In her rush to get to New York so she could enroll in Columbia in January, Hurston missed Christmas. On December 19, the Rosenwald Fund sent her a $100 check to facilitate her move from Chicago. Within a few days, she was at the wheel of her car (she nicknamed this one “High Yaller”) and traveling due east through Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Once she arrived in New York, Zora realized she’d taken time for “no holiday pleasures at all,” as she lamented from Harold Jackman’s bachelor quarters in Harlem—where she was bunking temporarily and recovering from her eight-hundred-mile drive. In early January, Zora was still waiting to see if she’d received any Christmas cards or presents in the mail, which was being forwarded from Chicago.
Christmas presents or not, Zora had much to be grateful for this Yuletide season. The $100 moving allowance from the Rosenwald Fund was gravy, served on top of the $100 per month she’d been promised for two years of graduate work, in addition to the $500 stipend the fund offered for field-work and international travel. In all, Hurston had been granted a two-year, $3,000 fellowship—close to $38,000 in today’s money. But, as Hurston’s award letter stressed, it was all contingent upon her “continuance of work satisfactory to the professors” who would be directing her studies.
To her delight, Hurston’s supervising professor at Columbia would be none other than Franz Boas himself. And Papa Franz was pleased that Zora would be able to devote herself to graduate studies in anthropology—a course of action he’d recommended for her back in 1930, but which Charlotte Mason had refused to support. Hurston now assured her longtime mentor that she was up to the task: “Now I realize that this is going to call for rigorous routine and discipline, which every body seems to feel that I need. So be it. I want to do it. I have always wanted to do it and nobody will have any trouble about my applying myself,” she told Boas, somewhat defensively. “I wonder if it ought not to be taken into consideration that I have been on my own since fourteen years old and went to high school, college and everything progressive that I have done because I wanted to, and not because I was being pushed? All of these things have been done under most trying circumstances and I stuck. … I have had two or three people to say to me, why don’t you go and take a master’s or a doctor’s degree in Anthropology since you love it so much? They never seem to realize that it takes money to do that.”
Hurston finally had the money she needed for graduate school, and the fellowship she’d secured was a plum, the Rosenwald Fund wanted her to know. “We are glad to cooperate in your further studies in an amount far beyond our normal fellowship awards,” Edwin Embree informed her, “because we believe you will greatly benefit by a full two years of study and supervised field work, and because we have such great confidence in the contributions which ultimately you may make to anthropology and to an understanding of the special cultural gifts of the Negroes.”
The “special cultural gifts of the Negroes” had become Hurston’s field of expertise and she never seemed to tire of talking about the intrinsic value of these gifts. In an article published during the final days of 1934—in The Washington Tribune, a black D.C. newspaper—Hurston stressed the significance and worth of black folk expression. And she urged her people to go the way of Chaucer, the Canterbury Tales author “who saw the beauty of his own language in spite of the scorn in which it was held” by England’s French-speaking Norman conquerors. In stern words, Hurston decried “the intellectual lynching” that black people perpetrated upon themselves whenever they sought to emulate whites, in art or in life. “Fawn as you will. Spend an eternity standing awe-struck,” she concluded her essay forcefully. “Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.”
For Hurston’s friends in Harlem—particularly those artists and intellectuals who’d devoted their young lives to placing something of their own on the white man’s cultural street corner—1934 had been a brutal year. From Jackman’s apartment at 442 Manhattan Avenue, Hurston could survey the toll the Depression had taken on Harlem and on what used to be known as the New Negro Renaissance. Many of the movement’s most vital participants were dead or gone. Jackman’s intimate friend Countee Cullen, one of the most promising poets of the Renaissance, had returned to his old high school to teach French, a job he would cling to for the rest of his life. His chief poetic rival, Langston Hughes, was in Mexico seeking to settle the estate of his recently deceased father; though Hughes was still writing prolifically, he was collecting a pile of rejection slips for his latest batch of short stories. Others suffered more grave denouements. Novelist and physician Rudolph Fisher died of cancer December 26—the same week that Wallace Thurman, one of the movement’s brightest fireflies, burned out unceremoniously in a charity hospital on New York’s Welfare Island. Fisher was only thirty-seven years old. Not to be outdone, Thurman was only thirty-two. Tuberculosis—aided by chronic unhappiness—killed Thurman, whose death devastated his peers. “He was our leader,” Dorothy West proclaimed, “and when he died, it all died with him.” Following Thurman’s funeral—on Christmas Eve 1934—everyone in the old circle seemed to realize, as Bontemps put it, that “the golden days were gone.”
