In her speeches and writings — including her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, which is liberally quoted by the film’s narrator, S. Epatha Merkerson — Hurston shaved a decade from her age and substituted the all-black town of Eatonville, Fla., where she grew up, for her actual birthplace in Alabama. The film doesn’t speculate about her reasons, but we can: perhaps when being a black woman in the Jim Crow South means that you finish high school at 27 and don’t become the first black graduate of Barnard College (with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology) until 36, you find it practical to obscure your age.
Zora Neale Hurston proves a feisty subject for PBS' American Masters series, reports Robert Lloyd. Jump at the Sun, written by Kristy Andersen and directed by Sam Pollard, does a fine job outlining Hurston’s life and her near-miraculous achievements, drawing on an unusually impressive and interesting group of talking heads. The roster includes the writers Edwidge Danticat, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker (who spurred the rediscovery of Hurston’s work in the 1970s) and the scholars Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Emily Bernard and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Lloyd has a kind of collect-them-all affection for the PBS biographical series American Masters, now in its 22nd year and happily catholic in its definition of who qualifies as an American Master. Jasper Johns, Julia Child and James Brown, to name just three whose names start with J. Some editions are better than others, of course, and few are really critical of their subjects, even when allowing a peek at the warts -- their American mastery is expressed and explicated, yet always taken as read. But most all are better than what passes for "biography" on most other networks, where a couple of hit records or a popular sitcom is considered reason enough to haul a star's old elementary school teacher in front of a video camera. (There are a lot of hours of TV to fill.)
It takes a little more than that to become an American Master. This latest episode, airing tonight concerns the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, which, most famously, Oprah Winfrey and Halle Berry converted into a TV movie a few seasons back.
But Hurston wrote other novels, nonfiction books, plays, and newspaper and magazine articles. The first African American to graduate from Barnard College, she was a charter member of the Harlem Renaissance and an ethnographer who documented Southern black folkways on the page and on film -- some of that footage is seen here. She put that culture on stage as well, calling it "the greatest wealth of the continent" and warning, "This stuff won't last long."She is described here, not necessarily by people who knew her, but people who have spent their lives coming to feel as if they did, as "bodacious," "outrageous," "feisty," "raunchy" and "a rebel." (Photographs show a lively, confident woman of whom this certainly could be true.) "She seems to have been herself all the time," says one commentator. A woman whose early hero was Hercules, Hurston was independent even to a fault, and though she was passionate about her roots, she was not political about her race. "I am not tragically coloured," she wrote. "I do not weep at the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
Enthusiastic talking heads include Alice Walker, who placed a headstone on Hurston's unmarked grave -- "A Genius of the South," it read -- and helped revive interest in the author. Maya Angelou sings two styles of blues. There are residents of Eatonville, the all-black Florida town where Hurston grew up, and Dorothy West, who knew Hurston in Harlem. (West died in 1998: Producer Kristy Andersen worked on the film for 18 years.) The seemingly ubiquitous Henry Louis Gates Jr. for once appears as the literary theorist he is: For Gates Their Eyes Were Watching God is "a novel about the capacity of the African American vernacular to narrate a novel, to tell a story."
That use of vernacular, and its apolitical story of a woman's self-discovery, put it out of favour with African American critics of the time -- though it was praised by the white press. Richard Wright, not yet the author of "Native Son," was particularly dismissive, and even Hurston's old mentor, Alain Locke, termed it "pseudo-primitive." (She called Locke a "malicious little snot" in return. "I will send my toenail to debate him on what he knows about Negroes and Negro life.")
As the century wore on, Huston fell out of fashion, and further out of step. A "bootstrap Republican," she found forced desegregation insulting to black culture, which she regarded as self-sufficiently rich and varied. She published her last novel in 1948, wrote more novels she couldn't get published, and died in 1960 with her books out of print. But they are all back now.
It’s possible, though, to draw your own portrait from the film’s wealth of testimony. It’s likely to be that of a woman whose independence, sardonic humour and ability to live in the moment are distinctively modern — on display every day in reality television shows and music videos and book clubs, but so rare as to be threatening in 1930s and ’40s America.
And she combined that attitude with a scholar’s fierce powers of observation, which are evident in this documentary’s best asset: long clips of film of children dancing in Eatonville and of preachers and carpenters at work, shot by Hurston herself during her field research. It’s a combination that can also be seen in the writers and scholars who testify here to her influence. They are her champions and her heirs.
