Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: Oof, Mason, ah, was a handful. Charles King, Political Scientist: It's not until she becomes an undergraduate at Howard University that Hurston feels like the gears begin to turn again, and her life restarts. Half of a yellow sun streaming vostfr online. She arrives in New York and at Barnard at exactly the perfect time. Narrator: "Papa Franz" wrote, "On the whole her methods are more journalistic than scientific and I am not under the impression that she is just the right caliber for a Guggenheim Fellowship. " Narrator: From Alabama, Hurston headed off to Florida where men worked at felling pine trees, manning sawmill camps, boiling turpentine and mining phosphate.
Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: The Fort Pierce community in which she lived, loved and adored her. You can buy "A Raisin in the Sun" on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Microsoft Store, DIRECTV, AMC on Demand, Vudu as download or rent it on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft Store, DIRECTV, AMC on Demand online. She honestly did lose somebody she saw as a kind of spiritual mother. In return, they told her stories, sang work songs and played blues riffs on the guitar. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. Half of a yellow sun movie. After writer Alice Walker read Their Eyes Were Watching God, she began a journey into Hurston's life, work and death that catalyzed another Hurston rescue—this one led by literary scholars, Black women. By May 1919 she was a high school graduate ready to enroll in Howard University. Narrator: Despite her publisher's robust promotional campaign and rave reviews in national publications, Their Eyes Were Watching God did not sell well. Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: That was devastating for the young Zora. At the time, this was a revolutionary, and as Ruth Benedict would have put it, an "undisciplined" way of doing social science.
But she's still connected to Boas, and she still wants to stay in Papa Franz's good graces. Narrator: Mason supported other writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Howard professor Alain Locke. Why didn't I try over there? " And it would drive her father bananas. Music ("College on a Hilltop"): … loyal be and true….
And as I understand she was the only African American woman there. Never come back 'til the Fourth of July… Come pay the money… Come pay the money…. Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: Black people understood themselves to be creators of culture and art and literature, and make important contributions to how American society understood, thought about and related to Black people in America. Watch Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space | American Experience | Official Site | PBS. Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston did not want to be in another relationship dependent like, um, Charlotte Osgood Mason, so she was like, "Peace out. María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: She starts at Barnard looking to become a teacher, which was the expected path of an upwardly mobile African American woman at the time, except she has this brilliant creativity, and a storehouse of stories and tales from Eatonville.
Hurston promoted the work, which helped establish her as a prominent literary figure. Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: I just don't think the American reading public was interested in the critical assessment of Caribbean history and history of dictatorship and colonialism. It is a "lovely book, " stated a review in The New York Herald Tribune, praising Hurston as "an author that writes with her head and her heart. Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: She alienated a lot of people. He is the gatekeeper of anthropology who also is an influential and an important antiracist. Narrator: In Spring 1940, Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist, arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina to study religious trances. Am keeping close tab on expressions of double meaning too, also compiling lists of double words. Zora (VO): The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. She was a published writer, friends with Fannie Hurst and part of the ambitious younger generation of Harlem's artists which made progressive minded Barnard students eager to know her.
Narrator: Most reviews were mixed or negative. Narrator: Six days after signing with Mason, Hurston boarded a train heading to Alabama with a guarantee of 200 dollars a month, money to purchase a car, and a plan for year long fieldwork in the South. That is to say, she's someone from the communities that she is studying. Until, that is, the family gets an unexpected financial windfall. She's really articulating a theory of how she views Negro culture at that moment in time.
She is not a member of that society. Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: Hurston was different than others; she'd come from the South—she was funny. A Raisin in the Sun(1961). Boas had convinced pre-eminent Black scholar Carter G. Woodson, director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and wealthy sociologist and anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons to fund her trip. She mixed memory, history, personal experience, fiction, and research into a story told through the eyes of a southern Black American girl-turned-woman named Janie Crawford, who lives part of her life in Eatonville. Narrator: Something of a celebrity on campus, Hurston later remarked that she was "Barnard's sacred black cow. " Mason, whose grandmotherly appearance belied her imperious ways, insisted that her beneficiaries call her "Godmother. If you're going to study Hoodoo or Voodoo, you had to do it from the inside, and so, she went through at least four initiation rituals. Like, we're not going to do this, because I've been there before.
Narrator: Despite the show's promising reviews, no producer picked it up. Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: She said, "I have to keep going and answer the questions about my people. " Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Franz Boas had a good eye for talent, and he didn't care if they were Black, white, women, male, or the like. Their Eyes Were Watching God. They don't have to look at the rail 'cause that's the captain's job to see when it's right. I feel like she knows it's going to be an important book. Zora (VO): Darling Godmother, At last "Barracoon" is ready for your eyes. Narrator: Hurston's tendency to speak her mind entangled her in the emerging national civil rights debates. Narrator: Collecting did not go as planned for one of the newest members of the American Folk-Lore Society. Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography is itself, "featherbed resistance": she's wearing a mask; it's a pack of lies. Hughes told her he would put in a good word with his New York patron.
I am knee deep in it with a long way to go. Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: When it comes to Haiti and Jamaica, the Caribbean space, she is very much an outsider. "The major problem…as I see it" Hurston wrote in her application, "is the collection of Negro folk material in as thorough a manner as possible, as soon as possible. It was an auspicious meeting for the aspiring writer-teacher. It turns out that the woman had a vendetta against Zora, but the people who abandoned her never really come back into her life. Text: After 87 years, Zora Neale Hurston's book Barracoon was published in 2018 and became a bestseller. And this time, she only asked one anthropologist to serve as a recommender. Zora (VO): What will be the end? I just get in the crowd with the people if they're signing, and I listen as best I can and I start to join in with a phrase or two and then I finally get so I can sing a verse and then I keep on until I learn all the songs, all the verses, then I sing them back to the people until they tell me that I can sing them just like them and then I take part and try it out on different people who already know the song until they are quite satisfied with that I know it and then I carry it in my memory. Her Americanness really comes through in how she writes that work. Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: He was one of the first people that took living with indigenous people seriously.
Narrator: On January 10th 1932 The Great Day premiered on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre. Work all day for money, fight all night for love. María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: The assumption behind participant observation was always that you were studying, as the anthropologist, a different culture. Charles King, Political Scientist: Hurston is reporting on a set of experiences that she had, using the first person. Benedict assessed that Hurston had "neither the temperament nor the training to present this material in an orderly manner when it is gathered nor to draw valid historical conclusions from it. " And she wanted to be a part of that. She fought for Black women in her writing, in her anthropology. Another had her lie naked and fasting for sixty-nine hours, experiencing strange and altered dreams. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea.