From Wrapped in Rainbows by Valerie Boyd. Copyright © 2003 by Valerie Boyd. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY. (Available for purchase on Amazon.Com.)

By all accounts, Zora Neale Hurston possessed a quality that enabled her to walk into a roomful of strangers and, a few minutes and a few stories later, leave them so completely charmed and so utterly impressed that they sometimes found themselves offering to help her in any way they could. Among those she thus impressed at the May 1, 1925, Opportunity magazine awards dinner were three people who had the power to help her immensely: Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, popular author Fannie Hurst, and novelist and man-about-town Carl Van Vechten. All three would become major champions of Hurston's talent and instrumental forces in the development of her career.

Zora soon coined a term for people like them—influential whites who supported the New Negro movement and who took an interest in black life itself. Because their philanthropic interests had a distinct racial angle, they were not merely humanitarians, in Zora's view. Instead, she called them "Negrotarians."

Zora caught the attention of this particular trio of Negrotarians with little conscious guile, simply by being herself. What they saw of her at the Opportunity dinner convinced them that she was a brilliant young woman, luminous with intellectual and artistic promise. Within months, Zora had become a regular at Carl Van Vechten's frequent interracial parties, and he had declared her "one of the most amusing people" he'd ever met. His friend Fannie Hurst concurred. Zora had "the gift," she once said, "of walking into hearts."'

Annie Nathan Meyer's response to Zora's "gift" was swift and sensible: She approached her after the awards dinner and offered her a slot at Barnard, an independent women's college affiliated with Columbia University.

Meyer had played a critical role in the founding of Barnard in 1889. Years before, as a Columbia University student, she had been disappointed to learn that the collegiate coursework offered to women was not as rigorous as the standard education for male students. Infuriated by this inequity, she had resolved to create an entire college for women in New York City. Within a few years, she had personally obtained much of the funding for the school through donations from her husband, Dr. Alfred Meyer, and from the likes of John D. Rockefeller.

Once Barnard was on firm footing, Meyer established her own career as a writer and soon became one of several Jewish philanthropists who offered a generous flow of cash to black organizations and causes. Others of this ilk included Urban League backer Julius Rosenwald (chief stockholder in Sears, Roebuck & Company), as well as Amy, Joel, and Arthur Spingarn, who provided years of financial support to the NAACP. These Jewish Negrotarians were not just curious about black life or intrigued by what some might have considered an exotic culture; rather, they were committed to black uplift, and their philanthropy was effusive. Commented one observer: "Being of use to the Negro was becoming virtually a specialty of the second most abused Americans of the early twentieth century."

By 1925, when she met Zora, Annie Nathan Meyer was a well-ensconced Barnard trustee who felt it was time for the college to become a bit more colorful. And Zora Hurston seemed to have gumption and genius in equal measure—the perfect combination, Meyer believed, for crossing Barnard's color barrier.

For her part, Zora relished the thought of attending Barnard—not because she wanted to become a racial pioneer, but because she wanted to finish school. In fact, she seemed to barely think about the discomfort she might feel as Barnard's only black student. (Zora was poised to step into a minuscule circle: of the thirteen thousand or so black people enrolled in college nationwide in the mid-1920s, fewer than three hundred of them attended white schools.) If she considered the racial consequences at all, she was undaunted by them. Eager to complete her college education, Zora wrote to Meyer less than two weeks after they met to tell her she had requested her transcript from Howard University. She also let Meyer know she was conscious of all that was at stake: "I am tremendously encouraged now. My typewriter is clicking away till all hours of the night," Zora began cheerfully. "I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world. You see, your interest keys me up wonderfully—I must not let you be disappointed in me."

With her underlined words, Zora placed the onus on herself, yet she still conveyed to Meyer how very important this opportunity was to her. Meyer could look at Zora and see a young woman with a future so bright it made her squint. But even squinting, she could not see the struggles of Zora's past or the depths from which she had risen. Zora could have told Meyer all about the dark tunnel she'd had to travel through; instead she only said this: "It is mighty cold comfort to do things if nobody cares whether you succeed or not. It is terribly delightful to me to have someone fearing with me and hoping for me, let alone working to make some of my dreams come true."

