“The Brown Bag of Miscellany”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Practice of Overexposure (Reprint)

Originally in Black Camera Volume 7, no. 1, pp. 115-133. © Fall 2015, Black Camera. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.

In March 1928, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to Langston Hughes, her friend and collaborator, to update him on her trip through the American South. Hurston was traveling under the sponsorship of Charlotte Osgood Mason, her white patron, who in December 1927 had equipped Hurston with a car, two hundred dollars a month, a 16 mm camera, and the directive to collect “all information, both written and oral, concerning the music, poetry, folklore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art and kindred subjects relating to and existing among North American negroes.” ¹ When she wrote to Hughes, Hurston was just three months into what would become a three-year trip, yet she was already making tremendous strides. “I am really getting inside of Negro art and lore,” she exclaimed. “I am beginning to see really and when you join me I shall point things out and see if you see them as I do.” ²

Doubtless, the 16 mm handheld camera with which Mason equipped her contributed to Hurston’s self-described visual transformation. During the next two years, Hurston amassed at least twenty-four minutes of silent 16 mm footage of everyday life, including children playing games, a baptism, a church picnic, and a Florida lumber camp. The most technically and artistically ambitious was Kossula: Last of the Takkoi Slaves, a five-minute silent film that features Kossula (also known as Cudjo Lewis), the eighty-eight-year-old man who many believed to be the last survivor of the Middle Passage. ³ Hurston never explicitly addressed the production of these films, which is strange given her penchant for documenting her creative and scientific endeavors in letters and autobiographies. ⁴ Equally curious is the fact that she never articulated the precise nature of the visual revelation she describes in her letter to Hughes, nor did she ever explicitly announce a unique theory of cinema.

Scholars have long turned to Hurston’s 1935 folklore collection Mules and Men to fill in this gap. Focusing largely on the films’ relationship to her ethnographic methods, these interpretative efforts ground their analysis in Hurston’s oft-cited formulation of the “spy-glass.” First invoked in the introduction to Mules and Men, for Hurston, the spyglass metaphorizes the privileges afforded by her status as a “participating observer” who is both detached from and deeply involved with Black folk culture. ⁵ With the aid of its mediating lens, Hurston perceived a dynamic picture of Black folk life that was neither outside of modernity nor in rapid decay, as both her Columbia University anthropology professor (Franz Boas) and her wealthy white patron (Mason) believed. Rather, Hurston writes, the spyglass unveiled a well-spring of cultural production and innovation, what Fatima Tobing Rony describes as a “highly visual world” of active transformation. ⁶

Although the spyglass, with its explicit visual resonance, is useful for theorizing Hurston’s filmic output, scholarly formulations that equate the spyglass with the camera risk confining Hurston and her films within a limiting paradigm of oppositional image-making. Within this script, Hurston is cast as bold filmmaker who confidently takes up the camera to correct negative (false) images of the Black folk with positive (accurate) representations of a vibrant folk community. ⁷ With the aid of the spyglass turned camera, critics suggest, both Hurston and her subjects reverse the atomizing gaze of white scientists and emerge as fully embodied Black folk subjects who are endowed with the cultural authority to represent the truth or reality of Black life. Such frameworks reflect a broader critical tendency to assess early Black cinema within the terms of accuracy, objectivity, and documentary, even as visual scholars outline the dangers of reading Black images, specifically films, within a positive/negative binary. ⁸ Thus, while contemporary Black films and filmmakers are theorized for their capacity to at once disturb the visual field and reconceive the very terms of cinema and the cinematic, far too often Black films from the first decades of the century are, as Jacqueline Stewart cautions, evaluated within preexisting paradigms and value systems, which eclipses the complicated and complex narratives taking shape on screen and behind the camera. ⁹

In this essay, I argue for a critical reassessment of Hurston’s filmic oeuvre, one that takes into account the kinds of subjects, viewing practices, and historical narratives that these films produce even as they attest to Hurston’s ethnographic endeavors. Turning toward a close analysis of two of Hurston’s films – a series of children playing schoolyard games and the five-minute film Kossula – and explore the visual grammar these films produce as they shift the existing logic of intelligibility governing the possibilities for what it means to see and be seen. Furthermore, these films reorient the history of Black cinema in general and Hurston as filmmaker in particular, consequently shifting focus away from a politics of representation that takes for granted the representability of Black social life, and toward a concern with what visual technology can and cannot convey.

