Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN STORIES
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storytelling was real; it was what she thought about all the time, imagining the
whole world—sticks, trees, birds, and rivers—all talking all at once:
I came in from play one day and told my mother how a bird had talked to
me with a tail so long that while he sat up in the top of the pine tree his tail
was dragging the ground. . . . Another time, I dashed into the kitchen and
told Mama how the lake had talked with me, and invited me to walk all
over it. . . . Wasn’t that nice?
My mother said that it was. My grandmother glared at me like open-
faced hell and snorted.
“Luthee!” (She lisped.) “You hear dat young’un stand up here and lie like dat?
And you ain’t doing nothing to break her of it? Grab her! Wring her coat tails
over her head and wear out a handful of peach hickories on her back-side!”
“Oh, she’s just playing,” Mama said indulgently.
“Playing! Why dat lil’ heifer is lying just as fast as a horse can trot.”
Zora knew she “did not have to pay too much attention to the old lady and so
I didn’t. Furthermore, how was she going to tell what I was doing inside? I
could keep my inventions to myself, which was what I did most of the time.”
In all of America, there were few places like Eatonville, where black people
were their own mayors and police chiefs, where black and white folk, who
lived nearby in Maitland, got along extraordinarily well. This was the kind
of home where a black girl could dream uninhibited by color, although in her
father’s opinion, “It did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit.”
Jim Crow was the big boss of the South, and segregation was his rule. With
physical violence a steady threat for any southern blacks who did not mind
their place, and with few good job opportunities in the South but lots of new
factory jobs in the North, the natural solution was to pick up and move. By
1920, every northern city that had good jobs had good music. Detroit with its
cars, Chicago with its meat, Cleveland and Pittsburgh with their steel, and New
York City with everything attracted more than 1 million “New Negroes,” who
were bound to change the sound, the look, and the feel of the places where
they landed. The trumpet-blowing Louis Armstrong went from New Orleans
to Chicago and started touring during the 1920s. The blues-singing Bessie
Smith went from Tennessee to the North and back again as she toured and
recorded for more than twenty years. Armstrong and Smith recorded music
together in New York City. The poetry-wielding Langston Hughes went from
Kansas to New York, which became a homebase for his own itinerant life that
included trips to Moscow, Paris, Africa, and Los Angeles. He sampled the
world, brought it back home, and set it to words. A favored destination for
those who could afford it, or at least thought they could afford it, was Harlem
in New York City, described by historian Robert Hemenway as “a city within
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THE 1920S
a city . . . the cultural capital of black America.”
22
By the end of World War
I, Harlem had more than 100,000 black residents. Harlem was hope; Harlem
was jazz and jazzy poetry; Harlem had swing; the Harlem Renaissance was a
period of black freedom and creative expression without oversight or permis-
s
ion. Zora Neale Hurston arrived in 1925, twenty-one years after her mother’s
death and twenty years after she had first set out on her own, unwanted by her
father and tolerated by an older brother only as a house cleaner.
A double dose of spirit and talent and what her mother had called “travel
dust” had put Hurston on the roads from Eatonville to Jacksonville and back
home again, only long enough to find the “walls were gummy with gloom”
caused by a dislikable stepmother. The antagonism between Zora and her
father’s new wife finally erupted into an all-out brawl, with hitting, scratching,
spitting, screaming, and hair pulling: “I made up my mind to stomp her, but at
last, Papa . . . pulled me away.” Although her father had done little to coddle
Zora, he would not totally abandon her either. Her stepmother said, “Papa had
to have me arrested, but Papa said he didn’t have to do but two things—die
and stay black.” At the age of fourteen, Zora Hurston left Eatonville for good,
seeking as much fortune as could be scraped from a nation that had not yet
read her name, had not yet read her talent.