Meyer was sufficiently moved by Zora's words to spend the summer trying to help her get the funds she needed for Barnard's tuition. Despite Zora's undistinguished transcript from Howard, Barnard's dean, Virginia Gildersleeve, admitted her after an interview in which she found her "an interesting person" who was "distinctly promising." Zora's record, however, did not warrant a scholarship, so Gildersleeve urged Meyer to look elsewhere for Zora's tuition money—$320, the equivalent of about $3,000 in today's currency. "Do you think you could get, from some outside persons interested in the Negro race, money for a special scholarship in her case?" Gildersleeve asked Meyer.

Zora and Meyer spent the next few months casting about for funds. They asked for help from a range of sources, including Carl Van Vechten (who had secured a publishing contract for Langston Hughes within eighteen days of the Opportunity dinner) and Poro Company founder Annie Pope Malone, a wealthy Negro who'd earned her riches developing and marketing a line of black beauty products.

Zora was genuinely grateful for Meyer's efforts on her behalf. Having struggled alone for the past twenty years for an education, she viewed Meyer's interest in her as a blessing. Yet Zora also was well aware of the complexities of relationships between New Negro artists and their Negrotarian patrons—an awareness that had led her to concoct the term "Negrotarian" in the first place. It was difficult, for instance, to know what Meyer wanted in return for her kindness. Zora always offered fervent thanks; she also rarely missed an opportunity to point out the disparity between herself and the fifty-eight-year-old Meyer, often signing her letters "your humble and obedient servant," and even occasionally referring to herself, in early notes to Meyer, as "your little pickaninny."

Most contemporary readers, of any race, would find Zora's self-degrading racial references odd, offensive, and unnecessarily obsequious. Yet Meyer, a product of her time, seemed to respond differently. One could argue that Zora was consciously playing Meyer, to use a vernacular term, for her own benefit. That is, she was perhaps playing up to any notions of racial superiority Meyer might have held in order to make the older woman feel good about her continued support of a helpless young "pickaninny." Zora admitted (or feigned) ignorance about what she called "white psychology": "I see white people do things, but I don't know that I grasp why they do them," she once told Meyer. Yet, from another perspective, it seems that Zora had a rather sophisticated understanding of "white psychology." She had to, in order to get as much help from white people as she got, suggested her contemporary John Henrik Clarke. Zora knew that "if she showed certain scars," Clarke asserted, "she'd get paid for them." In other words, she understood that engaging in a certain kind of racial role-play could be profitable, and she did so with a bittersweet humor.

Whether it was conscious psychological trickery or not, Zora's strategy with Meyer worked. In September 1925, with Meyer's support, Zora enrolled in Barnard College as a twenty-six-year-old transfer student, listing her birth year as 1899. As part of her charade, Zora never found it necessary to tell Meyer (or anyone else) that she was really thirty-four years old.

"We wear the mask," black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar had written famously before the turn of the century.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Zora Hurston—and arguably every other Negro in America—had learned that there were definite benefits to various types of masking. And when she thought it necessary, Hurston could wear the mask—and speak "with myriad subtleties"—as well as anyone.

It's interesting to note that after her first few months as a Barnard student—after she'd gotten what she wanted, cynics might say—Zora dropped all self-deprecating references in her letters to Meyer, as well as her standard closing ("your most humble and obedient servant"). By January, she had discarded that particular mask altogether and changed her customary closing to simply this: "most cordially yours."

During her first semester at Barnard, Zora completed an occupational interest form that was required of every new student. Asked to rate her extracurricular interests, she marked dramatics as number one and athletics as number two. She stated that she had previously held jobs as a manicurist and a "social worker"—perhaps a euphemism for domestic worker. (Zora likely anticipated, wisely, that her affluent white classmates would not take too well to the thought of sparring intellectually with someone who might have been their maid.) She noted that she planned to earn her own living expenses while attending Barnard "either as manicurist, social worker or writer. Perhaps sell a manuscript or two."

When responding to a question about her vocational interests after college, Hurston was definitive: She wanted to be a writer. "I have had some small success as a writer and wish above all to succeed at it," she scrawled. "Either teaching or social work will be interesting but consolation prizes."

