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Tracy Heather Strain, Zora Neale Hurston, Reclaiming A Space

Source: Courtesy of Yale, PBS / Yale l PBS

Long before contemporary movements to secure civil rights, equity and equality for Black people, celebrated writer Zora Neale Hurston led her own personal and professional movement as an anthropologist who studied African, American and Caribbean culture.

Hurston who was born in Notasulga, Alabama and raised in Eatonville, Florida, an all Black community, understood at an early age that Black lives mattered. Despite having a challenging life as Black woman, her eyes were always watching Black people.

Although she is largely known for critical, literary works such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, Barracoon and Mules And Men, unbeknownst to many, her life’s passion was studying Black people across the diaspora. The fierce author spent years in pursuit of Black life, language and spirituality that she researched and recorded.

Hurston told stories about Black people, and documentarian Tracy Heather Strain tells the story of Hurston’s commitment to procuring knowledge and authentic Black narratives. Strain, along with a team of scholars and researchers, delivers Zora Neale Hurston: Reclaiming A Space on PBS networks American Experience.

The award-winning filmmaker, who gave us Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart, the first feature documentary on the life and work of Lorraine Hansberry, sat down with MADAMENOIRE on an early Wednesday morning to discuss the beloved Zora Neale Hurston–how she gets this incredible work done.

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MADAMENOIRE: I want to talk about the work that you’re doing around Zora Neale Hurston and the long-awaited documentary. There have been others and plenty of literary biographies, but now we get to see something new onscreen. Would you tell me about how this project came to be?

Tracy Heather Strain: Sure, I’d be happy to tell you how this project came to be. I was in the grocery store one day and I got a call from the head of American Experience, Cameo George, and she asked me, “would you be interested in doing a documentary for us on Zora Neale Hurston?” I was so excited. Of course, I had to say yes, because Zora Neale Hurston is someone I’ve revered in many ways, but I didn’t know a lot about her, frankly. She was on the list. To really learn more, I spent a lot of time learning about Lorraine Hansberry for the film I made about her.

I spent decades in the Lorraine Hansberry land. So, this was the perfect opportunity to learn about Zora Neale Hurston’s work and life. The thing that was very exciting about this is that there actually was a documentary made several years ago about Zora Neale Hurston, but this one was going to focus on the connection between her literary output and her anthropology. And so that, to me, made it quite special.

 

I noticed the film really leaning into the anthropology work that she’s done, I don’t think we know about it in depth. I came into her book, Hoodoo, during the pandemic, and only because people were leaning into African traditional, religion and spirituality, and it was trending on social media. I was curious about American traditional spirituality.

So, what was it like for you discovering different materials of Zora’s? How was it to come across anything that was new to you?

I go through a process, a research process with a team of people, and we start with secondary sources. We look at the footnotes to help find primary sources. We read academic articles, and then we go to the primary sources to reveal things. I read Valerie Boyd’s book, for example. That was very much a guidebook for us. What then we do next is I think about story with the help of the team. What story of Zora can I tell and put on the screen, because it’s an audio-visual medium, so it has to also work visually.

So sometimes there are stories that are interesting. I can’t tell because there’s no way to visually represent it. But I didn’t know much about Zora Neale Hurston’s interest in Hoodoo and religion. But it makes sense. She was raised in a family where her father was a preacher, and she went to church. She was a curious child. Based on our research, it seems like Zora, when she discovered anthropology and decided to collect Negro folklore, she saw the church and religions as part of this. And she also was interested in the connection to Africa.

She was very curious about what came over from Africa that is incorporated into African American life or Black life, because she also went to Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, the Bahamas. So, that was a really interesting thing for us to see her. Not just interested in it because, “oh, I’m interested in the spirituality of these other Black people,” but to study it. She was studying it and to try to understand something about us all that identify as African descended. Right?

You asked me how did I feel. I felt like it was exciting to see that she was taking it seriously. It wasn’t just a passing interest. She really wanted to think about this deeply and analyze it. It wasn’t a fad.

