Zora Neale Hurston and Questions of Scholarship

The New Negro (1925), Alain Locke's anthology of writings about black America's enlightenment and transformation, includes "T'appin (Terrapin)," a folktale Arthur Huff Fauset collected from "Cugo Lewis, Plateau, Alabama. Brought to America from West Coast Africa, 1859." "T'appin say, 'King, we in te'bul condition on de earth. We can't git nothin' to eat."¹ Fauset makes the point that, in order to counter the distortions of even well-meant adaptations of Negro folklore, specifically Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, there was "a strong need of a scientific collecting of Negro folklore before the original sources of this material altogether lapse."² He believed in taking down stories as faithfully as possible.

Fauset was one of the few black anthropologists in the field when Zora Neale Hurston began to study under Franz Boas, also the teacher of Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Margaret Mead. As a child of the black American culture she wanted to study, Hurston greatly appealed to Boas. His anthropological relativism stressed trying to understand a given culture from the inside rather than by viewing it from outside. Boas cautioned that it was a mistake to judge different peoples by values that may not be universally applicable. He argued that cultures must be evaluated according to how well people adapted to their environments. The temperament of the observer, the degree of sympathy, and the absence of condescension were important to a method of cultural analysis that depended on descriptive information.

Boas instructed Hurston to pay attention to the behavior of people, as well as to the stories being told. Hurston recognized this approach to anthropology as a way of studying and preserving her origins, of asserting folklore's worth, even while Boas and his students were criticized within the discipline for not being rigorous enough. Though she was trained in the American tradition whereby anthropologists regarded societies they were trying to understand as fast disappearing, Hurston realized that she was not standing in the same relation to her subject as most anthropologists, and not just because she was not an outsider to the culture she was studying. Where professional anthropologists—and black sociologists, such as Charles Johnson—for the most part saw folklore as specific to sequestered communities and as collective memory from which the shape of the past could be inferred, Hurston regarded black folk culture as movable and constantly renewable.

Robert Hemenway's Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography tells us that Hurston considered her first trip to the South to collect folk material in 1927 a failure. Boas had enlisted the help of Carter G. Woodson and his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Hurston found the archive trawling and census checking expected by the exacting Woodson to be a burden. Her impatience and ambition maybe figure in her having resorted to plagiarism in her first professional publication in Woodson's Journal of Negro History. She published two articles in one issue in 1927: a transcription of records concerning the black community of St. Augustine, Florida, and an account of an interview with Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States, who was then living in the all-black town of Plateau, Alabama.

"Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver," Hemenway contends, is mostly taken from Historic Sketches of the Old South (1914) by one Emma Langdon Roche, a white woman whose book Hurston found in the Mobile Historical Society.³ Hemenway notes that Cudjo Lewis was well known among anthropologists, but he spoke a heavily accented English that was hard to understand, and what Hurston later said about their initial conversations suggests she could not get him to talk much. She wrote to Langston Hughes that she had found another original African, a woman who was "a better talker than Cudjoe."⁴ She told Hughes whenever she came across material that she would share only with him. Hemenway says that from the beginning she was collecting for different purposes.⁵

Hurston went back to see Cudjo...