All indications so far were that Zora Neale Hurston would not have to settle for a consolation prize. Her literary successes were quietly accumulating. The summer before she began her studies at Barnard, Hurston had published a short story, "Magnolia Flower," in the July 1925 issue of the Spokesman. In Hurston's fable, a river tells a brook a story of love conquering all. In the process, Hurston again addressed the theme she'd begun to explore in her play Color Struck: the self-destructiveness that results from color-based prejudice among black people.

Hurston also had just published an essay in the September 1925 issue of The Messenger called "The Hue and Cry About Howard University." According to Hurston's article, students at her former stomping ground had recently protested singing Negro spirituals for Howard's white president, decrying the songs as "low and degrading, being the product of slaves and slavery." They denounced the plaintive songs for their poor grammar, and they pointed out that spirituals were not sung in white universities—as if that were the measure for worthy art. In her essay, Hurston recounted her own years at Howard, when she'd proudly participated in "the sings"—with no shame and with no fear of being snatched back into slavery. Hurston sharply criticized Howard students' negative, embarrassed attitude toward Negro spirituals, defending the songs as authentic and valuable expressions of black folk culture.

Meanwhile, her award-winning story "Spunk"—whose characters were rooted in the same folk culture that birthed the spirituals—had been published a few months before, in the June 1925 issue of Opportunity. "Spunk" tells the story of Spunk Banks, a sawmill worker so big and brash that he struts around town with another man's wife. Joe Kanty timidly confronts his wife, Lena, and her new lover, but they persist in their very public affair. Finally, egged on by the men at the village store, Joe attacks Spunk from behind with a razor. Spunk cavalierly kills him and is then haunted by a black bobcat that he believes to be Joe, "sneaked back from Hell." Though Spunk expertly and bravely rides the circle-saw at his job, he is killed when he is pushed into the saw by an unseen hand. With his final breath, he tells a friend that he believes Joe pushed him, and that he intends to find him in the spirit world and seek retribution. "If spirits kin fight," comments one of the men on the store porch, "there's a powerful tussle goin' on somewhere ovah Jordan 'cause Ah b'leeve Joe's ready for Spunk an' ain't skeered anymore—yas, Ah b'leeve Joe pushed 'im mahself."

Though more deftly executed, this story contains all the elements Hurston had exhibited in her earlier short stories: an Eatonville-inspired setting; an ever-evolving use of dialect, metaphor, and humor (this time, it's a goading, communal humor); and a respectful treatment of black folks' belief in spirits and signs.

While the story is more complex than its title might suggest, the title itself likely made an impression on Opportunity contest judge Fannie Hurst that was inseparable from her impression of its author. If there was one word to describe the young writer who'd stopped the Opportunity after-party with her grand entrance, that word was "spunk."

Hurst had personally handed Zora the second-place award for "Spunk" on May 1, yet the two women apparently did not have any contact in the weeks that followed. Not long after the story was published in Opportunity, however, Fannie Hurst wrote to Carl Van Vechten asking for Zora's address. That fall, Zora—who was renting a room on West 139th Street in Harlem—received a letter from Hurst inviting her to tea at her downtown home. Zora excitedly told Meyer about the invitation, prompting Meyer to offer to ask Fannie Hurst to contribute to Zora's tuition. Zora thought it was a fine idea; "I am sure she would help," she said of Hurst, "but I felt a little 'delicate' about asking her."

At this point, despite a challenging French class, Zora was doing fine academically in her first Barnard semester. Yet she was waging a mighty financial struggle. She had to attend classes until 5:00 P.M. three days a week and had trouble finding a job that matched her academic schedule and afforded her time to study. She owed $117 for her first-term fees, and she'd already spent a small fortune, she told Meyer, for Barnard necessities: "books, gym outfit, shoes, stockings, maps, tennis racquet." The list went on: "I still must get a bathing suit, gloves, and if I am here in the spring, I will need a golf outfit." Overwhelmed by this lengthy slate of expenses, Zora resigned herself to the idea that she might not finish out the school year: "I have thought things over pretty thoroughly and concluded that this term is about all that I can do unless some more of the people to whom I have appealed send in something substantial. ... All I can do is make the most of this semester and then take a job."