In January 1935—as if to confirm Bontemps’s dolorous assessment—the biggest sensation in Harlem was not a book by a black author or a play by a black dramatist. It was Imitation of Life, a Hollywood film that was drawing crowds at all the uptown movie houses. Starring black actors Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington (and white starlet Claudette Colbert), Imitation of Life was based on the 1933 novel by Hurston’s erstwhile traveling companion, Fannie Hurst. After their 1931 jaunt to Canada, Zora and Fannie had traveled together again, accompanied by Fannie’s friend Helen Worden, a columnist at The New York World-Telegram. The trio had driven from Palm Beach, Florida, to Winter Park, where Fannie gave a talk at Rollins College. En route to Fannie’s speaking engagement, Zora had taken the two white women to visit Eatonville, where Worden snapped pictures for an article she planned to write about the quaint Negro town. This was in February 1934, when Zora was teaching at Bethune-Cookman. At that time, Hurst’s Imitation of Life had been in bookstores for just a few months. If Zora had not yet read the novel, she’d surely heard some of the stories behind it: Harper & Brothers had offered Hurst a $5,000 advance for Imitation of Life before she’d even drafted half its pages. More astonishingly, Pictorial Review, a popular women’s magazine, had paid Hurst a whopping $45,000 to serialize the novel, under the title “Sugar House.”
By any name, Imitation of Life—at least the film version—was a controversial hit. It is the story of Bea Pullman, a white widow who begins selling maple syrup to support herself and her daughter, Jessie. After a short time as a working woman, Bea hires Delilah—whom Hurst described as “an enormously buxom” black maid—to take care of her house. Delilah and her light-skinned daughter, Peola, move in with the white family (which includes Bea’s disabled father), and Delilah soon concocts a delicious recipe for waffles to go along with Bea’s maple syrup. In short order, Bea figures out a way to capitalize on Delilah’s fabulous waffles and maple candy hearts. With Bea’s business sense and Delilah’s kitchen expertise, the women eventually open a chain of coffee shops and become millionaires. But the selfless black maid doesn’t use her share of the money (only 20 percent) to strike out on her own. Instead, Delilah—at least partly modeled on “Aunt Jemima,” the ubiquitous icon for what was already America’s favorite pancake mix—wants only to maintain her role as Bea’s domestic servant. In the end, both women’s daughters grow up to break their mothers’ hearts: Jessie by falling in love with the same man her mother loves; Peola by denying her mother and trying to pass for white.
Though this racial subplot was not a selling point for the magazine series, or for the novel, it galvanized black audiences, particularly when the film version of Imitation of Life was widely screened in early 1935. Some black viewers and readers responded with admiration, others with outrage. E. Washington Rhodes, editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, could not praise Imitation enough; the black journalist called the film “the greatest condemnation of American racial prejudice ever screened.” Sterling Brown, on the other hand, angrily dismissed the film—and Hurst’s novel—for trading in stereotypes: “the contented Mammy, and the tragic mulatto; and the ancient ideas about the mixture of races.”
Preoccupied with her own work, Hurston stayed out of the fray, at least overtly. While she didn’t say anything to Hurst about the novel or the movie in their correspondence of the period, she may have voiced her views in person. And in a 1934 article she wrote for The American Mercury, Hurston took a covert (if thinly veiled) swipe at Imitation of Life: “Whenever I pick up one of the popular magazines and read one of these mammy cut tales,” she vented, “I often wonder whether the author actually believes that his tale is probable or whether he knows it is flapdoodle and is merely concerned about the check.” (Zora’s use of the word “flapdoodle,” so close to flapjacks, and her mention of popular magazines—of which Fannie Hurst was the top-dollar queen—read like daggers expertly aimed at her former boss.) Hurston went on to name several white writers—Dubose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, Paul Green—who seemed to look beyond convenient stereotypes in their portrayals of black characters. But even these writers did not fully escape Hurston’s criticism. For instance, Peterkin—author of the black-themed, Pulitzer-winning Scarlet Sister Mary—had made “a collection of Negro sayings and folk ways,” Hurston acknowledged, but “she does not assemble her material in a pattern to give a true picture.” Still, Zora conceded, “all these whom I have mentioned are earnest seekers, halted only by the barrier that exists somewhere in every Negro mind for the white man.” Conspicuously absent from Hurston’s list of true seekers was Fannie Hurst.
The American Mercury, a magazine edited by journalist H. L. Mencken and theater critic George Jean Nathan, never published Hurston’s scathing essay, called “You Don’t Know Us Negroes.” The editors’ decision to kill the article may have saved Zora some friendships, but the piece never should have been consigned to the slush pile. It is one of the most persuasive and engaging essays Hurston wrote in the 1930s, and it is fierce in its critique of what she called “the oleomargarine era in Negro writing.” For the past decade, Hurston argued, many of the novels and plays that claimed “they were holding a looking-glass to the Negro had everything in them except Negroness”—the real butter, so to speak, of black literature.
