A Woman Half in Shadow

Seriously...

BBC

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.1 • 885 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2017

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Zora Neale Hurston. You might not recognise her name. She was an African American novelist and folklorist, a queen of the Harlem Renaissance and a contemporary of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.

But when she died in 1960 she was living on welfare and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her name was even misspelt on her death certificate. Scotland's National poet Jackie Kay tells the story of how Zora became part of America's literary canon.

Alice Walker wrote in her collection of essays 'In Search of Our Mother's Gardens': "We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone."

And that's what Alice did: travelling to Florida in search of Zora's grave where she laid down a gravestone declaring Zora "A Genius of the South". That was in 1973. Now Zora is claimed by many of America's leading novelists including Maya Angelou, Zadie Smith and Toni Morrison, as their literary foremother.

Eighty years since the publication of her greatest work 'Their Eyes Were Watching God', Jackie Kay tells Zora's story.

Interviews include author Alice Walker, the poet Sonia Sanchez, The Guardian's Editor at Large Gary Younge and Zora's biographer Valerie Boyd.

Readings by Solange Knowles.

Photo: Carl Van Vechten

Producer: Caitlin Smith.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box.
0:05.0	The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from.
0:09.0	And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape.
0:12.0	The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape.
0:12.5	The IRA inmates who found a way.
0:14.5	I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path
0:19.5	through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history.
0:25.0	The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them.
0:28.5	Escape from the Maze, listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:34.0	This is the BBC.
0:36.0	My name is Salange Knoll's Ferguson and I first read Surinil Hurston's work in my early 20s and I started where I'm sure a lot of people started with their eyes
0:57.3	were watching God.
0:59.5	Zora Neil Hurston the African American writer, folklorist, anthropologist, is at the heart of today's seriously interesting story.
1:10.0	Maybe you've heard of her, maybe like singer-songwriter Solange Knowles, you've also read Zora's 1937 novel,
1:18.0	Their Eyes Were Watching God, or her essay, How It Feels to Be Colored Me.
1:23.7	But if you haven't, you won't be alone.
1:26.7	When she died in January 1960 at the age of 69,
1:31.0	her grave was left unmarked, her books out of print.
1:35.0	Zor was a lovely person.
1:39.0	You see some people with a little knowledge think they are better. But she wasn't like that. She dealt
1:48.9	with the people. That's 99 yearold Ella Johnson Dinkins, born in Orlando, Florida, now living in Etonville, Florida. She knew Zora
2:01.5	Neil Hurston.
	...

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