The Letters of Zora Neale Hurston with Melissa Kiguwa

KIM: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: Hey, everyone! Now a lot of you out there listening probably saw the topic for this episode and thought, “Zora Neale Hurston? She’s not lost!” 

KIM: Right. She’s a huge name in American literature. Her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is widely considered to be a masterpiece.

AMY: Yeah, and I’m willing to venture a LOT of our listeners have read that one. If you haven’t, you need to bump it to the top of your list, pronto. That said, when our guest today suggested we focus on Hurston for this episode I had a brief moment of pause wondering if she was too well-known. Then I did a little more investigating and discovered that she was very much lost for a portion of the 20th century until author Alice Walker ignited a new interest in Hurston and her work.

KIM: Yeah, were it not for that renewed push in the 1970s, Hurston and her legacy might have been obscured along with so many of the other women authors we feature on this show. We’ll dive into all that a bit later in this episode. 

AMY: Yes. But suffice to say, there’s so much about Hurston I didn’t know prior to preparing for this episode. We have today’s guest, Melissa Kiguwa, to thank for encouraging us to check out Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, which was edited by Carla Kaplan and published back in 2003.

KIM: Yes, reading her letters is such a great way to get to know the real Zora, and we’re thrilled to have Melissa joining us to discuss them, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro]

AMY: As host of The Idealists podcast, Melissa Kiguwa interviews visionary women for the inside scoop on their lives and experiences, their research and musings, all with an aim to help listeners reach their own highest potential. Her show’s past guests have included poets Nikki Giovanni and Joy Harjo, fashion designer Norma Kamali and many other female entrepreneurs and CEOs. And Melissa, I listened this week to your interview with neuroscientist Dr. Vivian Ming. I think it was a replay, but that was fascinating. And listeners, uh, it will have you rethinking your whole dependence on GPS to get places. Trust me.Um, so yeah, you always cover such an array of interesting topics. I love it. Melissa's also the founder and CEO of a new company called Breakthrough,  which, Melissa, can you tell us about it? 

MELISSA: Absolutely  Breakthrough dovetails well with what we do at The Idealists. We've been doing The Idealists for almost two and a half years, and we've aggregated so much data around the pain points of women who are audacious in the world and who push against the status quo and try to achieve extraordinary results and actually do it. And so we've been able to create a leadership, sort of service or platform where we're able to support women to, like you said, achieve their highest flourishing. We have  executive coaches that are able to help them, especially women founders.

We work with corporate clients who are stuck at that mid-level management level.  So we have self-coaching platforms  and then we work with venture funds that want to put their money where their mouth is and support  their founders, um, in their portfolio, their female founders. And so we provide a lot of support that way. So we do a lot, but it's all with the goal of making sure that the women who have the audacity and are gallant enough to say, I want to change the world. That they do it with support and are resourced.

KIM: That sounds amazing.

AMY: Yeah, we love the idea of women, uplifting other women  and giving them opportunities that they need.

KIM: So, before founding her company, Melissa worked as a radio and television host and producer in Uganda for outlets including the BBC World Service. She was also a 2020 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and was lauded internationally for her first collection of poetry, Reveries of Longing. Melissa, welcome to the show!

MELISSA: Thank you so much! I’m happy to be here.

AMY: I want to start off this episode by saying that when I was in my twenties, I had a photo of today's literary ladies, Zora Neale Hurston, taped up on my bedroom wall. And you probably both know the photo that I'm talking about. She's wearing that black fur collar coat. She has this cute little hat with a feather in it, and she's looking off camera with this big, bright kind of mischievous smile. And I don't even remember if I saw that photo first and then read Their Eyes Were Watching God, or I read the novel and then put that up. I, it, it all kind of happened around the same time.  And I remember just being like, “This is a woman I would've liked,” you know? And now that I've read her letters, I'm only validated in that belief. Um, so  what was your introduction to Zora Neale Hurston? And what about her do you find most compelling?

