![]() ![]() We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground. ![]() (wildlife chittering) HURSTON (dramatized): Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." Her mother gave her permission to dream, a permission to ask questions, a permission to be artistic. She said, "No, I'm going to do it this way. PATTERSON: Her father was very domineering. Religion and education were highly valued in a home ruled by her preacher father. NARRATOR: Hurston lived in an eight-room house on five acres of land with her parents, Lucy and John, and seven siblings. MCCLAURIN: This gathering of people, swapping lies, telling stories, is something that's going to attract her, because there is an innate cultural anthropologist in her curiosity about people.īAKER: Eatonville shaped Zora Neale Hurston's worldview from the beginning, and what it did more than anything else is, it showed that Black lives mattered. There was open kindnesses, anger, hate, love, envy and its kinfolks, but all emotions were naked, and nakedly arrived at. HURSTON (dramatized): There were no discreet nuances of life on Joe Clark's porch. She, uh, wanted to see what was going on at the store. TIFFANY PATTERSON: Zora was nosy, pure and simple. She's one of those children that people would say, "Go, go away."Īnd the more they tell her that, the more she wants to hear it. I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more to allow whatever was being said to hang in my ear. HURSTON (dramatized): It was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories.Įven the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As a child, Zora Neale Hurston possessed a keen interest in the stories she heard about people's lives and customs while lingering at Joe Clark's general store in Eatonville, Florida, one of a handful of all-Black towns in the United States. When I pitched headforemost into the world, I landed in the crib of Negroism. In a way, it would not be a new experience for me. ♪ ♪ HURSTON (dramatized): I was glad when somebody told me, "You may go and collect Negro folklore." MARÍA COTERA: Her independent streak and her iconoclasm, you could say it was both her superpower and her fatal flaw. KING: Throughout her entire life, the powerful people around her consistently thought of her as being an outsider, less than talented, a marginal figure.ĬARLA KAPLAN: We're talking about somebody who had an incredibly creative, fierce mind. BAKER: She was driven by her own integrity, she was driven by her own passion, and she was driven by her own sense of how best to collect this folklore. MCCLAURIN: She was an innovator, using stylistic conventions of literature, but the content is rooted in the research that she did. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: From the Jazz Age through the Great Depression, Hurston had published her extensive research in prestigious academic journals, popular magazines, and ethnographic books.īut it was her fiction, thick with dialect, cultural specificity, and richly drawn characters that over time would cement her place as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. MCCLAURIN: Zora studied her own people, which is not something that is supported in anthropology at that moment.ĭAPHNE LAMOTHE: Anthropology understood itself to be a science.Īn aspect of scientific inquiry that's really important is to be detached and objective. ♪ ♪ IRMA MCCLAURIN: The research that Zora Neale Hurston did in Beaufort, South Carolina, represents someone who understands that for people to trust you, you have to be in it.Īt the time, this seemed scandalous, that you weren't standing off to one side with your white lab coat and your clipboard, noting down what others were doing. She allows that culture to be dynamic, to have a voice in modernity. ♪ ♪ For more than ten years, Hurston had skirted danger, traveling alone across the American South and Caribbean, documenting rural Black people's lives and collecting their stories.Įducated at Howard University and Barnard, during her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston was considered the foremost authority on Black folklore.ĮVE DUNBAR: She's interested in all elements of Black folk. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In spring 1940, Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist, arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina, to study religious trances. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |