Of human bondage

Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the Harlem Renaissance. ‘Harlemania’ took off in jazz-age New York, as white thrill-seekers danced to Duke Ellington hothouse stomps and enthused over so-called primitive art.

Hurston made a ‘black splash’ of her own in 1920s Harlem. Among her admirers was the dance critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten, whose deliciously Firbankian 1926 account of life uptown, Nigger Heaven, gloried in blackamoor jungle dances and other Uncle Tom minstrelsy. (‘Period piece’ would be the most charitable description.) Hurston was careful not to mock the ‘Negrotonians’, as she called Van Vechten and his Fifth Avenue sophisticates, as she needed their patronage for field trips into the swamplands of Florida and the Deep South. In 1928, she graduated in cultural anthropology from New York’s Barnard College, where she was the only black student.