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The History of Literature
675 Zora Neale Hurston (with Cheryl Hopson) | Jack Kerouac's Newly Discovered Writings
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. If you need three new reasons to love Jack wraps at Jack in the Box, even more, here they are. Chicken fajita, chicken Caesar, and delicious. Starting at $3. Coincidentally, those are the same three reasons you should come to Jack in the Box right now at Jack. Every bite's a big deal. Hello. Today on the podcast, an author who's written a book examining the life, work and legacy of one of the 20th century's most published African American women, Zora Neale Hurston. And some new revelations about Jack Kerouac's Buddhist side. Some previously unpublished writings have emerged. All that plus a listener email today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson, here to host this here thing, this here thang. Thank you for joining me. I'm very glad you're here. We start today with a listener email. This comes from Julia in Woodstock, New York. Whoa, nelly. That's how it begins. Okay, I don't know. This is me again, Jack. This isn't Julia. I don't know what your email habits are. Dear listeners, I don't know whether you approach emails when you receive an email with the eagerness of someone getting a birthday card from a long lost friend or lover, or whether you open your emails with the dread of someone slicing open the envelope of what is sure to be a hefty bill. But I can tell you this much. As far as I'm concerned, if a message begins, whoa, Nelly. I'm going to keep reading a little bit with a little bit of excitement, but also a dose of apprehension. Let's see, that's what my mindset is. What have I gotten myself into this time? Just how badly have I screwed things up? Well, luckily, this is not one of those emails. Back to the email. Whoa, Nelly. As a frequent listener for years, I am always amazed at the profound effect your podcast has on me while I paint. Let me pause here. This is one of my favorite kinds of emails. The painters I love hearing from. Well, I love hearing from all of you. The drivers, the laborers, the travelers, the doers of chores, people who listen in, all the people falling asleep at night, but painters who are painting while they. Listening while they paint. What an honor. It's an honor to be everywhere, actually. But painting is such a glamorous kind of activity. For me at least. Is glamour the right word? I'd rather be in a studio painting, given the ability to paint, the talent, which I don't have. But I'd rather be there than in some fancy restaurant wearing a tuxedo. So I guess, yes, that's glamor. The glamour of painting in a studio. In Woodstock, of all places. Okay, back to the email. I don't know how I found you. It was the episode of the reading of Henry James's the Beast in the Jungle. There was no turning back. I paint mandalas and sacred geometry and find the spoken word allows me to focus, focus on the tip of my brush. Music distracts me and encourages mental floating, a disaster for my precision work. Pause there. That's nice. That is a nice. What a compliment. We're helping to focus the painter's brain on something precise. The tip of the brush. A previously unknown use for the podcast, but a worthy one indeed. Back to the email. Spending the late 1960s through the mid-1980s wandering our amazing planet with a backpack, I feel in you a kindred spirit, a brother of the open road. Okay, pause there. Speaking of which, we're going to have the High Priest of the open road here in a second. More about him, Jack Kerouac. And yes, we were almost kindred spirits. Almost. Almost literally. In the open road. I was out there backpacking. Although I came along a little bit after. I wasn't yet around in the 1960s. Well, as my sister was. My sister was around in the 1960s. She was born in 1969 and I was born in 1971, and she tormented me that throughout my childhood. I was a 60s child. She used to say, you were a 70s child. I felt the sting of that, even though I had no idea what it meant. But anyway, I did my backpacking stint through the 90s, mostly in the days before the Internet. Back to the email. In the days before the Internet, the emailer says cell phones, credit cards, and ubiquitous international airports. When hitchhiking was a viable means of transportation, our tribe of travelers had the opportunity to live the song of the open road. Sigh. Okay, pause there. You see people, young people. The days before the Internet. I said it. And then she said it. The days before the Internet was a thing. The days before the cell phone, you'd be out on the road, kind of lost, disconnected, detached, struggling to survive. Information came in a premium. I'm sure you get it, but I'm also sure you don't get it. How could you? The world moves on, and that's fine. I used to hate hearing people talk about radio, and they'd say, we used our imaginations back then. We didn't need the pictures and I would just point at the television and say, but we have this with pictures. It's clearly better. So I get it. Young people, you don't want to hear this, but okay, back to the email. Though now my journeys are interior, the adventures are still exciting. Thanks to your podcast, I've rediscovered classic classical literature and have spent the last few years with audiobooks, listening to all I can get. In these dark and disturbing days, I am reminded of the universal struggle humanity has always faced. And I know what team I want to play on. This brings me to your latest podcast, the Parable. You've done it again, Jack. Just when I felt the clouds of despair darkening any hopes for our collective future, you sent the eternal sunshine shining through. Thank you, Julia. Well, thank you, Julia, for that lovely email. Julia. The old. The retired. Not old. I didn't mean that. The retired backpacker. The lioness in winter. A traveler now, a recollector of travels and a painter. And yet still the same spirit and soul inside that body and mind, behind those eyes. People think that we battered old people. I'll call myself old. We battered old people. People think we no longer travel like we did in those early days. But we do, don't we? Our journeys reach the ends of the cosmos now, where we find that there is no end. And we have the perspective to see that yes, things change, and yes, they can get worse, measured not by technology or gadgets or gizmos, but by the human heart. People can better to one another at different times, in different eras, and they can be worse. The darkness can emerge, and it's hard to stuff it back into the bottle like an evil genie that emerges like smoke and pervades everything. Nostrils breathe in the toxicity of it, sometimes against one's will, and sometimes