1. Hemenway, Robert, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 96Google Scholar. Hurston's interview with Lewis, Cudjo, “Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver,” appeared in the Journal of Negro History 12 (10 1927): 648–63Google Scholar.

2. As Robert Hemenway writes, “The Harlem literati had much to tell the Alabama students about the Renaissance in New York” (Hemenway, , Zora Neale Hurston, 105Google Scholar).

3. Booker T. Washington to Dr. J. C. Hamilton, March 22, 1906, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

4. Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 149Google Scholar.

5. Initially, DuBois, W. E. B. had invited Franz Boas to speak at the 11th Conference for the Study of Negro Problems atAtlanta University(October 1905)Google Scholar. Boas was unable to appear, but this invitation led to his going to Atlanta the following year.

6. As William S. Willis has written,

Although Washington did not object to what Boas said, he did object to where Boas said it. Boas at Atlanta University was a coup for Du Bois, a coup Washington tried to minimize. In 1906, the enmity between Washington and Du Bois was at its peak, and Washington was doing everything possible to discredit and isolate DuBois…. At this time, Washington's influence with the black press was considerable. This influence, based on long-standing friendships with editors, advertisements, subscriptions, and even secret ownership, permitted Washington to censor news coverage as well as editorial policy.

Willis also makes the interesting point that the only notice of Boas's address that did appear was in the Southern Workman, a journal published by Hampton Institute. Although Hampton was Washington's alma mater, Boas was a close friend of Hampton's president, Hollis B. Frissell (he once attempted to help Boas gain a large research grant from Andrew Carnegie) and Boas had helped Alice B. Bacon (a Hampton teacher) and the Hampton Folk-Lore Society in collecting African-American folklore (American Philosophical Society Library, 22–23).

7. Reprints, for example, were sent to Archer M. Huntington (scion of the railroad family), George Foster Peabody (Wall Street), and Robert C. Ogden (director of New York City's Wanamaker's department store). Boas even sent a reprint to Washington himself (Willis, unpublished manuscript, American Philosophical Society Library, 24).

8. Ibid., 24.

9. Ibid., 25.

10. Hurston initially received most of her support from Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason.

11. During her first trip to the South, Boas expressed dissatisfaction with Hurston's reporting:

What you obtained is very largely repetition of the kind of material that has been collected so much. You remember that when we talked about this matter I asked you particularly to pay attention, not so much to content, but rather to the form of diction, movements, and so on. I would also suggest that it might be a good plan to lay more stress upon current superstitions and to get as many of these as you can. We ought to compare the superstitious beliefs that occur among the English speaking Negroes with those that occur among the Spanish and French speaking Negroes. Also practices that refer to marriage, birth, death, and other important events in life would be important. The methods of dancing, habitual movements in telling tales, or in ordinary conversation; all this is material that would be essentially new…. There is a very peculiar problem involved in the question of transmission of European tales, proverbs, riddles, games, and songs because the planters certainly did not bring along much of it and the question is who the Europeans were from whom all this material was obtained. (Boas to Hurston, May 3,1927, American Philosophical Society Library)

12. Hemenway, , Zora Neale Hurston, 123Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 159–60.

14. As Robert Hemenway writes,

Although anthropology and art are not incompatible vocations, they can imply different uses of personal experience. When Hurston became fascinated with anthropology, she acquired the relatively rare opportunity to confront her culture both emotionally and analytically, both as subject and as object. She had lived Afro-American folklore before she knew that such a thing existed as a scientific concept or had special value as evidence of the adaptive creativity of a unique subculture…. The discovery of such scientific “facts” eventually made the imaginative truths of literature pale, and by 1927 her writing had become less interesting to her because of the growing sophistication of her anthropological study. (Ibid., 21–22)

15. Ibid., 101–2.

16. Mead, Margaret, An Anthropologist At Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), xviiiGoogle Scholar.

17. Barbara Babcock goes on to explore the structural and imagistic relationships with Virginia Woolf's The Waves, a work Benedict was reading while writing Patterns of Culture (Babcock, , “Not in the Absolute Singular: Rereading Ruth Benedict,” in Hidden Scholars, ed. Parezo, Nancy J. [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993], 118–19Google Scholar).