Hundreds of years of slavery had induced most whites to think of black people “as creatures of tasks alone,” Hurston theorized. “When in fact the conflict between what we wanted to do and what we were forced to do intensified our inner life instead of destroying it.” Hasty generalizations and a mistakenly simplistic view on the part of whites had resulted in “near-Negro literature” that portrayed black people as “obvious and simple.” And these portrayals, Hurston pointed out, were all the more exaggerated onstage, where “all Negro characters must have pop eyes” and speak in a jumble of misplaced prepositions. “Most white people have seen our shows but not our lives,” Hurston declared bluntly. “If they have not seen a Negro show they have seen a minstrel or at least a black-face comedian and that is considered enough. They know all about us. We say, ‘Am it?’ And go into a dance. By way of catching breath we laugh and say, ‘Is you is, or is you ain’t’ and grab our banjo and work ourselves into a sound sleep. First thing on waking we laugh or skeer ourselves into another buck and wing, and so life goes. All of which may be very good vaudeville, but I’m sorry to be such an image-breaker and say we just don’t live like that.”
After providing more such mordant examples—and asserting that “this attitude on the part of editors and producers is deforming the Negro writers themselves”—Hurston challenged her artistic peers, both black and white, to “go buy a cow and treat the public to some butter”: “Negro reality,” she concluded, “is a hundred times more imaginative and entertaining than anything that has ever been hatched up over a typewriter.”
As this bitingly insightful essay hinted, Hurston’s “golden days”—to use Bontemps’s phrase—were still ahead. At the moment, her biggest problem was deciding whether she would study for her Ph.D. at Columbia, as planned, or return to the Chicago area to attend Northwestern, where she could work under the supervision of Melville Herskovits. Boas suggested Hurston consider the university in Evanston, Illinois, because of her interest in doing fieldwork in Haiti—on which Herskovits was a world authority. Hurston was willing to go to Northwestern if Boas believed it in her best interest, but she let him know she preferred to stay in New York and attend Columbia. Embree, of the Rosenwald Fund, preferred Columbia, too—but for different reasons, as he confided to Boas. At Columbia, he hoped, Boas would be able to provide the “certainly brilliant” Hurston with “the rather detailed direction” he felt she needed to be “transformed into a sound student.”
Once everyone had agreed on Columbia, Hurston sat down with Boas to work out her degree plan. She resisted the normal graduate coursework, largely because of her previous field experience and because many of the courses Columbia offered were unrelated to her specific interests in documenting black culture. Finally, she and Boas agreed that she would study general ethnology in the spring 1935 semester and then, beginning the following fall, for the whole 1935–36 school year. After that, she would embark on a field trip to Haiti, where she planned to explore the origins of hoodoo.
In mid-January, Zora said good-bye to Jackman—the gallant Harlem schoolteacher who’d shared his flat with her for several weeks—and moved into her own place a few blocks away in the Graham Court apartments, at 116th Street and Seventh Avenue. Haggling with the Rosenwald Fund over its methods of doling out money (the $100 monthly disbursements would not allow her to pay her tuition all at once), she nevertheless enrolled in Columbia in early 1935. Within a matter of days, however, Embree effectively snatched back Hurston’s fellowship.
Ostensibly distressed that she would spend only three semesters in graduate classes before going into the field, Embree claimed Hurston’s coursework did “not indicate a permanent plan on the basis of which we feel justified in awarding a longtime fellowship.” This despite the fact that Hurston had met what the Rosenwald Fund had put forth as its primary criterion—that her work be satisfactory to her professors. Franz Boas, the leading anthropologist in the country, had personally approved Hurston’s degree plan. But this was not enough for Embree: He arbitrarily cut Hurston’s fellowship from $3,000 to $700, limiting it to a seven-month period ending in June 1935. Rather than covering Hurston’s graduate school expenses for two years, the Rosenwald Fund was only committing to one semester. After this initial time—if her professors judged that she’d done “thorough and careful work”—Hurston would be free to apply for another fellowship, Embree noted, but “we are not now inclined to contribute further.”
