New PBS documentary puts focus on Hurston
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote in “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” It’s an often-cited quotation by the woman who went from an Eatonville childhood to become part of America’s literary pantheon, and January is a month in which we praise and ponder her legacy, in any year.
Hurston was born on Jan. 7, 1891 and died on Jan. 28, 1960, and the Eatonville-based cultural festival that bears her name returns for its 34th year this month.
In addition, we have a fine opportunity to learn more about Hurston’s pathbreaking work as a folklorist and anthropologist in a new “American Experience” documentary titled “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space,” slated to air on WUCF and other PBS stations on Jan. 17 at 9 p.m. It highlights Hurston’s anthropological work, which challenged the assumptions about race, gender and cultural superiority that had long defined the field in the 19th century.
Thirst for learning
“I find her so amazing,” the documentary’s director, Tracy Heather Strain, says of Hurston. “From an early age, she showed such a thirst for learning.”
Hurston was also always very much her own person but able to adapt when it worked for her, as revealed in a story from her Eatonville girlhood. When some white Northern women educators met and were impressed by the young Zora during a visit to the Hungerford School, they invited her to visit them at a Maitland hotel. Asked by her hostesses during the visit if she liked school, she faced a dilemma.
She did like geography and reading, Hurston recalled later, but she also disliked the way a teacher could sit in front of the class with a switch made from a palmetto and use it whenever he wished.
“I hated things I couldn’t do anything about,” she recalled. “But I knew better than to bring that up right there, so I said, yes, I loved school.”
Breaking boundaries
Hurston’s biographer, Valerie Boyd, told the story in her 2003 book “Wrapped in Rainbows,” and it’s consistent with the later chapters of her life revealed in the new PBS documentary, including Hurston’s studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and at Barnard College in New York. The life that called to her as a child in Eatonville was so much bigger than the horizons offered to most women of her time, especially Black women, and she often faced tough situations.
But what a life it was. At Howard, she became part
of a literary crowd that included future luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance such as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. In New York, she studied with Franz Boas, often called the father of anthropology in America, and later undertook fieldwork that included a study of zombies and voodoo rituals in Haiti.
She also undertook research trips though the American South, which included her 1927 interview with Cudjo Lewis, one of the last adult survivors of capture into enslavement in Africa. (Lewis’s story was told in Hurston’s book “Barracoon,” finally published in 2018, long after it was written). The new PBS documentary includes footage of Lewis, filmed by Hurston herself, as well as other fascinating footage she recorded that has been preserved in the Library of Congress.
Some includes scenes in Florida, to which she always returned. In the late 1930s, she came back to Eatonville and rented a house on the edge of town, where she pushed herself to finish a manuscript on her Caribbean travels. At points in her life, she also lived in Eau Gallie and Daytona Beach, as well as Fort Pierce, where she died in 1960 — her former Harlem Renaissance fame then faded.
It’s now a well-known story that Hurston’s grave in Fort Pierce in a segregated cemetery was unmarked for years until the novelist Alice Walker made a pilgrimage to it in 1973, on a journey of discovery that fueled the renaissance of interest in Hurston and eventually to her renewed fame.
On the marker, Walker chose an epitaph inspired by a poem by Jean Toomer: “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.” Now, in the new documentary, we can see more aspects of that genius as it took shape in Hurston’s anthropological work. “I feel privileged to have made it,” says Strain, the film’s director.
To learn more
More information on the documentary “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space” is available at PBS. org/wgbh/americanexperience. Here in Central Florida, the 34th Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts & Humanities this month begins a series of yearlong events shaped around the theme of “Spirituality via an Afrofuturism Lens.” The three-day Outdoor Festival of the Arts takes place in Eatonville from Jan. 27-29. For details, visit zorafestival.org.