18. As Robert Hemenway writes,

Hurston's correspondence with Hughes during the first year of her collecting trip was frequent and conspiratorial. It provides an unintentional documentary of the expedition. She saw the two of them as secret sharers of racial lore and as conspirators for the dramatic vehicle that would make it public…. At other times she imagined Locke together with them as a glorious artistic triangle; once she drew such a figure with LH and ZH at the base, AL at the apex. (Hemenway, , Zora Neale Hurston, 115Google Scholar)

19. Ibid., 63.

20. Zora Neale Hurston to Franz Boas, March 29, 1927, American Philosophical Society Library.

21. Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, ca. March 1927, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, June 19, 1945, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library. Hurston's words bring to mind feelings Benedict had earlier shared with Mead:

After the committee meeting yesterday Sapir came down to the house and spent the evening with me. But it was more trouble jollying him along than it could possibly be worth. I know enough to keep of conversation about you, but I praised Reo's book and talked of Papa Franz some. And he glowered. Oh darling, I'm glad neither you nor I am bound to care what his pleasures and displeasures are….. At last by all my wiles I got him to talk about the paper [my Configurations article] itself; “I was too lurid in my discription of NWC”: “Apollonian and Dionysian were too literary terms for him” “of course I said a great many things in the article that he'd used in his classes for years,” etc. By that time I wasn't paying much attention to him any more but just giving thanks to God that there was no man living whose whims and egotisms I had to take seriously. (Ruth Benedict to Margaret Mead, May 22, 1932, Margaret Mead Collection Special Correspondence [1928–37], Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

25. As Hurston wrote to Benedict,

(1) The Black Caribs. This group are not pure Caribs. These are interesting beca[u]se in a matter of 300 years, the[y] have, by isolation which is deliberate, established a stable ethnic unit. It is Carib, Arawak and Negro. The cannibal Caribs, eating their way north in the Antilles, ate up the Arawak men in their path, married the women, and moved on. The ancestors of our subject accepted runaway Negro slaves from the Spanish in the early days of colonization, adding a [t]hird element. On the penetration of the British into the Spanish islands, they seized a great number of these war-like and troublesome people and dumped them on the coast of what is now Honduras, and they have been here ever since, living in isolation from all others. They live in their own crude pueblos, having nothing to do with others. They have their own language, which one of them told me (in Spanish) is a bastard idiom. Many of the men speak some Spanish, but the women speak only the bastard language to prevent admixture. Also, no outside men are aloowed [sic] in the pueblos after sundown. (2) The Zamboes, on the Guatemalan border, who have an elaborate language of their own, and had a high culture even before the Spainiards [sic] came here. They are still intact and live thier [sic] own lives, a dictionary of their language, in addition to other studies of them seem [sic] indicated. (3) The Icaques, in a mountain near Cedros, have been in isolation up there since the coming of the Spaniards. So far, they have permitted no outside[rs] to enter their pueblo. They are the one example of the absolutely uncontaminated people left. From what I can learn, they fear the diseases of the White man, especially tuberculosis, and so keep themselves apart. All objects from the outside are especially fumigated before being allowed inside. (Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, ca. 1947, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library)

26. Parezo, Nancy J., Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 3Google Scholar. Parezo, for example, quotes Margaret Mead's reflection in The Golden Age of Anthropology that “anthropology.… welcomed the stranger. As a science which accepted the psychic unity of mankind, anthropology was kinder to women, to those who came from distant disciplines, to members of minority groups in general” (3).

27. For this reason, the rationale for this book is based on the following: “The rediscovery of women scholars is a critique of the history of anthropology and a call for a reexamination of anthropology, academia, and society. It is in many ways the discovery of the history of a marginalized group without a recognized voice” (ibid., 29).

28. According to Nancy Parezo,

By 1910, 20% of faculty were women: of these, 10% were professors, 5% associate professors, 10% assistant professors, and 73% instructors. Above the ranks of instructor, women were found almost exclusively in the professions of domestic science/home economics, English, music, and modern languages. In 1924, according to an American Association of University Professors survey, 4% of 680 women teachers were professors, 5% associate professors, 19% assistant professors, and 72% instructors. Women were still concentrated in English, home economics, and the Romance languages. (Ibid., 21)

29. Ibid., 118.

30. As Ruth Benedict writes,

All our efforts to trace out the influences from other areas [in the Southwest] are impressive for the fragmentariness of the detail; we find bits of the weft or woof of the culture, we do not find any very significant clues to its pattern. From the point of view of the present paper this clue is to be found in a fundamental psychological set which has undoubtedly been established for centuries in the culture of this region, and which has bent to its own uses any details it imitated from surrounding peoples and has created an intricate cultural pattern to express its own preferences. It is not only that the understanding of this psychological set is necessary for a descriptive statement of this culture; without it the cultural dynamics of this region are unintelligible. (Benedict, Ruth, “Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest,” in Mead, , Anthropologist at Work, 261Google Scholar)