 

You mentioned Valerie Boyd. Did you have an opportunity to speak with her while you were gathering your data and doing your research?

I did not have an opportunity to speak with Valerie Boyd on this project before she passed away. I had the great privilege of meeting Valerie Boyd when I was showing my Hansberry film down in Atlanta, at Spelman. I met her there. Actually, I don’t tell many people this, but it was Valerie who said to me, “Now, you got to make one for Zora Neale Hurston.”

So, after we started, I was so excited to tell her and to have her participate, and I was blindsided. I was unaware, like a lot of people. I think she was very ill, but I had no idea, and I was devastated. It was a beautiful book.

 

Val was my mentor, and even I was blindsided. You’ve pulled a lot of scholars into this film. You have Eve Dunbar and Daphne Lamothe. How do you curate who you’re going to work with on these projects?

I’d like to put a diverse set of people on the screen when I can on different films. And in this film, though, I really wanted to foreground as many African American women as possible. So, during the research phase, we read everyone’s work and thought about the story and who can tell what pieces of the puzzle. That’s how I came to Daphne Lamothe and Eve Dunbar, as well as Dr. Irma McLaren, Tiffany Patterson. Lee D. Baker at Duke was an advisor from the beginning of the project.

I’d worked with him years before in a series Race: The Power of an Illusion, and I was excited to collaborate with him again. He gave me a vote of confidence right from the beginning because you can imagine it’s pretty daunting to think about trying to make a two-hour documentary about Zora Neale Hurston.

Yes.

So, then there’s Charles King, who’s in the documentary, who wrote a book, Gods of the Upper Air. It’s been a bestseller. It won some awards, I believe. He was analyzing not just Hurston, but the connection between Hurston and Elizabeth Benedict and Ella Cara Deloria and Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. It’s a book that looks at how they were changing anthropology. He characterizes them as rebels and radicals.

The last person we interviewed was Carla Kaplan, who works out of Northeastern. She wrote a book and she collected Hurston’s letters. And so, she was able to help us round out some missing pieces that we had in the storytelling. It was a lovely thing to be able to add her to the team.

 

Like Hurston, you are storyteller. 

THS: I guess I am. I am a storyteller. I do identify in that way. One of several ways I identify with Zora Hurston is that I find myself here as a storyteller and I enjoy it.

 

I wanted to ask about that. Was there any way that you were inspired by her storytelling, that helped tell your story about her?

THS: I was most inspired by her life journey in many ways. It’s not to say that her writing wasn’t inspiring to me, but I have to admire someone who was able to accomplish the things that she did after being basically on her own from age 13 onward. And I don’t say that this is a great thing that happened to her. I’m not trying to suggest that at all. But there was something inside her that made her feel it was really important to get an education. We don’t know everything that happened to her or what she experienced between 13 and basically until she got to Baltimore.

Right.

But what we do know is that she craved an education, and she found a way to get it, and it required her to lie about her age. Then she was always working. It was so important to her. I was really struck by that. And then the other thing about Zora Hurston that impressed me was her ability. It appears that she was able to let things go. And it’s a muscle, I think she built up during this time, basically by herself, where she had to be adaptable.

She had to learn how to adapt. If something didn’t work out, she would try to find another way to make things happen. I think that there’s a way these days in our culture that we can get down on ourselves and let things fester or get angry at someone. Zora, I’m not saying she never got angry or was disappointed. Of course, she was. She’s a person. But she seemed to let it go and find a way. It’s like when she got turned down for the first Guggenheim. She tried again later, and not only did she get one Guggenheim, she got two.

 

I deeply respect the work you’re doing. The Lorraine Hansberry story, I mean, it had me in tears. Like real hard, ugly tears. That’s how your work impacts me. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has that experience. How does this work on Zora Neale Hurston compare to the work you’ve done on Lorraine Hansberry’s documentary? What was different? Did you learn anything from the first doc that was integral for the second doc?

