Jasmine griffin. She is a professor at Columbia University of english and africanamerican studies. Her current book is titled towards an intellectual history of black women. Ladies and gentlemen, Farah Jasmine griffin. [applause] thank you, and good afternoon. I know youre here because you love hers stop, not because this hurston you want hear . Okay. Is that better . No . All right. I will keep talking until you can hear me. Ill try to speak a little more loudly. Is that better . Good. So, i know youre here because you love hurston, not bus that is one of the only air conditioned venues today. It is wholly appropriate we have this panel on hurston here in harlem, place she called home. A place that inspired much of her work. A place that started her career. This year will mark the 100th 100th anniversary of her birth, and she continues to be a writer and a figure who messmerrize us. Were fortunate to be joined by a june of scholars and speakers and writers who have spent quite a bit of time thinking about hurston. I want to have introductions and then have a discussion and then open it up to you. Our first speaker is yvette christianse. She is an accomplishedpot. She is the author of a beautiful novel of the unconfessed, that i recommend you read if you have time, and even if you dont have time. And she is also a scholar, a literary scholar, having written one of the most important books on Tony Morrison and teaches also barnard college. She will be our first speaker. Cheryl wall is a leading hurston scholar. Do meant to anybody who knows more about hurston and her contemporaries than cheryl wall who is also a very significant and important critic and leader in our field. She is the author of wow worrying the line black women writers, lineage and literary tradition, and women in the harlem rein substance, and a beloved professor at rutgers university, department of english. Our final speaker is rich blint. Many of you may know rich. He has quite the profile as a curator, an important cultural figure in our art scene, a writer, scholar, and if cheryl is the leading scholar of hurston, rich is one of the leading scholars of james baldwin. He is the coeditor of a special issue of africanamerican review came out in within 2013 but you can still get it, as well as a contributing editor of the james bald win review. So baldwin so please join me in welcoming these panelists. Theres never enough time to talk about hurston. Thought i would open with a leading question that would allow our panelists to say give Opening Statements about their thoughts on Zora Neale Hurston, if they would share their opening thoughts and if youre able to consider this question in the context. Whatever you say will actually address this question. And that is why should we still read Zora Neale Hurston 100 years after her birth. Yvette . Well, first, i just want to say how wonderful it is to be on panel, and particularly because the panel is sponsored by the feminist [inaudible] i really am projecting. Think the people in the front row will feel im shouting atout at you. Hurston is important because theres two polls that existed in her life, but also says something about the way we read between her and her writing. Those two poles were marked by her parents. Mother encouraged her to jump at the moon and her father said, dont get to uppity because you make whites nervous and they wont like it. So that seemed to be a fork in the road. One is about hurstons jumping and her jumping a form of all forms of writing which went from reporting and inventing. The anthropologist, the fiction writer, the essayist. The singer. And the other was the person who had to negotiate those very hurdles and terrains, those cautions, those containment that her father warned her about. And i think that when we read hurston now, particularly for those of white house are teacher, we often conflate hurston with her writing. I think it is absolutelien ethical issue to read her book as the inventer, the writer, to read her writing. We must see some wonderful things as were doing that. One of the earlier panels was about trying to get students to read, children to read. Reading is a form of listening, and hurston understood this so powerfulfully. If were nervous about president obama and his nervousness about being too black in the eyes of the congress, we also cant be nervous about what seems to be impossible, improbable, rude speech. I dont think president obama would ever yell as hurston did when she won second prize for her play, color color strut. She wasnt demure. This maybe was a different time. I think what she did was she found a way to negotiate the demand of acceptability and containment and behavior that her father said she needed to observe, and that jumping. I think for young people today, for those who are in our 60s, it remains a critical issue, and hurstons writings keep showing us again and again that my opening shot, my opening a great opening shot. