'American Masters' revives Hurston's work -- and personality

Zora Neale Hurston is primarily known as the author of "Their Eyes Were Watching God," which has turned out to be one of the most influential novels of the 20th century.

Yet when PBS' "American Masters" examines her life in the episode "Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun" at 9 p.m. Wednesday on WTTW Channel 11, that book plays a very small part in the 90-minute documentary. It's a bold gambit, all but slighting an artist's masterpiece, but it pays off in that Hurston comes off not as an obsessive writer, which she was, but as a committed anthropologist, a social mixer, an irrepressible wit, a political contrarian, a liberated lover and, above all else, as quite simply an engaging presence and a captivating human being.

This is one of the best episodes of "American Masters," in that it considers the merits of the masterpiece self-evident and instead concentrates on the master amid all her joys and contradictions.

Hurston was born in 1891 in Eatonville, Fla., the first all-black town incorporated in the United States. That background, as someone raised in a self-sustaining black community, is what gave her a large part of her verve and confidence.

"At certain times, I have no race," she later said. "I am me."

Her father, a three-time mayor of the town, counseled caution overall, but her mother urged her to "jump at the sun." As Hurston later put it: "I do not weep at the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

She was 13 when her mother died. The family disintegrated, and she struck out on her own, rejecting the vocational training that was the standard for any sort of black education at the time. "Books give me more pleasure than clothes," she reasoned. Yet it took until her late 20s for her to get to Howard University. From there, New York City and the Harlem Renaissance beckoned, along with a scholarship that led her to become the first black graduate of Barnard.

Through it all, however, Hurston didn't look down on what she had left behind, the way so many in the Harlem Renaissance did. "She loved her own roots and she loved her people," says novelist Alice Walker, who led the Hurston revival in the '70s. Inspired and hired by anthropologist Franz Boas (yes, the very same man with a key role in the "American Experience" episode, "Minik, the Lost Eskimo"), she returned to her native South to study children's songs and games ("the boiled-down juice of human living," she called them), and she recorded work songs and oral tales along with the Alan Lomaxes, both Sr. and Jr.

"This is the greatest wealth of a continent," she said. "This stuff won't be around long."

She wrote novels and nonfiction and collaborated with Langston Hughes, but she didn't arrive at something uniquely hers until she left a lover to spend time in Haiti in 1937 and poured it into writing "Their Eyes Were Watching God," her book about a woman's self-discovery amid a joyfully turbulent black community.

The book was praised in the mainstream press, but trashed by black intellectuals like Richard Wright, who felt blacks had to elevate themselves from their slavery days and more directly address social issues.

Maya Angelou talks about the "sweet language" it captured, the speech of common folk, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. goes on to say that style is the book's substance, that it's about the "black vernacular" being used to tell the story. If, as William Gass has written, books are containers of consciousness, "Their Eyes" has endured as a classic because it contains that essential, uncontrived black consciousness.

Yet the black pride she reflected that makes her works so contemporary was also what put her at odds with her times. Not only did she fall out of favor with the black literary establishment, her belief in self-sustaining blacks led her to become a conservative Republican and reject the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. (After all, separate but equal had worked for her.) With rejected manuscripts piling up, she returned to Florida, for a while worked as a maid and died in poverty with her books out of print.

Great works of art are forever being rediscovered, whether they be "Moby Dick" or Van Gogh's self-portraits. Yet "American Masters" does something even more with "Jump at the Sun": It revives Hurston's personality, her essential being, and that is something equally precious for being far less tangible.

In the air

Remotely interesting: Newcomer Anne State will join Rob Johnson as lead co-anchors on the 6 and 10 p.m. weekday newscasts at WBBM Channel 2 next week. Roseanne Tellez will join Johnson at 5 p.m. and be joined by Jim Williams at 11 a.m. Williams in turn will have Kristyn Hartman as co-anchor from 5 to 7 a.m. Ryan Baker becomes lead sports anchor. … Welcome back to Allison Payne, who was to return as 9 p.m. anchor on WGN Channel 9 this week after recovering from a series of ministrokes.

Chris Maier, 66, of Vernon Hills competes on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" at 11 a.m. Thursday and Friday on Channel 9.

End of the dial: WGN 720-AM held on to its slight lead over WGCI 107.5-FM in monthly Arbitrends released last week. WBBM 780-AM, WLIT 93.9-FM and WPPN 106.7-FM filled out the top five.

Radio Arte, WRTE 90.5-FM, receives a Studs Terkel Community Media Award in a ceremony at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph, at 5 p.m. Wednesday.