Black people were not allowed to attend the 1933 performance of Zora's play From Sun to Sun at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
Meanwhile, Zora had written a short story that she had been thinking about for four years. Called "The Gilded Six-Bits," it was a love story about a married couple in Eatonville. Zora showed it to Robert Wunsch, the Rollins College theater director who had helped her stage From Sun to Sun. Professor Wunsch was captivated by "The Gilded Six-Bits." He read it aloud to his ereative writing class and also mailed a copy to Martha Foley and Whit Burnett, a married couple who edited Story magazine. Foley and Burnett also liked it and sent Zora twenty dollars (equal to about three hundred dollars in today's money) as payment to publish it. When it appeared in the August 1933 issue of Story, "The Gilded Six-Bits" became the first story or article Zora had published in nearly two years.
Story was a prestigious magazine, and editors at major book publishing houses combed its pages searching for new talent. The first copies of the August issue were barely off the presses when Zora received letters from four publishers asking whether she had a novel they might consider. For years, Zora had mostly experienced disappointment and rejection as a writer. Now, thanks to a gem of a magazine story, publishers were courting her.
There was one big problem, though. Not only had Zora not completed a novel, but she hadn't even started one—"not the first word," she admitted in her autobiography. However, she wasn't about to let that stop her. The letter that most appealed to her was from Bertram Lippincott, head of one of the country's leading publishers, the J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia. Zora wrote back saying that she was in the midst of writing a novel, which was almost true, for an idea for a novel had been swimming around in her head for a long time.
A few days after she answered Mr. Lippincott's letter, Zora moved a short way from Eatonville to Sanford, Florida, where nothing would distract her from writing her novel. For $1.50 a week she rented a small house where she didn't do much except write, eat, and sleep. After two weeks her money ran out and she had to regularly borrow fifty cents a week from a cousin just to buy weekly groceries. Her writing output was remarkable, though, and in only three months she had completed her novel, which she called Jonah's Gourd Vine. Authors generally do their best when writing about what they know. Zora's first novel was about a subject close to her heart: her parents' marriage. The novel's two main characters—John and Lucy—have the same names as her parents. There is even a deathbed scene modeled after the real-life instance when her mother asked Zora to stop the neighbors from removing the pillow from under her head.
By early October 1933, her manuscript was finished and typed. However, when Zora took it to the office of an express mail company, she found that she did not have enough money to ship the manuscript to the Lippincott Company. "It cost $1.83 to mail, and I did not have it," she wrote in her autobiography. She borrowed two dollars from an acquaintance, and on October 3 she sent off her novel.
Zora had found the town of Sanford so conducive to writing that she decided to stay there while awaiting Mr. Lippincott's decision on Jonah's Gourd Vine. Besides, she had a one-day job coming up in Sanford. The Seminole County Chamber of Commerce offered her twenty-five dollars to assemble part of her From Sun to Sun cast and perform the musical from a moving truck with a loud-speaker system. That way everyone in the town could enjoy the music. The date chosen for the mobile performance was October 16—a day that turned out to be one of the most important in Zoras life.
This photo of Zora was taken in 1935 during the Lomax-Hurston-Barnicle folklore-collecting expedition in Florida.
Early on that Monday morning, the woman who owned the house Zora was renting knocked on the door and demanded that she pay eighteen dollars in back rent that she owed. She didn't have the money just yet, Zora explained, but she would be able to pay her debt late that afternoon after she received the twenty-five dollars for her performance. Saying that she doubted Zora would ever have as much as twenty-five dollars, the landlady ordered her to leave the house immediately. Zora grabbed her clothes and her few other belongings and found shelter in the home of her uncle, the Reverend Isaiah Hurston, who also lived in Sanford.
At eleven a.m., Zora and her cast climbed onto the sound truck and for the next few hours were driven through the streets of Sanford as they performed portions of From Sun to Sun. Sometime in the afternoon a Western Union messenger tracked down Zora on the sound truck and handed her a telegram, which she put away for safekeeping. At three p.m., Zora and her cast completed their musical tour and were paid by the Chamber of Commerce as promised. They were also presented with gift certificates allowing them to receive a certain amount of free merchandise from various stores in Sanford.
Alan Lomax photographed Zora Neale Hurston, Rochelle French, and guitarist Gabriel Brown in Zora's hometown of Eatonville, Florida, during their 1935 expedition.
Zora needed shoes, so she took her gift certificate to a shoe store. She was trying on a pair of shoes when she suddenly remembered the telegram. In her autobiography she described the great moments that followed:
When I opened it and read that Jonah's Gourd Vine was
accepted and that Lippinicott was offering me a $200 advance,
I tore out of that place with one old shoe and one new one on,
and ran to the Western Union office. Lippincott had asked for an
answer by wire and they got it! TERMS ACCEPTED.
"I never expect to have a greater thrill than that wire gave me," added Zora, for, to an author, few events in life are as exciting as the first acceptance of a book for publication. The two-hundred-dollar advance—money paid up front before publication—also meant a great deal to Zora, for it lifted her out of poverty, at least for the time being.
