The following transcription is based on a lecture delivered by Carla Kaplan at the October 2003 Virginia C. Gildersleeve Conference, "Jumpin' at the Sun: Reassessing the Life and Works of Zora Neale Hurston." Herein, quotations from the work of Zora Neale Hurston are taken directly from Professor Kaplan's remarks and not from the writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Much of this talk is based on Carla Kaplan's recent Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. (Available for purchase on Amazon.Com.)

As a Hurston scholar, it's particularly great to be here, thinking of her and her work and her life at Barnard. As a former New Yorker, it's wonderful to be back in town in October.

Hurston's life has always been fascinating to people. Her writing career, though, has often stymied her critics and her fans. It is at once gripping and also bewildering. It is common for literary reputations to rise and fall. But I don't think there is any other American writer whose career has undergone the kind of sea change that Zora Neale Hurston's has. She's gone from being reviled in her day by many of her contemporaries who did not understand what she was doing—to having her privacy violated at every turn.

All of her published works are back in print. Almost all of her unpublished works are in process. I helped in that process by being one of the people to verify and uncover Every Tongue Got to Confess as the original manuscript of Mules and Men—the book she wanted—not the book they wanted.

So we are in that process too. We are publishing her drafts and her unpublished works. There are, to my knowledge, at least three new films coming out. The mention has already been made of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

I believe there are two PBS specials—one being done by a group out of Florida, and one being done I hope very soon, by Kirstie Anderson.

It's an extraordinary outpouring of interest. Now, Hurston's letters cannot, of course, explain this kind of phenomenal shift in public perception. But they can help us to put that shift in context.

And what I'm hoping to do today is just give you a little sense of what some of that context might look like.

American literary tastes changed dramatically during Hurston's lifetime. And the dizzying ups and downs of her career, in part, reflect those changes in taste. Her letters reveal in sometimes painful detail, how hard these changes could be for her to negotiate.

[Alain] Locke wrote a one-paragraph review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example, that so enraged Hurston, despite the fact that he did call her talented and dubbed the novel "folklore fiction at its best"—a veiled compliment if ever there was one—that she never forgave him.

In an angry, unpublished response, she accused him of being a no-nothing show-off. And she offered to debate him on what he knows about Negroes and Negro life, any time.

To James Weldon Johnson she wrote that Locke was "a malicious, spiteful little snot."

Hurston was not just a great writer, playwright, essayist, dramatist, folklorist. She was one of the absolutely great American letter writers, writing in a form that was then at its height.

She wrote so many letters that at one point, when she came back after one brief trip to the Bahamas, she described returning to "79 pieces of mail waiting for me, on my return."

She described suitcases literally filled with correspondence. Mail that would take her weeks to slog through. Fortunately, she saved carbons of many of her replies, which can be found in the University of Florida archive. Equally fortunately, many of her correspondents knew what these letters were, and recognized both their literary and their historical value, and saved them.

With great foresight and often at the urging of Hurston's friend, Carl Van Vechten, who devoted many years to collecting and archiving African American materials, Hurston's letters were saved and donated to various archives. . . . There are well over 35 of them.

She wrote so many letters that sometimes I was able to find and identify five or six that she wrote on a given day. Some of those were laboriously typed, single-spaced, multi-page letters. So simply as a letter writer, she was sometimes writing 15 to 25 single-spaced pages of typewritten material a day.

And so, the letters form an extraordinary archive about her thoughts, about culture, about writing, about everything that was going on in her day—because she wrote so often.

Here's a hand-painted Christmas card. You can see the top and the drawing at the bottom. There is her yule log, hand painted. Sometimes the letters contain little snippets that are just golden. I don't know if you can see the last line of this letter—"My idea of hell is that I would, all through eternity, be typing a book."

It's a letter to a friend named Katherine Tracy L'Engle.

She wrote to her collaborators to contest views she opposed, to work out ideas, to appeal for help in funding, to report on her activities, to stay connected to the various places that were important to her and which inspired her work.

Wherever she was, there was a community with which she needed to stay in touch. Her Florida community, if she was here in New York. Her New York community, if she was down in Florida—and so on.