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Im happy to be with all of you. I do believe with sarah and thank you so much for moderating this discussion. Those of news the room are people who hurston. The title of the panel i love myself, is something that i think is a wonderful starting point because we take it for granted, in this era of children being raised to have selfesteem, that children necessarily have selfesteem. Hurston came up in a time when nobody loved white people. Most people did not love black people, and the fact that she did and loved black people without hesitation is what set her apart and thats the first lesson that we can learn from zora hurston, and one reason we should continue to read her. Now, i imagine that most of you have read their eyes are watching god, and one of the rains love reading their eyes are watching god is the pleasure of reading that book. I laugh out loud every time i read it, even though ive now read it two dozen times. There are some lines i hear, and i do try to read their eyes are watching god out loud, at least a few passages, and every time i teach the novel, the first class, a couple of students will raise hands and say, i cant understand this dialect. I cant read this. I tell them, go home, read it aloud, just as it is written. And if you do that, you will hear the beauty and the humor in that language. That didnt just happen. Following up on yvettes comments, Zora Neale Hurston listens to the way that ordinary black people spoke, and she wasnt ashamed of how we speak. She loved how we speak. She decided as the line in the eyes of watching god goes, the people cast nations through their mouths. There was nothing that black people couldnt talk about and didnt have an opinion about, and hurston took black people seriously at a time when that was not the norm, and sometimes even today, we good to laugh at, good to praise, play sports, but she took our opinions seriously, and i do believe that thats something that we can and should continue to emulate. So, two things. We should read hurston because it gives us pleasure. It brings us joy. We should read hurston because she has much to teach us about loving ourselves. [applause] i think thats a really important question, why soria neale hurston, who is now 125 years after her birth, and for me, Zora Neale Hurston came into the life when i was 16 and just been in the country for, like, four years. I was reading in honors classes the illad. All these really european texts, and so she became in a moment of my life which in some ways scared my mother. Why are you building a library . And im like so i went to the lie bra and excavated things that were nourishing to me and i i Read Everything in my late teens, and what i found was she was incredibly productive. Her output, but she was also contradictory. Right . And in a profound way. She was a republican but fighting with langston hughes, and said in a letter to connie collins, she is going the way of her own mind. So she is fiercely independent, sovereign self, and why she was relevant now, which is also important, what was stunning to me in reading everything together so much, a kind of early assimilation, literary process, and something to get me through a different kind of education, was that she like she says, like the the history of what she is made of, where shes been, what shes done, and then we have to Pay Attention that. And so for me she turned to the model now of she is someone who said, theres no mourning bench for me, right . She was for social justice, and at the same time kind of an anacreonistic, and you couldnt pin her down. That model was is why she is important. Shes also one of the most Brilliant Minds and hilarious figures of the early and mid20th century. She just that. And again, because of the way she died she reminds me that black women remain to my mind, and farah you were at these event last week which was kind of stunning, and ill say this. Ive heard about it. Where Kimberly Crenshaw asking people to stand up for the names of the black men who were killed, and everyone stood up, and then when the names of black women who were killed, everyone took their seats. No one knew the names. So i think that zoras death but her voice of feminist, impulse, in literature, a certain kind of ugly correspondence there that people Pay Attention to that is timely, and reminds us of the work yet to do. Thats my opening salvo. Wonderful. So many ways to go with what each of you said. So, two things im hearing that id like to follow up on, is, one, especially yvette and cheryl but also rich, if you could talk about hurstons use of language, what she does with the language, so unique and rare, and also, we can think about something rich said, follow that up with richard talk about hurstons contradictions. Her contradictions are so fascinating. And i think also sustained our inquiries as well. So lets start with her language and then maybe talk about her contradictions. Could i i have to Pay Attention to actually write something, so could i just take a few minutes i was thinking, in this wonderful new become that feminist i love myself and im laughing, the introductory essay is by alice walker, and she opens with the an account that says hurston still makes many of us nervous and uncomfortable, and she talks about the friend who says, i dont think i would have liked her, and i talked with someone else and neither of us would have. The reason they wouldnt have liked her is because of her behavior at a prize event when she had received that second prize for color i want to call it color counts but color struck, and the hurston walked into the operates event and yelled the name of the prize, and for walkers friend this was really a sign they wouldnt like her. But i think that yell is the thing that is important. She does not demure. And she just does what someone else had done earlier in american letters and which she received and was elevated to the highest status. Im speaking, of course, of walt whitman