31. Although Benedict was primarily interested in the Native American cultures of the Southwest, as were all of Boas's students except Herskovits, , “The Science of Custom” initiates a concern that led to her important book Race: Science and Politics (1940)Google Scholar. Other publications include “We Can't Afford Race Prejudice” (folder 567, 1942), “Let's Get Rid of Prejudice” (folder 560, 1946), and “Race Prejudice in the United States” (folder 548, 1946) (Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library).

32. This article, initially published in Century Magazine (April 1929), would later appear as the first chapter in Patterns of Culture).

33. Because of her work with Herskovits taking cranial and facial measurements in Harlem, Hurston was quite familiar with the scientific critique of race. Also, see Lionnet-McCumber, Francoise, “Autoethnography: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road, in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr, and Appiah, K. A. (New York: Amistad, 1993), 241–66Google Scholar.

34. Gates, and Appiah, , Zora Neale Hurston, xiGoogle Scholar.

35. In the rediscovery and early critical literature on the Harlem Renaissance, Turner, Darwin T.'s In A Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity (1971)Google Scholar captures in its title the general opinion of Hurston held by even those who made the effort to discuss her out-of-print writings. For Nathan Huggins, Hurston had created uncomplicated, superficial “types.” In 1972, however, Robert Hemenway challenged his readers to discover “one of the most significant unread authors in America, the author of two minor classics and four other major books” (Hemenway, , “Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology,” in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, ed. Bontemps, Arna [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972], 190–214Google Scholar). Hemenway's alert, together with Alice Walker's discovery and search for this doubly neglected writer, was a catalyst that ignited what has become a major focus of critical scholarship.

36. Gates, Henry Louis, “Their Eyes Were Watching God: Hurston and the Speakerly Text,” in Gates, and Appiah, , Zora Neale Hurston, 165Google Scholar.

37. Bond, Cynthia, “Language, Speech, and Difference in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” in Gates, and Appiah, , Zora Neale Hurston, 205Google Scholar.

38. As Hans Jonas has argued,

Since the days of Greek philosophy sight has been hailed as the most excellent of the senses. The noblest activity of the mind, theoria, is described in metaphors mostly taken from the visual sphere. Plato, and Western philosophy after him, speaks of the “eye of the soul” and of the “light of reason.”…Sight, in addition to furnishing the analogues for the intellectual upperstructure, has tended to serve as the model of perception in general and thus as the measure of the other senses. (Jonas, , “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses,” in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology [New York: Dell, 1966], 135Google Scholar)

Not only has vision been privileged but, as Martin Jay notes, it could also lead to the denigration of language in several respects. As Jay writes, “Outside of the often maligned tradition of Sophism, language was deemed inferior to sight as the royal road to the truth. It was the realm, as we have noted, of mere doxa (opinion) instead. Rhetoric was thus banished from genuine philosophy. Even when the Greeks discussed verbal phenomena like metaphors, they tended to reduce them to transparent figures, likenesses that were mimetic resemblances, not the interplay of sameness and difference. ‘To produce a good metaphor,’ Aristotle claimed in his Poetics, ‘is to see a likeness.’” (Jay, , Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 33Google Scholar). Also see Tyler, Stephen A., “The Vision Quest in the West, Or What the Mind's Eye Sees,” Journal of Anthropological Research 40 (Spring 1984): 23–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. Baker, Houston A. Jr, “Workings of the Spirit: Conjure and the Space of Black Women's Creativity,” in Gates, and Appiah, , Zora Neale Hurston, 282Google Scholar.

40. Washington, Mary Helen, “‘I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands’: Emergent Female Hero,” in Gates, and Appiah, , Zora Neale Hurston, 98–109Google Scholar.

41. Ibid., 105.

42. In his seminal article “On Alternating Sounds,” Franz Boas likened mishearing to “sound blindness.” And in “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston not only singled out an African-American genius for dramatic action and self-dramatization but celebrated the use of language as “the interpretation of… English… in terms of pictures” (Hurston, Zora Neale, The Sanctified Church [Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981], 49Google Scholar).