I make a lot of documentaries based on history, and one of the many things that are the same in all of the films, the process is generally the same. I would say for the films, these two films about Black women, I feel a special responsibility first of all, to get it right. To try to make something that reaches people that are academics, that reaches people or general audiences that reaches Black women.

I really consider everything very carefully to see if it would be understood. I also add little things that certain audiences will get, and other audiences won’t, but it won’t diminish their experience if they don’t understand specifically. And sometimes it might be a visual sometimes, let’s say in a Zora Hurston film and the anthropology montage, there’s some things there that anthropologists would recognize but maybe general public would not. So that’s an example of what we’re talking about—the documents that are on the screen. But what I learned from Hansberry, I think Hansberry gave me a kind of confidence that I was a storyteller, that I could make an emotional story. I was excited to hear, that I had you quite emotional.

 

It was rough. I don’t want to say it haunted me because it wasn’t haunting. That documentary stayed top of mind for a really long time. I thought about her life, about her work, her age, her death, just everything that was involved there.

THS: What you’re saying is what I hope for with my documentaries, even though when I make things for nonprofits that aren’t biographies at all, I still want people to be a little misty-eyed. It’s a storytelling of humans, right? If I’m not making people feel things then I have failed. You know, the first feature film about Lorraine Hansberry gave me the confidence to feel like when the head of American Experience called me and said, would you consider doing a film and Zora Hurston, I could say yes.

One of the things that is the same with both films is there is a narrator and there is also a person, an actress, performing the voice of the main character. I really enjoy that. I really enjoy looking for the drawing from various sources, the words of the person who is the subject of the documentary and piecing them together so that they can narrate their own story as much as possible.

 

We talked about how your films make people feel. And you said you want people to feel a particular way, misty-eyed. My question for you is, how do you feel, particularly being a Black woman in the pantheon of women who have researched Zora Neale Hurston?

I feel honored and humbled to be even considered the way you framed it. Among the pantheon of women who have studied and wrestled with story, Zora Neale Hurston, wow, that’s very flattering.

As a filmmaker, I feel like I am doing the best I can to digest a lot of information that incorporates many years of work by those scholars and thinkers. Along with my team, we try to do justice to what they’ve said and their work and to accurately represent them if they’re one of the people that we have asked to be in the documentary, because we draw more research from people than are on the screen. I can’t say it any other way. I feel honored and I feel a great responsibility. It’s always a great relief in a film like this when the people that are on screen like the film and they feel like you did a good job.

 

So that’s your professional feeling. How do you feel personally about doing Zora Neale Hurston?

I’m happy that I finally got a chance to have a reason to read Their Eyes Were Watching God. I listened to Ruby Dee’s performance of it— which is lovely. I feel blessed to be able to be a filmmaker. It’s not easy to be a Black female documentary filmmaker. It’s not easy to be a documentary filmmaker, period, or any kind of filmmaker. It’s not an easy life, right? So, to be able to do work that is meaningful is a blessing, because sometimes people want to do different kinds of work and for whatever reason, these kinds of opportunities have not come to them.

So, I don’t take these opportunities for granted. As a person, I do look forward to resting a little bit. We did this very quickly. We did it in 11 months. So, I feel like I did sacrifice a lot of myself, last year in particular. We literally just finished it. As a person, I’m ready to chill out for a little while and look forward to my next project. I’m going to take my time with it.

 

So, do you know what your next project is?

One of my next projects, the one I’m most excited about and focused on in the immediate is a film titled Survival Floating, and it’s about Black people’s relationship to swimming and water, both historically and moving into the present day. I want to make it a different kind of film. But the documentary I made on Zora Neale Hurston is considered an expository documentary, and the documentary I envision with this is more poetic and maybe essay, because I think that a lot of what has to come out in this story are powerful feelings that aren’t easy to articulate.