who was a self selfproclaimed he cleared the air and was lauded for it, and i think that hurston as always, all her life, clearing the air. But the way she did it with a certain kind of masculine bravado. She did it in that way that the grandmother teaches the beautiful language and i want you to be raised to be a i just want to read this. This is a moment when you see her achieving her this is one and she is moving between the poles, those other poles, that are parallel that her parents laid out for her, and that was what is proper for a college educateed the grammar , the spontaneity legitimacy that she carries. And then also what id like to stay, there are instances when she finds her own in other ways and very important. Thats the way she lived. So on a road. Hurston writes my search took me into many strange places and adventures. And this is a straightforward sentence, its establishing, foreshadowing and it has that past tense, the past tense can contain and stabilize and can secure, and then she says my life was in danger several times, and it continues a rather ordinary progress, and then in the way of storyteling, theres a shift from the personal to the general. And the language she learned from anthropology, a language we will criticize her for, but for the anthropology itself had to unlearn those terms. She writes primitive mines are quick to sunshine and quick to anger, and anthropology begins the sentence, but her writing is already into that double quickness. Quick to sunshine, quick to anger, and the past tense is unnoticed if destabilized. She was some little word, look or gesture to either love or sticking a knife between your ribs. Someone is suddenly close by, looking and right there, and you feel her ribs as you perhaps move toward her, too. The past is now. It is here. It is a killer singing. Im going to make me a graveyard of my own. It is present and it is also staking out the future. I am, i and im going to make. A polk county, where the water tasted like cherry wine, great trees of muscle. Here you see the past, time and space are beginning to lose the power boundaries. The tense shift, and one of those waywards job places and then hurston sets the song as it should be. Narrow margins and sucks the margin in from he language margin with prose and what id like to call the left margin of obedience and the right margin of adventure, and she makes language visible and audible. She put exclamation marks and, the exclamation mark is a brick, and the ah is a word that is saying something, holding the place for the word that is yet to come. And i like to think that is where you see hurston, the writer, inventing, making another place. We may grieve with her. We may feel the brick. We may assume that it is hurston singing the song and its may not be. And even if itself is hurston, it may not be the hurston we want to make stable, because she just sure as hell doesnt want to be stable. I just wanted to bring that language to us. There you have a master reader. Who brings all of everything she has spared to reading hurston, so thank you for sharing your reading with us. Cheryl. To bounce off of that, a couple things stand out. Heres hurston in polk county, florida, a woman traveling by herself, a woman who is a student at barnard and there she is at a Migrant Worker camp in polk county, where she doesnt just show up and say, im their teach you. She doesnt show up to say, im hear for an hour, an afternoon. Shes staying overnight, and overnight, and for days. She goes with this group of people working, with them as they work. She joins the community, and im always humbled by her example as a scholar, where as scholars in the academy, we do work hard, and we do take our work seriously, but this level of commitment is just beyond anything that any of us is asked. So, heres shes going i talk about how she has the language of her education and then the language she grew up with and the language of the people that she is working with. I was interviewed one of her classmates from howard university. This woman lived in jacksonville, florida, where one of hurstons brother ran a grocery store, and this woman remembered she wanted me to know that after howard, there zora really went backwards. And i knew what she meant was that hurston had started or, rather, resumed, speaking in the way that she had spoken before she got to howard. And for this woman, that was a sign of her going backwards. For hurston is was a sign of her coming more fully into herself. She refused this idea that black people spoke the way they did by that i mean to speak specifics rural southern black people spoke the way they did because they didnt know any better, they hadnt had enough education. She said they spoke the way they did because thats how they thought through their words and their words were in fact beautiful, and this idea that, how die get that on the page . That wasnt an easy thing, and i love the way that yvette has taken that passage to say that person uses hurston uses that word hah sometimes to help us hear a preacher and his rhythm in the sermon. Sometimes to help us hear the rhythm of the folk singers, because she is its not easy to render the oral culture literate. That is that takes a lot of skill, as any of us know, if we just try to transcribe a conversation we head with our friend on the phone it would be a challenging thing to write that in a way that somebody else can read it and understand it. But hurston had that commitment to