Letters are well on their way to being a lost art. Few are more artful or more worth preserving than Hurston's. When I first began to work on the book, I had hoped there were about 200 or so letters. And what I found were well over 600.

It's amazing, given how may letters were out there, that it took as long as it did to get her letters out to the public—although many were indeed buried, unidentified, unknown to the archivists who had them.

But what's even more amazing to me, is that this book is the first of its kind, which is to say—we have no other volumes of an African American woman artist's or writer's letters. Now, that's particularly extraordinary, if you think of the larger context of the African American tradition.

We are talking, after all, about a literary tradition especially marked by coded, masked, double-voiced discourses designed to contend with the problem of double or triple or quadruple and divided audiences.

Consider for example, Paul Lawrence Dunbar's famous poem, "We Wear the Mask:"

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. . .

The problem of restricted audience expectations and the strategy of meeting them—or pretending to meet them—resonates throughout the African American traditions. In 1928, when Hurston was just fully launching her career, James Weldon Johnson, or, as she called him, Lord Jim, described the dilemma:

as a special problem which the plain American author knows nothing about. The moment a Negro writer takes up his pen or sits down to his typewriter, he is immediately called upon to solve, consciously or unconsciously, the problem of the double audience. To whom shall he address himself? To his own black group? Or to white America? It may be asked why he doesn't just go ahead and write, and not bother himself about audiences. That is easier said than done.

Now, if this was true, as Johnson so wonderfully put it, for the men, consider how even more complicatedly it was true for the women. As Farah Jasmine Griffin has put it—"silences, loopholes, interstices, allegory, dissemblance, politics of respectability—these are but a few of the terms that black women scholars use to help make sense of the silence that surrounds black women's lives and experiences."

Many have kept the most personal aspects of their lives—as well as the full range of their thoughts—secret. Not surprisingly, then, scholars have avidly sought the more private, unedited writing of African American women writers to locate what Skip Gates in his recent edition of Hannah Crafts: A Bond Woman's Narrative calls "an unadultered or authentic voice."

Letters, you would expect, would be hunted most avidly of all. But letters, while they reveal so much, do not in fact give us an unadultered and necessarily authentic voice. Or rather, they don't give it to us in a simple and straightforward way.

Letters do not always simply lift the veil, as DuBois and others put it. Which is to say that while we learn more about Hurston from her letters, than we do in any other way, there is so much that the letters cannot possibly tell us.

In her own writing, and throughout her career, Hurston is probably the canniest theorist we have, of the uses and the usefulness of performative, rhetorical gestures and of writing which seems to reveal, even as it conceals.

Her articulation of this and of the way it creates and responds to conditions both of double voice and double audience, is one of the most interesting that we have. This is a passage of hers, in which she described what she called "featherbed resistance":

The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see, we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, "Get out of here." We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person, because knowing so little about us, he doesn't know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a featherbed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes up. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries. The theory behind our tactics? The white man is always trying to know into somebody else's business. All right, I'll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle; he can read my writing, but he sure can't read my mind. I'll put this play toy in his hand and he will seize it and go away. Then I'll say my say and sing my song.

So, her letters are not simply the truth—but they are also often a performative act. One that constructs the ideal audience, sometimes against the person to whom the letter is actually written. Inviting us often to read between the lines, to read her words for hidden meanings, to read her meanings for the multiple layers from which they are so often constructed.

The letters are sometimes wishful. They are often ironic. And they are always revealing in complicated ways. Her first letter, the first letter I was able to locate, is a letter written to the dean at Morgan College:

Dear Dean

I want to know you and Mrs. Pickens ever so much, for many reasons. The first of which is, you are interesting to others. Second, you are interesting to me. Third, I want to reverse the usual process and know the writings by the writer. Greatest of all, 30 or 40 years hence, the world will look for someone that has really known you, to write your biography. To see you as a husband and father, and have you as a friend and teacher, should mean that one would get beyond the obvious, the superficial. I want to do that.

I would like to know to what extent a woman of Mrs. Pickens' character and accomplishments would influence your life." Impertinent, isn't it? "I want to get all that Morgan has to give. I feel that I would have done something equal to the course at Morgan, if I had really known you and Mrs. Pickens.