because we have to breathe, and the toxicity is there and what we're breathing, inhaling. But sometimes it's breathed in with great gusto by those who cannot wait for a license to hate. I'm glad you found the parable episode to be a bit of an antidote to the downward slide. We all need to keep that edge of focus available, like the one you've trained yourself to maintain while painting. I will keep that image in my mind of you and the tip of your brush as I plunge forward, trying to maintain sanity and humanity, the two best forms of anity. Now, as soon as I say that, I know I'm going to get emails from fans of inanity. Well, sorry. And profanity and urbanity. I'm sorry, folks. You guys didn't make the top two Christianity. Well, you guys might have a point. Paganity. Top two can be crowded sometimes. We need to move on. Jack Kerouac died more than 50 years ago. The first line in his obituary, of course, was that he was the author of on the Road. This is from October 22, 1969, in the New York Times headline. Jack Kerouac, novelist dead father of the Beat Generation, author of on the Road, was hero to youth, rejected middle class values. Jack Kerouac, the novelist who named the Beat Generation and exuberantly celebrated its rejection of middle class American conventions, died early yesterday of massive abdominal hemorrhaging in a St. Petersburg, Florida hospital. He was 47 years old. The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk. Desirous of everything. At the same time, he wrote in on the Road, a novel completed in only three weeks but had to wait seven years to see published. When it finally appeared in 1957, it immediately became a basic text for youth who found their country claustrophobic and oppressive at the same time. It was a spontaneous and passionate celebration of the country itself, of the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent. Mr. Kerouac's admirers regarded him as a major literary innovator and something of a religious seer. But this estimate of his achievement never gained wide acceptance among literary tastemakers. The Beat Generation, originally regarded as a bizarre bohemian phenomenon confined to small coteries in San Francisco and New York, spilled over into the general culture in the 1960s. But as it became fashionable to be beat, it became less fashionable to read Jack Kerouac. That's the first section of the obituary in the New York Times. The next section is the subject was himself that talks about typing on a roll of teletype paper on one continuous sheet and how he was transcribing but not revising in principle, because first thought, best thought, that was a bit of a misconception. He revised more than people originally thought. But okay, it's generally. It's got some truthiness to it. Truman Capote's famous crack about that being typing, not writing. That's in there in the obituary. But okay, that myth has been dispelled. But I still like the crack. It's useful in other contexts. He was friends with Allen Ginsberg, etc. We go back to his childhood, how he spoke French before English, he played football, he went to Columbia on a football scholarship, etc. Etc. We've covered all this, all familiar to Kerouacians. William S. Burroughs traveling Neil Cassidy, the beats, beatific, etc. Finally, there's the section delved into Buddhism. This is how the obituary ends. Actually, I'm going to read it out because it has some relevance to today's news. Delved into Buddhism. In the books that followed on the Road, the sense of loneliness and search became more clearly marked as their author delved into Buddhism, the first of the beat writers to look to the east for inspiration. I'm actually not sure that's true. I'd have to look that up. What about Gary Schneider? Doesn't he count? I think he might have been there before Kerouac. Okay. Anyway, back to the obituary. He called himself a religious wanderer, or Dharma Bum, as he expressed it in the novel called the dharma bums. In 1959, Allen Ginsberg said he was a very unique cat, a French Canadian hinayana, Buddhist beat Catholic savant. Many critics found something ludicrous in his search for sensation and instant salvation on the byways of America. In a parody in the New Yorker magazine called on the Sidewalk, John Updike portrayed two youngsters on a scooter riding into the wide, shimmering pavement through a bed of irises. Contemplate those holy hydrants, one of the boys calls out. But there were moments when on the Road had a sharp edge of social comment. For instance, when Sal paradise, the name the novelist assigned himself, wanders through the black section of Denver, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life. Joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough life. Eldridge Cleaver, the black writer, later cited this passage as a cultural turning point for white America. The Subterraneans, still one of the most popular Kerouac novels, was composed in only three days. The book ends with the novelist at the end of an unhappy love affair, sitting down to write this book. He shunned literary society and spent most of his last days, last years in a withdrawn existence in places like St. Petersburg, North Port, Long island and his hometown of Lowell, where he maintained a residence in a ranch style house with his invalid mother and his third wife, Stella. He had been drinking heavily for the past few days, his wife said yesterday morning. He was a very lonely man. The upheaval and values that on the Road helped signal had the ironic effect of making Jack Kerouac appear. A somewhat conventional writer, he had no use for the radical politics that came to preoccupy many of his friends and readers. I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic, he said. Last month he showed the interviewer a painting of Pope Paul VI and said, you know who painted that? Me. Okay, that's how it ends. That's the obituary for Jack Kerouac in 1969. Well, here we are in 2025, and a publisher named Rare Bird Books is bringing out a new edition. 