For
ten years fortune played peek-a-boo. Hurston learned how to work
and how to scrounge, and she later remembered, “there is something about
poverty that smells like death. . . . People can be slave-ships in shoes.” Hurston
cleaned houses, nannied, stiff-armed amorous employers, attended schools
when and where she could, and toured with a troupe of traveling actors as
the personal attendant to the star of the show. These were people who lived
words, who made their bodies talk, though her southern bumpkin tongue was
just as impressive:
In the first place, I was a Southerner, and had the map of dixie on my
tongue. They were all northerners except the orchestra leader, who came
from Pensacola. It was not that my grammar was bad, it was the idioms.
They did not know of the way an average southern child, white and black,
is raised on simile and invective. They know how to call names. It is an
every day affair to hear somebody called a mullet-headed, mule-eared, wall-
eyed, hog-nosed, gator-faced, shad-mouthed, screw-necked, goat-bellied,
puzzle-gutted, camel-backed, butt-sprung, battle-hammed, knock-kneed,
razor-legged, box-ankled, shovel-footed, unmated so and so! . . . Since that
stratum of the southern population is not given to book-reading, they take
their comparisons right out of the barn yard and the woods.
The theater tour ended for Hurston in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1916.
If a giant motion picture camera had been hung from the sky over the east
AMERICAN STORIES
130
coast of the United States in the 1920s, it would have shown two dust tracks
on the road: one made by white people heading to southern Florida, the other
by black people heading north. Zora Neale Hurston and Al Capone could have
waved at each other in passing, he on the way to Miami, she on the way to
Harlem. For generations, Florida had attracted the wealthy, the elderly, and
the sick. But in 1896, an oil tycoon named Henry Flagler—a partner of John
D. Rockefeller and part of the Standard Oil Trust—financed the building of
the Florida East Coast Railroad all the way to sultry, breezy Miami. And the
boom was on. Over the next twenty years, workers drained the surrounding
Everglades and built the Tamiami Trail, a 238-mile highway that ploughed
right through the swampy heart of the peninsula from Miami west to Naples,
connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf Coast. The workers slept in elevated
cabins that kept their feet from becoming alligator or snake feed. Now middle-
class Americans could ride a train or put-put-put in their Model Ts and GMCs
for a little Florida sun. Out in the bays, rum runners delivered Jamaican rum
for the speakeasies, clubs, and resorts that blossomed in the speculative frenzy
that had northerners buying empty lots, bungalows, and houses in subdivi-
sions.
Credit flowed like wine, just as it gushed and geysered on Wall Street.
Although some people prophesied collapse, the boosters, the developers, the
real estate jobbers, and the bankers kept on selling.
I
n 1926, a hurricane blasted southern Florida with 125-mile-per-hour winds
and threw a hungry tidal wave over more than 13,000 new houses. At least
115 people died in Miami, and another 300 drowned in the crashing waves,
mostly poor Latino migrant laborers who were too poor to have the means
for escape. Their bodies got stacked in heaps and burned. Two years later, the
land boom went bust, a bitter taste of the hard years to come. Florida, how-
ever
, had etched itself in the nation’s mind as the destination for vacation and
migration. A slow urban, suburban, and exurban sprawl was swallowing the
quaint towns of Zora Hurston’s childhood. But before Walt Disney built castles
in the sand for Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the 1950s, before Eatonville
got absorbed by Orlando’s asphalt, before the folktales told at Joe’s Country
Store went silent, Zora would get a college education at Barnard College in
New York, study under the master anthropologist Franz Boas, and return to
the South under his tutelage to collect the old-time tales and to tease out the
mysteries of hoodoo.
After
parting company with the actors in 1916, Hurston stayed on a while
in Baltimore and then skipped to Washington, DC. In between stints as a
waitress, a manicurist, and once again a maid, she found the wherewithal
to attend night classes and then Morgan College, for she was determined to
get an education. “This was my world,” she said to herself, “and I shall be in
it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God’s green dirt-ball.”