43. Locke, , The New Negro (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 5Google Scholar.

44. DuBois, W. E. B., “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in Souls of Black Folk (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1989), 5Google Scholar.

45. Hurston, , Their Eyes Were Watching God (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 285Google Scholar.

46. Hurston, , Mules and Men (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), 19Google Scholar.

47. As Cheryl A. Wall suggests, “The issues of sexual politics … soon prove to be the subject of the first section of Mules and Men” (Wall, , “Mules and Men and Women: Zora Neale Hurston's Strategies of Narration and Visions of Female Empowerment,” Black American Literature Forum 23 [Winter 1989]: 663CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

48. Ibid., 661–80.

49. Ibid., 671.

50. Hurston, , Mules and Men, 180–81Google Scholar.

51. Although Mules and Men was created from Hurston's field notes, it is not clear that this sermon was not one of her “in between” inventions. In this respect, Hurston herself plays the role of the outsider, the jackleg preacher who voices thoughts women in the village were unable, or unwilling, to express. “Full of tremors,” Hurston wrote to Boas, asking if he would write an introduction to Mules and Men. Her fear was that Boas would find the book too “unscientific” since her publisher (Lippincott) was fearful that the book was too technical for the average reader. Her strategy, as she explained to Boas, was to insert “the between story conversation and business” that, though true, were for the “sake of the man in the street.” To strengthen her plea, Hurston argued that no one knew more folklore than Boas and Benedict. For this reason, if Benedict would also read the manuscript and offer editorial suggestions, Hurston was confident that Mules and Men would help to “teach the public” and not simply add to the “enormous amount of loose writing [that] is being done.” Boas finally agreed to Hurston's appeal (Zora Neale Hurston to Franz Boas, August 20, 1934, American Philosophical Society Library).

52. Hurston, , Mules and Men, 229Google Scholar.

53. Ibid., 230. Hurston's comments are rooted in speculations she first tried out on Langston Hughes,

But as I work, my, I find new phases from moment to moment. I am convinced that christianity [sic] as practised is an attenuated form of nature-worship. Let me explain. The essentials are a belief in the Trinity, baptism, sacrament. Baptism is nothing more than water worship as has been done in one form or the other down thru the ages. Venus rises form the sea (All life coming up out of the water i.e. water one great necessity of man) Neptune and the other water gods, in every mythology. The name is missing in christianity [sic], but the tribute is paid nevertheless. “Uness [sic] ye be born of the water….” I find fire-worship in Christianity too. What was the original purpose of the alter in all churches? For sacred fire and sacrifices by fire. This has been brought over from Judaism. The burnt offering is no longer made, but we keep the symbol in the candles, the altar and the term sacrifice. Symbols my opponents are going to say. But they cannot deny that both water and fire are purely material things and that they symbolize man's tendency to worship those thing [sic] which benefit him to a great extent. I believe that the holy ghost is deified fire. It is spoken of too often as fire. On the day of pentecost it was claimed that it appeared as actual tongues of fire. You know of course that the sacrament is a relic of cannibalism when men ate men not so much for food as to gain certain qualities the eaten man had. Sympathetic magic pure and simple. They have a nerve to laugh at conjure. I shall ask is the Trinity, Fire, Water, and Earth? Who shall say me nay without making a purely emotional appeal? (Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, April 30, 1929, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

54. Hurston, , Mules and Men, 249Google Scholar.

55. Ibid., 249–50.

56. Ibid., 250.

57. Ibid., 269.

58. Ibid., 281.

59. Ibid., 18–19.

60. Baker writes,

She knows at the close of her work that she has refused to craft a compendium of “negro Folktales and Voodoo Practices” that would satisfy dry, scholarly criteria of anthropology. Hence, she tacitly slips the yoke that even the eminent Franz Boas seems to put on her efforts in a preface that invokes Uncle Remus as the prototype of the Afro-American taleteller…. But Zora has not merely slipped the yoke or “turned the trick” on a limited anthropology by the conclusion of Mules and Men, for, surely, she has also reclaimed the whole soul of the human enterprise for her conjure. She has rectified the theft of the “soul-piece” and become her own patron's superior through initiation into a world that practices arts different from what she calls “the American pharmacopoeia.” (Baker, , “Workings of the Spirit,” in Gates, and Appiah, , Zora Neale Hurston, 302Google Scholar)

61. Johnson, Barbara, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston,” in Gates, and Appiah, , Zora Neale Hurston, 139Google Scholar.