MELISSA: Yeah. I, similarly in college, was introduced to Zora Neale Hurston, and during that time, I think I was exploring a lot of the canon of black women writers. So, you know, Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler. I was just, you know, going deep Sonia Sanchez for poetry. And of course, you have to meet Zora Neale Hurston along the way. I didn't know much about her life, though, but I did know that, emblematic of many black women writers at the time (and you know what, writers in general, let's be real) that there was a sad note to it. Um, but I didn't know how sad. And I also didn't know how  mercurial she is. I think that if I had to put a word to Zora, it would be that she is so mercurial. And so I think that my introduction to her was really one dimensional in the sense of I got the Zora that said, you know, I don't know how anyone can discriminate against me. Like I'm a joy. Like  it's your loss if you are discriminatory, right? Like that sort of braggadocious. Um, and then I would learn more about her later on.

KIM: Yeah, her letters really give… we'll talk about it more, but they give such a depth of the character, that you think, you know, there's so much more there and you get to read it in the letters. PBS’s American Experience aired a documentary earlier this year called Claiming a Space which is all about Hurston. It merges really nicely with this collection of her letters that Carla Kaplan edited. That documentary is available on the PBS streaming platform, so definitely check that out. I think maybe we ought to work backwards to start this episode, though, because Hurston basically died in obscurity, and it’s kind of a miracle that so many of her letters were saved at all. Melissa, can you explain?

MELISSA: Yeah, it's actually a phenomenal story, right?   We now know and we being the general populace, we know Zora's story because of Alice Walker. She was the one who sort of went on a journey to find Zora's unmarked grave and put together a collection of her writings and sort of said, wow, there's this extraordinary thinker, an extraordinary writer, and how have none of us heard about her? And we almost lost the bulk of Zora's writings, because when Zora did die in complete obscurity, penniless working as a maid, um, she was in her sixties, and I think the person who was cleaning out the house had literally put it in a trash bin outside and set it on fire. And there just so happened to be a police officer,  driving by. And he knew Zora  very, like casually, I think she casually called him the devil, but they had like a, you know, a cordial relationship. He enjoyed her personality. He saw the fire stopped in just to see if it was a threat or there was some sort of fire hazard and realized that the thinker, the writer, the novelist, the woman who'd won a Guggenheim, um, you know, her papers were being burnt, and so he stopped it, took it, put it in a box and put it on his porch. Um, and it stayed there for about two years while he tried to write to her friends and family, trying to figure out who would pick it up. I think it was, it was eventually picked up by a university, I'm forgetting the name, but, um, it took him two years of just those papers sitting on his porch. So really, I mean, just  happenstance, coincidence and maybe the universe wasn't the kindest to her during her lifetime, but the universe did want her to live on in posterity, you know?

KIM: That story is so chilling. Oh my gosh.  And uh, I feel like I'm gonna cry. Just you. It's so incredible. 

AMY: It’s such an intriguing story, and one of my takeaways from learning more about her is how she was routinely, at every turn, undervalued. She had to  elbow her own path every step of the way in life. And in these letters, we see this from the very beginning, from letter number one, she's just bold. So this very first letter  that exists is a letter from Zora to the dean of the high school that she was attending at the time.And it's like, Girl, you are ballsy! But I love it. You have to admire it. Melissa, you wanna talk a little bit about this very first letter?

MELISSA: Um,  it was just the level of audacity that you'd be like, I need to meet this girl because she was like, “One, I wanna know movers and shakers and you're a mover and shaker. Two, I wanna know your wife because if you are with her and you're a mover and shaker, there must be something about her that's interesting. And three, it will benefit me to know you because eventually you're gonna wanna write your autobiography and I should be the one to do that.”

AMY: Yes. I mean,  was maybe late teens. At that point. I can't imagine getting that letter. But at the same time, you would chuckle if you received that and you'd be like, well, I kind of wanna get to know this girl, too!

MELISSA: You absolutely would chuckle. I mean, imagine sending that to the dean of Smith or the dean, you know, of um, I don't know, Harvard or Columbia. Right. The president, I should say. And just being like, “Hey, you're famous and I should know you, and also like, you should know me too, because I'm gonna be important and you're gonna want me around.”

KIM: Yeah. Like you're talking about women leaders, I mean, and she is doing this and she's doing it all through her letters because that was the means of communicating with people and getting them to know who you are.

MELISSA: Yeah.

