“I was glad when someone told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore’.”
Specifically, that someone was Franz Boaz, who was Zora Neale Hurston’s thesis adviser as she worked on a Master’s degree in Anthropology. This is not exactly a rendering of her thesis, but covers a lot of the same ground. I first read this book in college, when I took a class called “African-American Literature” — a cursed class taught by a grad student from another university hired on a temporary basis to teach a class someone backed out of but had already been populated. He had no idea what he was doing, and now that I have been a teacher for awhile, it’s clear we were luck to get out of there alive. He did pick some good books, this being one of them.
The book is divided into two main sections, one covering Zora Neale Hurston’s research into Black folktales in the South, which are often a combination of tall tales, origin myths, trickster tales, stories borrowed from a variety of African diasporic writings, and reconfiguring of actual accounts. In the book, these are often called “lies” by those who tell them. The second half of the book is Zora Neale Hurston’s research into Hoodoo culture along the Gulf coast. Both sections are presented as oral histories, with Zora Neale Hurston being a prominent figure in both.
The first half is the more engaging section, in part because the actual stories are presented. But also because the tellers of these stories are also a significant part of the reading experience. Zora Neale Hurston’s research is more grounded, and she’s offered a lot more latitude to weigh in on them. The second half feels quite limited, is less narrative driven, and her subjects are so resistant to her presence there, there’s a solid question of how much insight we’re actually given as a consequence.