“I dashed into the kitchen and told Mama how the lake had talked with me, and invited me to walk all over it. I told the lake I was afraid of getting drowned, but the lake assured me it wouldn’t think of doing me like that. No, indeed! Come right on and have a walk. Well, I stepped out on the lake and walked all over it. It didn’t even wet my feet. I could see all the fish and things swimming around under me, and they all said hello, but none of them bothered me. Wasn’t that nice?”
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: A Memoir
A girl I was chatting with at a networking event last year commented on the fact that I’d come into the city to attend it alone. A couple more exchanges in, she was even more impressed to hear that I’d gone to a concert in Italy by myself that summer, and that I’d been going on solo trips abroad pretty frequently since I was 19.
Only a number of years after moving back to the UK from Chile did I ever consider that my travelling might be labelled “brave.” At least not for the factors people instantly associate with that trait. Things like danger, getting lost, or being somewhere, anywhere, with no one you know by your side.
Most of my travel choices felt more to me like a given than a decision that even needed to be made.
My train of thought and actions would flow like so: the art forms, people, or histories of a particular place would capture my intrigue and spark affinity within me. I’d imagine how fulfilling it’d be to spend a slice of my time or a season of life there. So crystal clear was my vision of this future, it would feel both destined and unexceptional despite my enthusiasm. I’d then get to planning the logistics.
Since reading about her life last year, I haven’t stopped thinking about Zora Neale Hurston’s resoluteness.
A glorious writer, anthropologist, and folklorist, Hurston wrote about the experiences, cultural practices, and inner lives of people, mostly Black people. Her biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, penned masterfully by Valerie Boyd (RIP), was my favourite read of 2022.
One of the fascinating details about Hurston’s life that I keep coming back to is how she, a Black American woman, took several solo research road trips through the Jim Crow South for her academic and literary pursuits.
Her first trip as an anthropologist was in 1927, meaning she drove through unfamiliar Southern towns at a time when lynchings and other barbarities against Black people were commonplace. This compounded the risk of rape and other misogynistic violence any woman on the road would face.
Armed with a pistol for protection, she’d cover long stretches of deserted roads, locate private homes to sleep in at each stop, and take in the bigoted, oppressive glares of Jim Crow America and its adherents.
And you want to talk about bravery?
Not long after this journey, she’d travel to Floridian villages to collect folkloric expressions and stories, after being inspired by the memory of childhood songs.
On a later visit to Miami, Bahamian music and dance captivated her, and she sailed to Nassau to discover more that same month.
Upon being awarded a $2,000 Guggenheim grant in 1936, she went to the Caribbean (to Jamaica then Haiti) and immersed herself in its people’s conjure practices and philosophies.
Commenting on her frustrations with the standard of her writings, Zora Neale Hurston once said,
“when one has a burning bush inside one keeps on trying, whether or not.”
From Zora Neale Hurston’s letter to Guggenheim Memorial Foundation administrator Dr. Henry Allen Moe (Kaplan, 2002, p.394.)
I wonder if any of her desires to embark on those journeys also felt like a burning bush. If I could, I’d ask her if any fears around doing so were conscious “nots” she had to overcome. If they were, how big or how burdensome did they feel?
That is, did she see her choices as brave?
Something else I’d ask is this:
How or how much do you think growing up in one of your country’s first all-Black, self-governing towns influenced your ability to journey into new and risky places?
My thought is that Hurston’s childhood growing up in Eatonville, Florida, where she was visibly surrounded by Black excellence, by Black mundanity, and Black everything-in-between, and where she was relatively sheltered from the direct aggressions of Jim Crow, may have helped nurture her resolve and an internal sense of safety.
I remember a conversation between James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, where Baldwin said that Paris, his second “home”, was like an asylum: “It’s a place where I can work. I have a lot of work to do and if you are in a situation where you’re always resisting and resenting…you can’t write a book. You can’t write a sentence.”
Unlike Baldwin leaving New York City in the 1920s, Hurston wasn’t travelling to find a psychologically freer context in which to work. And as per Boyd’s telling, Hurston grew up especially free to express her deepest stories and thoughts. Perhaps her venturing towards racist contexts with her powerful pen, very little protection, and just the right amount of resources to get by, is somehow connected to this aforementioned inner security that her unique childhood location may have contributed to.
There’s one last thing I’d rush to ask Zora in this impossible scenario where I’d flood her with my assumptions and questions:
What would you say and what stories would you tell to Black women and girls in 2023 who dream of exploring more daringly and widely than their present fears will allow them?
– Rinu
Sources
Boyd, V., 2003. Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Scribner. New York, United States.
Britannica, 2023. James Baldwin | Biography, Books, Essays, Plays, & Facts | Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Baldwin (Accessed 22 February 2023)
Hurston, Z. N., 1942. Dust Tracks on a Road: A Memoir. J. B. Lippincott. Philadelphia, United States.
Kaplan, C., 2002. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Anchor Books. New York, United States.