past decade. Go hard or go home. Instead of coloring up coconut grease in the kitchen, go buy a cow and treat the public to some butter.”

— Zora Neale Hurston (1958)

A few weeks shy of her 69th birthday, Zora Neale Hurston died abandoned, bankrupt, and ill. Though her friends knew her as authentic and imaginative, the innovational ethnographer was regarded as obdurate and unyielding—a woman with a cause.

She began writing a book on folklore in 1927. She was still a student, spending months interviewing Oluale Kossola, the third-to-last black cargo of the middle passage. They met during her research trip down south. Yet, publishing her drafts—later disclosed as Barracoons (2019)—took almost a century. Prospective publishers rejected her writing. They refused to publish a Kossola-inspired dialect. An unwavering Hurston did not change his voice; she knew her publisher’s anticipated white readers. ‘Go hard or go home,’ she wrote decades later, before passing away. Today marks sixty-five years since she went home.

“Man, like all the other animals, fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and [the] mere difference is apt to connote something malign.”

— Zora Neale Hurston, “What White Publishers Won’t Print.”

I’m currently reading You Don’t Know Us Negroes: And Other Essays (2022), one of her many posthumously published texts. The book webs together essays penned by Zora, primarily in the 1920s, when she was still a student at Barnard College, the first black woman to graduate, and a growing figure of the only Renaissance america has ever seen.

Under the mentorship of Dr. Franz Boas, founder of anthropology at Columbia University, Hurston trekked home, conducting fieldwork across the South. Before she traveled in 1926, she was to complete fieldwork in Harlem as Boas' research assistant, collecting data on Black culture. He requested she conduct anthropometric research, measuring the skulls of black people across the neighborhood. Langston Hughes, her friend, was astonished no one called her out.

Hurston got personal in her research of the 'Negro farthest down’ under the mentorship of Boas and, later, Charlotte Osgoode Maison: a funder who supported many Renaissance figures, asking her beneficiaries to call her 'godmother.’ Hurston bought herself a car and a revolver, asking her people about hoodoo, conjure, and folklore. Then, she was introduced to Kossola and began her status as a seminal citation in feminist anthropology. But to maintain her funding, Hurston hid her prose, fiction, plays, and stories about black love and life as she wrote thank-you letters to Maison, addressing her as "mother of the primitive world.”

I’ve been thinking about the risks Hurston got familiar with as a writer breaking new ground or as a researcher taking jabs at the coloniality of the ivory tower. A perpetually curious writer, she devoted her life to archiving almost forgotten folklore, returning to indigenous sounds, lore, and ways of living.

A committee rejected Hurston the first time she applied for a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1933, her mentor, Boas, was a gatekeeper of the field. As he wrote in his reference letter, she was not of the 'right caliber' for Guggenheim: her methods were too journalistic, not scientific enough. In another reference letter, an American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, wrote: "I don't think she is Guggenheim material."

After her rejection, Hurston, broke as the Depression engorged, mustered the strength to keep going. She started and dropped out of a PhD program, produced a play, and published Mules and Men (1935). Then, she reapplied for a Guggenheim under ‘literary science’ instead of ‘anthropology.’ This time, she was successful. In 1937, she received a Guggenheim award to complete her seminal text, "Their Eyes Were Watching God." She won it again in 1938 to research Obeah, an amalgamation of indigenous belief systems throughout the Caribbean.

The cast of "The Great Day," with Hurston at far right. (Zora Neale Hurston Papers, Literary Manuscripts, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida)

Hurston went downright hard pursuing folklore; she almost drove herself towards heartbreak.

At the John Golden Theatre in New York City, Hurston premiered her folk opera, The Great Day, in 1932. She believed folklore, the subject of her lifetime of poking and prying, should be overstated. “Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized,” she wrote. The crafting of her play teaches us how artists, moved by love and curiosity, should approach an inquiry from different optics using every tool available to them. Hurston intimately got to know folklore as a poet, anthropologist, fiction writer, playwright, and a Black woman on the run.