Her writer friends had undoubtedly encouraged Zora with the old saying "Once your first book is accepted, the others will be easier to sell." This was certainly true for Zora. She sent her folklore book Mules and Men to the Lippincott Company, which accepted it within a few months of buying Jonah's Gourd Vine. This meant that, after years of rejections, Zora suddenly had two books pending. That number quickly jumped to five, for Bertram Lippincott was so enthralled by her writing that he sent Zora a contract for her next three books even though she hadn't started any of them yet.
The Lippincott editors decided that Jonah's Gourd Vine was in good shape and scheduled it for publication in May 1934. But they thought that Mules and Men read too much like a textbook and needed rewriting. Having already devoted seven years to researching, writing, and revising Mules and Men, Zora spent a few more months in a cottage near Sanford, livening up the manuscript.
Zora posed for this photo at the 1937 New York Times Book Fair.
In the months before Jonah's Gourd Vine was to be published, Zora began to worry. What if her first novel received a poor reception? That was a real possibility, especially since she already had two strikes against her: She was black and female. At the time, most American authors were white males. Of the tiny percentage who were black, nearly all were men. A black woman author was so rare that Zora was afraid she would be treated like a circus sideshow.
To help her chances of being taken seriously, Zora asked her friend, the famous author Fannie Hurst, to write an introduction to Jonah's Gourd Vine. Miss Hurst did so, but in her preface she made a sly joke at Zora's expense. "A brilliant spade has turned over rich new earth," Miss Hurst wrote. "Spade" is a derogatory name for a black person, so Hurst was poking fun at Zora's race. If one of her best white friends made a cruel joke about her being black, what could Zora expect from the critics? Zora was so nervous about how Jonah's Gourd Vine would be received that just a week before its publication she confessed to Carl Van Vechten that she was "scared to death of reviews."
Zora needn't have worried, for when Jonah's Gourd Vine appeared in May it received glowing reviews. The New York Times Book Review called the book "the most vital and original novel about the American Negr
o that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race." When her folklore book Mules and Men appeared in October 1935, it too received fine reviews.
With both a fiction and a nonfiction book to her credit, Zora Neale Hurston had emerged as a new voice in American literature.
10. "I Wrote It in Seven Weeks": Their Eyes Were Watching God
ALTHOUGH PLENTY OF PRAISE was heaped on Zora for her first two books, neither fame nor fortune accompanied it. In all, her advances for signing to do her first five books with Lippincott probably totaled only about a thousand dollars. While the money enabled her to buy a car and pay her debts, it wasn't enough to keep her going for long. Furthermore, during her entire writing career none of her books sold more than a few thousand copies. This meant that her royalties (her share of the proceeds from the sale of her books) were typically only a few hundred dollars per year. For Zora to keep writing, she would need additional sources of income.
During the mid-1930s, Zora earned a little money by writing magazine articles and stories. In 1934 she wrote an article for the American Mercury titled "You Don't Know Us Negroes" that lambasted white authors who wrote about black people without knowing what they were really like. The article would have been one of the most controversial pieces Zora ever published, but the American Mercury chose not to print it—perhaps because the magazine's white readers would have found it insulting. But Zora was just as likely to criticize black people as white. On December 29, 1934, the Washington Tribune ran her article "Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent." In it she upbraided black people for failing to take pride in their own culture.
For a few months in 1934 Zora taught drama at Bethune-Cookman College, a black school in Daytona Beach, Florida. That job didn't last long, mainly because Zora clashed with Mary McLeod Bethune, who had founded the school in 1904 and who was widely considered to be the nation's foremost black woman. Mrs. Bethune assigned Zora the job of presenting a pageant to celebrate her school's thirtieth anniversary. Instead of allowing Zora to create the pageant herself, however, Mrs. Bethune handed her a script written by another faculty member. Zora thought the script was terrible—embarrassingly so.
Not only that, but Mrs. Bethune allowed other members of the faculty to help Zora direct the pageant. "One day eight people were trying to direct one scene at the same time," Zora explained in a letter. "Anyway the performance was just some students stumbling around on the stage." Because of incidents like this, Zora soon quit the Bethune-Cookman faculty.
In the fall of 1934, Zora was offered five hundred dollars by a group in Chicago to present Singing Steel, a new folk concert she had written that was based on her earlier musicals The Great Day and From Sun to Sun. Zora drove to the Windy City, where she stayed in a YWCA. She not only saved money by living at the Y, but recruited people she met there to sing and dance in her show. While rehearsing the show, Zora also found time to speak before wornen's clubs and at a Chicago bookstore about her work. Then on November 23 and 24, Zora presented Singing Steel at a large Chicago theater.
The audience for Singing Steel included some officials from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which granted money for worthy projects. These officials thought that Zora's folklore work deserved support, and they encouraged her to apply for a Rosenwald grant to study for her doctorate in anthropology at New York's Columbia University. Becoming Dr. Hurston would help her gain wider acceptance as a writer, Zora believed, and in December she applied for and was promised a $3,000 grant to study for her doctorate at Columbia. This was truly a huge sum—equal to about $45,000 in today's money.