KIM: So after attending Howard University, Hurston ended up in New York City, and after winning a prestigious writing honor there she entered the orbit of some very influential people. The author Annie Nathan Meyer recognized her nascent talents and secured a scholarship for her at Barnard College. It’s at Barnard that Zora’s passion for anthropology took root. She also met a wealthy philanthropist named Charlotte Osgood Mason who took an interest in financially supporting Hurston’s scholarly pursuits after she graduated. Zora’s goal was to collect Black folklore and study the culture and language of Blacks living in the Southern United States.

AMY: Yes, and so reading the many letters from Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, it seems like they had a complicated relationship, right Melissa? I kind of hated her, but then you also have to acknowledge that Hurston wouldn’t have been able to do the work she did without an angel investor type.

MELISSA: One hundred percent. She was an angel investor. You kind of see in a very obvious way when Zora writes to individuals she needs something from… on the one hand, we know that she's radically  outspoken and she has this perspective of the world, but when she is confronting individuals of power that have the ability to do something for her, these gatekeepers, she becomes deferential, she becomes, uh, reverent. It's like, um, her tongue is laced with honey. And you couple in like how race-aware she was, it becomes even more complicated because, you know, she knows what she's doing. And so in that sense it can feel really grimy. But then if you extrapolate it like, who is not doing that, right?

 Aren't we all  shifting and, you know, converging ourselves so that we can get what we need in the world? The question becomes how good are you at it? Sometimes she was good at it, and sometimes she was not, because coming back to her personality and her mercurialness, after a while she'd kind of be like, I'm tired of all of this. I'm tired of having to bend down low. And she'd just yell at somebody or tell them off or call them a name, and then they'd get sick of her.  

KIM: Yeah. It seemed like she had to work hard for Mason. Go ahead, Amy, what?

AMY: Oh, no, that's, that's true. But I, I was gonna say also, like when she gets to Barnard, she's the only black girl there, and so she's something of an object of fascination for all of her classmates, you know? And I think, well first of all, the relationship with Annie Nathan Meyer and Charlotte Osgood Mason, that gave her a little bit of cred at the school. Like, look, these very distinguished women are supporting me. You know? But also I think she kind of plays up that like…

MELISSA: The exoticness.

AMY: Yes. In her letters to Mason, doesn't she kind of sometimes sign off with like “Your little pickaninny?”

MELISSA: Yeah, yeah.

AMY: … which is shocking.

MELISSA: She goes all in. She would prostate herself in these letters, 100%.  Again, because we know the woman she was, we know how substantial what she was doing is.

KIM: Yeah, she called her “godmother,” too.

AMY: She needed their money. She would have to write out to Charlotte a detailed line item budget of like, “I need tampons.”

MELISSA: Right. 

AMY: …Which is kind of humiliating, but it's also like,  I'm gonna have to do what I'm gonna have to do. And she probably didn't enjoy it, but they're interesting letters. Yeah.

MELISSA: They're super interesting.  I just did an interview with a woman who raised her own venture capital firm, and when she talks about all the asks she had to make of individuals, she used the word humiliating, right? 

And this is supposedly a professional circumstance of a business asking an investor to invest in their business, but those human indignities that happen. Again, like we're talking about power and it's sad that some of these things haven't changed, right? Like even she calls it “featherbed resistance,” and I know we're gonna get into this a lot, but basically she talks about what does it mean to be of a marginalized community or a disenfranchised community? You know that you need to perform something to get something in the mainstream culture. You need to give them something. But what she said black people are really good at is the ability of saying, “Okay, I'll do your little dance, but you don't get to actually see my heart, my soul.” And we see her doing that on, off, on, off. And I think the saddest thing in Zora's story is that even when she prostrated herself, it still wasn't enough for her to be able to quote unquote, “live her best life.”

It wasn't, you know, enough for her to be able to do the research as she needed, right? You still always feel the foot on your neck. You read her stories and you just feel like that she was so free in one way in terms of like her wild imagination and where her mind could go and what she wanted to see and the things she did see through her own anthropological research.

But then you also realize just how contained her body was, within the material reality of the life she lived. Such  extremes she lived in.

