The Tribune

By ERIC WIBERG

Bahamian artist Jackson Burnside confided in the nation’s leading hurricane authority Wayne Neely for his book on the 1929 Andros hurricane that he “first learned about this storm by listening to older persons in the community talking about this giant of a storm.

I also learned about it by reading a book called Their Eyes Were Watching God, by well-noted American author Zora Neale Hurston. He said that a TV film collaboration between Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones and Halley Berry garnered 24.6 million US viewers “entrenching the novel in the public consciousness, and in the American literary canon”.

Zora Neale Hurston encountered this hurricane in The Bahamas while she did research for that book, and has said that it influenced the depiction of the storm in its climax.

From New Orleans, Hurston travelled to South Florida, then on to The Bahamas. Her stay was devoted mostly to the collection of native songs and learning about the Jumping Dance.

During her visit to The Bahamas in 1929, Hurston experienced the powerful three-day hurricane of late September, which resulted in the deaths of many persons and animals and the washing away of hundreds of homes.

Hurston called on the memory a few years later to develop and duplicate the terror in her Everglades hurricane in Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is actually based on the Great Lake Okeechobee Hurricane that struck Florida in 1929 and caused severe flooding…” and casualties. “She repeated her trips to The Bahamas during the latter part of the 1920s and early 1930s. Today, this book is widely regarded as a literary masterpiece.”

When Hurston became an anthropologist, she was not only compelled to explore her African-American heritage in Florida but also to travel to the Caribbean. She used scholarship money, grants, and advances on her books to finance field trips to various islands.

In late September and October 1929, she traveled to The Bahamas for two weeks, doing research and filming dances. She experienced a violent hurricane, and was able to return to The Bahamas in January and February of 1930 to finish her field work, which was published in an article entitled “Dance Songs and Tales from The Bahamas” in the July to September 1930 issue of Journal of American Folklore.

According to a biographer, in April 1936 the author travelled to Jamaica and studied the Maroons, then visited Haiti until the end of the year. In early November of 1936, she began writing Their Eyes Were Watching God and finished it the third week of December, either while still in Haiti or soon after returning to the States. In May 1937 Hurston went back to Haiti but took ill, yet continued to return. She wrote a book covering travels and research in Haiti and Jamaica entitled Tell My Horse.

In K Cartwright’s “‘To Walk with the Storm’: Oya as the Transformative ‘I’ of Zora Neale Hurston’s Afro-Atlantic Callings,” her biographer notes that Hurston’s research trip to The Bahamas began when she “left behind a tumultuous love affair with a younger man”.

The “Guggenheim-fellowship-supported trip gave her respite from a man who demanded she give up her career to devote to their relationship. This personal tale is interwoven with memories of Hurston’s own experience of a 1929 hurricane in The Bahamas, as well as her interviews with survivors of the Okeechobee hurricane in Florida. Their Eyes Were Watching God thus intersects the geopolitical memories of Florida, Haiti, the Bahamas, and New York… the hurricane an apt metaphor for tensions and contentions shaping black women’s lives…”

In her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston recalls hearing a song on her first visit to Nassau in 1929: “I loved the place the moment I landed. Then, that first night as I lay in bed, listening to the rustle of a coconut palm just outside my window, a song accompanied by string and drum broke out in full harmony. I got up and peeped out and saw four young men and they were singing Bellamena, led by Ned Isaacs. I did not know him then, but I met him the next day.”

Hurston the musicologist and anthropologist continues to relate how Ballymena “has a beautiful air, and the oddest rhythm. I found out later that it was a song about a rum-running boat [the former yacht Ballymena] that had been gleaming white, but after it had been captured by the United States Coast Guard and released, it was painted black for obvious reasons. That was my welcome to Nassau, and it was a beautiful one. The next day I got an idea of what prolific song-makers the Bahamans are. With that West African accent grafted on English of the uneducated Bahamian, I was told, “You do anything, we put you in sing.”” With humor, Hurston comments wryly that she “walked carefully to keep out of ‘sing.’” And she did.