Hurston was mortified by the Rosenwald Fund’s dishonorable maneuver, and after several weeks of brooding and seething, she turned to Boas for succor. The embarrassed professor immediately wrote to Embree for an explanation: “Naturally the uncertainty in which she finds herself now is not favorable for her work,” Boas argued on Zora’s behalf. In a few days, he received a reply revealing the real reasons Embree had decided to so drastically reduce Hurston’s fellowship. “The young woman, while unquestionably brilliant, has a capacity for keeping her plans—and her friends and sponsors—in tumult,” Embree complained to Boas. Essentially, Embree’s objection to Hurston as a Rosenwald fellow was a matter of personality: He did not approve of her maverick style, nor her knack at self-promotion, which he thought crippled her potential as a student.
Specifically, Embree might have been reacting to an article on Hurston that appeared in The New York World-Telegram in early February, under the headline “Author Plans to Upbraid Own Race.” Prominently mentioning Hurston’s headfirst dive into Harlem nightlife and the recent teas that had been held in her honor—at Barnard and on Park Avenue—the article also revealed a bit of information that must have dropped Embree’s jaw: “Miss Hurston said that she had just about decided to pass the proffered Julius Rosenwald scholarship in anthropology at Columbia and start in writing a book that would give her own people ‘an awful going over,’ particularly the ones who talk about the tragedy of being Negroes.” Several weeks after the article appeared—and the original fellowship offer had been rescinded—Embree confessed to Boas: “We have been distressed at the over-zealousness in her own behalf of this young woman, and at her lack of tendency to serious quiet scholarship.”
Hurston probably never saw Embree’s letter to Boas, but she could have guessed its contents. Her response to the Rosenwald Fund’s parsimonious policy change was a trickster move, or what Zora might have regarded as a devious deal with the Devil: She accepted the reduced fellowship money and remained enrolled in Columbia—but stopped attending classes.
In his eagerness to develop her into a “serious” student, Embree was trying to treat Hurston like someone fresh out of college, and demanding that she remain “quiet” in the process. Yet she was a member of the American Folk-Lore Society, the American Ethnological Society, and the American Anthropological Association. She also was the author of a published novel (Jonah’s Gourd Vine had just been released in England as well) and a soon-to-be-published book of folklore; as such, self-promotion was part of her job. Wholeheartedly rejecting Embree’s paternalism, Zora used the Rosenwald money to finance her life as a writer. At the beginning stages of a new novel, she was “working like a slave and liking it,” she told a friend. “But I have lost all my zest for a doctorate. I have definitely decided that I never want to teach, so what is the use of the degree? It seems that I am wasting two good years out of my life when I should be working.” For Hurston, working meant writing, and that’s what she set about doing. By April, Boas was inquiring of her whereabouts—as was Fannie Hurst and “a perfect hotbed” of Zora’s friends, all “eager and greedy for news” about her. “Where did you disappear,” Fannie wanted to know, “and why haven’t I heard?”
Hurston’s friends would have had better luck locating her at their local newsstands. On April 6, New York’s Amsterdam News, a popular black newspaper, ran a huge profile of her. In it, Zora bragged about her Rosenwald fellowship—as if the original terms were still intact—and revealed that renowned artist Miguel Covarrubias was illustrating her forthcoming Mules and Men. Noting that she’d only taken one class in creative writing—“an absolute waste of time, for writing is a gift”—Hurston said she liked to write in bed at night. “Since I don’t compose well at the typewriter, I prepare my manuscript in long hand, revise and revise, and then type it. ‘Hunt and peck’ is my system on a portable machine.” Hurston’s favorite American author, she disclosed, was Robert Nathan (who wrote several books of fantasy fiction, including The Bishop’s Wife in 1928 and, interestingly, a 1934 novel called Jonah or the Withering Vine). But, she added, 1921 Nobel Prize winner Anatole France was her “author of authors.”
As this exuberant piece of personal publicity suggested, Hurston had not disappeared into some cosmic void of depression. Her scarceness among her friends had another root: Zora had fallen, it seems, into that mysterious black hole called love. Or, as she put it: “I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.”
Soon after her return to Manhattan, Zora started dating “the man who was really to lay me by the heels,” as she would recall. A graduate student at Columbia, his name was Percival McGuire Punter. Zora had met him four years before, when he was an undergraduate at the City College of New York. A member of his college orchestra, Punter had enough musical talent to land a singing part in Hurston’s original production of The Great Day, at the John Golden Theatre in January 1932. Zora had noticed Punter then: “He was tall, dark brown, magnificently built, with a beautifully modeled back head. His profile was strong and good,” she observed. “But his looks only drew my eyes in the beginning. I did not fall in love with him just for that. He had a fine mind and that intrigued me. When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous.”