Once, Zora was so broke, she borrowed money from a beggar. The way the story goes, she was penniless but needed to go downtown. On her way to catch the subway, she was stopped by a blind panhandler holding out his cup. Taking some change from the cup for her subway fare, Zora said: "I need money worse than you today. Lend me this! Next time, I'll give it back."

On October 17, when she gave Meyer the go-ahead to write to Fannie Hurst for funds, Zora had only eleven cents to her name. She had recently lost a job because her employer wanted her to report to work at 3:00, but she could not get there most days until 5:30. "So you see," she told Meyer, "there is some justification for my doubts as to whether I can remain [at Barnard]. I must somehow pay my room-rent and I must have food."

This letter seems to have been written on a day when Zora was seeking to rearrange her priorities in life. She had wearied finally of her long struggle for education in the face of destitution. "I have been my own sole support since I was 13 years old," Zora explained. "I've taken some tremendous loss and survived terrific shocks. I am not telling you this in search of sympathy. No melodrama. If I am losing my capacity for shock absorbing, if privation is beginning to terrify me, you will appreciate the situation and see that it isn't cowardice, but that by being pounded so often on the anvil of life I am growing less resilient. Physical suffering unnerves me now."

By the end of the month, however, it appeared that Zora's days of physical suffering were over, at least for a while. Fannie Hurst responded immediately and generously to Meyer's call for help on Zora's behalf. Undoubtedly, Hurst's openhandedness also was a response to the considerable charm Zora must have exhibited at their meeting over tea. By the first week of November, Zora had moved into Fannie Hurst's apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street and had begun working as her secretary, answering her telephone, replying to letters, and running various errands. She also was reading the proofs of Hurst's soon-to-be-bestseller Appassionata.

When Barnard's Dean Gildersleeve learned of the famous Fannie Hurst's interest in Zora, Gildersleeve's own regard for Barnard's sole black student suddenly took an upward turn. She told Meyer of a student loan fund that Zora might benefit from, and she reopened the possibility of a scholarship.

Because of her association with Fannie Hurst, Zora also surged in popularity with her previously chilly classmates—some of whom had burst into unkind laughter upon hearing her, a black southerner, reciting French. Post-Hurst, Zora reported, "they don't laugh in French when I recite, one of those laughers has asked to quiz with me." Zora wanted to believe the laughter had stopped at least partly because her French had improved—not just because she had been hired by one of America's favorite novelists. Of the laughers, she reasoned: "I knew getting mad would not help any, I had to get my lessons so well that their laughter we seem silly."

Though Zora likely underestimated the role her impressive new job played in silencing her classmates' laughter, she was right to take some credit for herself. For the first time in her life, she was competing academically with white students—young women who'd benefited from all sorts of preparatory advantages that simply were not available to her. Yet Zora performed as well as she had during her more attentive days at Howard, and as well as could be expected, considering her financial troubles. With a load of seven classes her first semester, she managed to earn Bs in English and history, and Cs in everything else, including French. She also got a booster shot of confidence: "You see," she told Meyer, "being at Barnard and measuring arms with others known to be strong increases my self love and stiffens my spine."

Zora's job with Fannie Hurst was certainly a stabilizing factor during that first term at Barnard. The exact nature of the Hurst-Hurston financial arrangement remains a mystery, according to Fannie Hurst's meticulous biographer, Brooke Kroeger. "Perhaps Zora bartered secretarial services for room and board. Perhaps Fannie paid part of the tuition debt, which Zora worked off in this manner. Maybe the deal was a straight salary-for-hours arrangement," Kroeger speculated.

Though Zora Hurston and Fannie Hurst apparently never documented their fiscal relationship, they both chronicled their mutual affection easy to understand why they "took a shine" to each other right away, as Hurst put it. Both women were no doubt intrigued by the similarity of their surnames; this alone must have made them feel an immediate and curious kinship. A committed Negrotarian, Fannie Hurst—who kept in her home office a bulky file headed "Negro Matters"—often lent her name to various black organizations. One of her pet projects was the National Health Circle for Colored People, a nurses' association for indigent black southerners. Hurst had become an active supporter of the health circle, and she had recently joined other prominent white literary figures in loudly lauding Harlem's New Negro writers.