30 semi autobiographical, spiritual and soulful stories, musing and musings and poems by Jack Kerouac with titles like the Long Night of Life and A Dream Already Ended and the Blessedness Surely to Be Believed. I read about this in the Guardian, by the way, where the book's editor, the editor of the book, the new book, the Kerouac book, Charles Shuttleworth is quoted as saying, this is Kerouac at, quote, his soulful best, end quote. The writing is earnest and full of yearning desires for understanding and transcendence. His wish to be a better person, says Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth dove into Kerouac's sprawling archive to find these excerpts and selections. Only two of them had been published before. When he talked about Buddhism, Shuttleworth says, few people listened. The irony is that in the long term, he was unable to live up to Buddhist precepts. Re embraced Christianity and died alcoholic. He may have died, and he may have been an alcoholic who didn't really want to live. I've heard his friends say in interviews that at the end, Kerouac used to say that he could never commit suicide because of his faith. So his plan was to kill himself early but slowly through drinking. But while he was at his soulful best, he was searching, looking for meaning from the madman, the ecstasy and life that he knew must be part of existence. The joys of life elude the angry man, he says in one of these newly discovered stories. We might not share everything with Kerouac, but we can share the sentiment shortly, at least with this young version of Kerouac, that if there are joys of life out there, we don't want them to elude us. We want to capture them and pin them down. What was the Far side cartoon when the movie Free Willy was dominating the box office? Do you remember Free Willy about the whale that was in captivity and the point of the movie was to try to free Willie. And the Far side ran a cartoon where there was a sign that said, catch Willy and make him do tricks. Well, I'll let my whales swim in their ocean free. But the joys of life, I'll pursue those to the ends of the earth. I'm going to catch you Joys and make you do a few tricks. Okay, did Joy. Sorry Did Zora Neale hurston, speaking of 20th century spirits? They overlapped a bit in era and in approach to life, I think Hurston and Kerouac. Hurston was born in 1891, which was about 30 years before Kerouac, but she lived to an older age, dying in 1960. That was only about nine years before Kerouac. The bulk of their lives, they were both on the planet at the same time. The two of them lived through the Depression, the Second World War, the aftermath of the Second World War, and into that era of the automobile and the highway and eventually better highways, more travel. I can picture them both in cars. And they were both seekers exploring a way of life, a culture. Both attended Columbia University, where Kerouac became a kind of amateur anthropologist studying the souls of his generation. And Hurston was a professional one, studying with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Now, let's drop the comparison with Kerouac because we want to focus on Hurston today, her incredible life story and some of the ways in which she was misunderstood, both in her own life and in the minds of generations who came later. What exactly did she see in the America of the 1930s and 40s and 50s? How was that shaped by her childhood, her family, her education, her anthropological trips, and her general spirit and outlook? She's one of the most often assigned writers in America. My younger son is reading her right now, in fact, in his high school English class. But who exactly was Zora Neale Hurston, and how did she become that person? Cheryl Hopson will help us out with all of those questions after this.
- [20:16]
Cheryl Hobson
Foreigning me now is Cheryl Hobson, who is professor of English at Roanoke College. She's published essays on Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker and Zora Neale Hurston, and she's the author of the poetry collection In Case youe Get this. She's here today to discuss her book, Zora Neale Hurston, from the Critical Live series by Reaction Books. Cheryl Hobson, welcome to the history of literature.
- [20:46]
Thank you, Jack. It's good to be talking with you today.
- [20:50]
Do you remember the first time you read Zora Neale Hurston's any of her works?
- [20:54]
I actually read her through Alice Walker. So my first introduction to Zora Neale Hurston in college, and I was it was a writing class and we read Alice Walker's collection In Search of Our Mother's Gardens as our text.
- [21:09]
Yeah.
- [21:10]
And in that collection is an essay on Zora Neale Hurston titled Looking for Zora, which was also published in Ms. Magazine in 1974. And that was my introduction to Zora Neale Hurston. So it was really the writer and her life.
- [21:25]
Yeah. Right, right. Well, that's interesting because it does. You know, my question for biographers is often if they came to the writer starting with the work, and they fell in love with a book or something. But by the time you were actually reading Zora and Neale Hurston, like her fiction, for example, you already knew something about her.
- [21:47]
I did. So I fell in love with the Persona that Alice Walker sort of created or depicted in her essay, and then I fell in love with the writer by way of her work. Yeah, right. Yes.
- [22:00]
What do you think it was about her Persona that drew you to her?
- [22:05]
Well, I realized she was of my great grandmother's generation and a woman I never knew. But my family talks about her, you know, as if she was still walking the earth. And so once I realized that they were coming out of the same generation, it just drew me to her because I've always been wanting to know more about my maternal great grandmother. And so Zora was my link in an odd way. She gave me sort of a window into. Her name was Lula her world. And that, for me, was a beginning point. And she's Southern, and I'm from Virginia, and. And I'm a poet and a writer. And I knew pretty early on that I wanted to be a writer. And so Zora just became just a natural draw for me.
- [22:53]
Yeah. It's interesting that you say that about a great grandparent, because I guess we all have eight of them potentially, but it does seem like not all of them wind up being the ones who get handed down to us through stories and. And memories and recollection and so on. What was it about your great grandmother that made her stand out to your family?
- [23:18]
Yes. She had 18 children.
- [23:20]
Okay.
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Right.
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We could stop there, really.
- [23:24]
Exactly. It really was. That's. That was it for me. It was full stop.
- [23:28]
Jack Wilson
But.
- [23:28]
Cheryl Hobson
So My grandmother was one of 18, and I knew maybe 11, anywhere from 11 to 13 of them growing up. So I was just. I was surrounded by her children, basically, and they talked to their mother with so much love that she became almost this character in my mind. And I just wanted to know more and more. So she stood out for that reason. Yes.
- [23:55]
I've always thought that parents with that many children would have to be really efficient in kind of their child raising, that it would be you. You'd learn how to say something, you know, so that you would only have to say it one time, Right?
- [24:11]
I imagine so. I Yeah, I just. I couldn't even conceive of it. I'm one of four. And to me, that was a big family. Massive.
