Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun
Directed By: Sam Pollard
photo by Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" which was made into a feature film in 2005.
Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter, and her mother was a schoolteacher.
Roots in Eatonville Florida
Though Hurston claimed as an adult that she was born in Eatonville, Florida, in 1901, she was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama, where her father grew up; her family moved to Eatonville, the first all-Black town to be incorporated in the United States, when she was three.
Her father later became mayor of the town, which Hurston would glorify in her stories as a place black Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. Hurston spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up in Eatonville in her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me".
In 1904, Hurston's mother died and her father remarried almost immediately. Hurston's father and new stepmother sent her away to school in Jacksonville, Florida. She later worked as a maid to the lead singer in a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan theatrical company.
Leaving Home
In 1917, Hurston began attending Morgan Academy, the high school division of Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland. It was at this time, and apparently to qualify for a free high-school education, that the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her date of birth.[5] She graduated from Morgan Academy in 1918.
When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its peak, and she soon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnard, Hurston's short story "Spunk" was selected for The New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African American art and literature.
In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman produced a literary magazine called Fire!! that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Library of Congress
A Literary Life
By the mid-1930s, Hurston had published several short stories and the critically acclaimed Mules and Men (1935), a groundbreaking work of "literary anthropology" documenting African American folklore. In 1930, she also collaborated with Langston Hughes on Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts, a play that was never finished, although it was published posthumously in 1991.
In 1937, Hurston was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct ethnographic research in Jamaica and Haiti. Tell My Horse (1938) documents her account of her fieldwork studying African rituals in Jamaica and voudon rituals in Haiti.
Hurston's first three novels were also published in the 1930s: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written during her fieldwork in Haiti and considered her masterwork; and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).
Hard Times at the End
Hurston spent her last decade as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. She worked in a library in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and as a substitute teacher and maid in Fort Pierce.
During a period of financial and medical difficulties, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke and died of hypertensive heart disease. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery in Fort Pierce.
In 1973, African-American novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried and decided to mark it as hers.
Fort Pierce and Eatonville Remember Her
Fort Pierce celebrates Hurston annually through various events such as Hattitudes, birthday parties, and a several-day festival at the end of April known as Zora Fest. Her life and legacy are also celebrated every year in Eatonville, the town that inspired her, at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities.
Jump at the Sun
The documentary was produced for the PBS series "American Masters" and debuted on national television August 26th 2008. The Festival screening will be the first showing of "Jump at the Sun" in Tampa.
The documentary was eighteen years in the making
"I could have done a film a long time ago, but I wanted it to be the right film," says writer-producer Kristy Andersen.
"Jump at the Sun" supplies a multifaceted portrait. The program continues the revival of interest in this free-thinker, who in death has gained stature as a leading literary figure and author of "Their Eyes Were Watching God".
Kristy Andersen
Kristy Andersen is a filmmaker who has worked in various Tampa Bay area television stations since 1974. Her environmental and cultural films have been broadcast locally on WEDU and featured in museums and environmental centers. Her company Bay Bottom News is in St. Petersburg, and she now lives in Treasure Island.
Interview with Kristy Andersen
Kristy Andersen describes how she became interested in Zora Neale Hurston, first as a filmmaker and writer, then as collector of Southern folklore and finally as a strong and tragic woman. Interview at PBS website.
"Zora was ahead of her time," said Kristy Andersen. "She anticipated the influence that African-Americans would have on literature, music, art and America. What she anticipated was the melting pot."
Sam Pollard
Sam Pollard has over thirty years' experience as a producer, director and editor of both feature and television films and videos. He teaches film studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and regularly works with director Spike Lee as an editor and producer.