It's wonderful, isn't it? This is not just audaciousness. This is calculated audaciousness. Because remember, she is here with no money, no background. She is having to do domestic work to get her way through. She is not the age of the other students, although she is not letting them know that.

And she does this audacious act of writing the dean a letter—something, to this day, many of us don't do. This calculated audaciousness was a persona that she created, and which would serve her well, and which she would use often. And it comes up again and again in her letters.

It was, on the one hand, a way for her to mask some of the loneliness and isolation she often felt, as someone who was both older than other members of the Harlem Renaissance, and from the South, not from the North. Almost completely without financial resources. New to many of the ideas and styles of her Harlem peers. But even more importantly, someone who was fiercely dedicated to an aesthetic program which was not in line with that which was most popular in her day. She was, to make it even more complicated, trying to make her mark as one of the first black folklorists of black culture. And problematically, indebted to a series of white patrons, who she felt had to constantly be placated, sometimes in the most extreme way.

This is a piece of her legal contract with her white patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. And what you can see about this is, in fact, she is designated as Mason's employee. This relationship obtained during the five, in many ways, most productive years of her own writing career, which meant that she didn't literally own a word of her own writing—and had to placate Mason and appeal to her [to] get permission to use her own work.

She frequently signed letters to other white patrons, including Annie Nathan Meyer, as "your devoted pickeninny." She would need all of her audaciousness to get her through those kinds of relationships.

She would also need all of her audaciousness as a feminist. And as a feminist woman writer in a moment in which, for many reasons and in many ways, she was out there on her own. In the context of publishers' warnings during the '40s and '30s to black writers that certain subjects were just too volatile to risk with white audiences. Too risky to contend with the problem of double audiences. Here's an example. This is literally printed as a publisher's warning. "Nothing that casts the least reflection on contemporary moral or sexual standards will be allowed. Keep away from the erotic. Contributions must be clean and wholesome."

And you can imagine how white racist stereotypes of the licentiousness of black women contributed to this mandate. In that context, what does Hurston do? She writes one of the single sexiest passages in the history of American literature. Right?

She was stretched on her back, beneath the pear tree, soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun, and the panting breath of the breeze, when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom, the thousand sister calyxes arched to meet the love embrace, and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch, creaming in every blossom and throbbing with delight."

Keep away from the erotic—indeed! So as I say, she needed this audaciousness in the worst way. She needed it in the '40s and '50s when nobody would publish her work. She needed it in the '40s and '50s when she couldn't sell the kind of work that she wanted to write.

And during that period, in the '40s and '50s, she was hoping to write without having to bother about white audiences. She began a novel called The Golden Bench of God, and imagine if we had this now; it was a novel about black hairdressing entrepreneur and art patron Madame C. J. Walker. Imagine that novel . . . which is lost.

She wrote to her literary agent: "Imagine that no white audience is present to hear what is said."

Her publisher rejected it. Waterbury was unable to place it, and the novel is missing. She needed that audaciousness to get through the various political struggles in which she was engaged. And to hold on to her own committed vision. The last letter that I want to share with you is a letter that she wrote to W. E. B. DuBois in 1945.

This letter is audacious in many ways, which you will see in a minute. But one of the things that makes this letter so particularly audacious is that they hadn't spoken in over 20 years. During the 1920s, they were friends. Although, as always, she was critical of his leadership. She was critical of everybody's leadership. But she gave him a nickname—Dr. Dubious. She actually put it in print at one point. And they had had quite a falling out. Yet 20 years later, when she had an idea that she thought was worth pursuing, this is the letter that she wrote DuBois. And compare this to the letter to the dean of Morgan College, back in 1917. That audaciousness, I think, is getting her through. It's allowing her to stay committed to her vision of race, at a point at which she is subject to so many critiques by so many people, when they will even publish her work.

My Dear Dr. DuBois:

As Dean of American Negro Artists, I think it is about time that you take steps towards an important project which you have neglected up to this time.