Still, Zora—so recently divorced from Sheen—did not express her interest in Punter at the time. When they met again in 1935, though, their mutual attraction soon became obvious. “He began to make shy overtures to me,” Zora would remember. “I pretended not to notice for a while so that I could be sure and not be hurt. Then he gave me the extreme pleasure of telling me right out loud about it. It seems that he had been in love with me just as long as I had been with him, but he was afraid that I didn’t mean him any good, as the saying goes.”
The reasons for Punter’s initial reticence toward Zora are fairly obvious. With her gingerbread-colored skin, her intrepid eyes sparkling like polished pennies, and her one-of-a-kind wardrobe, Zora had a funky elegance that many men found attractive. Would-be wooers occasionally approached her on short acquaintance, panting something like this in her ear: “You passionate thing! I can see you are just burning up! … Ahhh! I know that you will just wreck me! Your eyes and your lips tell me a lot. You are a walking furnace!” Such breathless proclamations usually amazed Zora, and tickled her, too. “I may be thinking of turnip greens with dumplings, or more royalty checks, and here is a man who visualizes me on a divan sending the world up in smoke,” she once said. “It has happened so often that I have come to expect it. There must be something about me that looks sort of couchy.”
Beyond her sex appeal, Zora also had a certain amount of notoriety that Punter at first may have found intimidating. She’d been the subject of feature articles in the New York press, she’d been toasted on Park Avenue, and she’d traveled the country. Punter, on the other hand, was just a poor graduate student whose father, an immigrant from the Caribbean island of Antigua, was “a maintenance engineer” at a big building downtown. Punter had no money, Zora knew, and “nothing to offer but what it takes—a bright soul, a fine mind in a fine body, and courage.”
Another inhibiting factor for Punter—and for Hurston—may have been the age difference between them. Born in 1912, Punter was twenty-three years old in 1935. Zora was forty-four. Punter surely knew his love interest was older than he, but because of Zora’s persistent mendacity about her age, he probably had no idea she was more than twenty years his senior. Zora knew, though. And—despite her clear ability to maintain what she called her “mental youth”—she must have questioned the long-haul wisdom of getting involved with a man so much younger than herself.
She did not question it for long, however. Punter’s forthright gaze, refulgent smile, and licorice skin—not to mention his “fine mind”—became too tempting for Zora to resist. “People waste too much time worrying about whether an affair will last,” she rationalized. “Enjoy it while it does last and then suffer no regrets later.”
In no time, Hurston and Punter were immersed in an intensely passionate, mutually satisfying romance. It was, Zora would recall, “the real love affair of my life.” Before Punter (and after Sheen), Zora’s courtships had been rather casual. Valuing her freedom above all else, she could find ardor in a given moment, but those moments tended to pass fairly quickly: “Under the spell of moonlight, music, flowers or the cut and smell of good tweeds, I sometimes feel the divine urge for an hour, a day or maybe a week,” she once said. “Then it is gone and my interest returns to corn pone and mustard greens, or rubbing a paragraph with a soft cloth. Then my ex-sharer of a mood calls up in a fevered voice and reminds me of every silly thing I said, and eggs me on to say them all over again. … It is asking me to be a seven-sided liar. … I was sincere for the moment in which I said the things. … It was true for the moment, but the next day or the next week, is not that moment.”
With Punter, however, the moment appeared to be never ending, and Zora began to make room in her life for a committed relationship. She enjoyed cooking for her sweetheart when she could; her cool, crystallized grapefruit peel was a particular favorite as warmer temperatures began to descend on the city. The lovers stayed up late talking about religion (he was considering the ministry), art, and literature. Punter was impressed by Zora’s instinct for art; she intuitively knew what was good and lasting, he observed, and seemed to quietly recognize the enduring value of her own writing. (She once told him she knew she was a better writer than Fannie Hurst, despite Hurst’s fame and money.) To keep up with her work, Zora sometimes got up in the middle of the night to write. Even this adjustment did not curb the couple’s calenture. Punter called his beloved “Skookums”—because she reminded him of the Indian on the Skookum brand apples label—and every day, Zora found new angles for her adoration. “No matter which way I probed him,” she allowed, “I found something more to admire. We fitted each other like a glove.”
Zora emerged from the love nest on the afternoon of Friday, May 10, to attend a tea in her honor at the Women’s University Club on East Fifty-second Street. Annie Nathan Meyer, who’d sponsored Zora’s education at Barnard, helped to plan the tea. “Celebs too numerous to mention were there,” Zora boasted. Among them, publisher Bertram Lippincott, who traveled from Philadelphia for the occasion, and novelists Robert Nathan, Pearl S. Buck, and, of course, Fannie Hurst, who said a few congratulatory words. Zora wore “a flaming white dress, a terrific-looking kind of thing,” as Lippincott recalled, “and all kind of big wraps all around her like a movie actress.” Comfortable being the center of attention—and “really amazing to look at”—she made a brief speech that thrilled the mostly white crowd. Or, as Hurst cooed proudly to Meyer: “And didn’t our Zora cover herself with glory?”