Recast as a comment upon the interface between Blackness and filmic technology, rather than an exercise in documentary style, Hurston’s films illumine a social terrain that exceeds the epistemological frameworks of cinematic representation. In other words, I argue that the significance of Hurston’s films is secured not so much by their visualization of a predetermined ethnographic methodology as by their struggle to reconcile the filmic medium with its subject: Black folk culture. In this spirit, I diverge from the tendency to read Mules and Men as a key to Hurston’s filmmaking, and instead name her essays from this period, specifically the 1928 autobiographical essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” as the basis for reconceptualizing her filmmaking. Written and published while Hurston was recording these films, the contingent racial politics that she articulates in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” bears the stamp of a visual logic that reproduces her emergent encounters with the camera. From this perspective, the Hurston who surfaces within film history is far from a master camera operator who deployed her cinematic eye with a perfect balance of confidence and dexterity; instead, she is a woman who managed the camera with the clumsiness of an amateur and the skepticism of an artist who was unconvinced of cinema’s documentary powers. ¹⁰

Indeed, the twenty-four minutes of footage are riddled with technical imperfections and inconsistencies: the film is frequently over- or underexposed, the lens is often obstructed, and subjects regularly come in and out of focus. Film historian Elaine Charnov describes this as Hurston’s method of “pushing the medium to its limit” so that the film itself is as much a subject of the recording as is Black life. ¹¹ Charnov’s observations attune us to the variable technical quality in Hurston’s films, as well as to an understudied aspect of Hurston’s aesthetic that I term “overexposure.” My use of the word draws on its technical sense. Within the realm of production, overexposure is exposing the film to too much light, an effect that can be either minor (resulting in washed-out images), or extreme (producing blinding brightness). At the same time, overexposure registers the limit of film’s representational capacity, the threshold where visibility collapses into invisibility, and light doubles back on its promise of elucidation. In what follows, I extend this definition to name instances of excess (light, motion, bodies) that disrupt film’s basic conditions (synchronization, narrative coherence, embodied movement) and consequently interrupt the filmic experience. Through encounters with overexposure, the filmic experience is transformed from one of detached immersion to a persistently shifting relation between viewers and subjects, so that overexposure’s formal and visual effects undercut the widely held assumption that cinema can accurately capture its subjects. ¹² That Hurston’s footage disrupts film’s “authoritative perspective” – that is, film’s capacity to capture and relay the real, accurate, and true – is especially notable given the long-standing demand for realism in Black art and filmmaking. ¹³ This demand, Wahmeena Lubiano argues, is rooted in an embrace of film’s referential capacities and a politics of representation that dates back to at least the seventeenth century in which “African Americans are persistently occupied with the need to intervene in the dominant culture’s construction of African-Americanness” as abject, dehumanized, and hypervisible. ¹⁴ The politics of “setting the record straight” or “telling the truth,” Lubiano contends, is premised on the problematic claim that “[African American] lives can be captured by the presentation of enough documentary evidence or by the insistence on another truth.” ¹⁵ Within this long-standing relationship between precision, documentary evidence, and transparency, the Black subject is figured as always already intelligible to filmic technology, while the spectator is granted unmediated visual access to the real facts of Blackness.

In contradistinction to a discourse of filmic realism, overexposure in Hurston’s films destabilizes the chain of association that links documentation, authenticity, and truth by simultaneously producing too muchevidence and withholding other, expected knowledge. After all, the footage contains countless sustained close-ups of the body, and frames are often overloaded with gestic and historical referents: figures come in and out of focus; one scene depicts a group dance that abruptly zooms in to isolated movements of feet; another scene reveals children with hands clasped, knees bent, and body weight evenly distributed spinning in circles until they dissolve into a blur (figure 1).

Whether Hurston recorded such fragments for integration into a more “polished” film during editing or for experimentation with the possibilities – and limits – of this novel filmic technology, the result is a filmic grammar that oscillates between the recognizable and the uncontrollable, producing visually discordant and disruptive effects at the very moment when coherence is at stake. Although these practices of overexposure vary, in the face of an overabundance of visual data, the films unhinge the putative relationship between spectator, film, and subject and clear a space for the emergence of social formations, political narratives, and ways of seeing that move outside the terms of positive, good, and real, unhinging the authoritarian perspective of both the camera and the spectator. Open-ended and unresolved, in these short film sketches the overexposure effect produces an overload of visual information that refuses easy or neat interpretation.

This ambiguity is not entirely surprising when we remember that Hurston neither wrote about nor publicly screened her films, even though she repeatedly returned to cinema and filmmaking at different points during her career. After her late 1920s experiments with filmmaking, Hurston tried her hand at screenwriting and was even briefly employed as a story editor by Paramount Studios. By 1940, and with the assistance of Jane Belo (an anthropologist who was also interested in film), Hurston set out to produce a sound film of the Commander’s Keepers Church in Beaufort, Alabama. Yet even these later efforts are underpinned by the sense that film technology and the modes of Black life that appear before the camera are not necessarily compatible. In a 20 May 1940 letter to Belo, Hurston emphasizes this disconnect:

We’ve been shooting, shooting, and shooting. … Not all that we planned worked out – We don’t have synchronization because our motor lay [sic] on us before we started – so we were hand cranking all the four hundred rolls using the spring on the 100 foots. … Had we attempted to synchronize the sound the flexibility of the jumping from place to place would have been impaired. … We find that after having gone through it once that there are a number of things we’d have liked to do that our equipment did not permit. ¹⁶