Why do you not propose a cemetary for the illustrious Negro dead? Something like Pere la Chaise in Paris. If you like the idea, may I make a few suggestions to you?

1. That you secure about one hundred acres for the site in Florida. I am not saying this because it is my birth state, but because it lends itself to decoration easier than any other part of the United States. I think that was why Edward S. Bok chose Florida for the world famous Bok Tower. I hope that you have seen it, for it is a thing of wondrous beauty. And the thing I want you to note is that two-thirds of the beauty is not in the Tower itself, but in the surroundings. You see, Dr. DuBois, the very woods of Florida afford trees and shrubs free that would cost a fortune north of here, even provided they could be made to grow. Magnolias, bays, oaks, palms, pines, all free for the taking. Beautiful shrubs, while not wild, so plentiful that you could get thousands of cuttings of hibiscus, crotons, oleanders and the like, for the mere asking. And dont forget the beautiful disease and insect repelling camphor tree which grows here so free and quickly. By the time that each wellknown Negro contr[i]buted a tree or two, you would have a place of ravishing beauty. Ceremonies of tree-setting, of course. You would, like Bok, select a site in the lake county of Florida, where thousands of acres are available and as cheap as five to ten dollars an acre on lakes.

2. That there be no regular chapel, unless a tremendous amount of money be secured. Let there be a hall of meeting, and let the Negro sculptors and painters decorate it with scenes from our own literature and life. Mythology and all. Funerals can be held from there as well.

Addition to first suggestion: In Florida, the vegetation would be green the year round, so that visitors during the winter months would not see a desolate looking place. For you must know, that the place would attract visitors from all over the world.

3. As far as this is possible, remove the bones of our dead celebrities to this spot.

4. Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness. We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored. You must see what a rallying spot that would be for all that we want to accomplish and do. There one ought also to see the tomb of Nat Turner. Naturally, his bones have long since gone to dust, but that should not prevent his tomb being among us. Fred Douglas, and all the rest.

You will naturally ask me why I do not approach Mary McLeod Bethune, since she is right here in town with me. But my objection is that she has never uttered nor written a quotable line, never created any art form, nor even originated an educational idea. She has not even improved on any that have been originated. So I think that she should come into the thing later on. In fact, having made the suggestion to you, I shall do nothing more if you like the idea and take it up. I mean nothing that is not asked of me. I am no organizer, and I know it. That is why I have never accepted any political appointment, though three have been offered to me since the War began. I like to sit and meditate and go my own way without strings, so that I can say what I want to. That is precious little at present, because the publishers seem frightened, and cut everything that seems strong. I have come to the conclusion that for the most part, there is an agreement among them to clamp on the lid. But I promise you, that if you like the idea and go ahead, I will fall in behind you and do all that I can.

I feel strongly that the thing should be done. I think that the lack of such a tangible thing allows our people to forget, and their spirits evaporate. But I shall not mention the matter to anyone else until you accept or refuse. If you accept, there is no need for me to say anything more because that will be your province. If you refuse, then maybe Walter White and the N.A.A.C.P. might take it up.

Oh, yes, the reason that I suggested so much as 100 acres was because it would prevent white encroachment, and besides, it would afford space for an artist colony if ever the need arose. You can call on me for the first contribution. If you came down to look over sites, I could save you a lot of trouble by driving you around to look, since I know the State pretty well. I think that I know where to get some mahogany from Central America for the inside woodwork of the building.

Your own mind can furnish you plenty of details, so there is nothing more for me to say except congratulations on your stand at San Francisco, and many good wishes for the future.

Sincerely,
Zora Neale Hurston.

His reply was a very terse, one-sentence note in which he thanked her very much for her idea, but that the press of other work and obligations would unfortunately keep him from responding.

So as I say, we learn a lot from her letters. Those that survived the fire. This one did not, in its entirety. It's a letter to Nunn, and like many, it's partly burned. But there are also many things that we will never learn.

And I think she knew that. My favorite letter in the book is actually a letter which is only a fragment. This is all we have of it, and it reads: "To add to the storehouse of human knowledge and permanent literature. So don't bother about me. You could never understand me. Cordially yours, Dr. Zora Neale Hurston."