131
THE 1920S
Though she did not fit in at Morgan, which catered to a decidedly middle-class
group of students, her work gained her the opportunity to enroll at Howard
University, which “is to the Negro what Harvard is to the whites,” where she
earned a two-year degree in English in 1920. Introductions to the witty and
well connected at upwardly mobile Howard University helped Hurston with
her next step up the socio-economic ladder.
By 1920, black Americans were divided over the best means to gain equal-
ity
. Should they persist with established channels, cooperation with whites,
petitions, demonstrations of worth, and patience? Or should black Americans
give up the goal of integration and simply go their own way, create their own
black society, a nation within a nation—or perhaps a new nation somewhere
else, a grand resettlement? W.E.B. DuBois, the leading voice of the NAACP,
advocated the first method, still committed in the 1920s to cooperation, though
no less vehement or forceful in his demands for justice.
Rising
like a black Moses from the colonial streets of Kingston, Jamaica,
Marcus Garvey spoke in a different voice. Arriving in Harlem in 1916, Garvey
learned to move and speak like a preacher from the master of posture and
pose, America’s first pop-culture evangelist, Billy Sunday (a fevered foe of
alcohol and one-time golf chum of Babe Ruth). Schooled in pomp, Garvey
dressed in colorful uniforms and carried a ceremonial sword. He opened the
Harlem doors of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in
1917 in the aftermath of a disgusting race riot in East St. Louis where white
people rampaged through the African-American district, killing at will, toss-
ing
children back into burning buildings. Just as American doughboys were
suiting up to “make the world safe for democracy,” black people in America
were being brutalized. Rage, indignation, and injustice gave momentum to
Marcus Garvey’s cry: “One God, One Aim, One Destiny.” Garvey wanted
black people to unify and to take care of their own, in particular by start-
ing
their own businesses, their own banks and investment funds, their own
newspaper—the Ne
gro World—and a shipping line, Black Cunard. By 1919,
Garvey had 750,000 followers, ships in the water, and his movement was
heading for disaster. His calls for an entirely black nation in Africa—free
from any white colonial control—scared the authorities, and J. Edgar Hoover
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was busy spying on Garvey, literally
sabotaging Black Cunard ships by mixing junk into the gasoline. Worse, with
millions of dollars coming into UNIA and the shipping company, Garvey
began to embezzle from his own empire. Sensing conspiracy all around him
(with good reason), he made an imaginative leap and met with the leader of
the Ku Klux Klan—the man in whom Garvey assumed real and true power
was vested in white America. The news that the self-styled leader of the first
black power movement in the United States was negotiating with the grand
AMERICAN STORIES
132
wizard of the KKK lost Garvey thousands of supporters. Before long, Garvey
was charged and convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in
prison. In 1927, before the end of his term, President Coolidge pardoned him
and deported him back to Jamaica.
Some
of Zora Neale Hurston’s first published writing appeared in Gar-
vey’
s Negro World in 1920, which at the time had more subscribers than the
NAACP’s Crisis. Hurston’s gratitude to Garvey for the chance to publish
lasted
no longer than Garvey’s reputation could sustain: in 1928, Hurston
laughed at Garvey for having found greatness only in his great ability to steal
from his own people. By that time Hurston was becoming something of a
phenomenon in her own right. She had moved to Harlem in 1925, enrolled at
Barnard College (the female wing of Columbia University) as the only black
student in a sea of rich, white faces, and enchanted professors, fellow artists,
and even a wealthy patron—Charlotte Mason, who demanded to be called
“Godmother” by anyone accepting her money. At Barnard, Hurston made the
professional choice to study anthropology rather than English, largely because
of the charisma of Franz Boas, an intense German-born professor who headed
a variety of famous studies and students: sending researchers into the Pacific
Northwest to record Native American languages and myths and promoting the
adventurous career of Margaret Meade, who sailed to American Samoa and
examined adolescence as a cultural, rather than biological, phenomenon. Boas
was a staunch critic of eugenicists, the scientists who wanted to create perfect
people by selectively weeding out “undesirables” through sterilization, and
through Boas’s training of a new generation of anthropologists he combated the
racism and biases inherent in eugenics. His social vision appealed to Hurston,
and with his intellectual guidance and Godmother’s money, she went back to
Florida in 1927 to collect folk tales and to study hoodoo. There she heard of
the most famous hoodoo priestess in New Orleans—Marie Leveau, “the queen
of conjure” who once charmed a squadron of police into assaulting each other
instead of arresting her. When not in Boas’s classroom or wading through the
magic tales of the South, Zora was collaborating with Langston Hughes on a
number of projects, going to parties and speakeasies, and generally drinking
in the effervescence of Harlem at the zenith of its renaissance.