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Some people love the water and there’s a way that water makes people feel, but also some people are completely terrified by water for good reason, and there’s history behind it, right? So, I’m still in the early development of this, but I’m quite excited and I really want to have a robust engagement, outreach and impact campaign that encourages people of all ages to learn how to swim. I am tired of every summer—

I’m not tired, I am saddened every summer, as soon as the pools open or as soon as it gets warm, there’s stories often about young people, particularly young Black boys, drowning in pools and lakes. It’s something that I would like to be a part of changing. My mom was a swimming instructor. She ran a swimming pool in a suburban Black neighborhood when I was a kid. So, I’ve seen lots of Black people swimming. I’ve seen a Black oasis. I’d like to see what I can do to help other people feel empowered by knowing how to swim.

That’s a great undertaking. I’m one of those people who very much fear the water. I recently got into the beach water over the holiday for the first time in a years, probably decades. I’m afraid of the ocean. A lifeguard had some time on his hands and facilitated the experience. He got behind me and just held me so I could be fully immersed in the water. I can’t tell you the feeling that washed over my body, just being in the element like that and feeling safe and free. I’m really looking forward to your work on this.

I want people to feel that freedom you talked about. That’s the feeling. I feel like there’s more things in our world, in our society, that we’ve been cut off from. A lot of things related to nature and that freedom as human beings. To be in mid-water and feel comfortable there or to be out in the woods, whatever it is, it’s like we’ve been cut off from so much stuff, and I like to be a part of changing that. Even healthy foods. Right?

 

If you haven’t already investigated, Sowande Mustakeem, an African American historian, wrote a book called Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. It talks about the Middle Passage and Black people’s relation to it, food, and health and the impact of that voyage. It make connections with the water and Black folks.

My final question is what do you want us to take away from Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Space?

I think there are several things that I would like people to get from the documentary. First and foremost, I want people to feel like they’ve learned something about Zora Neale Hurston and would like to know more about her. I also think that it’s important for people to think about support. What would Zora Neale Hurston be if she had more support, if she had authentic support?

We have a society, American society, that likes to act like people can do everything on their own. People need mentors, authentic mentors, especially those of us who’ve been kept out of things. I think that Zora Neale Hurston is a good example of why the academy needs to change, the fact that she was kind of kept out in a certain way.

She made the decision not to pursue the PhD. But suppose she had been supported in a way that would have been productive, so that she could have actually learned how to study, learn anthropological techniques and applied those to African American people in a more authentic way than spending time studying Native Americans.

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—and  had been able to sustain herself financially. But, yeah, you just spoke gospel. 

That’s the other thing about this notion of support is we also live in a society where we have a lot of people on social media that want to give their opinions, which is perfectly fine. People, of course, should have opinions. But it’s interesting, Zora Neale Hurston, when she gave her opinions, she was so well read and she knew her stuff, so she said things and she often could back it up.

 

Right.

Because she knew what she was talking about. It wasn’t completely just from off the top of her head saying that Zora Neale Hurston didn’t get herself into some trouble sometimes by speaking harshly, but she was well read. That book, Their Eyes Were Watching God just did not come out of nowhere. She worked hard. It’s a product of her imagination, her memory, and this ethnographic work that she did and refinement; what we see is not how it looks. When she first drafted. She worked it, she done it. And really good work takes time. I think there’s a way in our society that one-hit, overnight successes are promoted and the artists, creative people are not one-hit overnight successes usually.

I think that with this film and Lorraine Hansberry, I thought I really wanted to show that the creative process isn’t necessarily easy and being a creative person isn’t necessarily easy and that people who show promise in these fields as well need support, authentic support, not the Charlotte Osgood Mason style of support.

 

I love the way you were able to capture that and Zora’s ability and resilience to stay the course. Thank you. I’m keeping my eyes on you and hoping you sit with me for the swimming project, too.

Thank you! Thank you so much.

Watch Zora Neale Hurston: Reclaiming A Space here or on PBS network.

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