capture that lyricism, that beauty on the page, and i think, again, thats one of the things that draws us back to her language. Im thinking, farah, that both the language and the contradictions go hand in hand for me. So theyre not separate. In this moment, for me im thinking more about the beginning of what you said in 1943, zora hurston wrote a letter to county collin. And in it she is going through a lot of stuff. She is, like, telling off elegantly, thinking about language, a Certain Community literary figure, the men mostly. But black writers who want to join the band wagon of the moment, and what is interesting in saying that, she is how die say this she is pissy and then backs up a little built. Talks about how violence is the kind of religion of the anglosaxon, of america, which echos james baldwin. She also suggests in different pieces in her work, which kind of corresponds can you hear me . Which corresponds to just a a an expression in 1930s that how she part and parcel of black life but in the beginning of that letter she talked about metaphor being primitive. Someone who put a proverb and a tall tale is a real embrace of the sophistication, a way of modern it in and a certain way of reading to illustrate, she says, is much easier than to explain. So you become think about the critics who say her language is embarrassing. She herself in a moment that is reallyclysm really complicated in jamaican language are or language here, you are moving at high cotton. Think about how amazing to kind of counselor your hand and make fashion. Thats a certain kind of sophisticatation and nat a sign of primitive unless. But set also in another moment done irshay with the student, she is align enfrom on page 87she says theres something about possessty that smells like death, impulses shorted in the air of underground cave. The soul lives in a sickly air, people can choose. You hear what im saying to you . Thats hurston breaking it down. Whether she is a conservative republican which she was, right but she also in that letter talks for the first time i think any scholar who kind of its a binary about her conflicted history. Because she says this about both or dim earned with social justice but theres no mourners bench for me. She knows that black folks are like she goes louis 14en on e side you. Cant find me a black man who is not so theres a contradiction between the black people and how were treated. So she is not going to go along with the moment of literature of certain people but the actions of trying to write yourself in a National Narrative that is belittling or diminishing. She suggests she takes from mason a fair amount of money and throws parties that are kind of compromising but she says also she is not going to do this, even though she does this, for the cheap coin of pattronnage. So how she lives her personal and political life and what she says are fiercely, deeply, contradictory. One person which is rich for investigation, and so i think so much more to say about the language, but ill leave it there. Well, this is leading because rich has brought this up a couple of times. As an aside i want to say were referencing many different hurton texts. Few writers as prolific as she is. Most people are more e most familiar with their eyes war watching god but she was a playwright, core youre choreographer, and this new edition of was a bible before her other works were available is a great collection of the range of her writing. Fictional. So thats a good place to start and then from there you can go into maybe one day, like rich, you can say on page 82, this is what happened. m are o thing is her political conservatism, and we would that do her justice if we did not talk about her politics. One that if we an take one thing from hurston its her as a lit rare figure and the language she bequeath us. Hurston has a kind of conservatism changes and becomes more what we identify at political conservatism toward the end of her life, in the beginning of her life its not something that is necessarily shared by many black people. But its never you can correct me if you think im wrong her political conservatism is never antiblack. And if she kind of justifies it in a kind of problackness. One thing that maybe you can talk about a little bit is that since her death, she has been claimed by feminists, by black conservatives, by black nationalists, by leftists, and most recently by libertarians. How can any one person leave a legacy up for grabs in that way. Rich, you have been. Thank you for night at te moment it shows up in so many ways in charleston. No way to reconcile the attempt to say we are differently equipped. The way i reconcile it, showing off her literary accomplishments. She turned up in all these other ways, and you are jarred by that. You are never unsure. You are confused and disoriented, what i realize is what she called for, about a certain thing to deal with, they know who black people are, the presentation personified itself which is in that moment, walks in with a followup and walked out. That autonomy, recognized and embracing what has not granted black people as a matter of them being excluded from citizenship and how they are perceived in popular tradition, she is so nourishing in all she has done, she also kept working up until her death. After being published, the minor work, we can say things simultaneously so the contradiction of american life, the woman who can talk about violence in one hand that romanticize the