To Hurst, Zora Hurston seemed an especially worthy cause. Here was a talented young black woman who exhibited a "blazing zest for life," as Hurst later recalled. Zora seemed "awash in splendor," and the well-off Hurst was more than willing to be of service to an emerging black female author gleaming with such potential.

Hurst was only five years older than Hurston, but because both women lied about their ages, they each assumed the gap was much wider. And Zora gladly played the role of brilliant young protégée to Fannie's role as older, wiser mentor.

With her keen nose for opportunity, Zora immediately grasped the importance of nurturing a relationship with Fannie Hurst, who was, in Zora's words, "a great artist and globe famous." Hurst was indeed a bona fide celebrity. A best-selling author, highly paid screenwriter, frequent radio guest, newspaper columnist, and popular magazine writer (for McCall's, Cosmopolitan, and Harper's Bazaar, among others), Hurst was in a position to open doors for Zora that few others could. And she had a bold sense of style that Zora found appealing. "She knows exactly what goes with her very white skin, black hair and sloe eyes, and she wears it," Zora noted of Hurst, whom she once called "a stunning wench." "I doubt if any woman on earth has gotten better effects than she has with black, white and red. Not only that, she knows how to parade it when she gets it on. She will never be jailed for uglying up a town."

The fondness Zora and Fannie felt for each other lasted long after their formal financial arrangement ended. In fact, Zora's stint as Hurst's secretary was remarkably short-lived—mercifully so, both women might have agreed. Hurst found Zora's secretarial skills atrocious: "Her shorthand was short on legibility, her typing hit-or-miss, mostly the latter, her filing a game of find-the-thimble," Hurst later recalled. For her part, Zora was happy to be relieved of her secretarial duties, particularly typing. "My idea of Hell is that I would all through eternity be typing a book," she told a friend years later.

In early December—after just a month as Fannie Hurst's live-in secretary—Zora moved out, taking a room on West 131st Street in-Harlem. "Though the myth holds otherwise," Hurst's biographer concluded, "the month between November 4 and December 6, 1925 seems to have been the full extent of Zora's tenure in an early-day work-study arrangement at the home office of Fannie Hurst."

The women's friendly relationship was by now firmly established, however, and Zora continued to reap the benefits of their ongoing association. Fannie Hurst, it seemed, was Zora's passport to social success among her elite classmates. "The girls at Barnard are perfectly wonderful to me," Zora reported to Meyer a week after she'd moved out of Hurst's apartment. "They literally drag me to the teas on Wednesdays and then behave as if I am the guest of honor—so eager are they to assure me that I am desired there."

She added: "They have urged me to come to the Junior prom at the Ritz-Carlton in Feb. and several girls have offered to exchange dances with me if I will bring a man as light as myself." Rather than take offense on her darker-skinned brethren, Zora (at least in her letter to Meyer) laughed off her classmates' color-struck racism: "Their frankness on that score is amusing, but not offensive in that dancing is such an intimate thing that it is not unreasonable for a girl to say who she wishes to do it with." On Meyer's advice, Zora decided not to further upset Barnard's status quo by attempting to integrate the prom. "But even if things were different," she judged, "I could not go. Paying $12.50 plus a new frock and shoes and a wrap and all the other things necessary is not my idea of a good time. I am not that 'Ritzy' yet."

Being the only black person at a party (other than her date) was not Zora's idea of a good time, either. She knew it would only make her feel conspicuously black and intractably different. Not inferior. Just different, and apart. This was something Zora felt often enough in her academic life to know she did not wish to seek it out in her social life. "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," she once noted. This was, of course, her everyday experience at Barnard: "Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself." And that self preferred a Harlem rent party to a formal dance at the Ritz any day of the week.

Still, even among her black friends, Zora expressed satisfaction with the way Barnard was treating her. "I suppose you want to know how this little piece of darkish meat feels at Barnard," she playfully wrote to Constance Sheen, the sister of her still-long-distance sweetheart, Herbert Sheen. "I am received quite well," Zora bragged. "In fact I am received so well that if someone would come along and try to turn me white I'd be quite peevish at them."

