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Marcia Douglas develops Zora Neale Hurston’s lost camera into novel and National Endowment for the Arts fellowship

In 1936, rising American literary star Zora Neale Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the practice of obeah, a branch of folk magic and religion practiced by West African slaves in the Caribbean and similar to Vodou and Santería.

Hurston had already found critical and commercial success with her wide-ranging work, including the Broadway revue, The Great Day, the 1934 novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and Mules and Men, a work of “literary anthropology” featuring African-American folk stories told by Southern laborers.

She also cut a flamboyant, independent path through early 20th-century American culture, embracing everything from libertarian non-interventionism to feminist individualism and rejecting the left-leaning politics of many African-American literary lights.

Her year-long Guggenheim sojourn to Jamaica and Haiti in 1936-37 would result not only in the novel she’s best known for today,  (1937), but also the anthropological study, .

Nearly eight decades later, Marcia Douglas, associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship of her own, from the National Endowment for the Arts, to pen a novel extrapolated from a minute, almost tossed-off, detail in Tell My Horse.

“She spent a lot of time in the village of Accompong, a village of descendants of runaway slaves,” says Douglas, who was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. “She persuaded the villagers to take her on a wild-hog hunting expedition and during that three-day trip she lost her Kodak. … She mentions it only very briefly, but I took notice. That’s where my writerly imagination comes in.”

"I also see myself as carrying on Walker’s work in an imaginative way. In my own way, I’m also ‘looking for Zora."

As Douglas, who teaches creative writing and Caribbean literature, writes in her NEH proposal: “The project imagines the camera was found, and the photos developed in (Hurston’s) absence. The 16 exposures reveal details of Hurston’s time among the maroons of Accompong” that, with other artifacts, “become catalysts for narratives of fugitive subjectivity. Unknown to (the ‘self-professed curator’), Hurston’s camera also captures the ghost of an 18th-century slave boy.”

Imagining Hurston’s lost Accompong photos, Douglas says, has brought her into a “literary conversation,” not just with Hurston, but with novelist Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”). Walker’s 1975 Ms. Magazine story, “Looking for Zora,” almost single-handedly rescued Hurston—who was so poor when she died in 1969 that she was buried in an unmarked grave—from undeserved obscurity.

“I’m in conversation with (Hurston’s) scholarship and I like to think she would give me permission to do this. I use a lot of imagination, but I mean to honor her and to honor history,” Douglas says. “I also see myself as carrying on Walker’s work in an imaginative way. In my own way, I’m also ‘looking for Zora.’”

Douglas also hopes to bring the once better-known history of Accompong and the maroons to a wider audience. She has already traveled to the village and plans to return for more research.

“I’m interested in this group of people in particular. … In 1739 they signed a peace treaty with the British that granted them autonomy and since then they have been left alone and allowed to self-rule. Part of why the slaves were successful in running away was that the British soldiers found it difficult to go after them in the interior of the island, which was very difficult to navigate,” she says. “To this day they don’t pay taxes to the Jamaican government.”

Douglas is quick to note that the novel is not finished and details are subject change—and that’s a good thing.

“I’m always fascinated to see what will unfold. Surprises are part of the joy of being a writer,” she says.

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.