In this chapter I give an account of how I remember my childhood in the melodious echoes of songs my mother continues to sing in my mind, punctuating the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s, or 1330s and 1340s, to be more precise on our own calendar, in conjunction with historic events that stormed my homeland during this fateful time and then by extension much deeper and longer into history, culture, context – into religion, art, poetry, philosophy, and mysticism. I remember and I forget and I write and I wonder. I do all of these as an adult looking back. I detail how I wrote this book in the early hours of the morning, when most of the world around me was fast asleep, and as the sun rises and the room becomes bright, only the reflections of those memories linger about me. In the darkness of my room and the brightness of the laptop screen on which I wrote, I was reassured of a window that has opened into the womb into which I was conceived.

The shortages of goods, in combination with the proliferation of new control measures that changed the terms for (licit) market transactions, fostered new opportunities for ‘economic crime’ and incentives to violate or evade the controls. This chapter analyses economic behaviour to show how illegality was normalized in accordance with everyday needs, opportunities for access to goods, and the confusion of boundaries between licit and illicit commerce. This confusion also generated alarm that France was experiencing a serious moral decline.

The films shot by Zora Neale Hurston during her anthropological research trip through the US South (1927–1930) were perhaps the first professional recordings ever made by an African American woman. Durkin examines this footage to explore Hurston’s contributions to ethnographic cinema and to black southern cinema more broadly, and to elucidate some of the connections between her anthropological and creative work. The films show how Hurston understood and sought to depict black folk cultures on the page and stage. They draw attention to the international focus of her research and suggest that the textual and cinematic strands of her research project should not be read in isolation because they were conceived as a joint corrective to mainstream US distortions of black artistry. Moreover, the films are rare cinematic documents of the everyday lives of black working-class subjects whose artistry underpinned so much of Hurston’s creative work and interwar US culture more generally.