In this rich account, Hurston draws attention to what the cinematic apparatus cannotdo: “jump from place to place” or coordinate sound and motion. In doing so, she unsettles the long-held notion that Black life was necessarily amenable to the camera, and likewise, that the camera could reveal a “real” and “accurate” picture. Instead, Hurston suggests that film’s technical limitations attest to what Black cultural life is: a continually moving networking of relations requiring a level of dexterity and flexibility that exceeds the technical capabilities of a camera, let alone an entire crew and its arsenal of modern equipment. Part of what overexposure registers is this tension between filmmaking, Hurston’s vision (both real and imagined) of Black folk life, and the cultural practices that transpire in front of the camera. For, in spite of her best efforts, Hurston could never synchronize the technical working of film with the practices that constitute Black life. As a metaphor for filmic practice and an aesthetic emerging on screen, overexposure underscores film’s inability to ever completely capture and represent (Black) subjects; it announces film as a medium that disrupts and reconfigures many of the strategies, practices, and tropes used historically to structure Blackness as a knowable subject.

Footage of children playing games make up nearly half of the twenty-four minutes Hurston filmed on her 1927–1930 trip. Ranging from mere seconds to just under two minutes (or half of a four-minute roll of 16mm film), the footage shifts between highly organized schoolyard games and spontaneous play. In one film, children face off in a dance, each one taking turns showing off in the center of a circle; in another scene, a toddler dressed in a too-formal white dress stands among a group of preteens who circle around her in some version of ring around the rosy. Interspersed throughout are five independent shots that feature a young child standing before the camera and holding up a large white rectangle of paper. Like many of the other films from this period, this footage encapsulates the tension between the codes of cinema and forms of Black sociality that emerge before the camera’s lens. It is during this footage, for example, that we see the children spinning at a dizzying rate or rushing toward the camera with such force that Hurston and her equipment topple over. However, the films of children holding up the white pieces of paper demonstrate the productive working of over-exposure, particularly its capacity to recalibrate a visual grammar of race in which visual technology can quantify, document, and distill some otherwise nonvisible racial essence.

In her foundational reading of Hurston as visual anthropologist, Fatima Tobing Rony reads these films as evidence of Hurston’s conservative scientific training with Franz Boas, who had a particular investment in objective and distanced observation. From the early motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge to Boas’s and Margaret Mead’s later ethnographic cinema, this was a positivist tradition predicated on the ideas that embodied motion was the locus of racial essence, that film was an indexical medium that recorded and transmitted reality, and that tools like identifying placards and measuring grids could order racial meaning. ¹⁷ Against this context, Rony assumes the white placards are anthropometric devices, signs deployed by scientists, anthropologists, and eugenicists to record and classify racial difference as pathology. “Boas’s interest in ‘isolable actions’ are reflected, for example, in Hurston’s footage of children playing: they are made into types, holding up pieces of paper with their ages, filing past the camera frontally and then in profile,” Rony writes. ¹⁸

But on closer inspection, the white cards record not identification data, but rather production information. On one of the rolls of film, a young boy walks toward the camera clutching a white card to his chest with the letters “E-E-L” faintly etched across it (figure 2). As he advances into the foreground, the scene abruptly ends. In the next shot the same boy reappears, assumes an identical pose (eyes forward, white paper clutched to his chest), and again begins to move toward the camera. As he approaches, it becomes clear that this is a second card inscribed with the number one.

Although the initial letter of the first card is indecipherable, when taken together it is safe to assume that they read “Reel 1” and the young boy marks the start of a roll of footage. Children appear holding white cards three more times on different reels. Except for the number five, the writing on the other cards is impossible to make out. However, I assume they also document some production information.

On one hand, Rony’s misclassification of the cards, a reading that persists among Hurston film scholars, is entirely understandable. The footage is old and often difficult to see, and as I noted above, Hurston was a filmmaker who, whether intentionally or not, frequently over- and underexposed her film. The cards’ illegibility is also due to the internal limits of early film technology. Because white objects reflect more light than black ones, and thus require less exposure time, and since cinematic technologies from aperture settings to film stock were calibrated to take the white face or object as its focal point, balancing Black people and white people in a single frame posed a formidable challenge for early filmmakers. ¹⁹ Indeed, under the intensity of glaring sunrays and against the brown of the young boy’s skin, the white paper repels the natural light, endowing the standard prop with a nearly fluorescent glow that at once enraptures us and makes it nearly impossible to decipher its inscription. In the most technical sense of the term, the white card is undeniably overexposed.