KIM: I love that juxtaposition between the freedom and then being contained because it almost feels like when she's writing and she's having to detail these things, like the tampons or medical things, it's like she's writing to the prison warden or something. Like, give me just this minutiae; I need this to survive.Yet she's so free in her writing, so yeah, it's incredible.

MELISSA: I also wanted to mention just this element of how free she was. Anthropologists at the time, and this is still I think, an issue that like, you should be an objective witness. You should not be in the thing with, you know, don't, don't become native, right? Like, don't, don't go wild. And she did. She would participate in these like ritual dances where they'd sacrifice a goat; orgiastic dances… like she was in it. She'd go to Haiti to study voodoo. Who knows all the things she saw? I mean, she was studying black magic, like the blackest, and would go to the swamps. It's not pretty like tarot cards and crystals. It's like slaughter chicken heads and drink the blood. So, I mean, she was wild, you know? Yeah.

AMY: But look how much more information she was able to get by doing that? Because people are so shut out from the stranger coming in to see their world. They're not gonna tell you anything, you know? But by her coming in and saying, “No, I'm one of you,” quote unquote, they're willing to open up. And that kind of gets back to the idea of the featherbed resistance as well, right?

MELISSA: Yeah. And there, there was a note about that in the book, how she was applauded for being able to get in and break featherbed resistance when she talked about how featherbed resistance is actually how people are able to survive. Right. Um, it's actually better if your inner self is not known. And, I'm of two minds about it because what we then have is we don't know the truth of the work.  And this is a big element with Zora. You read different works and they will say totally different things. Sometimes she's pandering to white gaze. Sometimes she's like “F– off,” white gaze. Sometimes she's conservative, sometimes she's liberal. So we don't know the truth of her. And maybe that is the truth of her, that she was even mercurial in that way. But just knowing how big she believed in featherbed resistance and playing, right? Like just tap in, tap out, tap in, tap out. It's so hard to get a sense of what she genuinely believed about certain things.

AMY: Yeah. Mercurial is not necessarily a word that scientists would want to have used to describe them, right?  

MELISSA: I love that you keep calling her a scientist. I love that. We should do that.

AMY: Well, to me it was! I mean, I know she didn't really have a scientific process, but I think of anthropology as a science. I mean, I know she wasn't using the scientific method and everything like that, but it was kind of an emerging field still at the time, and she had ideas on how to do it differently. And unfortunately people shut her down at every turn because they didn't really like her approaches all the time. But I liked in her letters when she would be out in a rural community in Florida or the Caribbean or wherever she was, and she would write back cataloging a lot of the idiomatic phrases and slang terminology that she was discovering in her research. I thought that was super interesting.

MELISSA: I think she had a deep respect for the people that she learned from. I think that that is a constant about Zora. I think she had a deep love for what did she call it? “The people furthest down there.” I think Langston Hughes also did as well, and that's why they bonded. They both really loved  their people. And not middle class bourgeoisie, but like, the untamed raw, right? Um, and so again, she's countering against a lot of the cultural narratives at the time, because in the Harlem Renaissance, it's like, don't play into the idea that we are primitive and that we are wild. But we know that that's a class thing, right? Like, lower classes have always been deemed to be, quote unquote, more wild, more sexual, more, you know, uh, lawless, more, um, debaucherous, right? And so she played within all of this, because she said, “Well, but if someone is lawless and debaucherous, why can't we own that?”  But I come back to like, you genuinely get the sense that she really loved and admired the communities that she would go into and see and learn from. And she just thought it was so fascinating  and she traveled internationally doing that. Bali, Honduras, you know, wherever she could go, she'd go.

AMY: And she was able to bring that language into her work. I mean, for me, Their Eyes Were Watching God…the dialogue being written in the Black dialect is what makes it the beauty of it.

MELISSA: And going between both, right? Showing her deftness of skill at being able to do both. But I think she, in some books, she could do it better than she could do it in the real world. It's really hard to go into a room of white patrons and explain the complexity of the worlds that you're participating in. Similarly, it's really hard to be in a swamp in like Louisiana, where people are like doing dances by the full moon and talk about these wealthy spaces that you're in that you have to pander to, right? So within her own embodied reality, she's experiencing this in real time, but also collecting the research to map what she's experiencing. So, I mean, so much cognitive dissonance, right?

