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NARRATOR: In spring 1940,
Zora Neale Hurston,
the celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer
and anthropologist,
arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina,
to study religious trances.
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For more than ten years,
Hurston had skirted danger,
traveling alone across the American South and Caribbean,
documenting rural Black people's lives
and collecting their stories.
Educated at Howard University and Barnard,
during her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston
was considered the foremost authority on Black folklore.
EVE DUNBAR: She's interested in all elements of Black folk.
She allows that culture to be dynamic,
to have a voice in modernity.
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IRMA MCCLAURIN: The research that Zora Neale Hurston did
in Beaufort, South Carolina, represents
someone who understands that for people to trust you,
you have to be in it.
And that's what she does.
She joins in with them.
CHARLES KING: She's playing a drum.
At the time,
this seemed scandalous,
that you weren't standing off to one side
with your white lab coat and your clipboard,
noting down what others were doing.
MCCLAURIN: Zora studied her own people,
which is not something that is supported
in anthropology at that moment.
DAPHNE LAMOTHE: Anthropology understood itself to be a science.
An aspect of scientific inquiry
that's really important is to be detached and objective.
She didn't play by those rules.
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NARRATOR: From the Jazz Age through the Great Depression,
Hurston had published her extensive research in
prestigious academic journals, popular magazines,
and ethnographic books.
But it was her fiction,
thick with dialect, cultural specificity,
and richly drawn characters
that over time would cement her place
as one of the most important writers of the 20th century.
MCCLAURIN: She was an innovator,
using stylistic conventions
of literature, but the content is
rooted in the research that she did.
LEE D. BAKER: She was driven by her own integrity,
she was driven by her own passion,
and she was driven by her own sense of
how best to collect this folklore.
KING: Throughout her entire life,
the powerful people around her consistently
thought of her as being an outsider,
less than talented, a marginal figure.
CARLA KAPLAN: We're talking about somebody who had
an incredibly creative, fierce mind.
MARÍA COTERA: Her independent streak and her iconoclasm,
you could say it was both her superpower
and her fatal flaw.
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HURSTON (dramatized): I was glad when somebody told me,
"You may go and collect Negro folklore."
In a way, it would not be a new experience for me.
When I pitched headforemost into the world,
I landed in the crib of Negroism.
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NARRATOR: As a child,
Zora Neale Hurston possessed a keen interest
in the stories she heard about people's lives and customs
while lingering at Joe Clark's general store
in Eatonville, Florida,
one of a handful of all-Black towns in the United States.
HURSTON (dramatized): It was the habit of the men folks particularly
to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories.
Even the women folks
would stop and break a breath with them at times.
I'd drag out my leaving
as long as possible in order to hear more
to allow whatever was being said to hang in my ear.
She's one of those children
that people would say, "Go, go away."
You know, "This is grown folks' stuff."
And the more they tell her that, the more she wants to hear it.
TIFFANY PATTERSON: Zora was nosy, pure and simple.
She had questions.
She, uh, wanted to see
what was going on at the store.
HURSTON (dramatized): There were no discreet nuances of life on Joe Clark's porch.
There was open kindnesses,
anger, hate, love,
envy and its kinfolks,
but all emotions were naked, and nakedly arrived at.
It was a case of "make it and take it."
MCCLAURIN: This gathering of people,
swapping lies, telling stories,
is something that's going to attract her,
because there is an innate cultural anthropologist
in her curiosity about people.
BAKER: Eatonville shaped Zora Neale Hurston's
worldview from the beginning,
and what it did
more than anything else is,
it showed that Black lives mattered.
NARRATOR: Hurston lived in an eight-room house
on five acres of land with her parents,
Lucy and John, and seven siblings.
Religion and education were highly valued
in a home ruled by her preacher father.
PATTERSON: Her father was very domineering.
Zora had her own ideas.
She said, "No, I'm going to do it this way.
I see it this way."
And it would drive her father bananas. (laughs)
She was her mother's child.
Her mother gave her permission to dream,
a permission to ask questions,
a permission to be artistic.
(wildlife chittering)
HURSTON (dramatized): Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to
"jump at de sun."
We might not land on the sun,
but at least we would get off the ground.
MCCLAURIN: The idea that she would strive to jump at the sun
really puts into place the idea that Zora is
always trying to reach someplace
that may be unattainable to the ordinary person
and represents a real challenge for her--
and a real opportunity.
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NARRATOR: When Hurston was 13,
her beloved mother became ill and died.
HURSTON (dramatized): That hour began my wanderings.
Mama died at sundown and changed a world.
PATTERSON: That was devastating for the young Zora.
She's set adrift.
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NARRATOR: Hurston's father soon remarried
and sent the shattered young teenager
to join two siblings at
Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville.
He only paid her tuition for a short time,
leaving Hurston to scrub the school's floors
to finish out the year.
And then she was on her own.
HURSTON (dramatized): The five years following my
leaving the school at Jacksonville were haunted.
I was shifted from house to house
of relatives and friends and found comfort nowhere.
It seemed that I had suffered a sea change.
I was not Zora of Orange County anymore.
I was now a little colored girl.
I found it out in certain ways,
in my heart, as well as in the mirror.
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NARRATOR: Hurston spent another eight unaccounted years
trying to find her way in the world.
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HURSTON (dramatized): I wanted family love and peace and a resting place.
I wanted books and school.
When I saw more fortunate people
of my own age on their way
to and from school, I would cry inside
and be depressed for days,
until I learned how to mash down on my feelings
and numb them for a spell.
I felt crowded in on,
and hope was beginning to waver.
(car horn honking)
NARRATOR: At 26, Hurston landed in Baltimore
with education still on her mind.
She realized by working during the day,
and shaving ten years from her age,
she could attend high school for free at night.
With her academic prowess
evident to teachers and classmates,
and sustained by jobs as a waitress,
maid, and manicurist,
an inspired Hurston enrolled in the elite
Black college prep school Morgan Academy in Baltimore
and then Howard Academy in Washington, D.C.
By May 1919,
she was a high school graduate
ready to enroll in Howard University.