62. Ibid.

63. Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, April 17, 1932, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library.

64. Ibid.

65. Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict (undated letter), Vassar. Hurston also thanked Benedict for the work she had done on materials Hurston had sent her: “Thanks and thanks for fixing up the MS. so well. You must say you edited and otherwise fixed it [the Hoodoo article for the JAFL] up.” The correspondence carried into the next year. On February 11, 1933, Benedict acknowledged Hurston's promise to pay for the reprints of her article and inquired about further material Hurston had for the journal

I've got the manuscript of Tokula, but you took the unedited manuscript that was the result of your first field trip. Have you ever done. anything with it, and can I have it back and have it edited here? I'd use it in one of the Journal issues. So send it back just as soon as you can. (Ruth Benedict to Zora Neale Hurston, February 11, 1933, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library)

In a follow-up letter, Hurston elaborated upon her financial problems, now that she had been cut off financially by Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason, and detailed possibilities of establishing an anthropology department in Rollins College (Maitland, Florida):

So perhaps a graduate of your Dept. could find a place here. I'll get [Professor W. R.] Wunsch or [Professor] Rice to write you about something and off hand they can be asked why not have a dept. here and collect all the Couch (obscure white element in South Florida analogous to backward mountaineers in Va.— Tenn.) Negro and Indian lore? Your dept. at Columbia could get a lot of new stuff and extends [sic] its influence here and at the same time make another opening. (Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, February 23, 1933, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library)

66. Baker writes, Hurston also inquired if the Museum of Natural History would loan her a sliding caliper and a pair of spreading calipers: “If I can have the use of the head-measuring instruments, I can turn in something that papa Franz will like I am sure” (Hurston to Ruth Benedict, December 4, 1933, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library).

67. Although Benedict did not write a review of Jonah's Gourd Vine, she wrote her congratulations to Hurston and coupled her remarks with further business for the Journal of American Folklore:

I wonder where you are these days. Congratulations on your book. I enjoyed it, and was delighted at all the good reviews you got. Aren't you enjoying it? I am getting the Negro Tales from the Gulf States ready for the next number of the JAFL. The list of informants is not grouped so that the state where you collected the tale can be decided. Send me your address so that I can sned [sic] youthe [sic] list to identify. Are chickens in the south fed on nux voromica? and why? Do you remember the tale? Is there any point to the story of rabbit's filling the air with dust from the rock when he danced? Or is it supposed to be nonsense? (Ruth Benedict to Zora Neale Hurston, June 25, 1934, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library)

Herskovits also thought highly of Hurston's novel. In reply to a letter that a Miss Marie C. Joyne had addressed to Hurston, Herskovits writes,

Your letter to Miss Zora Hurston has been sent by her to me with the request that I give you some references. I am afraid what you ask is a little difficult, since there is really no “psychology of the Negro,” but actually a vast number of people who have attitudes and opinions, aptitudes and deficiencies much as the individuals of any large aggregate might have. Much has been written on this subject, but I must confess I do not have very great faith in most of it, as in the majority of cases, books and articles by white authors usually contain misinterpretation through misunderstanding, and of Negro authors, a similar misinterpretation through a desire to apologize for real or fancied defects.

Herskovits, however, did recommend Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine: “You will find much of what you are after in that. But definite books on the subject are either lacking or are not good” (Melville Herskovits to Miss Marie C. Joyne, December 4, 1934, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois).

68. Ruth Benedict to Dr. Henry Allen Moe, November 15, 1933, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library.

69. As the letter from the Rosenwald Fund concludes, “We are glad to cooperate in your further studies in an amount [$3,000] far beyond our normal fellowship awards because we believe you will greatly benefit by a full two years of study and supervised field work, and because we have such great confidence in the contributions which ultimately you may make to anthropology and to an understanding of the special cultural gifts of the Negroes” (Julius Rosenwald Fund to Zora Neale Hurston, December 19, 1934, American Philosophical Society Library, 2).