KIM: Yeah. I love the way you put that. So you mentioned Langston Hughes. Let's talk a little bit about their relationship next. They seemed like best friends, very close friends for years, and they had a falling out that turned quite nasty. Do you want to fill our listeners in on the story there?

What happened?

MELISSA: They'd been friends for a long time. Uh, I think that Langston was one of the first people she met when she arrived in New York. Part of her charm is that Zora was apparently known by everybody. And so she met Langston pretty early, moving to New York, and they became close friends, um, and wrote to each other extraordinarily over the years, you know, about all sorts of things. And so they had planned to do, I believe it was a theater project together. And suddenly it started falling apart in the sense I think of she felt she was doing more work than him, things like that.  She shared a copy  of the work with somebody who shared it with somebody else who shared it with somebody else. And Langston didn't know about it and he's thinking Zora's trying to cut him out. So there was a lot of external and internal sort of things happening, which I think just speaks to maybe a lack of trust there and a lack of communication around how do we do business together. As a business person, I know how big those things can be. They're basically trying to be co-founders and, uh, they hadn't had some, some deeper conversations.

AMY: You can't always go into business with your bestie. It just boils down to that. Kim, it's worked out all right for you and I, knock wood.

KIM: I think we don't have very big egos. And also they're just both so incredible in their own right with their own projects and their own work. I think it would be really hard to supplicate that. 

MELISSA: And it doesn’t sound like either of them would, because I think that does come in a dynamic with not big egos where you're able to say, it's okay if you're right in this moment. Right. Um, but I think that they both didn't have that capability to say “I'm gonna let you have this and I'll get the next one.” I think they both were like, “Oh no, baby, this is mine.”

KIM: Yeah, yeah.

MELISSA: But according to the letters, Langston was still there for her  over the years and they were still cordial for some time before they just stopped talking altogether. I don't know what exactly was the thing that made them both say we're not communicating again for the rest of our lives. Um, It's an interesting element of like big friendships, you know. Do big friendships last a lifetime you know? It's like that lover that is so passionate and so wild and like, oh my god, but like when you gotta do the dishes every day and you have kids and you gotta pay bills, does that bigness and wildness and passion last? And I think that, you know, there's a question there on that too. 

AMY: Yeah. Uh, so we get to see evidence of so many of her friendships in these letters, but what we don't really see is much evidence of her romantic partnerships, which is really interesting.

MELISSA: Yeah, what’s your take on that?

AMY: I wonder if she destroyed some of the letters.  It's shocking how dismissive she is of, like, there might be a passing reference to somebody that's her husband and then, “Oh, we're getting divorced.” Unless she was trying to really keep something private and personal to herself, I don't know. What do you think?

MELISSA: Because she wasn’t a private person.

AMY: No, she wasn’t. 

MELISSA: She did orgiastic dances under the full moon and wrote about them.

AMY: Or she just wasn't really that into them? I don't know. 

MELISSA: I wonder what love felt like in her body at that time. I think that it's hard for brilliant women to find love in general. I think that it'd probably be harder to be a poor, brilliant woman because you're always straddling two things. You're straddling higher upper echelons, but at the same time, your material reality doesn't allow you to live like the higher echelons.

And what kind of men is she meeting, right? Um, and how much space could they hold for her? Whether they were men of well means, what would they have needed her to be and do in order for her to fit into their world? Can she just go to Honduras for three months and dance with the natives, right? And similarly, what does it mean to meet a man who maybe isn't as intellectually savvy as her? Was that interesting to her over a certain amount of time? She married a lot. She divorced a lot. She had lovers here and there. And I was reading even the accounts of, um, the records when they, she divorced a young guy. She was maybe in her fifties, they'd been married for maybe a year. Um, he was very, very young, maybe in his twenties. And, when she divorced him, she wrote that “he doesn't work and he expects her to take care of him.” And he wrote that “she's mean tempered, she practices voodoo black magic. And she promised that she'd take care of him, and  she's not.” So, you know, and I think that there was a lot of, uh, naughtiness there and, you know, just going with the flow.