Pursued by the student government president as well as "the Social Register crowd," Zora became "Barnard's sacred black cow," as she put it. She knew she had Fannie Hurst to thank for her fast ascent to fashionableness, and she did: "Partly because you took me under your shelter, I have had no trouble in making friends," she wrote to Hurst. "Your friendship was a tremendous help to me at a critical time. It made both faculty and students see me when I needed seeing."

Hurst offered other support as well, agreeing to take two of Zora's articles and a short story on rounds to the magazine editors with whom she was so well-connected. As Zora's would-be mentor, Hurst also suggested some changes to the short story, which Zora made reluctantly. "I do not wish to become Hurstized," Zora complained to Meyer. "There would be no point in my being an imitation Fannie Hurst, however faithful the copy, while the world has the real article at hand." Yet Zora knew she could not afford to balk too loudly: "I am very eager to make my bow to the market, and she says she will do all she can for me with her editors. Victory, O Lord!"

In addition to acquainting editors with Zora's work, Hurst introduced her Negro protégée to some of her celebrity friends. At a December 19 party at Fannie's home, for example, Zora shared a box of matches with Fannie, explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and novelist Charles Norris. She sent the empty matchbox to Constance Sheen—a Fannie Hurst fan—as a souvenir.

Zora was not entirely seduced by her heady company, however. "They are OFTEN insincere," she said of her new celebrity acquaintances. "Their show of friendship mere patronage." Zora sensed that this moment in history—when budding black writers like herself were so welcomed by the mainstream literati—would be fleeting. "I know it won't last always," she told Constance Sheen, "so I am playing with my toy while I may."

No longer on Hurst's payroll, Zora found another way to eke out an income—by working part-time as a waitress at private dinners and doing some housekeeping work, often for friends of Meyer's. At the same time, Zora was continuing to write. In late 1925, she penned a satirical essay, called "The Emperor Effaces Himself," about Marcus Garvey's imprisonment in February 1925 on a mail-fraud conviction. Though the piece was never published, it was an early example of Hurston's ability to use biting satire to great effect, as well as an example of her impatience with "race leaders" of dubious moral character. With his "wealth of titles," Garvey "had taken the people's money and he was keeping it," Hurston wrote. "That was how he had become the greatest man of his race. Booker T. Washington had achieved some local notice for collecting monies and spending it on a Negro school. It had never occurred to him to keep it. Marcus Garvey was much in advance of the old school of thinkers," she wrote mordantly.

Meanwhile, Hurston's other creative work was going well: Her play Color Struck was scheduled to be presented by an upstart theater company in Harlem at the end of the year. And in December, Alain Locke reprinted "Spunk" in The New Negro, a book that was roundly hailed as the benchmark anthology of the Harlem Renaissance.

Locke dedicated his volume to "the younger generation," and declared: "Youth speaks, and the voice of the New Negro is heard. What stirs inarticulately in the masses is already vocal upon the lips of the talented few, and the future listens, however the present may shut its ears." While Locke noted that the writers and artists included in the anthology "constitute a new generation not because of years only, but because of a new aesthetic and a new philosophy of life," the term "New Negro," for him, was largely synonymous with youth. Yet several members of "the younger Negro group" were not so young. Although apparently no male writer of the period felt compelled to invent a later birth date, several women did. Zora Hurston, Jessie Fauset, novelist Nella Larsen, and even grande dame Georgia Douglas Johnson all routinely lied about their ages.

On January 7, 1926, Zora quietly marked her thirty-fifth birthday. But since youth was such a valuable commodity in Harlem (and at Barnard, no doubt), she publicly celebrated it as her twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, or twenty-seventh, depending on how she was counting that year.

As if to coincide with her progressing age, Zora's relationship with Meyer was gradually moving toward maturity as 1926 began. Like a peer, Zora inquired about the progress of Meyer's writing. Meyer, in turn, sent Zora a copy of her play Black Souls and asked for her comments—as if Zora were a well-regarded colleague, not an erstwhile "humble and obedient servant."