Eager to begin her studies after New Year's Day of 1935, Zora drove from Chicago to New York almost immediately upon learning that she had been awarded the grant. At the last moment, though, the Rosenwald Fund cut Zora's grant to seven hundred dollars—not enough for her to complete her doctorate degree. In order to at least receive the reduced amount, Zora attended classes occasionally at Columbia over the next few months, but she used most of the money to support herself while she wrote.
Although she now considered Florida her home, Zora made periodic trips to New York to attend a few classes at Columbia and to visit friends and promote her books. But she had another reason to spend time in the big city. During the mid-1930s the man to whom she referred as "the real love affair of my life" lived in New York. In her writings, Zora referred to him as P.M.P., but later research by her biographer Robert Hemenway revealed that his name was Percival McGuire Punter.
Percy, as she called him, had been born in New York City in 1912. The two had actually met back in 1931, when Percy had been one of the singers in Zora's production of The Great Day, her folk musical that had lasted just a single day at the John Golden Theatre. At that time, Zora had recently divorced Herbert Sheen and she wasn't interested in beginning a serious relationship with anyone. But more than three years later when Zora came to New York to begin collecting her Rosenwald Fund money, she and Percy met again and began dating.
In several ways, Zora and Percy were an unlikely pair. First, there was a huge age difference, for she was forty-four years old while he was only twenty-three. They came from vastly different backgrounds—Percy from the nation's biggest city and Zora from little Eatonville, Florida. Another difference was that Zora had established a career for herself. Percy, on the other hand, was thinking of studying for the ministry but wasn't at all sure about his future path in life. He worked at some kind of menial job while attending Columbia University in quest of his master's degree.
For a while these differences didn't interfere with their romance. "He was tall, dark brown, magnificently built," Zora wrote in her autobiography. "But his looks only drew my eyes. I did not fall in love with him just for that. He had a fine mind and that intrigued me. I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute Jump."
After a few months, though, their love affair ran into snags. Percy didn't have much money, so sometimes he walked more than fifty blocks between his and Zora's apartments to visit her. One night, Percy was ready to start the long walk home when Zora suddenly felt sorry for him and offered to lend him a quarter until his payday so that he could take public transportation. Percy was insulted. What did Zora think he was, a cream puff? He was a man and he didn't need charity to visit the woman he loved.
"I love myself when I am laughing," Zora wrote. "And then again when I am looking mean and impressive."
They had more serious disagreements. Percy was the jealous type and didn't like Zora even smiling at another man. In her apartment Zora had some photographs that her friend Carl Van Vechten had taken of her. While thanking Carl, whom she called "Pink-Toe" because of his light skin, Zora had written: "I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive." Percy pointed to a picture of Zora looking "mean and impressive" and said that he wanted her to look like that when she was with other people. The laughing and smiling Zora was to be only for him.
Their biggest clash was over her career. Percy was jealous that Zora hobnobbed with celebrities and always seemed to be going to teas and luncheons with Annie Nathan Meyer, Fannie Hurst, Bertram Lippincott, and Carl Van Vechten. Sometimes Percy accompanied her to these events, but he would just sit in a corner and sulk because he felt left out. After a while he refused to go with Zora to her literary get-togethers. In fact, he insisted that if Zora wanted to continue their relationship, she must give up her career and marry him.
Giving up writing for any man was impossible for Zora. "That one thing I could not do," she explained in her autobiography. "I had things clawing inside of me that must be said." Despite her deep love for Percy, she refused to surrender to his demand. Instead, she gave up "the real love affair" of her life in the spring of 1935. Later, Zora's lingering feelings for Percy would inspire her most famous book.
That June, right after she and Percy parted, Zora was hired to help two folklorists collect African American folk music in the South. One was Professor Mary Elizabeth Barnicle of New
York University. The other was Alan Lomax, the twenty-year-old son and assistant to John Lomax, a prominent folklorist at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Zora led Professor Barnicle and young Lomax to African American communities in Georgia and Florida, where they made recordings of numerous folksingers. In her hometown of Eatonville, Zora arranged for an acquaintance of hers to play the guitar for Lomax and Barnicle. After hearing him play, Alan Lomax wrote: "Miss Hurston introduced us to the finest Negro guitarist I have ever heard, better even than Leadbelly." He was referring to Huddie "Leadbelly" Led' better, whom John and Alan Lomax had discovered in 1934 when he was an inmate of a Louisiana prison. Paroled into the Lomaxes' custody because of his talent as a folksinger, guitarist, and composer, Leadbelly by 1935 was on his way to becoming a performing and recording star. For Alan Lomax to rate the Eaton' ville musician "better even than Leadbelly" was enormous praise, but the man, whose name was Gabriel Brown, never gained fame comparable to Leadbelly's.
Unfortunately, Zora and Professor Barnicle did not get along. The last straw for Zora occurred when Barnicle insisted on photographing a young Eatonville boy eating a watermelon. For many years white people had portrayed black people happily eating watermelon in drawings, stories, and movies, and Zora was upset that Barnicle was perpetuating the stereotype. The two women argued over the picture. Zora became so angry that she quit as the guide for Lomax and Barnicle's folk'song collecting expedition.
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