AMY: It might have been tough to handle. Yeah. But then there's some other letters that almost hint that she was in love with a woman, right?

MELISSA: I’m sure she was.

AMY: Jane Bellow. Yeah.

MELISSA: The other element, and again, this is all speculation because we don't know because we literally don't have enough context. Maybe love was not that big of a priority to her.

KIM: Yeah, that could very well be.

MELISSA: There are some famous, uh, women writers who talk about sex and just being like so done with it.

KIM: She's like, “I've got voodoo; I've got dancing around…”  What's gonna top that?

AMY: I don't know, but then you have Their Eyes Were Watching God and  I feel like that younger husband maybe inspired Janie's relationship with the younger guy in that book. But she obviously thought about romance and..

MELISSA: I mean, she killed him off,

AMY: Yeah, that’s right.

MELISSA: It was very short-lived. No one gets bliss forever in Zora’s world.

AMY: Yeah, and it was a pretty startling way to go, yeah. Okay, so there’s a lot of humor in her letters, and there are also moments where her beautiful writing really shines through. I want to read a section from a letter she wrote to Annie Nathan Meyer when she was still quite young… she has had to apologize for something related to her schooling that she let slip and she chalks it up to forgetfulness and a sort of brain lapse. So she ends the letter saying: 

I shall try to lay my dreaming aside. Try hard. But, Oh, if you knew my dreams! My vaulting ambition! How I constantly live in fancy in seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world, but conscious all the time of being a mouse on a treadmill. Madness ensues. I am beside myself with chagrin half of the time, the way to the blue hills is not on tortoise back, it seems to me, but on wings. I haven’t the wings, and must ride the tortoise. The eagerness, the burning within, I wonder the actual sparks do not fly so that they be seen by all men. Prometheus on his rock with his liver being continually consumed as fast as he grows another, is nothing to my dreams. I dream such wonderfully complete ones, so radiant in astral beauty. I have not the power yet to make them come true. They always die. But even as they fade, I have others.

   All this is not a reason, not an excuse. There is no excuse for a person who lives on Earth, trying to board in Heaven.

    Most cordially yours,

Zora Neale Hurston

I mean, can you imagine getting letters like that?

MELISSA: Yeah, the other side of me is like, if I was the professor and she had missed something for that, I'd be like, “This girl is so dramatic! Are you coming or not? What are we doing here?” You know, it's so funny. Um, no, but it's, it's stunning. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: A born writer.

KIM: It beautifully captures that idea, I mean, like you feel that especially I think when you're younger too, but just that feeling like you have all these dreams and you wanna have the wings, but you don't, I mean, it's just..

AMY: Yeah. She does, she has these lofty ambitions that she's just bursting to achieve really all her life. She had so many things she wanted to accomplish and she just could never figure out the means.

MELISSA: Yeah. And she tried. And I think what that letter demonstrates, especially going back to how banal the context is, is that she gave all of herself all the time. And maybe that is also the later on in her life, especially her later years, um, maybe that's where all the jadedness and bitterness came in. Because  it's a particular way of moving in the world where you believe if I give all of me, the world will embrace me back. If I show who I am with dazzling certainty all the time…You read that letter and you know the level of the person you're dealing with. You know the vastness of the interior world of the person you're dealing with. And so it's almost like if I show up and I give all that I have, and you're, you're able to see me undeniably, then of course the world will also give to me in that way.

And that's one of the saddest things about Zora's life is that the world consistently said no. No, we don't. But  she kept going. She kept writing, she kept creating. She kept all the things, you know? Put out extraordinary work over and over and over and over again.

KIM: Melissa, are there any other moments from any of these letters that really stood out to you or made you laugh or do a double-take? 

MELISSA: You know, we've discussed a lot of it. We've also discussed how she lives to gossip, you know, uh, and, and talk, talk about her friends, right?

AMY: I mean, honestly that's relatable. She's in one letter nice to somebody, and then she turns around in a letter to someone else talking smack about them, and you're like, “Yeah, we all do that. I'm sorry, but we do.”