primitive ways of black people, it is incredible we get that done. So glad you raise this because it is what i call in those polls the debate with washington. The mother and the father, saying exit and it is important because it is an issue that comes up again and we shove it away. There was a club, not boldly defined outlier but her mothers family did think they were better than the fathers family so i think she did inherit those tensions, i dont want to litter up the book. There are spots where she is on the subway and makes completely unacceptable remarks about my people embarrassing me, dont remember the exact language because i glanced away, looked away, there are many, that is what bothers us, she is not the proper he is not contained and stable, she is remaking herself because there wasfor her yet. We also have to understand her as someone who was in process. As she got older there was nowhere else for her to go. So to say that, i think her writing is full of conflict and we should read not only the eyes are watching god. What does it mean that her contradiction was brought up in another charge or she was found out working there at the same time she was trying to make a living as a writer, given all the same she was always struggling to repeat herself. The contradictions for what did a certain kind of work, she was discovered in this way is shocking to me. She was found innocent. I want to get that out there. The contradiction alice walker, her champion and editor of the volume that we are here to recognize, and artist in my mothers time, my grandmothers time, there were no models, no this process of constantly inventing herself, to speak at all, and ongoing struggle, i think of the back row of alabama, part of louisiana, by herself, in search of that people, black peoples culture at a time when nobody was interested in that. Maybe somebody wants to say we could take a spiritual or make it into a symphony on the basis of a novel and no, i want to honor these for themselves. I argued with them on a regular basis and have done so for many years but there are those moments i sit back and i am really in our of the courage and integrity of the perseverance it took for her to do what she did. One last question before we open it up. We keep going back to their eyes are watching god because it is so rich but we are alluding to these other texts. If you could leave the audience with something you think they should read, not only their eyes but something that compels you that you keep going back to, what might that be . I really think the track from the road is extraordinary. The strike on the road is the autobiography. The significance of the definite article. I recommend two things, one is the short story sweat published in 1926 which is a distant relation of language of concern and exploration of gender politics, a wonderful story. The second thing, you dont have to read it all, the first volume of africanamerican folklore collected and edited by an africanamerican published in 1935 and you will find some of us find phrases and stories we have heard in our families and again stories that are laugh out loud funny and deeply unsettling. It took me a long time to get through it because a story, god, make me black. That is not an easy story to teach. Why would people ask such a story. If you were a southerner in the early decades in the 20th century, where you live, who you love and who you work, it depended on whether you are black or white. When you think of that, it does not become isnt that funny or embarrassing, isnt this an example of people trying to come to terms with what is existential in their lives . No question is more important. Lots of laugh out loud funny moments. I want to say Read Everything, the book is profoundly more like mythology in some ways because the first part about her dad is rich, but she is elusive in the second part. There is a kind of circling when she goes to the first person to write the popular account of voodoo practice in haiti and jamaica. And 1938, and why is she compelled to collect the furniture. You have time. I was going to say so much because they said the other ones. The ethnographer. A person who takes people in the western hemisphere so seriously in the first to say voodoo is a religion. These are the components and a person who has moments of american nationalism about the us occupation. And how she sees the caribbean. What we are talking about, and it is wonderful to take us seriously. How we turn whenever i hear someone use a word like that i think about and inventiveness, not bad english but inventiveness, we make it exist and they had that which i think is so beautiful. Black english is not english then no one is. This embodies that. We have a few minutes of questions. Lets get them in. Can everyone hear me . No. I will repeat it. Thanks for this wonderful panel. The writing award at Columbia University, the institute for research in africanamerican history. And the original question about what it is about Zora Neale Hurston that is instructive in our understanding of black women today. How is Zora Neale Hurston present today . How is she a role model . How is it her life can be instructive for us thinking about black women today . The importance of knowing oneself and claiming ones voice, talking about the flexibility which is still with us, whether one must defer to the men in ones life, whether one can assert her own opinion. A lot of things through us all the time. There are consequences