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.”