On the other hand, the misclassification registers our own critical predisposition to read early Black films through the lens of objectivity, truth, and a resistant politics of representation as much as it does the mechanical capacities of film technology. Indeed, for Rony, the presence of the cards on the screen is enough to situate Hurston and her films within a visual discourse that privileges cinema as an unimpeachable record of racial essence and that positions Black people within a racial classification schema where Black subjects are flattened into objects. What is more interesting about the long-standing misreading of the cards, however, is not so much the error itself, but the way in which Hurston’s efforts reveal themselves to be at odds with film’s technical capabilities. Although it would seem that Hurston cast the boy as an active participant in the film production and not as a specimen of scientific inquiry, the near impossibility of making out the inscription on the overexposed white card undercuts even this seemingly empowered role. The camera’s technical limitations inadvertently return us to cinema’s intended project of order, control, and intelligibility. That is, the nearly impossible task of properly registering the white cards in the footage of children’s games simultaneously destabilizes the correlation between filmic representation and truth embraced by early twentieth-century ethnographic filmmakers and oppositional Black image-makers alike, and points to the limits of cinema’s representational techniques.

As the films unfold, overexposure extends from the white cards and pushes our vision out toward the frame’s material and conceptual margins. In addition to the white cards, these two short films contain other compositional elements that make it difficult to situate them within a recognizable interpretive paradigm. For example, in the first film in which the boy holds the card with the letters “E-E-L,” his body organizes a visual field that teases viewers into thinking we have entered an organizational space of racial data. Yet this project is complicated by a group of children playing schoolyard games behind him. As the boy clutching the card approaches the camera, his body creates four distinct fields of vision: the spaces between his bent elbow and his ear on either side of his head, and the spaces to the left and right of his body. The individual spaces function like apertures: in one perspective, a buckle on a boy’s overall is visible; the opening carved out by the space between the elbow and ear gives view to a raucous game among a group of boys (of whom one remains off screen, one on screen, while a third darts in and out of the frame); elsewhere, a group of girls plays a hand-clapping game. With his body now taking up the entire frame, the boy emerges as the conceptual and physical link that connects the otherwise disparate activities taking place behind him. In his transmutation from a possible object of analysis to an object designed to anchor and organize knowledge, the boy conjures another image linked to the production of racial data: a grid. The term “grid”draws us back to film’s instrumental function of regulation and surveillance. As Shawn Michelle Smith documents, “Schooled on discourses of ‘savagery’ that sought to dehumanize men and women of color, scientists employed the grid to rein in the body perceived to be not quite fully human. They [race scientists] used the grid to manage the black body’s perceived excess.” ²⁰ But rather than provide an a avenue for extracting coveted racial statistics, as a grid come to life the boy’s body unleashes a cacophony of undisciplined “data” while summoning hierarchical ways of seeing, only to dissolve them. Instead of proffering measurable units designed to calcify the supposedly excessive racial body, here, each perspective gives way to partially exposed limbs, indecipherable movements, and, together, an entirely out-of-focus tableau. At just thirty seconds long, the film concludes before the viewer realizes the entire action taking place and where to direct their gaze, leaving us with the awareness that we have seen too much and yet not enough. Although it is tempting to read this film as simply signifying upon scientific conventions, together, the boy’s symbolic transformation from subject to grid and the intense activity behind him produce an interpretative frenzy that interrupts viewers’ consumption of anyracial data. Indeed, the boy holding the card at once anticipates and refuses the compulsory fragmentation that his very presence before the camera would seem to invite. While each of the openings that his body creates draws viewers in, they are greeted with starts, stops, and dead ends. Moreover, our persistently frustrated attempt to comprehend the films operate as a metaphor for what the films imply is the impossibility of capturing Blackness as a quantifiable object of knowledge.

Whereas the first film leaves viewers at a visual impasse, the second film momentarily promises to locate subjects andviewers on steadier ground. Starting closer to the camera and in the center of the frame, the boy’s stance produces the impression of a symmetrical image that might be easier to apprehend. But as if anticipating the viewer’s comfort, the shot moves

in and out of focus as the boy moves forward, yanking away the viewer’s hope of a stable perspective. As he approaches the foreground, the boy’s position creates three distinct fields of vision and his body acts as a focal point that actually draws viewers’ attention back toward the distant horizon. Although his body occupies most of the frame, once again all efforts to capture or isolate him are undermined by a flurry of actions transpiring in the background. A few feet behind his starting position, several young girls stand near the left edge of the frame, one of whom seems to be captivated by the camera; just behind them another figure dances into the right corner. Meanwhile children playfully dart on and off screen, again producing indecipherable blurs that together draw the viewer’s attention away from the central figure (the boy) and out toward the fringes of the frame. With each flash of a limb or glimpse of a piece of clothing, the children seem to test the camera’s capacity to capture their movements for posterity. But if this is a test, it is one that utterly fails. Not only is it impossible to recognize exactly what we are seeing on screen, but also even were the film to be slowed down or frozen – methods popular among early scientific filmmakers who wanted to decompose movement – the bodies always remain just beyond the reach of Hurston’s filmic intention.