with some blowback, and what is expressing what one thinks is paramount. The question over here . He imagined black women 3. When you think of all the things that were around that in their eyes, a product of enslavement, cant imagine the possibility beyond legacy of slavery and janie is like i want to be free. That is what hurston gives us. She have a great imagination and can imagine us free and herself free, she doesnt always see things that mitigate the quest for freedom but that is what she did, a willingness to imagine, it is almost how do we treat her now. I have one thing, i say this with fear and trembling on this stage with these particular thinkers because they are talking about the daughter, the mother of us all, walker called her, i think it is important to not keep drawing her into the recognizable woman to whom we can relate as sister or mother but in a way orients us towards keeping nurturing us. She is doing something else. There is another role for the kind of woman Zora Neale Hurston was. I want to say that. It is very important. Not a mother. A wife. In addition to what has just been said beautifully, what you said, not to conflate her personal life with her professional life but something about how dogged she has to be and all the different ways i mentioned it. Because of a certain vulnerability about a black woman not being treated seriously. She is a serious american writer. She is not just a black woman writer but a writer of extraordinary skill and quality but she died the way she did and she was always fabulous, but there is something about the fact that her biographer said about alice walkers placement, no way walker can no about that. Think about that. Think about the honorary gravestone. Her exit from this room in that wing and in the nursing home reminds me of the work we all need to do about understanding what it means to be a black woman in america, how unfulfilled the democratic promise has been and we dont understand black women are part of that. That is what she does for me in addition to the stuff in a contemporary moment we have to reconcile that, we really do. Yes . As a contemporary of marcus darbybased on your collective research, have you found any panafrican influence in her writing during that time . Hurston published at least two poems in negro world. So she was certainly conscious enough of his work that she sent her poem to that publication. I am not trying to suggest she is a darby 8 because she is not but she is interested as sarah said in this community. At the end when they go to the musk, and are working as Migrant Workers, that is, however, a Diaspora Community and hurston is constantly making us aware they are a bohemian, the community, there are other people from the caribbean in the community and they were working cooperatively with each other despite, she doesnt pay enough attention to the capitalist system they are working for but among themselves they are working with each other. There is that connection. She says in talking about her conservatism, she says White Association is about something, what is another white hide, a wonderful phrase, if we must die, she really basically reproduces the poem, it is kind of radical, and i am there. And and just like marcus darby. One thing happening. And at the same time it is hard to reconcile those two things, she sees it engaging in a form of colonialism it doesnt want to call colonialism but never looking outside the United States as a place for black americans. I wanted to thank the panel. What you have done, you have galvanized me to go home and read this book. Is that the one . That is the one i want and think of some things she said. I was reading about hells kitchen, licked out all the parts and i am thinking Toni Morrison said language must not sweat, but i like the way hurston makes her language sweat. I love the way she does that. I have a tree in my front yard, not a real rooster but a ceramic rooster. People roost in their yard because they eat out with anything in your yard. And i am thinking of someone who did a lot of Research Early on, the writer college. And in that society, ruth, i am thinking of her. You are bringing back my interest. When she died she was working on a biography of julius caesar. My question is what is the genesis of that . How did she come about choosing that . Hurston was always interested in the bible. The title comes from a [speaking in native tongue] in the bible, she is raised in a church and always fascinated with religion so i would never say she was a traditionally religious person. She said black people are not christians really. Her spirituality was different. She was interested in the bible and i suspect that interest led her to imagine writing a biography of king herod. Thank you. I would like to say such a phenomenal panel, i feel so honored and privileged. I am a fourth generation storyteller for children and also with the arizona bureau, excited i was coming here but my question, i have been fortunate to teach literacy to children k12. I want to incorporate hundreds of stories i have written and adopted but i want to incorporate this incredible woman we should develop audiences for our children. I am not keen on all her writing but with this great panel, anything about writing at least to embrace childrens thinking or thoughts that can be adopted. To tell that i may not know about . Really adaptable for children, stories about butterflies, animals, those are the stories where i