Shortly after her birthday, Zora interviewed for a Barnard scholarship and in early February, she hastily scribbled the good news on a postcard to Meyer: "I got the scholarship!!!"

Even so, Dean Gildersleeve still harbored reservations about whether Zora was true Barnard material, apparently because she had missed a recent history exam and had run into trouble completing the registration process for her second semester. "I wonder whether we really ought to encourage her to remain in college," Gildersleeve pondered in a letter to Meyer. "Does she get enough out of it to compensate for the difficulty and annoyance of trying to fit in to the administrative machine? We have given her a grant from the scholarship funds, but I feel a little uncertain about her."

Doing well academically was important to Zora, but it wasn't everything. "I felt that I was highly privileged and determined to make the most of it," she later recalled of her time at Barnard. "I did not resolve to be a grind, however, to show the white folks that I had brains. I took it for granted that they knew that. Else, why was I at Barnard?"

Zora was not only at Barnard, she was in New York—in "Harlem City," as she called it. And she discovered much more to do there than coop herself up in Barnard's classrooms. Zora admitted to a friend that she was "just running wild in every direction, trying to see everything at once." She was regularly partying with the New Negroes in Harlem, occasionally going downtown to visit Negrotarians Hurst and Van Vechten, writing short stories and plays, working part-time, and attending to her studies.

Meyer admonished Zora that she would do well to abandon her Harlem-centered dreams and distractions and to focus all her attention instead on the rigors and routine of Barnard. In response to her patron's reprimand, Zora acknowledged her huge blunder in missing her history exam. (Having copied down the wrong time, she showed up for the test four hours late, only to be greeted by a classroom full of strangers.) "Your rebuke is just," she wrote to Meyer. "I have been guilty of gross forgetfulness." Yet Zora was hesitant to part with her tendency toward reverie, offering an impassioned defense of her intrepid imagination that sounded like an answer to every-one—starting with her father—who had ever criticized her for having ambition, and for reveling in it. "I shall try to lay my dreaming aside. Try hard," she promised Meyer. "But, Oh, if you knew my dreams! My vaulting ambition! How I constantly live in fancy in seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world, but conscious all the time of being a mouse on a treadmill. Madness ensues. I am beside myself with chagrin half of the time; the way to the blue hills is not on tortoise back, it seems to me, but on wings. I haven't the wings, and must ride the tortoise."

Surely, Zora could feel her wings sprouting daily, but she feared she was not growing swiftly enough to accommodate her ballooning spirit. "The eagerness, the burning within, I wonder the actual sparks do not fly so that they be seen by all men. Prometheus on his rock, with his liver being consumed as fast as he grows another, is nothing to my dreams. I dream such wonderfully complete ones, so radiant in astral beauty. I have not the power yet to make them come true. They always die," she confided. "But even as they fade, I have others."

Endnotes

Notes from Page 1

"one of the most amusing people": Carl Van Vechten, in letter to his wife, Fania Marinoff, June 3, 1925, Watson, p. 71.

"the gift": Fannie Hurst, "Zora Neale Hurston: A Personality Sketch," Library Gazette, Yale University, 1961.

Meyer had played a critical role in: Unpublished biographical sketch, part of the Inventory to the Annie Nathan Meyer Papers at the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH.

"Being of use to the Negro": Lewis, pp. 100-101.

Notes from Page 2

of the thirteen thousand or so black people: Lewis, p. 158.

"I am tremendously encouraged": ZNH to Annie Nathan Meyer, May 12, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"It is mighty cold comfort": Ibid.

"Do you think you could get": Virginia C. Gildersleeve to Annie Nathan Meyer, June 9, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

who had secured a publishing contract: Rampersad, pp. 109-10.

Annie Pope Malone: ZNH to Meyer, July 18, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives. Also, Hine and Thompson, p. 204.

"your humble and obedient servant": ZNH to Meyer, July 18, 1925, September 15, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"I see white people do things": ZNH to Meyer, June 23, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"if she showed certain scars": Author interview with John Henrik Clarke, May 28, 1997.

"We wear the mask": Excerpt from Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask," 1895. The full poem has been reprinted in various anthologies, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie McKay, general editors, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 896.

