Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

by Zora Neale Hurston

It is possible that the submitted report may have both relieved Hurston of tedium and allowed her a boon of lore for her own purposes, thereby hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick. Or, as Lynda Marion Hill suggests in Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston’s perceived professional faux pas may have been an instance of Hurston masking her emotional response to a troubling event. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston was new. Although Hemenway may have agreed with Franz Boas that “Hurston was a ‘little too much impressed with her own accomplishments,’” it is equally true that she herself was still very much impressionable.21 In 1927, the career to which critics allude was in the future. Hurston was not the seasoned social scientist who had published the folklore collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). She was not the author of four novels, including the celebrated Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She was yet at the beginning of things.