- [24:20]
Yeah.
- [24:20]
So 18 is just, you know, something I can't even write, but I did. I just. I. I just thought the way they. They talked with so much love and devotion. And she also had two brothers, one of whom became very wealthy, and he paid for her grandchildren, one of whom was my mother, to attend college. So I think that she. She stands out for that reason also to access.
- [24:48]
Right, right, right. Okay. So let's talk about Zora and her. I feel like I can call her Zora, but let's talk about her childhood and what. What did she face when she was a child? There was a lot of dramatic things happened to her.
- [25:09]
Right. I think she faced quite a bit of misunderstanding within her family, even not so much with her brothers and her sister, who. They were just. They were all for each other, in particular, as children. They were very close, but her father certainly didn't seem to understand her as a girl, as a person, maybe even a human being. Her grandmother, her maternal grandmother, who was present often to have. Well, she thought Zora was too brazen. And she was a woman who spent a great portion of her life under slavery. And so she really thought that Zora's parents letting her just sort of be who she was was endangering her life. And so she was frightened of Zora, I think, of her personality and her. What we would call chutzpah. Right, yeah. And just her joy at living the way she would just talk to anyone.
- [26:03]
Yeah, right. She had a nickname, so I guess backing up a little bit. When she was one, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida, which was the first incorporated, all black town in the United States. And this is very close to the Civil War and that era. Her father had been born a slave and had become a sharecropper. But then you say that in Edenville she was called everybody's Zora. What was behind that nickname?
- [26:32]
Well, there's a film, it's called Jump at the sun, and I think it may have been released in 2008. But in the film, they interview a woman and a man who grew up with Zora. So they were her childhood friends. And the woman says this. What made. This is sort of what made me understand a little better. The woman says that everyone was your parent, basically. So if you got into trouble, that person would whip you and then they would tell your parents. And then when you got home, you get another whip. And it was Just like. So they claimed her. So she. She was known to everyone. And I think of her as being like Sula in Toni Morrison's novel by the same name, where Morrison says, bottom was the only place that Sula could. She was theirs and they were hers, basically. And that. That was Dora, for the most part, she distinguished herself because she was an early reader, and she was always daydreaming and wandering, and she spent a lot of time outside on her own or playing with her brother. She had a lot of brothers, and so she stood out. And people knew her. They knew her from the time she was a baby.
- [27:42]
Yeah. But then her mother died when she was, I guess about 12 or 13, and her father sent her to a Bible school in Jacksonville. And at that point, he does something that is. I mean, to me, it's inexplicable. Maybe you've found an explanation for it. But he seems to have kind of abandoned her, and he stops paying tuition, and he wants the school to just keep her.
- [28:07]
Right? He does. She went there. Her sister Sarah was already there, and her brother, her older brother, I believe John was there. And then John left. He graduated and Sarah left. She was 15 years old, and she left and got married. It was a way to get out of basically the home. And it wasn't a great marriage, but she left and she married. And so Zora was at school now by herself, on her own, and her dad in the process. Within six months of her mother passing, her dad remarried into a much younger woman. And I think that the younger woman really wanted the children out of the way as much as possible.
- [28:46]
Right.
- [28:46]
So he might have also been despairing because he. I mean, apparently, even though he was a philanderer, right around her, as my great aunt would say, he loved Lucy, he loved her mother, and her death may have worked some kind of change in him. Right.
- [29:04]
Yeah. And he had not exactly had an easy life coming up. No, not at all.
- [29:10]
Yeah, right. Not at all.
- [29:13]
But it presented quite an obstacle for Zora to overcome, just knowing that that was the way. And so, you know. But yet she seems to have persisted and thrived. When did she start writing stories? And was that something she was doing all through childhood?
- [29:35]
She wasn't writing them down, but she was telling them, and her. She would speak them. Right. And so she was known in Harlem in particular, as being just great storyteller. And so that's what she was doing as a child. She started writing when she got to high school at Morgan Academy, so 19, 17 or so. And I think she Says her first writing was on a board, a chalkboard. It was an allegory where she used the teachers in the story. I, you know, I don't know what the story was, but that was her first actual, what she regards as her first publication, so to speak. And then it's when she's at Howard, so 1919, that she starts working as an editor, a student editor for their magazine Stylus. And that's when she really starts writing the poems and the short stories in that moment, 1919 and 1921, that's when she's generating the written text.
- [30:31]
And I want to talk later about ways that I think she's been misunderstood. I think that kind of often happened to her, both while she was living and then as her legacy has been discussed. But one of the things that I had, I think, misunderstood was when she had been passing herself off as much younger. And I always thought that that was kind of a career move and maybe a bit of a vanity move. And what I learned from your book is that that actually was her way of getting a free high school education. That it was more necessary than something that she had just done to kind of, you know, the way, a lot of, you know, the way an actress, for example, might fib about their age just to, you know, help themselves career wise. For her, it was actually more of a necessity in order to even get access to the basics.
- [31:25]
Exactly. So she was working as a lady in waiting, or basically a maid for a traveling actress until about, from 1914, about 1916. And then when the woman left the troop, the acting troupe, she looked in the schools for Zora. So she got some information. And that's how Zora discovered that she needed to be a certain age to access education. And so she did. She shaved 10 years off of her age. And she enrolled, as she said, she just showed up, enrolled in school. And yes, she sure did. And then she continued to do that. I think she may have even done it before because she was said to look much younger than her age. And so it was hard for her to get jobs as domestic, for example, when she was a teenager. So she added years before that, and then certainly to enroll in school, she removed 10 years.