In both short films, Hurston’s camerawork grants the visual and affective illusion of approaching living Black culture, an illusion that is certainly bound up with viewer’s enduring desire to know and possess the truth about Blackness. Although both the camera and the viewer’s inability to provide either accuracy or familiarity, proves unnerving for viewers, as the filmed subjects the effect of this perceptual conundrum is nothing short of liberating. Unable to be fully captured by viewers, the young children are symbolically emancipated from their duty to produce truths, knowledge, and data. Likewise, if these films index anything, it is not Black life as a discrete and consumable “object,” nor is it the Black folk as embodied subjects who reverse the scientific gaze and whose actions illustrate the dynamic life pulse of “real” or authentic Black life. On the contrary, Blackness emerges as an always-shifting network of relations and movements that, in spite of cinema’s best efforts, are impossible to sync up. And while the films are certainly not lacking in a proliferation of Black embodied movement, the significance of the physical body to the film is as ambiguous. Are the children the subjects of footage or scientific objects? Is their movement presented for analysis or are we intended to focus on Hurston’s uneasy camerawork? Left with more questions than answers, the films suggest that Black cultural life must be defined in tension with filmic technology.

From this perspective, the philosophy of race that emerges in these short films comes closer to the practice of racial formation that Hurston analogizes in her short essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” than to any of her strictly ethnographic writings. Published in 1928 in The World Today and written while she was shooting these films, at least of the surface, the brief autobiographical essay promises to supply readers with unmitigated admittance into the emotional and psychic experience of Blackness. Just as the films purport to offer unimpeded entryway to the highly coveted terrain of racial knowledge, so too does the essay extend a seemingly earnest invitation into the depths of Hurston’s psyche, of how it “feels” to be her. In this groundbreaking work, considered by many to be both her most vague andrevealing articulation of Black identity, Hurston simultaneously assembles and rejects a linear narrative structure in favor of a snapshot aesthetic that one critic describes as a “collage of scenes.” ²¹ As Shane Vogel writes, “From her childhood performances in the front porch of her Eatonville home, to the very white campus at Barnard, to a mixed-race basement cabaret, to a stroll down Seventh Avenue … the juxtaposition of these scenes suggests that racial feeling for Hurston is contextual and relational.” ²² To be sure, Hurston’s racial feelings shift according to where she is and whom she is with, so while she admits that “I do not always feel colored,” at other moments her “color comes” when she “sit[s] in the drafty basement of the New World Cabaret with a white person” listening to jazz. ²³ Elsewhere in the essay, Hurston confesses that “at certain times I have no race,” only to later explain, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” ²⁴ In addition to being “contextual” and “relational,” as Hurston imagines it, racial feeling and identity is also ephemeral and unstable.

Coming and going, appearing and disappearing, the feeling of Blackness moves in excess of extant categories of identification, racial idioms, or visual grammars. By the end of the essay Hurston considers and rejects history, genealogy, and music as critical frameworks for either imaging or imagining the particularities of Blackness, and instead embraces an entirely banal object: a brown bag: “But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in the company with other bags, white, red, and yellow.” ²⁵ Here, the “little colored girl” who became brown the moment she left her home in Eatonville is refigured as an inanimate, portable, and exceedingly average “brown bag of miscellany” offered to the reader for inspection: “in your hands is the brown bag,” she writes. But as it turns out, the only thing the bag contains is a “jumble of small things priceless and worthless.” ²⁶ Without a key or decoding device, the contents can only exist as a series of loosely affiliated objects: “A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two, still a little fragrant.” ²⁷ If there is any organizing principle here it is disorder; the parts are in a jumble, a “heap,” “dumped” together. Anticipating her readers’ frustration, Hurston ends the essay with a sort of resignation: “On the ground before you is the jumble it held – so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped into a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place – who knows?” ²⁸ A repository that collects and records random objects, but cannot and does not order its elements – here, Blackness is a position best articulated in the impossible to answer question, who knows? Like the paper bag, in Hurston’s hands the camera is also a technology at the base of which we find Blackness to be graspable only as an unstable term that eludes modes of material and representational capture.

That Hurston’s films manifest the theoretical moves of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” suggests that ephemerality and syncopation are at the heart of cinema and Black cultural life. Yet if Hurston’s filmic work is organized around an aesthetic of overexposure that reveals a filmic subject who is perpetually inaccessible within the bounds of cinematic realism and that finds its literary analog in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” then her film Kossula: Last of the Takkoi Slaves bears this theory out in explicit terms. In particular, through its subject matter and formal tropes, Kossula simultaneously summons and challenges the extensive and varied visual culture of slavery where the deeply imbricated themes of objectivity, race, and visuality are intensified. Prolonged segments where the film has been overexposed, producing a near-blinding wash of light, magnify this project. These moments of searing white light, I argue, reproduce the interruptions, disruptions, and discontinuities constitutive of visual accounts of enslavement. The five-minute silent film is structured around Cudjo Lewis, believed to be the last living survivor of the Middle Passage, who was also known as Kossula. Although we can only speculate about the order in which Hurston recorded these films, it is likely that Kossula was among the first footage shot. In a 9 December 1927 letter to Hughes, outlining the preliminary itinerary for her impending trip, Hurston underscored her desire to get to Lewis quickly: “I am leaving for the South on Wed. 14th on the 3:40 from the Penn Station enroute [sic] to Mobile. I shall see Cudjoe [sic] Lewis first as he is old and may die before I get to him otherwise.” ²⁹

