was no small problem. On the other hand, she was magnetically attractive
and voluble with a genius for friendship, and she won the financial support
of a wealthy, white, Upper East Side matron.
In , then, she was off to Florida, first to Eatonville. This had been her
home, of course, but Zora’s rationalization of central Florida as prime pros-
pect for accumulating southern black lore was valid: Florida was booming
in the s, not only its fabled housing and land market but its phosphate
mines, its timber operations, and its ever-lengthening railroads. So Orange
and Polk counties were new homes, or mere pass-throughs, for countless
immigrants from throughout the South. Florida was a semitropical melt-
ing pot where men and women from all over mingled in work camps and
told ‘‘lies’’ and played music. Zora thrived there until, in danger of losing
her life to the fury of a jealous woman, she hopped in her coupe and drove
fast to Louisiana.
Early in her Floridian sojourn, she had first investigated hoodoo—also
known as voodoo—in the Lake George port town of Sanford with a female
practitioner who specialized in woman-man problems. Now, in and around
New Orleans, she devoted herself to hoodoo, underwent several initiations
involving lying naked face-down upon a snake skin, sacrificing chickens,
and drinking potent libations concocted, of course, from nature. The Flor-
ida stories, many of them suffused with bears, snakes, and giant birds—ani-
mals actual and imagined—and the Louisiana hoodoo combined to make
a fascinating, often hilarious book,Mules and Men().
While Zora wrote her first book she also published popular and schol-
arly articles and began to develop plays and musical shows that elabo-
rated on the Gulf coast stories and songs she had learned. The sprawling
ensemble, not least her own drumming, singing, and dancing, made her
a star of the Harlem Renaissance. She knew everyone: Langston Hughes
was a dear friend. He rode with her on the long drive from New Orleans
to New York, and while they once fell out over credit for a collaborative
theatrical creation, their correspondence was frequent and long-lasting.
Carl van Vechten, white hanger-on and chronicler of the renaissance, took
her photograph more than once. Yet Zora could seldom support herself.
The stock market crash and descending Great Depression strangled and
killed off magazines that paid, straitened existing theater, discouraged in-
vestment in new drama and musicals, and dried up philanthropic sources.
Black artists certainly suffered more than white ones, and single dark
women such as Zora Neale Hurston could not survive in Manhattan. Once
she tried Hollywood ( just as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald did),