- [32:22]
Jack Wilson
Absolutely right.
- [32:24]
Cheryl Hobson
And then she, it seems like she was working hard, but it also seems like she just had a real likability, a kind of charisma. And others seemed drawn to her. And it seems like once she gets into the high school and then when she goes off to college, she seems like she's becoming known, among others, as someone to keep an eye on as bound for success.
- [32:51]
Right. She met a friend, Mae Miller, at her high school at Morgan Academy. And May was the daughter of a dean at Howard University. And so she knew people who knew people, basically. And so this Mae Miller, who became a playwright, said to Zora, you are Howard material. You need to apply. So that was her reason for applying to Howard. She had to be convinced by her friend who said to her, you are it, basically. And you're right. I think once people sort of contacted with her and engaged with her and listened to her, most people were just so moved by her, just her intelligence and her ideas, et cetera. And once Alan Locke discovered, I call it discover, but. And I think perhaps he did discover her in his class, and that was it. You know, I think he and Charles S. Johnson and others, they wanted to use Zora in a way, and others to forward this idea of a new Negro. And she was a perfect model.
- [33:52]
Right. You write at one point, Hurston had no models. So she was herself kind of a pioneer. In what ways? What were her goals and what was she trying to accomplish?
- [34:07]
Her primary goal was to be a writer, and as she said, to make it as a writer. And a secondary goal was just to provide for herself and to provide herself a life that was livable and that would allow her time to read and think. She was a voracious reader. And from early on, and I think that. And she says those early sort of Nordic tales influenced her. Gulliver's Child, all of that influenced her to want to explore, to see more of the world. Right. So early reading, on the one hand, it made her aware of more, but on the other hand, she says it made her sort of disappointed with her current state. And so she always wanted more.
- [34:54]
Yeah. And did anthropology grow out of that taste for exploring and seeing other worlds and other cultures, or did that start at Howard, or was that. Not until she went to New York and fell in with some of the Columbia people.
- [35:14]
It was that. It was when she fell in with some of the Columbia people. So she was a. An English major at Howard, and then even when she transferred to Barnard, she was an English major, but she took an anthropology class. I forget the woman's name that she's studying under. And she wrote a paper, and the department shared it with Franz Boa, who founded Anthropology Department at Columbia in 1899. And he read the paper and he wanted to meet her. And I think once she met him, who she saw as a king, once she met Boa, similar to when she Met Lockett Howard, she possibility there. And Zora, she was always looking to see, you know, where she could grow and develop. And that seemed avenue. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:03]
Jack Wilson
You.
- [36:04]
Cheryl Hobson
Another quote I have here from you is as a girl and woman, if not always as a writer, Hurston understood her value early on in life was this. Did she just feel this? Did she recognize that she was a little brighter than those around her or were others praising her, encouraging her? Where did she get this self confidence and the belief she had in her own value?
- [36:32]
Well, I think from her parents. So many scholars say Lucy Pottshurst and her mother was very smart and very self assured, and she taught her children, she homeschooled her children for as long as she was able until her knowledge was sort of met with limits. Right. And she was a superintendent in the church. She. But also John Hurston. She watched her father write his sermons. She listened to his sermons. She was. She was a child of a Baptist minister, and so she saw his magic when he would go up to the pulpit and transform. And so all of their children. So Zora's one, all of them. So one became a pharmacist. So they all went on to do the great things. Zora's the one who became the writer. So she, I think she was looking around her family as well, and certainly her mother's family, who saw themselves as being above John and his family because they were land owning, et cetera. So I think it was also within her family. And then her teachers recognized it quite early. Her principal in fifth grade, actually, he showcased her talent. And to some visitors from the north, two white women who were just enamored with Zora and her abilities and so gifted her money and books and clothing, and they would continue to send her items. They were just so amazed by her abilities as a reader and a speaker. So she was praised early? Yes, she was praised early, and I think it was recognized early.
- [38:15]
Right.
- [38:16]
She was reading pretty quickly because she had all those older siblings and so. And her mother was teaching them. So she was reading at a young age. So I think it came from within her family and the community.
- [38:29]
Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Cheryl Hobson. Okay. So we're kind of. We kind of got up to the point where she is taking anthropology with the famed Franz Boas. And one of the things that interests me about her time in New York is her relationship with the other black writers. And we're kind of entering into the Harlem Renaissance era. And then also these kind of white sponsors and philanthropist types who are helping her out along the way. And what, I guess, when did she kind of first achieve success? Was there a particular essay or book that broke through and made her name, or was she kind of known as more of a student and promising scholar and starting to get this sort of attention from her peers?
- [39:52]
I think she first achieved success when Carter G. Woodson and Boa Sinhur to the south to conduct field work in 1926, still a student. And so that was her first sort of breakthrough moment. And then when she signed the contract in 1927 with her patron Mason, Charlotte Mason, that was another moment. So she was. Once she finished the field work for Woodson, she published in academic journals. And so she was gaining a footing there. She wasn't known for literature yet, but she was gaining a footing there. And then she published the 1928 essay, How It Feels to Be Colored Me and World Today, which also gave her an audience, a wider audience. And she published twice, an opportunity before, I think she even went to New York. So 1921, 22. So she has some publications, but she wasn't a known name. I don't think she really became a known name until the 1930s. Right. So. And then the two Guggenheims and the publication of In Search of Our Mother's gardens. By then, 1937, she is. She is well known.