Punter did not attend the tea with Hurston. Her increasing celebrity—and the apparent delight she took in it—was beginning to rattle him. Perhaps because of the age difference, and because of Zora’s worldliness, Punter was starting to wonder how long he could hold her attention. “I was hog-tied and branded,” she admitted, “but he didn’t realize it. He could make me fetch and carry, but he wouldn’t believe it.” So when Zora attended literary parties or met people on business, Punter often sulked and then Zora became unhappy, too. One evening, for instance, the two were at Zora’s apartment, “soaked in ecstasy,” when her telephone rang. A literary celebrity was in town and wanted to meet her. Zora was eager to go but Punter asked her not to; she invited him to join her. He refused and walked out. Zora went to the gathering, as she recalled, but was distracted and downcast all evening.
Another time, looking at the very serious Van Vechten photo of Zora in which she looked “mean and impressive,” Punter said he wanted her to look that way all the time unless she was with him. Zora almost laughed out loud—not because she found the statement absurd, but because she felt the same way about Percy, as she called him. “He was so extraordinary that I lived in terrible fear lest women camp on his doorstep in droves and take him away from me,” she confessed. “I hated to think of him smiling unless he was smiling at me.”
Punter’s jealousy, though, soon was exacerbated by his machismo. At first, Zora thought his resolute sense of “manliness” was chivalrous and sweet, but she quickly discovered that it could get out of hand. One time, for example, Punter became angry when Zora offered him a quarter. He’d used his last nickel to travel uptown (from his place on Sixty-fourth Street) to visit her. As he and Zora lingered in an embrace at the door, he asked her to let him go so he could begin the long walk home. Concerned that he would have to hoof it for more than fifty blocks, Zora got a quarter out of her purse to loan him until his payday. Punter was insulted: He’d known he didn’t have the return fare when he left home, he protested, but he’d come because he wanted to see her; now he must bear the consequences of his choice like a man. “No woman on earth could either lend him or give him a cent,” Zora remembered him saying. “If a man could not do for a woman, what good was he on earth?”
Eventually, Punter asked Zora to give up her career, marry him, and leave New York. The marrying and leaving New York parts were fine. Zora preferred to write in Florida anyway. (“New York is not a good place to think in,” she once complained. “I can do hack work here, but I need quiet to really work.”) The idea of giving up her career, however, was chilling. “I really wanted to do anything he wanted me to do,” she would recall, “but that one thing I could not do.”
Punter did not seem to understand that Hurston’s work was her sustenance. “I’m tired of seeing you work so hard,” he told her. “I wouldn’t want my wife to do anything but look after me. Be home looking like Skookums when I got there.” But Zora needed to do more with her life than look after a man, no matter how wonderful he might be. “I had things clawing inside of me that must be said,” she tried to explain. “I could not see that my work should make any difference in marriage. He was all and everything else to me but that. One did not conflict with the other in my mind. But it was different with him. He felt that he did not matter to me enough. He was the master kind. All, or nothing, for him.”
Hurston and Punter continued to see each other, despite this fundamental conflict, and their mutual jealousies escalated. If Punter smiled too broadly at a woman on Seventh Avenue, Zora fumed. If she accepted a kiss on the cheek from a male acquaintance, Punter smoldered. Their love became blissful misery. “We were alternately the happiest people in the world,” Zora recognized, “and the most miserable.”
One night, an argument turned particularly ugly, Hurston recalled. “Something primitive inside me tore past the barriers and before I realized it, I had slapped his face. This was a mistake.” Angry over some week-old hurt, Punter struck back. To Zora’s horror, she and Punter were soon trading slaps and shoves. “No broken bones, you understand, and no black eyes,” but combat nonetheless. Stunned by the wrong turn their passion had taken, the two ended up on the floor together, apologizing to each other profusely. He went out and bought a pie while she made a pot of hot chocolate, over which they made up fervently. The next day, he built her a bookcase and the couple became more affectionate than ever.
But something had changed for Zora. “Then I knew I was too deeply in love to be my old self,” she admitted. “For always a blow to my body had infuriated me beyond measure. Even with my parents, that was true. But somehow, I didn’t hate him at all.” Hurston—“delirious with joy and pain”—had lost hold of herself. And this frightened her. “I suddenly decided to go away and see if I could live without him. I did not even tell him that I was going. But I wired him from some town in Virginia.”