Despite rave reviews, her play The Great Day (1932) was not picked up, and Maison pulled out of funding her projects. Hurston also fell out with her longtime friend, Hughes, over a creative dispute. She fell in love with her actor, Percival “Percy” Punter, who performed in her play, but he was twenty-one years her junior and far too controlling. (Punter would later inspire Hurston’s character Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God, a carefree drifter fifteen years junior to Janie, the protagonist, and his love interest). Heartbroken and poor, she went home to Eatonville, Florida.

“[Zora Neale Hurston’s] research was sometimes disparaged by cultural assimilationists, and complaints were made about her lack of scholarly apparatus. Yet Hurston saw black Americans as cultural creators, and she documented the creation, not by amassing statistics for behavioral studies but by presenting examples of oral tradition which inferred a behavioral system. Her emphasis on the tale-telling context anticipated — admittedly in a non-scientific way — many of the methodological assumptions of modern Folkloristics, a discipline only recently finding self-definition as a social science. Her attempt to distinguish black culture from white forecast the direction of much subsequent research, and in the last thirty years, the social sciences have begun to systematically collect the data that Zora Hurston indicated was there all along. We now have a body of "scientific" literature that provides evidence for the existence of a number of distinctive African American cultural domains, including that domain of black aesthetics which so interested her.”

— Robert Hemenway, The Black Scholar, April 1976, Vol. 7, No. 7, Black Social Science (April 1976), pp. 39-46

Hurston continued to write and research her people. She found ways to create despite all the limitations the great depression gave way to. As the Renaissance dissolved, Hurston kept moving. She made back-and-forth trips from north to south, poking and prying at folklore, imagining and contemplating in between. She published Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), a study on the black experience of Central America, Seraph on the Swanee (1947), and a few other texts before divorcing from a short, tumultuous marriage.

But by the 1950s, things got tough. Life gave her less creative outlets, becoming laborious. Hurston, now financially strapped, worked as a maid. She wrote occasional essays for the Saturday Evening Post and reported as a journalist for The Pittsburgh Courier, but publishing did not sustain her. She died from several ailments in a segregated nursing home; her books were no longer in print when she was buried in an unmarked grave. Her lifetime of rejected writing and research was celebrated posthumously.

At the end of her novel Their Eyes Are Watching God, Zora’s protagonist, now an older and wiser Janie, tells her friend, Pheoby: “Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” In her final days, I wonder if there was comfort. Through the economic strife and the accompanying pains poverty brings, I wonder if Zora had a semblance of peace before she went home. Was she gratified she did her best, leaving enough notes, drafts, and ideas to give life to Kossola’s story of being a survivor of the Atlantic slave trade? Or, was she at peace there were enough sketches to spare for a young literary critic named Alice, who would come a decade after her death, gluing together bits and pieces of Hurston’s grand imagination back into our periphery?

The same Alice would come to purchase a headstone for her, engraving it: “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.” I’ve been thinking a lot about Zora lately, how she boldly went hard before she went home.

Some things:

1. I wrote a feature for New York Magazine on the rise of book bans. More specifically, I spent most of 2024 getting to know some elders organizing against the concerted efforts toward anti-intellectualism;
   

2. As some of you may have noticed, I’m sharing more here. I’ve also updated my newsletter writing schedule to two pieces a month. This may be a lot, considering my previous schedule (once a year). So, it might be a good time to share: I’m releasing a new interview series called Conjunctures soon, in which I’ll chat with artists, organizers, and thinkers about gentrification and the city they call home. You can expect these monthly conversations to arrive in your inbox. I’ll also send out a second piece of writing every month. That’s two posts per month.
   

3. I hope you enjoy the work so far and the work to come. If you enjoy my ramblings, do a gal a favor: smash the ‘share’ button.

xo,
HH