This was not Hurston’s first encounter with Lewis. Under the sponsorship of the Carter G. Woodson and Franz Boas, in July 1927 Hurston met and interviewed him. Three months later, Hurston’s findings appeared in the October 1927 issue of Woodson’s Journal of Negro History as “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver.” However, the short essay, which details Lewis’s story of capture, the Middle Passage, and enslavement, turned out to be a heavily plagiarized version of Emma Langdon Roche’s 1914 book Historic Sketches of the Old South. Although the plagiarism was never discovered during her lifetime, Hurston’s return to Alabama can be understood as an attempt to, as Genevieve Sexton suggests, “confront the task of recording this story once again.” ³⁰ Hurston’s strategy was certainly different the second time around. While the first trip lasted just a few days, this time Hurston spent several months routinely visiting Lewis, sharing meals with him, accompanying him to church, and recording his story. ³¹ Yet her interest in revisiting Kossula and filming him, combined with the odd exercise in plagiarism and deception, also registers a larger formal and aesthetic challenge, one that returns to questions of realism, representation, and cinema: how do you render legible the story of enslavement?

Importantly, this challenge was not limited to the years Hurston actually spent with Lewis. Over the course of her career, Hurston repeatedly sought formal and aesthetic modes capable of conveying the nuances and complexities of Lewis’s life. Hurston’s unpublished manuscript “Negro Folk Tales of the Gulf States” includes an index of 482 stories “Kossula Told Me,” and in the early 1930s she considered dedicating the final chapters of Mules and Men to “Kossula’s little parables,” although they never made it into the final draft. ³² Additionally, Hurston spent much of the 1930s editing and revising a full-length narrative version of Lewis’s story called Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, although this too remained unpublished. Within the context of these multi-generic efforts, Kossula speaks to Hurston’s ongoing commitment to conceptualizing the story of the “last black Cargo,” along with all of its complexities and contradictions.

Indeed, Lewis’s account rests somewhere between the conventions of testimony, slave narrative, and first-person witness. As Sexton notes, Barracoon “shows a conflict between looking to testimony in order to access the atrocity of the past as a means of recovering [the rupture of slavery] … and the simultaneous recognition that the past is interminably closed off as inaccessible and intangible.” ³³ Extending Sexton’s insightful reading, both Lewis’s story and his embodied presence blur the commonplace conception of history as a progressive movement between past, present, and future, and instead insist that the past, specifically enslavement and the Middle Passage, continues to condition the historical present. Thus, Hurston’s efforts to account for Lewis index the persistent struggle to register a story that exists at the “precipice of loss” and dispossession – or, to return to the brown bag metaphor, a history that is only graspable as unknowable, ephemeral, and which dismantles the idea of a past that is distinct from the present. At the same time, her attempts at narrative coherence and technical finesse with the film Kossula suggest Hurston’s investment in experimenting with cinema as the most viable medium for representing the wholeof Kossula’s life.

Kossula begins with a series of title cards introducing Kossula as “Full of Vigor at 89” and “Cheerful and Dignified; Always Gracious and Courtly,” which parallels the film’s simple three-part narrative structure. The film opens with a full-body shot of Kossula dressed in overalls, a worn jacket, and a rumpled hat. Seated on the porch of his cabin, he smiles “graciously” at the camera before he begins to tell what we can assume is his story. Kossula’s mien within this mise-en-scène recalls the figuration of the “old plantation Negro” Joel Chandler Harris made famous in his Uncle Remus tales that turn-of-the-century racist cinema, such as D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), subsequently spectacularized. The opening setting and the literary and historical worlds that it evokes seek to establish the title’s promise of opening a window onto a coveted relic of the past: the “last” African slave. In the next shot, Kossula has relocated to a clearing on his property where he begins to chop wood, sits down, and continues to tell the story of his life. In the third and final scene Kossula has returned to the porch, where the film ends.