Notes from Page 3

"I have had some small success": Record of Freshman Interest, Barnard College.

"The Hue and Cry About Howard University": ZNH, "The Hue and Cry About Howard University," The Messenger, September 1925.

"If spirits kin fight"; ZNH, "Spunk," The Complete Stories.

Fannie Hurst wrote to Carl Van Vechten: Brooke Kroeger, Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst (New York: Times Books, 1999), pp. 122-23.

"I am sure she would help": ZNH to Meyer, October 17, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

She owed $117: Gildersleeve to Meyer, October 2, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"I still must get": ZNH to Meyer, October 12, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"I need money worse": Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 240. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. Also, Arna Bontemps interview, November 1970. REH Files.

"I have been my own sole support": ZNH to Meyer, October 17, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

Zora had moved into Fannie Hurst's apartment: Kroeger, p. 123. Also, ZNH to Meyer, November 10, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

She told Meyer of a student loan fund: Gildersleeve to Meyer, November 5, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

Notes from Page 4

"I knew getting mad": ZNH to Meyer, November 10, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

With a load of seven classes: Barnard College transcript, Barnard Archives.

"You see": ZNH to Meyer, November 10, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"Perhaps Zora bartered'. Kroeger, p. 123.

Hurst had become: Kroeger, pp. 104, 121-27,187-90.

"blazing zest for life": Fannie Hurst, "Zora Hurston: A Personality Sketch," Library Gazette, Yale University, no. 35, 1961.

Hurst was only five years older than Hurston: Kroeger, p. 126. Fannie Hurst was born in 1885.

"a great artist and globe famous": ZNH, Dust Tracks, p. 197.

"She knows exactly what goes": Ibid.

"a stunning wench": ZNH, "Fannie Hurst by Her Ex-Amanuensis," Saturday Review of Literature October 3, 1937.

"I doubt if any woman on earth": ZNH, Dust Tracks, p. 197.

"Her shorthand was short": Fannie Hurst, "Zora Hurston: A Personality Sketch."

"My idea of Hell": Undated letter to Tracy L'Engle, Tracy L'Engle Angas Papers, University of Florida.

"Though the myth holds otherwise": Kroeger, p. 124.

"The girls at Barnard": ZNH to Meyer, December 13, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"But even if things were different": ZNH to Meyer, December 17, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"I feel most colored"; ZNH, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," The World Tomorrow, May 1928.

"I suppose you want to know": ZNH to Constance Sheen, January 5, 1926. ZNH Collection, University of Florida.

"Barnard's sacred black cow": ZNH, Dust Tracks, p. 139.

"Partly because you took me under your shelter": ZNH to Fannie Hurst, March 18, 1926. Fannie Hurst Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

"I do not wish to become Hurstized": ZNH to Meyer, December 13, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

At a December 19 party at Fannie's home: ZNH to Constance Sheen, January 5, 1926. ZNH Collection, University of Florida.

"They are OFTEN insincere": ZNH to Constance Sheen, February 2, 1926. ZNH Collection, University of Florida.

working part-time as a waitress: ZNH to Meyer, December 13, 1925. Also, ZNH to Fannie Hurst, March 18, 1926.

"That was how he": ZNH, "The Emperor Effaces Himself," typescript. ZNH Papers, Yale.

Notes from Page 5

Her play Color Struck was scheduled: ZNH to Meyer, November 10, 1925. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"Youth speaks": Alain Locke, "Negro Youth Speaks," The New Negro (New York; Atheneum, 1974). Originally published in 1925.

all routinely lied about their ages: Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 12.

Meyer, in turn, sent Zora a copy: ZNH to Meyer, January 15, 1926. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"I got the scholarship!!!": ZNH to Meyer, postmarked February 5, 1926. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"I wonder whether": Virginia Gildersleeve to Annie Nathan Meyer, February 9, 1926. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.

"I felt that I was highly privileged": ZNH, Dust Tracks, p. 140.

"just running wild": ZNH to Constance Sheen, February 2, 1926. ZNH Collection, University of Florida.

"Your rebuke is just": ZNH to Meyer, undated [January 1926]. Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, American Jewish Archives.