Zora Neale Hurston brought the country to the city. Her Eatonville back-
g
round was central to just about everything she wrote, including most of her
essays, plays, novels, and ethnographic studies. In 1928, looking back at her
childhood, she recalled that other blacks in Eatonville had “deplored any joy-
f
ul tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to
the nearby hotels, to the country.” When she left monochrome Eatonville and
ventured into multicolored Jacksonville, Hurston discovered that she “was now
a little colored girl . . . a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.”
23
From that
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THE 1920S
point forward, she would experience what DuBois in 1903 called “this double-
consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of
others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
24
Hurston
made sure to emphasize that she was “not tragically colored. There is no great
sorrow dammed up in my soul nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not belong to
the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them
a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.” In 1928, when
she wrote these words in an essay titled “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she
was not giving in to anyone else’s petty race tyrannies or degrading demands.
Instead, she saw a “world to be won and nothing to be lost.”
25
For a time, Zora Neale Hurston won that world. She took first prizes for her
plays and earned money for her essays. In the 1930s, she began publishing books,
most notably (to the English teachers who now assign it) Their Eyes Were Watch-
i
ng God, a story about one woman’s shot at self-fulfillment told in the dialect
of Hurston’s old South. Big-name newspapers and magazines gave her books
good reviews, but ultimately her color caught up with her. As author Mary Helen
Washington explained in the foreword to a 1990 rerelease of Their Eyes Were
Watching God, “one white reviewer in 1937 [said he] had difficulty believing
that such a town as Eatonville, ‘inhabited and governed entirely by Negroes,’
could be real.”
26
When the novels of white authors like Ernest Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis sold in the hundreds of thousands, not one
of Hurston’s books sold more than 5,000 copies before her death. She never
earned even as much as $1,000 in royalties for a single volume, at a time when
Babe Ruth was making more than $30,000 a year for swinging a bat. By 1960,
she was living in Georgia, penniless and on state assistance. After she died that
year, some of her unpublished writings were saved by a firefighter who put out
the smolder in a heap of her papers that the apartment manager was torching.
This woman who once sarcastically styled herself “Queen of the Niggerati,” this
woman whom fellow writer Langston Hughes said was “full of side splitting
anecdotes, humorous tales and tragi-comic stories”
27
to the enjoyment of all in
her glow, this black woman from Eatonville, Florida, died in relative obscurity
and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Though her own generation had largely abandoned her, she never meant to
be tragic nor tragically taken, so it may be best to remember her own version
of a tombstone epitaph. “In the main,” Zora Hurston wrote, “I feel like a brown
bag of miscellany propped up against a wall. . . . Pour out the contents, and
there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. . . . On
the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the
AMERICAN STORIES
134
bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in 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
In Cars, on Roads, to Cities
The newspaper writer Heywood Broun captured the ebullient mood of the
era when he said, “The jazz age was wicked and monstrous and silly. Unfor-
tunately
, I had a good time.”