70. Zora Neale Hurston to Franz Boas, December 14, 1934, American Philosophical Society Library.

71. Zora Neale Hurston to Franz Boas, January 4, 1935, American Philosophical Society Library.

72. As Herskovits wrote to Boas,

Zora Hurston is in Chicago these days, and she was up here last Sunday. It was the first time in over ten years that I had seen her and it was interesting to see how she has developed in that time. I was very well impressed with the kind of information she has apparently obtained in the Bahamas and in the South, and I hope that she will be able to get this out in somewhat systematic form. (Melville Herskovits to Franz Boas, October 24, 1934, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives)

73. As Hurston writes,

I got the grant from the Rosenwald and they rushed me off to talk with Dr. Boas and arrange things. But lo and behold when I get here it turns out that there is nothing here to prepare me for my special field. You see, what you have done and what I have collected is all that there is to this Negro phase. Of course Dr. Benedict suggests that I go into linguistics, but Dr. Boas couldnt [sic] see why the language of the Pawnees would help me any in Hayti. Nor the language of the Plains Indians in Alabama. So he thinks that the only way I can be prepared for my trip to Hayti this summer is for me to return to you and work with you this summer. (Approaching). (Zora Neale Hurston to Melville Herskovits, January 6, 1935, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives)

74. Ibid.

75. Melville Herskovits to Zora Neale Hurston, January 9, 1935, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives.

77. Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, March 6, 1935, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library.

77. As Hurston writes,

Trying to get as many kinds of folk expression as exist:

1. Songs

a. Unknown spirituals

b. Social songs

c. work songs

d. Chants

2. Sermons

a. prayers

b. How I got religion

c. Calls to preach, etc.

3. Children's games

a. songs

b. chants

3. [sic] Woofing (characteristic talks) (varied kinds)

4. Instrumentation

a. Guitar

b. mouth organ

c. Home made instruments

d. Dreams

(Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, June 28, 1935, Special Collections Department, Vassar College Library)

78. Zora Neale Hurston to Melville Herskovits, April 15, 1936, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives.

79. Melville Herskovits to Zora Neale Hurston, April 22, 1936, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives.

80. Ibid.

81. As Herskovits wrote to Hurston,

No better illustration of this could be had than the outline of the book of Jules Faine which you sent me. I have read the parts of his work which have been published in La Releve. I quite agree with you concerning the scholarly nature of his approach and the careful way in which he has worked. But where he falls seriously short is in his inability to evaluate the African elements in Creole. Thus to attempt to derive principles of Creole phonetics from Norman French alone is the exact parallel of the work of Guy Johnson in his attempt to derive Gulla Island speech from Elizabethan English, which you and I both, I believe, feel to be not tenable. So not only would I not be interested in seeing this work published, but I should deeply regret its publication, as I believe M. Faine himself would were he to take two or three years and study the languages of West Africa as carefully as he has studied Norman French. (Ibid.)

82. Ibid.

83. Zora Neale Hurston to Melville Herskovits, July 30, 1936, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives.

84. As Herskovits wrote to Hurston,

Let me, however, set you straight concerning Katherine Dunham and her program. The Rosenwald Fund is not responsible for her stay in Jamaica, since it is I who planned her program of field work. Needless to say, I had no idea that you were planning to go to Jamaica, though even had I known it, it would not necessarily have made any difference, since there is no reason on earth why two persons should not study the same people. On the contrary, there is every reason why this should be done, and it is for this that I have sent students of my own into areas where I myself have studied. Incidentally, since Katherine Dunham is primarily interested in the study of dance, I do not think you will find her material conflicts with yours. (Melville Herskovits to Zora Neale Hurston, September 28, 1936, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives)

85. Zora Neale Hurston to Melville Herskovits, April 6, 1937, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives.

86. As Herskovits wrote to Hurston,

I was glad to hear about the Maroons. Of course I was there only a part of the day, and wanted to get an impression of their physical type as much as anything else. It is perfectly possible that there is more of interest in other parts of Jamaica, though I suppose it depends again on what you are looking for as to how you will evaluate the significance of a given fulture [sic] for your work.

(Melville Herskovits to Zora Neale Hurston, April 10,1937, Melville Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University Archives)

87. Ibid.

88. Baker, , “Workings of the Spirit,” 303Google Scholar.

89. Ibid.

90. Mikell, Gwendoly, “When Horses Talk: Reflections on Zora Neale Hurston's Haitian Anthropology,” Phylon (09 1982): 221Google Scholar.

