research haul: Zora and friends
"Now I was in New Orleans and I asked." - Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935)
Scholar Kelsey Moore reminded me that it is Hoodoo Heritage Month. We are reading Jenny Sharpe’s Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss in the Black World Seminar. A good time to revisit Zora.
“Zora Neale Hurston, the Florida Negro novelist, has signed onto the project and will soon be paying us a visit. Zora has been fêted by New York literary circles, and is given to putting on certain airs, including the smoking of cigarettes in the presence of white people. So we must all make allowances for Zora.”
- Stetson Kennedy, “Mark of Zora” A Florida Treasure Hunt: Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942 | Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/collections/florida-folklife-from-the-works-progress-administration/articles-and-essays/a-florida-treasure-hunt/mark-of-zora/
Reading Jenny Sharpe invoke Erna Brodber invoke Zora and the power of recorders in accessing the spirit world led me to an essay by Stetson Kennedy and posted by the Library of Congress. And it had this gem: Eartha White speaking to God:
“When I pushed the playback button after the first stanza (to make sure the recorder was recording, but also as an infallible means of turning the most shy into ham actors), Eartha White, founder of the mission named for her mother, commanded: "Hold it right there! I want to offer up a little prayer."
“What she prayed was: "Dear Lord, this is Eartha White talkin' to you again . . . . I just want to thank you for giving mankind the intelligence to make such a marvelous machine, and a President like Franklin D. Roosevelt who cares about preserving the songs people sing."
Zora’s New Orleans travels: Zora Hurston, “Hoodoo in America.” The Journal of American Folklore 44, no. 174 (1931): 317–417. https://doi.org/10.2307/535394. [Link]
Mona Lisa Saloy notes Hurston was given a $1400 scholarship from the Carter G. Woodson Foundation to do her anthropological work.1 Thanks to research by Saloy we have Hurston saying this in a letter to Langston Hughes in 1928:
“I have landed in the kingdom of Marie Laveau and expect to wear her crown someday - Conjure Queen as you suggested.”
And if I take Saloy right, we also must thank Mrs. Naomi Grooms, who Saloy interviewed, and who was Hurston’s friend and assistant during her time in the city.
There is no end to this post. My obsession with Zora, if you know me, you know goes back to the #AntiJemimas, and goes on and on and on.
xo, jmj
Mona Lisa Saloy, "Zora Neale Hurston on the River Road: Portrait of Algiers, New Orleans, and her Fieldwork" Louisiana Folklife https://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/lfmhurston.html