would start that you would find material there the children would really relate to. She didnt write them so they belong to us. You had a recommendation. This is Cheryl Nelson from the Zora Neale Hurston festival. I also incorporate childrens literature in my coursework, Teaching Community college in philadelphia and the one they love the best is the china berry tree. If you would like one to start with, that would be a great one. There is also one titled the three whiches, that is a good one as well. I have copies at home. You could get them in any online bookstore so thank you, panelists. There are always people in the audience who know as much if not more than people on the panel. I every time i read the life story, i get very sad she lived a hard life, suffered a lot. And the affect white patrons had on black literary heritage controlling the type of writing, that had to do with her moving south, going to florida meaning she wanted to write the kind of writing she wanted to do, she didnt want the patriots to influence the kind of writings that others would instantly by. My point is she suffered as a result of her resistance. She suffered a hard life, she was accused of child abuse or child neglect, she was acquitted and she suffered a lot as a result of the accusation, the fact she was discovered and on public assistance for a long time and she suffered and i think she was the most important black writer of the 20th century. The sacrifice she made, for her to be able to write the books or the writing i consider the most authentic in america. Just the poverty she went through, the sacrifice she made because she didnt want to be a sellout. One thing i would say about that which is absolutely true is she chose to do that. She was so committed to that, she chose not to go the commercial route and when she did it earlier on as a way to design, to serve as that kind of witness, to be that committed to what black people, to gather that narrative in the way she did, for me is triumphant, heroic. Because she doesnt what i was saying about her life, not to gloss that over but something really instructive about how real that is for a lot of people in academia and writing, that could be the outcome. Baldwin knows a lot of brilliant ruins. She is not that. To take that path it might be a little bumpy, but look what she has given us. So glad you did remind us of the price she paid. She was very ill. We she couldnt afford the medical assistance she had. The last decade, and her mothers daughter. She is down on her luck, a mobile home. Just so sad. In the sense she has no security. She lost the home, she couldnt afford it. And lacerated personally by the vicious journalism that did write about the molestation charge and didnt actually follow through by saying she was not only exonerated but so falsely accused, not even in the country when this molestation was supposed to happen. It is important that you remember, look at the virginia book, see her, she is still opinionated, problematic opinion. She is insistent, she is not giving an inch. There are tragic dimensions in her life but i dont think her life is a tragic one. That is the important difference and that is how she would want to remember. One of the things i find, i wake up with a headache and cant write a sentence, the sense of self and need to create and produce whatever is taken away from her that is never taken away from her. There are writers, you cant say that about her. Tragically colored. You are asking a question, as an anthropologist, value as an anthropologist and how she was able to integrate her audience, integrate her values coming from someone trained as an anthropologist. Anthropology minor, anthropology is you were saying, history, people of color. Stands out first of all comes to new york, where she studies with the socalled father of american anthropology. At the same time, and it was a big name. In samoa, Margaret Mead wrote an influential book called coming of age in samoa. Ruth benedict studied the indians of the southwest. They suggest it is suggested to study. And going to eatonville. That is the profound thing because Margaret Mead didnt know where she was from and to go back to Home Community and take those people one knows intimately, take the idea seriously and everyday practices seriously and Cultural Expressions seriously and not to put them out there as objects of ridicule or pity. It is a very profound thing, that is where i would say hurston makes intervention in anthropology. The other thing is present folktales in context, we get the whole storytelling process. Anthropologists came to appreciate decades after hurston initiated that example. She does make a profound contribution to the study of anthropology. Important to remember hurston did not turn the people she spoke with into ethnographic artifacts and what she heard from them in a way that they could also read. She did not alienate them from their own stories. I would like to follow up, you see from hurstons blind spots, for me, that adds to the layers of hurston, i am cringing. To have that, come to see that it is early. The limits of her imagination. What it means to collect where she is from, just reminds us that we all have work to do. Anthropology itself is fraught with the same discipline. She is always working, thank you so much for helping us celebrate. [applause] the final event from the harlem book fair in new york city, Princeton University professor eddie glaude weighs in on race in america