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.