The second week of June, Hurston left Manhattan with New York University Professor Mary Elizabeth Barnicle for fieldwork in the South. On June 15, after several days on the road, she and Barnicle met collector and college student Alan Lomax in Brunswick, Georgia. Lomax was armed with a recording machine and orders to collect as many Negro folk songs as possible for the Music Division of the Library of Congress. Hurston—whom Lomax recognized as “the best informed person today on Western Negro folk-lore”—was to choose the locales for their research and contact the subjects.
“Through Miss Hurston’s influence,” the young Lomax noted, “we were soon living, in an isolated community on St. Simon’s island, on such friendly terms with the Negroes as I had never experienced before.” St. Simon’s, a tiny black community on the Georgia coast, had been largely untouched by progress because of its isolation; it would be a rich source of folk songs, Hurston assured her coworkers. The interracial trio rented a little shanty and sent out a call for folksingers. “The first evening our front yard was crowded,” Lomax reported. And the crowds never let up. “They have thronged our house by day and night ever since we have been here,” he wrote to his folklorist father, John Lomax. “They have been perfectly natural and easy from the first on account of Zora who talks their language and can out-nigger any of them. She swaps jokes, slaps backs, honies up to the men a little when necessary and manages them so that they ask us for no money, but on the other hand cooperate in the friendliest sort of spirit.” In a week’s time, the researchers had made about forty records. They recorded children’s game songs, work chants, ring shouts, jook songs, spirituals, and ballads. “We felt when we left St. Simon’s island that we had turned back time forty or fifty years and heard and recorded some genuine Afro-American folk-music of the middle of the nineteenth century,” Lomax informed Oliver Strunk of the Library of Congress.
From St. Simon’s, the researchers went to Eatonville, where Hurston acquainted her white colleagues with “the finest Negro guitarist” Lomax had ever heard, “better even than Lead Belly, although of a slightly different breed,” as the folklorist put it. (Leadbelly, a.k.a. Huddie Ledbetter, was an ex-convict whom Lomax and his father had met at Louisiana’s Angola Prison Farm. Floored by his talent as a folksinger and guitarist, they convinced the governor to parole him into their custody, then brought him to New York and arranged a record deal for him. By 1935, he was a star.) After recording Eatonville’s answer to Leadbelly, as well as a small collection of spirituals and work songs, the trio moved on to Belle Glade, where folk songs were “as thick as marsh mosquitoes.” For the first three or four days, the researchers recorded songs from the thousands of black workers who populated the Everglades, where the soil was rich, black muck. Then Hurston introduced her colleagues to a small community of Bahamians. Lomax and Barnicle witnessed the Fire Dance and heard songs that were as close to Africa as they ever hoped to find in America. Satisfied with their work so far, the three social scientists moved on to Miami for a bit of rest.
From there, Hurston sent a tart dispatch to Edwin Embree, of the long-forgotten Rosenwald Fund, in response to a form letter requesting a report on her activities. With genuine excitement, she apprised him of her field-work with Lomax and Barnicle, but she did not attempt to hide the sarcasm in her tone when she told of her other recent work. She also did not try to hide the fact that she’d pulled a little bait-and-switch of her own: “I am a little tardy with this letter but life has been rushing,” she began. “I want to express my appreciation for all that I was able to do under your grant. You would understand that I would not be able to do anything important towards a doctorate with a single semester of work. So I did what could amount to something. I wrote two plays, both of which have a more than even chance of being produced in the fall. I wrote the first draft of my next novel which has already been accepted by my publishers. It was six months of most intensive labor, because I considered it simply must count constructively.”
At Hurston’s suggestion, Lomax and Barnicle went on to the Bahamas for further research, but she opted not to join them. Hurston and Barnicle did not get along so well, as Lomax recalled, and their quarreling had come to a head in Eatonville, where Barnicle wanted to photograph a child eating watermelon, a ridiculously stereotypical image that Hurston simply could not abide. Of course, Zora could enjoy a good slice of watermelon as well as anyone, and she sometimes reveled in the sweet, wet taste of it, the juice running down her arms. Once, at a ritzy interracial party in New York, Zora had angered some of her fellow New Negroes by going straight for the watermelon. They viewed its inclusion on the buffet as a test of sorts, almost an insult, and had collectively vowed to abstain from the forbidden fruit. “And leave all this good watermelon for the white folks?!” Zora dissented. But her objection to Barnicle’s photograph was different; there was something in the New York professor’s motive that she distrusted. Though Lomax felt a deep kinship with Hurston—“we were interested in exactly the same things,” he noted—he took Barnicle’s side when the women argued. Barnicle was like a second mother to him, he explained, and perhaps Zora was overreacting. After all, Hurston had “a temperament as big as a house,” as Lomax remembered fondly, and was “a macaw of brilliant plumage.” Hurston also was “almost entirely responsible for the success” of their expedition, Lomax acknowledged.
