Bay Bottom News

Zora Neale Hurston’s name is almost synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance.  Yet, she spent only a modest amount of her time in Harlem during the decade it flourished as an incubator for black arts in America, from 1920 until the stock market crashed in 1929, launching the Great Depression.

Zora arrived in New York in 1925 and in 1927 she was given a 16-mm camera and a car by her patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, and immediately headed south to Florida.  A majority of the footage from 1927 consists of children playing games.  Researcher Keith Bollum has identified the location as Loughman, Florida, the site of an immense central Florida lumber yard and sawmill, the same place where Zora gathered stories for her anthropological collection Mules and Men. Other footage appears to be Bartow where she documented a medical “root doctor” whom she also wrote about in Mules and Men. She side-tracked to Mobile Alabama, interviewing and filming Cudjo Lewis, the last living African to have made the Journey of the Middle Passage to America as a slave (on an illegal slave ship, as slave transport had been banned).  Unfortunately, the audio didn’t survive, and neither did footage of “the Zulu Crew” from New Orleans, nor dancers on a beach (a list Mason created describing Zora’s footage is in an archive at Howard University).  Because Zora’s interest was black folk culture, she shot footage at baseball bleechers in Florida, most likely one used by the Negro Leagues, and yet she filmed the average folks in the stands but not the players.

This early footage documented precisely the culture and people Zora wrote about in her books and was an important asset for my film, Jump at the Sun.

I hear occasionally from filmmakers who want to know how to make a documentary.  The first thing I tell them is that you have to have an idea.  And that’s where some of them get stumped.  What’s your passion, I ask them?  Many are new to this idea, that they can have a passion.  They have a degree, they have a camera, they have hope.  But alas, they are not inspired.  And I remember back when I was looking for my next project and I read Bob Hemenway’s wonderful book, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Who was this brave woman, I wondered?  Where did she get that voice of hers, accusing her arrogant peers of being “malicious snots”, scaring her ex-husband by sprinkling voodoo dust around his home.  And I wondered, who did she think she was – and more importantly, how could I capture that courageous spirit on film and tape?  I puzzled by the very few holes in Bob’s story that left me with unanswered questions.  I knew I had to do my own research because unless I thoroughly understood Zora, I couldn’t write her story.  And so, with these loose ends in hand, I launched my film.

So you want to make a documentary film?  Then first, find your passion.  Read a book about where you live.  Research in the library.  Read the newspaper.  Watch TV and ask yourself what you’d like to see up there other than what’s there.  Then you can start your own documentary film.