Despite these straightforward narrative cues, Kossula contains a number of technical missteps that inadvertently point to the aesthetic and practical limitations of rendering a narrative of Black survival within the generic bounds of cinematic realism. Three minutes into the five-minute film, an object (perhaps Hurston’s finger) covers half of the lens for nearly thirty seconds. During this time, the top of Kossula’s body fades in and out of focus, his bottom half is obscured, and eventually nothing but rustling treetops is visible. When his entire body does come back into view near the four-minute mark, it is clear that Kossula has finished this story: he stands up, stops speaking, and circles back to his porch. In a move that would seem to mark a transition into the next segment, Kossula looks at the camera, takes off his hat, and gestures to viewers to follow him indoors. At this moment, the scene begins to fade out, as a glow of light gray and then whitewashes the screen for a full minute. The film culminates in this oversaturation of light, producing a bathetic effect that renders both Kossula and his narrative illegible. As a technical “error,” this protracted moment of overexposure disrupts narrative cohesion and closure. Conceptually, however, the overexposure in Kossula reflects cinema’s inability to provide the representational frame with which to reconstruct Kossula’s African past. Constitutive of the film’s fragmentary and jarring amalgam of genres, techniques, and visual cues, overexposure betrays cinema’s own promise to synchronize sight, sound, and motion in order to represent Black life. That is, even when overexposure amounts to a technical “failure,” it is ultimately an epistemologically productive one in that it calls into question cinema’s fitness to capture and convey a “true” account of enslavement (figure 3).

In her brief treatment of Kossula, Charnov characterizes the incongruity between the film’s technical strivings and final form as “ironic.” Describing Kossula, as the most formally sophisticated ø the most technically “poor” of Hurston’s early footage, Charnov argues that the subject, “a silent film whose theme is that of a man story-telling,” is fundamentally at odds with Hurston’s goal of presenting an accurate portrayal of Black Southern life. What Charnov names as the film’s “irony” triggers a series of important, if impossible to answer, questions: “Why,” she asks, “would one make a silent film of folklore? … Why was the segment edited, with titles and intertitles? For whom was this film intended?” ³⁴ Yet when approached as a failure of realist techniques, overexposure in Kossula reveals the limits of these very kinds of queries. If overexposure registers an incongruity between filmic medium and Lewis, then it is because the technical failure illustrates how an “accurate” portrayal of enslavement would depend upon a “complete” image that elides something else. In an exaggerated manner, overexposure reveals how “properly” registering the details of one filmic subject is to necessarily lose information about another. The sustained overexposure suggests that film is never accurate or authentic, and instead the product of a series of decisions that are often out of the hands of even the filmmaker. ³⁵

The representational challenges rendered visible by Kossula and amplified in the extreme instances of overexposure demand a rethinking of cinema’s particularities in relation to the formal, aesthetic, and political limitations that subtend any attempt to visualize an account of slavery. Thinking the visual alongside accounts of slavery is at best difficult and, more often than not, impossible within the bounds of realist techniques like cinema. As Krista Thompson and Huey Copeland show, this formal and aesthetic struggle derives from slavery’s slippery place within historical records and archives that depend upon the assumed visibility of the slave experience, but also its visual absence. ³⁶ Even as antebellum slavery depended upon tools of visual subjection that range from the scientific daguerreotype to more diffuse forms of visual surveillance circumscribing the plantation as a space of continual surveillance, slavery nevertheless posed, and continues to pose, artistic challenges for artists, historians, and scholars. At the heart of such political and artistic quandaries, write Thompson and Copeland, is the question of rendering visible an account of slavery without reinscribing the forms of violence that “occlud[e] [the enslaved’s] subjectivity at the very moment of representation.”³⁷ Even as slavery is cast as a highly visible and visual institution, it nevertheless strains against the boundaries of available modes of representation.

As a filmic representation of a survivor of the Middle Passage, enslavement, and the (failure of) Reconstruction policies, Kossula contributes additional layers of complexity to this formal and generic conundrum by demanding that we ask how it is possible to visualize a story about slavery that has not yet come to an end? Filmic representations of slavery are valued as “real” or “true” because of their temporal precision (their ability to confirm that slavery happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and ended with emancipation), as well as their ability to present the subject of slavery in objective and truthful terms. Thus, slavery’s visual power depends upon the figuration of slavery as a remote historical event, which underscores the conception of time as progressive and continuous that, as I show above, is fundamentally at odds with Lewis and his story. By the very nature of his status as a survivor of the Middle Passage and witness to the transatlantic slave trade, Lewis throws this temporal order into crisis; he signals, to borrow a phrase from Saidiya Hartman, the afterlife of slavery. ³⁸ At least symbolically then, the moments of dramatic overexposure in Kossula highlight the technical limitations that arise when trying to synchronize time and motion into a coherent document when its subject continues to resonate with and in the present. Put another way, if, as Natalie Zemon Davis suggests, the “coming together” of sound, motion, narrative, and cuts of film “has implications not only for the coherence and beauty of a film but also for the account it gives of the past,” then together, the inability of Kossula to come together (either commercially as a publicly screened film or technically) suggests the historical past of slavery remains open, indeterminate, and fractured. ³⁹