For Hurston, though, the excursion was over. In mid-August, she returned to New York—and to Percy Punter’s arms, “just as much his slave as ever,” as she put it. To her dismay, the same old jealousies soon resurfaced and she and Punter again were locked in a vise of divine nights and devilish days. “Our bitterest enemies could not have contrived more exquisite torture for us,” she commented.
Meanwhile, Hurston spent her first few weeks back in New York looking for work, her feet getting more tired and her spirits lower with each rejection. For a celebrated young author whose second book was about to be published, this was a difficult time; dramatically, Hurston called it “the hour of my dumb agony.” In early September, though, she could sense a turnaround: “I have lived thru a horrible period of grim stagnation but I see my way out of the woods at last,” she confided to Carl Van Vechten. “My mental state was such that I could neither think nor plan. … A love affair was going wrong too at the time. I think it is O.K. now. You know about it already.” A weekend trip to the country had helped to clear her head, she said. “Honest, Carlo, I had got to the place I was talking to myself.”
The Great Depression was still wreaking economic and emotional havoc on the country. Writers and other artists, particularly black ones, found it practically impossible to secure suitable work in the private sector. Fortunately, the federal government had stepped in to offer some relief. Back in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt had won the presidency with his promise of a “New Deal” for America. Significantly, he’d garnered an overwhelming majority of the black vote, marking the first time in the nation’s history that Negro voters favored the Democratic candidate over the Republican. Black voters had maintained their loyalty to the Republican Party for decades, largely because it was the party of Lincoln, whose signing of the Emancipation Proclamation had precipitated the demise of American slavery. “Go home and turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall,” the Pittsburgh Courier had urged before the election of ’32. “The debt has been paid in full.” Following the newspaper’s advice, many New Negroes had helped to catapult Roosevelt into office, but they’d been disappointed by the Democrat’s behavior once he’d moved into the White House. Hurston and her contemporaries found the president’s refusal to sign antilynching legislation particularly disturbing.
To his credit, though, FDR had launched several relief programs that benefited many black professionals. Among them was the Works Progress Administration (later named the Work Projects Administration), whose various programs offered artists employment and the chance to earn a respectable wage. On October 1, 1935, Hurston joined the newly formed “Negro Unit” of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project in New York. As a “dramatic coach,” she was paid $23.66 a week, less than the $100 a month she’d received, briefly, for her work on the Lomax-Barnicle expedition, and far less than the $200 a month she’d collected from Godmother starting in 1928.
On this small salary, however, Hurston supported herself and, for a short time, her niece and namesake. The little girl was sent to live with various relatives, including her Uncle Everett in Brooklyn, following the 1933 death of her mother, Sarah, and up until her father’s remarriage around 1937. For a few months, she lived with her Aunt Zora, who—having faced the same predicament thirty years before—kindly empathized with her niece’s muddled emotions. “She was very nice to me,” Zora Mack recalled. Hurston cooked often for the ten-year-old and managed to buy her “the most gorgeous clothes” and lots of “beautiful things,” even on her slim WPA earnings.
At work, Hurston kept company with many talented black theater people, as well as some white ones, including a youthful Orson Welles and John Houseman, who directed the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Unit in Harlem. Hurston participated in the Harlem unit’s staging of its first production, Walk Together Chillun!, and The New York Times reported that her newly penned, still untitled play would be among the troupe’s upcoming productions. Zora had written it, she confessed to a friend, in a week. Years later, John Houseman would remember Hurston’s play as a racy adaptation of Lysistrata, the Aristophanes comedy in which the women of Greece pledge to withhold sex from their men until they agree to end the war. Hurston’s bawdy, all-black version—which was never produced—was set in a Florida fishing village, as Houseman recalled, and it “scandalized both the Left and the Right in its saltiness.”
Hurston held on to her employment with the Federal Theatre Project through the publication of Mules and Men that fall, but she only stayed on the job for a total of six months, despite her March 1936 promotion to “senior research worker.” By April, when the Harlem unit staged its most famous production, Macbeth—set in nineteenth-century Haiti, with an all-black cast—Zora was not among the thousands who rushed the Lafayette Theatre to applaud the performance. Nor was she among the hundred-plus players trying to help director Orson Welles impose imaginary voodoo sensibilities onto the thickets of Shakespearean verse. Instead, Hurston was en route to the Caribbean. There—in real twentieth-century Jamaica and Haiti—she would experience things that Welles and company could scarcely fathom.