- [41:06]
When they sent her down to the south, what exactly was she going to be writing about, what she observed? Or was she collecting folktales and stories and things like that, or what was her project?
- [41:18]
Right. She was collecting folk tales and stories and music and children's games. And then for Woodson, she was to interview Cujo Lewis, which she did in Alabama. And that was for. He was a man who was abducted at 19 years old from Africa, and it was the last slave ship that we know of to be. What is it, the Clotel. Yes. And so he was a survivor of that, and he was in his 80s when she interviewed him. So that was her job for Woodson, to interview him and then to write up. And she. That was her first meeting of him. She went back years later and interviewed him again for her own efforts. And that's where her book Barracoon came from. That book was not published in her lifetime. It came out in 2018 and was edited by the scholar Deborah Plant. So she had been working on collecting folklore for her professor and certainly for Woodson. And then those articles also came out of some of that collecting she did.
- [42:24]
Now, it seems kind of natural to me anyway, and maybe this is because she made it look natural to kind of make the move from being an anthropologist and then moving into writing fiction and essays and the things that she did later in plays. Did it seem that way to her, or did she look at it as anthropology was kind of. Did she worry she was going to get pigeonholed in that and it was going to be a hindrance? Was she able to write what she wanted to write when she wanted to write it? I guess, is the question I want to ask.
- [42:59]
No, that's a good question. Yeah. No, she wasn't. She wasn't. So while she was under contract with Mason, which was for about three and a half years or so, that material was owned by Mason. And Mason also wanted her just to focus on folklore collecting and anthropological, not the creative writing. And so she. I think for a little while, she did feel pigeonholed. She did feel. Or the constraint of her patron. And so it really wasn't. It was. It wasn't until Hurston was out of that contract that she started publishing her literary work. So the Gilded Six Bits was published in 1933, and Jonas Gore vine, her first novel, came out in 1934. So she had to come get out of that contract first. That had to end, and then she was sort of free to explore. She said. She writes in one of her letters that she had the idea for Jonas Gorbine sort of in her mind for a few years. So she was clearly thinking about these stories, even if she wasn't writing them at the time, they were in her consciousness. And certainly, I think the folklore collecting enhanced that, because you see it in the novels.
- [44:08]
Right, right. That's what I was thinking is that it seems like it would give her such a, you know, some source material. And the idea of thinking through those stories and what they meant and being able to draw upon them and kind of working with how the stories are shaped and the significance they're given and so on. But you also get the sense that it was, you know, she was a person who needed to have creative freedom, and a contract to somebody else is probably, you know, not going to last real long. And speaking of which, she was married several times. None of them seem to have lasted. What do you make of her relationships with others? Was she restless or were these just not the right choices, or what happened there?
- [44:57]
I think a combination. I think, yes, she was restless, and I think the choices. Perhaps she thought that the men would care for her and not interfere too much with her work and that they would help provide for her and she tended to draw to her men who became jealous of her work and also jealous of the people she interacted with. And so they wanted her to choose always. And they were younger. So I think sometimes, you know, if. I think. Sometimes I think, what would a psychoanalyst say about this? Right? But I think she may have also been just kind of purposely connecting with these men who ultimately would not prove. Or engaging in these relationships that would ultimately not prove sustainable. I wonder if she was self defeating in that way. And I know she craved family because her family kind of dissipated after, even though they tried to maintain connection. But they lived far apart, most of them, after her mother died. And so I think for her, a lot of it was also family. She wanted to feel that sense of having her brothers and sister around her. And that might have been also why she went for some of these younger men. I'm not sure. They were definitely talented men. They were upwardly mobile and they, they were good looking. She. She liked a good looking fellow, but. But they were incredibly jealous. And one of them had a drinking problem and there was violence that accrued in all of these relationships.
- [46:34]
Right.
- [46:35]
So, yeah.
- [46:37]
Do you get the sense that she was happy? I mean, I'll tell you that I used to, years and years ago, I used to do this blog and I had a series I would run and it was called Writers Laughing. And I would just post a picture of a writer who was laughing. And the one that I think drew the most. Well, there were a couple that drew a bunch of comments. One was Pablo Neruda Had a Bird on His Head, which was popular. And Flannery O'Connor was one that most people were surprised that I was able to find a picture of her laughing. But the one who got the most positive feedback, I think was one of Zora Neale Hurston, because her laugh in that photo, she looks so exuberant and so her eyes are dancing. And she just seems like such a big happy personality. But is that, do you think that was effect at all or affect at all? Do you think that she, deep down, was she happy? You know, she had that big personality. But what do you think was underneath?
- [47:46]
I think possibly it was affect. Part of it might have been a performance. But she seemed to me, when I read her letters, when she's working and when she has what she needs and when she's able to help her friends out, she's happy.
- [48:02]
Oh, yeah.
- [48:03]
She. It's when she. That's when she's the most happy. It's when she, you know, Someone is in need and she can't help, or when she can't access what she needs to for her work work, or when she's struggling to find a coat, for example, or shoes, that's when. But when she is in her element and with the people that she cares deeply about, she's happy. I think when she first met Langston Hughes, for example, and they spent that time together driving from the south to New York, she was incredibly happy. It shows in her letters to him when she reflects back on that moment. So, yeah, I think she did have moments, definitely. And if she could have had what she needed to sustain herself and her writing, I think we would have seen a very happy Zora. Definitely.
