The 1920s saw the Harlem Renaissance, when black artists and scholars rejected second-class status and promoted a refined image they called the "New Negro," who was educated, literate, and accepted in white circles--the Negro literati, they were called. Hurston, however, called herself and her friends the Niggerati and shocked the movement's leaders with her interest in black folklore, dance, and language.

"Zora (says writer Alice Walker) was more like an uncolonized African than she was like her contemporary American blacks, most of whom believed ... that their blackness was something wrong with them."

What evidences of this conflict can you find in Hurston's autobiography? Find and mark passages we can share during our discussion.

From The Big Sea

Of this "niggerati," Zora Neale Hurston was certainly the most amusing. Only to reach a wider audience, need she ever write books-because she is a perfect book of entertainment in herself. In her youth she was always getting scholarships and things from wealthy white people, some of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the Negro race for them, she did it in such a racy fashion. She was full of side-splitting anecdotes, humorous tales, and tragicomic stories, remembered out of her life in the South as a daughter of a travelling minister of God. She could make you laugh one minute and cry the next. To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect "darkie." in the nice meaning they give the term that is a naive, childlike, sweet, humorous, and highly colored Negro.

But Miss Hurston was clever, too-a student who didn't let college give her a broad a and who had great scorn for all pretensions, academic or otherwise. That is why she was such a fine folk-lore collector, able to go among the people and never act as if she had been to school at all. Almost nobody else could stop the average Harlemite on Lenox Avenue and measure his head with a strange-looking anthropological device and not get bawled out for the attempt, except Zora, who used to stop anyone whose head looked interesting, and measure it.

From The Big Sea by Langston Hughes, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940)

Cosmos and Zora Neale Hurston sat in straight-backed chairs outside a dilapidated shack with a sand yard, under the shade of a chinaberry tree, a fice dog near Zora Neale’s chair. Eau Gallie, Florida. Hard by the Space Center, where she last worked in the Base Library at Patrick AFB—a library which contained her books. Like Cecil Taylor washing dishes in a restaurant that had his records on the jukebox.

Q: I’m wondering about why you didn’t become an anthropologist.
A: Honey, I did become an anthropologist. I studied voodoo in Haiti. I went into work camps in the south and collected folklore. I published books on those subjects. Do you know who paid for Margaret Mead’s field trip to the South Seas?

Q: Who?
A: Her daddy. That’s who becomes a professor of anthropology. People with rich daddies.

Q: That’s who becomes a professor of writing, too.
A: And that’s why I’m not a writer. I am a writer. I’m just not a professor of writing.

Q: Like Alice Walker.
A: She didn’t have a rich daddy. They’ll let a token nigger through, once in a while, if you’ll do their dirty work. Suck up to them. Keep your mouth shut about what you know about them, and call somebody other person names. You know how I feel about Alice Walker being my champion?

Q: How?
A: A cigar ain’t got a thing to say about who smokes it.

Q: Ain’t it the truth. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ maid says the reason you were buried in an unmarked grave is you high-hatted the people of Eatonville. You were uppity.
A: That’s ridiculous. I was buried in an unmarked grave because I died a ward of the state in Fort Pierce. No way would I go back to Eatonville on welfare. I’d been too grand. But that was me, not them.

Q: Do you think it was a judicious career move to call the writers of the Harlem Renaissance the niggerati?
A: It killed Wallace Thurman, to break ranks. Proving what I had to say.

Q: Whew—black folks!
A: We have our problems too.