29
While Babe Ruth, Al Capone, and Zora Neale
Hurston were having a good time batting, boozing, capering, and writing, the
rest of the nation paid the Babe and Capone a lot of attention and Hurston at
least a little. Other Jazz Age Americans had to content themselves, typically,
with less: less money, less crime, and maybe less fun. After all, a lot of people
still lived on farms, many wishing they could sample the sparkling neon lights
and spicy clubs of the big cities a bit more often, or at least once. One farm
wife got interviewed in 1919 and was asked why she owned a car but no
bathtub. She responded, “Why, you can’t go to town in a bathtub.”
30
Roads and cities were not new to America. As far back as the 1820s, Henry
Clay of Kentucky had been arguing that the federal government ought to be
in the business of building roads so that goods from out west could get to the
markets back east a whole lot quicker and cheaper. But it was not until 1916
that the federal government passed a law offering the states one dollar for
each state dollar spent to pave roads in the interest of rural mail delivery. The
objective was limited, but the effects were limitless. Along those roads that
the states built, like the Tamiami Trail in Florida, people toured and migrated.
Some went from city to city. Some went from farm to farm. But of those
who actually packed up and moved, the major step was from farm to city. In
fact, 1920 marked a turning point: in the census that year, more people were
recorded living in cities (of at least 2,500 or more) than in rural districts and
small towns. In search of jobs, fun, or simply something new, Americans
chose the mixed joys of urban jungles.
Notes
1. Communication and Consequences: Laws of Interaction (Mahwah, NJ: Law-
rence Erlbaum, 1996), 152.
2.
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic (San Fran-
cisco: Encounter
, 2002), 34.
3. For the full text of the 1927 Indiana law, see “An Act to provide for the sexual
sterilization of inmates of state institutions in certain cases,” S. 188, Approved March
11, 1927,
www.in.gov/judiciary/citc/special/eugenics/docs/acts.pdf.
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THE 1920S
4. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to
Create a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2003), 400.
5. Maureen Harrison and Steve Gilbert, eds., Landmark Decisions of the United
States Supreme Court, Buck v. Bell, May 2, 1927 (Beverly Hills: Excellent, 1992),
48–52.
6.
Gerald Leinwald, 1927: High Tide of the 1920s (New York: Four Walls Eight
Windows, 2001), 78.
7. Quoted in Nicholas E. Tawa, Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th
Century (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005), 58–59.
8. Leinwald, 1927, 165.
9.
Laurence Bergreen, Capone: The Man and the Era (New York: Touchstone,
1994), 83.
10. Leinwald, 1927, 134.
1
1. Robert Sobel, Coolidge: An American Enigma (Washington, DC: Regnery,
1998), 313.
12.
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression
and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33.
13. Leinwald, 1927, 3.
1
4. Robert Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1992), 222.
15. Quoted in Roger Kahn, Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and
Writing About It a Game (Lincoln, NE: Bison, 2004), 51.
16. Ber
green, Capone, 262.
1
7. “What Elmer Did,” Time, December 6, 1948,
www.time.com/time/magazine/
article/0,9171,853607,00.html.
18. Cyndi Banks, Punishment in America (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005),
76.
19. Ber
green, Capone, 524.
20.
Jeffrey Toobin, “The CSI Effect: The Truth About Forensic Science,” New
Yorker, May 7, 2007, 32.
21. All
excerpts from Zora Hurston’s autobiography are taken from Zora Neale
Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippencott, 1942).
22.
Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1980), 29.
23.
Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” World Tomorrow, May
1928, 215–216.
2
4. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: A.C. McClurg, 1903), 3.
25. Hurston, “How It Feels,” 216.
26. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper and
Row, 1990), vii.
27. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940), 239.
28. Hurston, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” 216.
29. Alistair Cooke, Talk About America (New York: Knopf, 1968), 74.
30. Franklin M. Reck, A Car Traveling People: How the Automobile Has Changed
the Life of Americans—A Study of Social Effects (Detroit: Automobile Manufacturers
Association, 1945), 8.
INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
8
Into the Great Depression
Eleanor Roosevelt shakes a wounded soldier’s hand, 1943.
(George Silk/Getty Images)
137