- [48:51]
We did an episode on that. And I've always found that to be on the relationship between Zora and Langston Hughes and it always seemed like so painful because it always struck me that she just loved the guy and he seems to have just been the sort of person who had a hard time time dealing with that after a while. And I don't know if it was necessarily anything she did, but he seemed to have kind of a predisposition to trying to keep people at a distance a bit. But it always seemed like there was a friendship that was maybe a little more one sided and it would have been nicer for Zora Neale Hurston if it hadn't been quite so much that way.
- [49:38]
Right. Absolutely. I, I, I don't know what his thought is on it. When I read, sometimes when I read her letters, I do think he might have been overwhelmed because he was younger. He was, he was much younger than Hurston and so she might have felt too, too much, like too much for him because he was quite busy. He was quite busy and he was traveling and he was trying to establish himself and he was so young.
- [50:03]
Yeah.
- [50:03]
When I remember their age difference, it makes more sense to me. Yeah.
- [50:09]
That he just needed some breathing room.
- [50:12]
Absolutely. Right. And he just drew women to him. And I think that might also have been maybe something that she didn't appreciate.
- [50:22]
Too much, that she had a bit of territoriality with him or over him and he resisted the feeling that he was getting tied down to her and her friendship.
- [50:35]
Yeah, yeah, it's possible. Right. And they share Mason as a patron for a little while.
- [50:40]
Oh, yeah.
- [50:41]
And then Mason completely cut him off. And Zora aligned with Mason and so I think quite a bit went to work on that relationship. But she said it was the biggest regret of her life. She said to her first husband, Harold Sheen, in A letter, I think, in 1953. What I love about Zora and Harold Sheen is they remained in contact. They were friends. They never stopped talking to one another as friends. And so she would share some of that with him.
- [51:11]
Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about. Their eyes were watching.
- [51:16]
Jack Wilson
God.
- [51:16]
Cheryl Hobson
Yes.
- [51:17]
We consider that now to be just a classic novel. Was it viewed that way upon publication or even during her lifetime? Or was it not recognized until later?
- [51:30]
What was the Book of the month, I think. Or was that Jonas Gordon? I believe it was. And also she. It was translated into Italian soon after. So I think it did have some popular appeal. But the critics in the U.S. alan Locke, for example, her former mentor and others, they kind of panned it. They thought it was homespun, and some even thought it as embarrassing to black Americans. So. But it was published at the height of what was called protest literature. So you might think of Richard Wright's native son and black boy. So when you think about what the difference in those novels, people were seeing it as being less, if that makes sense. Yeah.
- [52:13]
Yeah. And Richard Wright may be getting credit for. Well, this is urban. This is. This is almost. It kind of is an elevated literature in a way of. You could look at Dostoevsky or Kafka or.
- [52:28]
Jack Wilson
You know, that's the idea.
- [52:29]
Cheryl Hobson
Right.
- [52:30]
People like that. And so maybe it was viewed in that context or with that comparison, people might have missed it.
- [52:39]
I think also the focus on what people deemed a love affair, which is really not the focus of the novel, but that was part of the criticism that at a time of when there's so much more pertinent to write about in the nation at the time, why focus on this? Right. It just seemed right. That's the way people were seeing it, at least. But if you stay with the novel, you see all she's doing in it. But there's so much there. She requires close reading. It's true of Hurston then and now.
- [53:09]
Yeah. Was she able to live solely from her writing? Did she end up taking on other sponsors or having to take on other kinds of work?
- [53:20]
She worked for the Federal Writers Project.
- [53:23]
Oh, huh. Right.
- [53:25]
So she did that and made a pretty good living for the time she was working for them. But she would. I mean, she worked as a domestic, a maid. She really did have. She was a ghostwriter on a memoir for Senator. She had to take on quite a few jobs to help support her. So, no, her writing didn't sustain her, and she wasn't able to save. And what she did have, she often Gave away. I remember reading somewhere, she gave a big chunk of money, a lump sum of money she didn't have, to her nephew, to her youngest brother's child to help him buy a car. So she was always. And she helped her nieces, two of her nieces who lived with her until they got married in the 30s. And she would always say, I think Bruce Nugent, one of the Harlem Renaissance writers, he would always say, hurston could tell if you were hungry. She wouldn't let you go hungry. And if you needed anything, you know, she just. She. If she had it, she would give it. And even if she didn't have it, she would give it. And so she know, writing. The writing didn't sustain her at all. But she would take on jobs to make enough money and then get back to her projects, basically.
- [54:30]
Right. And then had she kind of fallen out of the public eye by the time when she passed away? Was she at all well known at that point?
- [54:41]
She was. She was known. And many people knew of her. Right. So she had. I mean, all the. All these famous writers that we know of today who were writing during her time, they knew her, but the public wasn't that much aware of her work. And I think with the rise of black arts in the 60s and with Hurston's refusal to be anything other than herself and her politics, the way people sort of regarded her politics in the 50s and 60s, she fell out of favor because she wouldn't align within a particular group. She was a thinker. And I think she wouldn't allow herself to be pigeonholed in any way ideologically and personally.
- [55:27]
Right. Do you think she's misunderstood even today in terms of her politics? And a lot of her positions were kind of more subtle than I think she's given credit for. They almost feel like they're used and sometimes misused by people.
