Carla Kaplan, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: a Life in Letters.

Carla Kaplan, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. 880 pp. $19.95.

At the heart of Carla Kaplan's Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2002) is a nexus of Hurston correspondence deeply rooted in African American history and culture. In fact, it is difficult to read the collection without connecting Hurston's letters to her careful appropriation of myth, folklore, or both in her published works. In addition to the 600-plus letters that comprise the collection and span almost 40 years of Hurston's life, other important materials frame this volume. In the Foreword, Robert Hemenway synthesizes information about Hurston's background and complexity as a letter writer, noting her literary and personal connections. Furthermore, Kaplan includes several pages of never-seen-before photographs of Hurston and her correspondents as well as some of the places she lived and visited, all of which constitute visual pleasure and little known aspects of Hurston's life and career. Kaplan's chronology of Hurston's life is invaluable, and the sample correspondence that she includes offers surviving evidence of the writer's handwriting, personality, and creative originality. The glossary provides interesting, pedagogical details about the people, foundations, and presses that were inextricably linked to Hurston's contributions. Also included are a comprehensive bibliography of Hurston's works and a selected bibliography that points readers to additional current scholarship.

Kaplan assembles the collected letters in chronological order, appending useful notes about the historical period that influenced them, clarifying important allusions, situating a plethora of names and layers of individual and personal histories that, if not for her scholarly commitment to detail and knowledge, might make meaning seem elusive.

As Kaplan's commentary suggests, some of the best clues to Hurston's intentions as anthropologist, literary critic, writer, world traveler, folklorist, politician, race woman, teacher, Harlemite, editor, friend, and lover can be found in the letters she wrote during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As prolific as Zora Neale Hurston strove to be in a variety of areas--anthropology, fiction, film, folklore--she saw herself from the beginning of her career until its end primarily as a black woman writer "thoroughly immersed in [her] dreams" and the "will to love."

Of the many works she wrote during her lifetime, none mark the height of Hurston's creativity as pointedly as do the letters she wrote in the twenties and thirties. First and foremost was her life-long concern with securing both the funds and the proper framework for her to work. In this period, Hurston wrote as many as 49 letters to Charlotte Osgood Mason, infamously known as "Godmother," explaining her need for money as well as the uses to which she had put funds that she'd already received. In a June 4, 1931, letter addressed to "Darling Godmother," Hurston wrote: "I don't see, really how this month I can make the $100.00 do. I think by July 1st I can make some arrangements that will help tide me over. I fully appreciate the present economic situation." The collection is rife with statements like these such that Kaplan achieves something remarkable: a text that expresses intense emotions ranging from excitement, gratitude, and anticipation to isolation, sadness, and despair.

In addition to money, Hurston sought to acquire the necessary educational training, travel, and insight she needed to succeed as a folklorist. Some of the most important letters in the collection detail Hurston's persistence as a graduate student, anthropologist, professor, writer, and folklorist in the face of broken promises, bold lies, failed marriages, and unfulfilled desires. In a 1935 letter outlining her anthropological objectives, proposed research methods, and request for funding, Hurston explained to Edwin Embree, then President of the Rosenwald Foundation: "I am not being trained to do a routine job. I am being trained to do what has not been done and that which cries out to be done." According to Kaplan, such correspondence reveals Hurston as "an artist committed to communication and an anthropologist enthralled with community."

In her brilliant unmasking of Hurston's correspondence to friends, patrons, colleagues, publishers, and foundations, Kaplan accomplishes the challenging task of unveiling the various ways that Hurston employed language and the unique ways that her ethnographic subjects used it. For Hurston, recording that linguistic sophistication meant turning to folktales, gossip, music, myth, and other manifestations of the oral tradition. In a 1932 letter to Charlotte Osgood Mason, she highlights a fictional excerpt that she titled "Dialogue of Quarrel between man & woman." Hurston wrote:

Eugene: Somebody's gointer bleed!

Gold: Look out it aint you. I'll whip you wid dis switch-blade (knife) to de very red. (bleed excessively).

In this instance, we encounter Hurston's skill in reconstructing the kind of authentic oral exchange that would later emerge in Their Eyes Were Watching God; hence, readers can draw connections between Hurston's published works and her prior preparation.

From the early 1940s throughout the '50s, Hurston's letters exemplify a steady progression of disappointment and bitterness as she was increasingly betrayed by both black and white people. The pride, vibrancy, and fierce independence that mark Hurston's 1930s letters nearly dissipated in the last two decades of her life. More specifically, some letters from this latter period protest the social conditions of blacks; some are boldly declarative of the beauty and dignity of the race while still others--perhaps the most telling--transcend both angry protest and bold declaration to affirm quietly her disappointment in all humankind. In a 1944 letter to Benjamin Botkin, Hurston wrote: "These do be times that take all you have to scrape up a decent laugh or so. I do not refer to the battlefields, but to this enormous pest of hate that is rotting men's souls. When will people learn that you cannot quarantine hate? ... I see it all around me every day. I am not talking of race hatred. Just hate. Everybody is at it. Kill, rend and tear!" These lines provide excellent background commentary, both somber and informative. Unfortunately, by 1948, after having endured various betrayals and endless disappointments, having accepted her society's willful resistance to change, and having been wrongly accused of child molestation, Hurston had herself become what she called "a good hater." As a result, she fell into despair about her life.

The letters compiled and edited in the chapter devoted to Hurston's life during the 1950s articulate the personal and political resistance that infused her published works of that decade with controversial political ideas that continue to baffle contemporary scholars. The emotion in her 1950s correspondence indicates that she was working against the hostile forces and criticism of the black community into which she had been born and to which she had devoted much of her work and energy. Together, all four central chapters of Kaplan's collection illustrate how Hurston's own consciousness was transformed amid landmark historical events: Her major works were published at the intersection of an individual African American and a collective African American history.

The most satisfying aspects of the collection are its success at unveiling the historical framework and overview of each decade of Hurston's writing life, the prodigious sense of history and culture that informed Hurston's letter writing and life, the complex intricacies of language with which Hurston wrote, and the cultural resources that formed the basis of her folk aesthetic.

The achievement of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters is that while it reveals Hurston's individual quest for identity and meaning, it also devotes full attention to the larger historical and cultural contexts that made such a quest possible. What Carla Kaplan gives us is an important, insightful, well-documented, and well-researched portrayal of Zora Neale Hurston's critical temperament during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Hers is a text that not only serves as an amalgamation of many of the beliefs and opinions that Hurston held from 1917 to 1959, but also a reminder of the value of historicizing representations of black life and culture. The clarity and faithfulness of Hurston's voice and vision as captured in the letters collected by Kaplan is one of the best tributes yet to her writing, fighting life. I admire this collection because with care, thoughtfulness, and the high regard that Hurston truly deserves, it reaffirms Hurston's secure place in the texture of American experience.

Teresa Gilliams

Albright College