MELISSA: Exactly. And because her friends were all important, she was talking shit about all the leaders, like W.E.B Dubois. It's like talking crap about former president Barack Obama, being like, “Oh, you're so great. First black president.” And then you're like, “Oh my God, if he talks 

about hope one more time! I swear to God, we are tired of change, okay?”

AMY: That's exactly why this is fun to read.

MELISSA: Because of the humanness. And then I'd say, you know, one of the most startling things that comes up in the book, and I've never read this about her anywhere, is that she had allegations thrown at her later in her life that she molested a 10 year old boy sexually. They were found to be unsubstantiated, probably done by a really big hater who was after her, a really malicious man. But whoa, did that do her in, because the black press got wind of it, didn't really do any journalistic research around it, and just started seeing that, “Hey, Zora Neale Hurston, the acclaimed novelist and author, is a child molester.” Um, and that really sort of brought her to her knees. You know, I think that there's Zora's life before that, and then there's Zora's life after that. 

 AMY: Yeah, it was like the turning point, you could see. Let's get back to, you know, when she's doing her anthropological work. She's going down to Florida, doing all this research in the Everglades, in the swamps. She's driving a car that she nicknamed Sassy Suzie, she has to carry a gun for protection. This is this segregated South! Think about how scary this would've been for a woman by herself driving around, going up to strangers, being like, “Hey, let's talk!”

MELISSA: Coming back to this question of love, is that a woman you think can easily be a wife, like in the traditional sense?

KIM: Hell, no!

MELISSA: A woman going to the Everglades by herself to do voodoo rituals with a gun in her strap by herself? 

AMY: Also, you know, we kind of talked about her spat with Langston Hughes, but I'm also thinking of the letter that she wrote, um, she basically got really mad at Alan Leroy Locke, who was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He basically gave her a not so great review of, I think it was Their Eyes. And she was not happy about this review and  I'm just gonna read what she wrote somebody in a letter about Alan Leroy Locke: 

I get tired of the envious picking on me. And if you will admit the truth you know that Alain Leroy Locke is a malicious, spiteful little snot that thinks he ought to be leading the Negro because of his degrees. Foiled in that, he spends his time trying to cut the ground from under everyone else. So far as the young writers are concerned, he runs a mental pawnshop. He lends out his patronage and takes in ideas which he soon passes off as his own….

KIM: Ooh, that’s good.

AMY: Oh, yeah. Do not get on her bad side! Later, they totally patched things up.

KIM: Yeah. There's other letters where they're friendly and everything,

so she at least got over it.

MELISSA: I think people knew her personality, so they just knew, “Oh, that's just Zora.”

AMY: Yeah, they knew she was just venting.

MELISSA: It was also something I thought is interesting, like, she's wildly individualistic, right? She believes in the individual's ability to make up their decision. And I think that that was a really rough thing too, because at the time, and I think we still see this today in different communities, are you for us or are you against us? And if you're gonna have a voice in the public sphere, then you should probably speak party lines, right? We don't put our business out in the streets. We can fight amongst ourselves, but when we're out, we have to be of one accord because we know that we're in front of enemy lines. And she just didn't do that. She just wasn't interested in participating. Even if she could, she'd get into an organization and be like, “This sucks.” She like, she just couldn't stand it. She couldn't stand authority. She couldn't stand bureaucracy. Then she would go out and talk about the issue she had with that organization with others. So people in the Black movement tended to be upset with her about that because they were like, well, where is your true loyalty?

AMY: But then in other instances, she has valid points. Like I'm thinking of the Federal Writers Program, which we did another episode on. Zora had signed up to participate in this, going to do her anthropological work in Florida and contributed to the writer's guides. And she realized like, I'm actually more knowledgeable than the editor  but I'm being treated like an assistant! So she got really ticked off about that. And then the other thing that was appalling is that she really wanted to earn her PhD in anthropology. And she had everything lined up. She had some sort of scholarship situation that she had secured. And the school wanted her to go through the traditional  scholarship of earning a PhD in anthropology, which would've been like early Mesopotamia, you know, like all this stuff

that was not her focus. And she's like, “Hey, I would like to create my own program, which is studying Black culture, and I have a plan to do it this way.” And they're like, “No, we really need you to study ancient Mesopotamia.”