91. Hurston, Zora Neale, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 204Google Scholar.

92. Mikell, , “When Horses Talk,” 221Google Scholar.

93. Hurston, , Tell My Horse, 22Google Scholar.

94. Mikell, , “When Horses Talk,” 222Google Scholar.

95. Hurston, , Tell My Horse, 75Google Scholar.

96. Ibid., 58.

97. After passing from the twilight world of the Zombies (the “bodies without souls”; the “living dead”), to the secret societies of human flesh eaters variously known as the Cochon Gris, Secte Rouge, and the Vinbrindingue, Hurston concludes with a chapter on Guede, the only entirely Haitian god that represented as well as voiced the conscious and unconscious concerns of the common people (ibid., 219–36).

98. Ibid., 246.

99. Ibid., 257.

100. As Robert Hemenway writes,

Zora Hurston was convinced that her illness and her voodoo studies were related. She had learned how horse hair chopped fine and put into one's food could kill, how gleanings from a curry comb were sometimes hidden in vegetables…. She backed off from continuing the intense research and began to make plans to finish Tell My Horse on American soil. She was forced to admit that she could not “pretend to give a full account of either voodoo or voodoo gods.” She had gone deeply enough into the Caribbean night. (Zora Neale Hurston, 248)

101. Carby, Hazel, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston,” in New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, ed. Awkward, Michael (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 80–81Google Scholar. I would only add to Carby's extremely insightful analysis that, as I have argued, the tension she addresses was itself rooted in the Boasian school of anthropology.

102. Hurston, , Their Eyes Were Watching God, 43Google Scholar. Hurston's conception of thought and feeling reminds one of Locke, Alain's similar formulation in his dissertation “The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1918)Google Scholar.

103. Ibid., 10.

104. As Martin Jay has written, “The eye is not only, as the familiar cliches would have it, a ‘window on the world,’ but also a ‘mirror of the soul’” (Jay, , Downcast Eyes, 10Google Scholar).

105. Hurston, , Their Eyes Were Watching God, 43Google Scholar.

106. Ibid., 138.

107. Ibid., 72–73.

108. Ibid., 134–35.

109. Ibid., 138–39. It is interesting to note the following advice and support Hurston gives to the anthropologist Jane Belo, with the emphasis on self and images of light:

But this letter is not to talk about me. My feelings are not so valuable after all. This is about little Jane Belo — a tiny ivory casket housing infinite beauty and worth. This valuable container of priceless things has been in the hands of careless handlers, who not only had not the intelligence to look inside, they lacked the appreciation for the marvelous handiwork of the casket itself. Now this precious thing must be retrieved from the hands of the blind and the dumb and placed where its worth can be appreciated. I put this priceless thing with all it holds into the hands of Jane Belo. She must care for it and protect it from the bruising contact of the puling [sic] insensitive. If you, Jane Belo, fail in this your stewardship, then you have failed, not yourself alone, you have failed humanity. Your care of the precious thing I entrust to you may seem to others to be egocentric and the like. But there must be singleness of purpose in any great endeavor and so you must risk the accusation of self-interest in the interest of what is inside the cosmic box. For once let out a glimmer of the inner light, and you shall be that Jane Belo which was from the beginning, but which has been mutilated in attempts to follow the pattern of the common herd. Your first great work will be THE TRANCE. But that is only a beginning. Like Hercules, scramble on up your narrow and rugged path with the light of the blue hills of fame and glory for your light. You have genius within your jewel box. Use it. You are fortunate enough to have financial means. Cease to apologize for it and begin to use it as a weapon to clear your path to your destiny. It was meant to be.

Bon voyage! Go, my little Jane with the light of the future in your eyes. You cannot fail. You have not been successful in your other experiments because the butterfly was attempting to return to the caterpillar stage. Spread your wings and soar! You have no place in your life for the puling [sic] weakling who would sap your vital fluid. Be true to your destiny and Jane Belo. (Zora Neale Hurston to Jane Belo, December 3, 1938, Margaret Mead Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress)

110. Hurston, , Their Eyes Were Watching God, 286Google Scholar.

111. Hurston, , Dust Tracks on a Road (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 235Google Scholar.

112. Ibid., 235.

113. Robey, Judith, “Generic Strategies in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road,” Black American Literature Forum 24 (Winter 1990): 668–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes, “She [Hurston] aspires, in some way, to transcend the constraints of group identification. By insisting on being a self independent of history, race, and gender, she comes close to insisting on being a self independent of body” (Genovese, , “To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women,” in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Benstock, Shari [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 176Google Scholar).

114. Hurston, , Dust Tracks, 33–34Google Scholar