Like its strange mix of ostensibly competing visual idioms, the dramatic moments of overexposure in Kossula index Hurston’s urgent attempt to reconcile Lewis’s status as survivor of the Middle Passage with the visual grammar of cinema. These moments in the film insist that viewers occupy the space of incommensurability and contingency that also structures the brown bag of miscellany and organizes the footage of the children playing games. If the films of the children suggests a Black social life that is taking shape in excess of the filmic technology, a life that is at odds with the filmic technology itself, then the moments of overexposure in Kossula announce a visual logic that is governed not by veracity, truth, or realism, but by fragmentation, contradiction, and generic diversity. A filmic practice and an aesthetic, overexposure speaks to and visualizes the limits of cinematic technology, its narratives, and its representational grammar of race. Overexposure, in both the films of children playing games and Kossula, reminds us of Hurston’s precarious relationship to filmic technology and, in turn, provides the platform from which we can begin to return to the period of early Black filmmaking and uncover alternate narratives of race, visibility, and cinema.

1. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 109.[↑]
2. Carla Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: First Anchor Books, 2002), 114. Hurston’s emphasis.[↑]
3. Library of Congress, The Margaret Meade Collection, 16 mm film, 1927–1929. Hurston may have recorded more than the twenty-four minutes of footage; however, to date, only twenty-four minutes have been recovered.[↑]
4. Hurston comes closest to discussing her status as a filmmaker in her autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road. In the midst of discussing her relationship with Mason, she explains, “[Mason] summoned us when one or the other of us [Langston Hughes, Miguel Covarrubias] returned from our labors. Miguel and I would exhibit our movies.” Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography 1942, ed. Robert Hemenway (Urbana, Il: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 177.[↑]
5. Fatima Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 204.[↑]
6. Ibid., 204, 207.[↑]
7. Such assessments describe Hurston as a filmmaker who arrived in the South with a predetermined “representational method” that depended upon creating an image of Black life that would counter the construction of positivist knowledge that, as Kelly Wagers argues, is “about racial history and the division of this knowledge into distinct, mutually exclusive discourses that further negate African American experiences and history-making methods.” Against this context, Hurston is read as actively and strategically working to “reformulate the subjects and practice of documentary study,” in a way that anticipates the social documentary projects of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. See “‘How Come You Ain’t Got It?’: Dislocation as Historical Act in Hurston’s Documentary Texts,” African American Review 46, no. 2/3 (2013): 210–16.[↑]
8. See, for example, Valerie Smith, ed., Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); and Frank Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).[↑]
9. Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.[↑]
10. Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Scribner: New York, 2003), 193. This reading of Hurston’s camera work also resonates with Daphne Brooks’s recent assessment of Hurston’s sound recordings. For Brooks, Hurston’s inexperience with sound technology and her lack of musical training provide the grounds for teasing out a radical, and indeed renegade, aspect of Hurston’s gender politics. While I am not making a claim regarding Hurston’s gender politics here, like Brooks I am interested in how approaching Hurston’s artistry from the standpoint of experimentation by a nonprofessional is generative. See Daphne Brooks, “Sister Can You Line It Out?: Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 617–27.[↑]
11. Elaine Charnov, “The Performative Visual Anthropology Films of Zora Neale Hurston,” Film Criticism 23, no. 1 (1998): 45.[↑]
12. For a foundational analysis of the regulatory function of early cinema see Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Here Gunning shows how in the midst of rapid demographic, geographic, and technical transformations, cinema produced the illusion of securing otherwise “fugitive physicality” and thus established a sense of security and stability in the midst of the feeling of chaos.[↑]
13. Wahmeena Lubiano, “But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representation and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse,” in Smith, Representing Blackness:, 105.[↑]
14. Ibid., 106.[↑]
15. Ibid., 105.[↑]
16. Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 459.[↑]
17. See Rony, The Third Eye, especially chapters 1 and 2.[↑]
18. Ibid., 204.[↑]
19. See Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997).[↑]
20. Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 84.[↑]
21. Shane Vogel, The Scene of the Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 96.[↑]
22. Ibid., 96.[↑]
23. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: Norton, 2004), 1031.[↑]
24. Ibid.[↑]
25. Ibid., 1032.[↑]
26. Ibid.[↑]
27. Ibid.[↑]
28. Ibid., 1032–3.[↑]
29. Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 110.[↑]
30. Genevieve Sexton, “The Last Witness: Testimony and Desire in Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon,’” Discourse 25, no. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 2003): 190.[↑]
31. Zora Neale Hurston, “Barracoon” typescript, Morgan Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, 1931. See also Sexton, “The Last Witness.”[↑]
32. Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 193.[↑]
33. Sexton, “The Last Witness,” 191.[↑]
34. Ibid., 44.[↑]
35. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby makes a similar point in her reading of antebellum photography, specifically Sojourner Truth’s famous portrait, captioned “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” See “Negative Positive Truths,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 16–38.[↑]
36. Krista Thompson and Huey Copeland, “Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011).[↑]
37. Ibid., 4.[↑]
38. Saidiya Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 755–77.[↑]
39. Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).[↑]