MELISSA: Columbia had no Africana studies at that time. 

AMY: Right. There was no option for her to do what she wanted to do. So she was trying to find a way, and she was very tactful about like, “Hey, why don't we work together and navigate it in a way that works for what I'm actually have been studying for years and I've been contributing to you guys this research?” And they wouldn't let her do it. And then the scholarship got rescinded. 

MELISSA: Yeah. Yeah. That was rough, because she really did try. But, uh, it goes back to like, she was a maverick and sometimes when you are a maverick trying to do things on your own path, it doesn't always work out. I don't think that that's specific to Zora. I think she was trying to create a program for something that would already have been underfunded in a school that didn't even have a plan for it. So  it was just gonna be difficult.

AMY: Yeah, that's true, but I think it was always a disappointment to her because I think she really wanted to earn that. Um, and at one point in the 1940s, she contemplated suicide. There's one letter that kind of refers to it, and, um, I didn't know about that detail of her life either. That came after  the molestation accusation, right?

MELISSA: [responds… can talk about how demoralized she became after the false accusation of child molestation…]

KIM: Do you think this incident was sort of the beginning of the end for her in any way?

MELISSA:Yeah. Yeah, she was like, I'm, I'm kind of done with life.

KIM: Do you think that there was a moment that was the beginning of the end for her? I mean, was it the molestation accusation or is that too pat of an answer? Was, you know, was there a beginning of the end?

MELISSA: It was always difficult, you know? It was always a difficult run, but I think that she had amazing moments of ecstasy and joy and absolute fulfillment with her work. She was always trying to make her life bigger than it was, but never got there. There's these spurts of everything's clicking, running this theater, getting these gigs, I've got these patrons, I just got published. And like any artist can tell you, there comes a time when the tides turn suddenly  you're no longer the hot thing anymore. But also, the Harlem Renaissance is a particular time period, right? Things moved on.  People wanted new things. There were new, novel things happening culturally. And then I think also just life took its wear on her. She didn't stop creating the things she wanted to create, I just think the appetite changed.   The Thirties were her best decade. Um, she just did the most, she got the most, she was able to like, just accomplish. And it sounds like every other decade was just trying to grapple and get a piece of hers, but it never quite landed.

AMY: I really, I, I said at the top of the episode, I was like, oh, Zora Neale Hurston. Everybody knows her. She's an institution. But knowing her story and reading these letters,  it's like, “No, it wasn't like that at all.”

She could have been lost with everybody else.

KIM: Yeah.

MELISSA: And how many other women are sitting there, their brilliant minds, very fascinating thoughts, fascinating lives, complicated lives, that we just don't know about, right?

KIM: Definitely. Changing topics for a moment, Melissa, since you spent time living in Africa and your mother is from Uganda, we were wondering if there are any African lost ladies of lit (and I know that’s a big continent) but is there anyone you’d care to give a shout-out to?

MELISSA: Um, yeah, so someone who was introduced to me, years ago, um, it's called Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera. she was introduced to me by a Zimbabwean writer, actually, uh, who is well known.  And I said, oh, are you influenced by Toni Morrison? And she goes, “Oh, no. Before Toni Morrison, there was Yvonne Vera.” And so when you read it, you know, she's talking about sort of apartheid, not even South Africa, more of like the Zambia, Zimbabwe, you know, former Zaire areas. But, the richness of the language, it's like pure poetry. It's like reading a poetry book. So lyrical. Um, yeah, I would, I would say Yvonne Vera.

AMY: Great! Never heard of her.

KIM: Thank you. We're adding her to the list, for sure. She sounds wonderful.

AMY: So we are going to continue to follow you on The Idealists. We are so happy that you were able to drop by and talk Zora with us!

MELISSA: Well, thank you so much, and I love what you all are doing and I love that you're giving voice to women who have voices. We're just, as a culture, not always attuned to listen.

KIM: That's for sure. Yeah, we're learning so much. So thank you very much for coming on. So that's all for today's episode. You can visit lost ladies of lit.com for more information and our show notes, and we would love it if you visited our Facebook forum. You can meet up with other listeners and share your thoughts on the episodes.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.