Bay Bottom News

Sunday March 28 at 2P there will be a screening of Jump at the Sun at the Winter Park Public Library at 460 East New England Avenue.   The photo below is Knowles Hall at Rollins College in Winter Park, turn of the century.

Over my years of working on the film, I encountered quite a few people from Winter Park who bubbled over with their own recollections of Zora Neale Hurston, the acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and one of the first African-American anthropologists.  Zora’s hometown of Eatonville was separated from Winter Park by a large lake or two but that didn’t stop Zora from jumping in her model-A and rumbling down Orange, Orlando, Park or Fairbanks Avenues, getting together with her white friends to play croquet.  According to Zora’s niece, Winnifred Hurston Clarke, the folks in Eatonville frowned on this.  And they also frowned on Zora’s lack of attendance in church on Sundays.  And that’s what life in a small town was like back then.  We’re fortunate that Zora created an aura that inspired so much adulation and memories in both cities.

Zora often described herself as the Florida Chamber of Commerce, sitting on her gate post, enticing tourists with her antics, querying them with “don’t you want me to go a piece of the way with you?”  She managed to lure Fannie Hurst and the travel writer for the New York World Telegram to visit Winter Park in its tourist heyday.

Please stop by for the film.  And bring your stories as we all like to hear them.  The filmmaker (me!) will be in attendance.

Who was the coolest of the cool, long before it was cool?  In 1933 an unknown writer by the name of Zora Neale Hurston became the very first documented writer to use the world “cool” to imply hip-ness. 

In her short story The Gilded Six Bits written for Story Magazine (1933), the conversation between two poor but devoted lovers turns to the local town big-shot who not only has a mouth full of gold teeth but also money in the bank: “What make it so cool, he got money ‘cumulated.”  Then in 1934 in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Zora keeps her “cool” going as she describes a man as not only a good guitar picker but also good looking (“What make it so cool, he de’ bes’ lookin’).  Then again in 1935, as scholar Robert Farris Thompson notes in my film JUMP AT THE SUN, a man flirting with his girlfriend dishes up some cool when he tells her he’ll be making her breakfast in the morning: “Whut make it so cool, ah’d fix you some, and set it on de back of de cook-stove so you could git it when yo’ wake up.”

As for that Beat Generation, it wasn’t until 1948 that “cool” was next found in a New Yorker magazine quote about jazz.

I started my independent documentary career in 1985 when I produced an environmental documentary for WTOG in Tampa called Bay Bottom Blues. I was promptly fired by the news director because I sent the documentary to the newspapers.  That was my first experience with mean bad guys in news departments.   The St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune both wrote nice reviews of my film and I soon found myself being feted by snook fishermen and birders infatuated by mangrove cuckoos. Then I went on to work at other stations before finally going independent.  I remember trying to get others in the media interested in doing news stories about the environment, and I recall their disinterest.  I wondered what had happened to the environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s?  How had interest waned?  Was it just a fad?  I proceeded on my own path, producing in-depth looks at sea turtles and species’ diversification, beach erosion, manatees.  Following that there was once again a surge of environmental interest in our nation, but then once again it waned.

And now, after many more years of environmental degradation, it seems we are once again going green.  I’m contemplating jumping on board.  There must be a cause out there that needs some championing.  I’d be interested in any ideas out there for a green doc – before interest in saving the planet once again wanes.

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun will screen Saturday March 6 at 7:30 at Studio@620 in downtown St. Petersburg, FL.

In attendance will be Zora’s great-niece, Dr. Lois Gaston, and filmmaker Kristy Andersen.  The film will be followed by Q&A.  Admission is Pay-As-You-Can.  Admission proceeds will go to Studio@620 .

DVDs of the film will be available for purchase, with a percentage of sales going to Community Tampa Bay, a nonprofit organization that sponsors Anytown, an award-winning diversity awareness program  for bay area teens.

This article is fascinating.  Zora is being interviewed in Port-au-Prince Haiti by a reporter who’s just discovered that she’s not only researching a book about voodoo but is also on the verge of having another novel published in the United States.  That book was “Their Eyes Were Watching God”.  In the interview, she admits unhappiness with her own work.  She is disappointed with her two published books, and the one that is about to be published.

“Each book has fallen short of what I wanted to make of it.  And despite the fact that some critics have been kind enough to praise my work, I can’t fool myself.”

Zora was in Haiti, studying the vadoun religion under a Guggenheim grant.  Her work put her in danger of her life, and she eventually went home with knowledge of the process of zombification – drugs that induced a state of unconsciousness easily mistaken for death.  While others had been to Haiti and had studied the people, Zora alone isolated the secret societies and the substance that caused the zombie trance.  And when given the opportunity to visit a local hospital, she brought her camera.  Her photo of a zombie would be published in LIFE magazine in 1937.

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” would become an American classic.