- [55:44]
Right. I think Hurston, if you read her from the first publication, all of her essays, if you see all of her plays, all of her. All of her work, her and her. Her body of work, she has remained the same. She's been consistent throughout. She says in her 1928 essay, She's Cosmic. That's the way she conceives herself. I am me. I am me.
- [56:08]
Right?
- [56:09]
Right. I only feel my color in these spaces. Right. But I am me. And that is who she is. And I think in a national landscape that wants you to be one thing or another, it was hard. It made it difficult for her to be palatable to people who want you to claim something. So, yes, I think she is misunderstood. I do.
- [56:30]
Yeah. You know, she has that passage where she talks about it just seems almost alien to her way of thinking that white people would take this pride in Edison when black people take pride in George Washington Carver. And she was sort of saying, well, if you're doing that, does that mean you have to feel the guilt or the shame when someone from that race does something awful? And she's kind of saying, you know, there's a lot more awful people out there than Edison's and Carver's.
- [57:02]
Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I. I think how. How is it possible to be yourself in a landscape where. Or to even. Because she was herself. She absolutely was. But to live that self freely. Right. Without hindrances in all sorts of ways. So people. I think of Fanny Hearst's letter to the Guggenheim foundation in 1934. She didn't get that first one because of that letter where Fannie Hirst says something like, you know, she has no work. I mean, it's a weird. I forget how she says. It's not that she doesn't have a work ethic, it's that she basically, she's not reliable. And so by the time she applies again, she doesn't ask Fanny Hearst for a letter. She asked Edwin Grover at Rollins College and Carl Van Becketen, and they write exceptional letters. And she gets at Guggenheim, I think, because she wouldn't submit to any limited ideas of herself as other than human. People have a very difficult time with that, especially from a woman, and in particular from a black woman of her generation who is also an intellectual and an artist and who doesn't rely on others for her to make it through the world. I mean, other than her patron, but who relies on herself. She would not accept favors from people. She had a hard time receiving anything from anyone that was gifted.
- [58:24]
Right. Did writing this book change your mind about her in any ways? Did you find anything in the research that surprised you?
- [58:33]
I. What happened writing this book for me was I realized more and more how difficult it is to pin a person down, a writer in particular, as free, you know, and as complex. And I. As is Hurston, and I grew to respect and admire her that much more. I think I had a kind of cursory knowledge of her, and it was built up in my imagination. And the more I read of her and her ideas and the more they took root. She just transformed me, I have to say. She truly did. And she changed the way I thought of her and the way I teach her work. I think so, yeah. I. So Any surprises would have been the surprise for me was the. She didn't marry the fellow who. Who influenced the character, the creation of the character. Tea Cake. He was the one of the lovers that she did not marry. So I was. I was sort of perplexed by that because she was quick to marry.
- [59:38]
Yeah.
- [59:38]
But there must have been in something in her that knew, no, don't do that. She says she ran from him because she didn't recognize herself. And so she must have known that this could have been the one. And when I think of that in the context for other. The other men, the ones that she did choose to marry, it makes me realize that Hurston was very clear on things. Even when she was in a state of confusion, she knew what not to do somehow for herself.
- [60:16]
And you ended up, it sounds like, admiring her more. And do you feel like you understood her better or do you feel like more mysteries revealed themselves?
- [60:28]
I think there are more mysteries. I feel like I need to spend more time with her essays. I spent so much time with her literature and all the biographies on her, etc. I need to just really ground myself in her essays. And I think, you know, that could be. That's another book because you get this other perspective, which is coming out straight out of the woman. And she's often writing for pay, which I found out. I realized she didn't get paid most of the time for the articles, but she was still writing them. If she had something to say and she couldn't find an avenue for it, she find another way to get that idea out. So I think my recognition of her as being sort of recognized in other countries at the time that she's writing and publishing and alive, that was just such a wonderful thing to know that she was alive and she was aware that she was celebrated and recognized for her talents in her lifetime.
- [61:27]
Yeah. So that feeling she had even as a girl, that there was. There was something special about her and she had a value that ended up being validated.
- [61:41]
Absolutely right. Yes. And before she left here, one of the things that I most appreciate about her is that before she died, when she moved to Fort Pierce to work as a journalist, she was known in the community. And the local children would come to her house and they'd often bring her food, and she would tell them stories, and she was just trying to pour everything that she had into them, and she would remind them to write, write, write. She'd always sort of work to convince them to write it down, to keep a journal. So I just really appreciate that. I like the spirit of that person who wants to pass it on.
- [62:22]
Right. Well, I like everything I've heard. And I also kind of liked hearing that you think there's another book here, because I would love to have you come back and talk about her essays. But this book is called Zora Neale A Critical Life. Cheryl Hopson, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [62:42]
Jack, thank you.
- [62:51]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Cheryl Hopson for joining me. Wasn't she fantastic? And to Julia for helping me by sending me that beautiful email. I have retrained my own focus thanks to Julia telling me about doing the same. We have Mike Palindrome. On Thursday. We'll be looking at a story about Chinese immigrants by Sui Sin Far. And Mike had some thoughts. He didn't love the story. Is it okay if I'm really critical of it? He texted me and then followed up by saying tastefully. Then his next text was a picture of a hot dog he was about to eat from Devil Dogs in Chicago, where he was traveling on business. It's hard to keep up with Mike sometimes, but his response to the story was interesting and insightful, and it came from a personal place. Speaking of which, we have Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. After that, he wrote from a personal place. And Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote from a personal place or personal places, one might say. And then Henry James. Again, a gift to help Julia get through February up there in Woodstock. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.