New Orleans is a huge and cosmopolitan city with many and marked characteristics. Very European, very American. Bogaloosa [sic] is a huge industrial center, sawmills, paper mills, chicken hatcheries and reforestation nurseries.— Zora Neale Hurston, Every Tongue Got to Confess

Hurston’s journeys to Bogalusa began in October or November 1928, about three months after she arrived in Louisiana to research hoodoo practices in New Orleans and the surrounding areas. Although she prioritized her work in NOLA, which she referred to as “the kingdom” of famed “Conjure Queen” Marie Laveau, the smaller, yet auspicious Washington Parish city of Bogalusa attracted her attention and held promise for hoodoo and folklore research. Named for the nearby Bogue Lusa (Dark Waters) Creek, Bogalusa had been heralded as the “Magic City of the Deep South” at the turn of the twentieth century to highlight its swift development, incorporation, and designation as home of the world’s largest pine sawmill.¹ Hurston became aware of the city’s fame and research potential during her New Orleans fieldwork, and she traveled to Bogalusa numerous times seeking more evidence of Louisiana hoodoo practitioners and folktales. There, she met and interviewed sawmill employees and residents of the bustling city, which already had attracted African Americans from across Louisiana and Mississippi. She also consulted with one of the most infamous conjure men in the area, a figure whose healing and business practices created such a stir that they led to several state supreme court cases. 
Despite Hurston’s documented presence and activities in Bogalusa, only two known resources acknowledge her work in Louisiana beyond New Orleans. Hurston biographer Robert E. Hemenway mentions her “skipping over to Bogalusa to see a great Conjure doctor” in the introduction to Carla Kaplan’s collection, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Additionally, Louisiana poet laureate Mona Lisa Saloy provides two acknowledgements of Bogalusa in her 2011 essay entitled “Zora Neale Hurston on the River Road: Portrait of Algiers, New Orleans, and her Fieldwork,” with both references listing the city among several locations as evidence of Hurston’s “sheer rigorous extent of traveling.” Notably, Saloy's article rectifies a similar gap in scholarship related to Hurston’s life and known interactions in Algiers, a historic neighborhood across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans.  

It is possible that the disregard of Hurston’s Bogalusa research in contemporary scholarship originated with her own omission of the city and its residents in her influential autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. In the text, she devotes only five paragraphs to her experiences in Louisiana, none of which concerns any city, town, or sawmill camp other than New Orleans. However, she does reference Bogalusa in two of her folklore collections, including Mules and Men, published in 1935. Largely concerning Hurston’s folklore research in Florida and hoodoo in New Orleans, the collection includes a singular reference to the Washington Parish city, which Hurston phonetically misspelled as “Bogaloosa,” a common occurrence in her publications and correspondence.² In an appendix section of the same text, titled “Prescriptions of Root Doctors,” Hurston mentions Bogalusa while explaining the prevalence of and differences between practicing folk medicine and conjure in Southern communities. She writes,

Folk medicine is practiced by a great number of persons. On the “jobs,” that is, in the sawmill camps, the turpentine stills, mining camps and among the lowly generally, doctors are not generally called to prescribe for illnesses, certainly, nor for the social diseases. Nearly all of the conjure doctors practice “roots,” but some of the root doctors are not hoodoo doctors. One of these latter at Bogaloosa, Louisiana, and one at Bartow, Florida, enjoy a huge patronage. They make medicine only, and white and colored swarm about them claiming cures.³

Originally published verbatim in Hurston’s “Hoodoo in America” report, this statement reveals her intimate knowledge of nontraditional medical and spiritual practices in the state and documents her awareness of Bogalusa’s specific involvement in these activities.   

A more detailed accounting of Hurston’s research in Bogalusa exists in the posthumously published folklore collection Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States, which contains the volume of folklore she hoped to release after concluding her ethnographic research. In Appendix I, Hurston documents her research sources and timeline, and in section three of the same appendix, she lists her research locations in Louisiana as “New Orleans and Bogaloosa [sic].”⁴ Hurston draws further attention to her time spent in these distinct locations in a description of the nature of her work. She lists her collection dates in New Orleans as “Sept. 1928–March 1929” and “Nov. 1929–March 1930,” and she includes only “Nov. 1929” as her timeline for Bogalusa; yet, both cities receive roughly the same amount of space in this section—about two sentences each—suggesting that Bogalusa may have had an equivalent or similar influence on her research.⁵As if anticipating her readers’ likelihood of associating New Orleans with the entire state of Louisiana, Hurston reports, “New Orleans is a huge and cosmopolitan city with many and marked characteristics. Very European, very American. Bogaloosa [sic] is a huge industrial center, sawmills, paper mills, chicken hatcheries and reforestation nurseries.”⁶ This explanation reveals Hurston’s commitment to emphasizing the unmistakable and distinct characteristics of these two cities and to highlighting their relevance in her research.

It is likely that Hurston spent a longer time in Bogalusa than the appendix asserts. She provides only the month and year for Bogalusa (see more information about the year discrepancy below), whereas she includes a specific number of days spent in other locations such as “Loughman Sawmill: Jan. 15, 1928–March 20, 1928” and “Eatonville: March 20–April 18, 1928,” suggesting that she may have traveled to and/or resided in Bogalusa on several occasions over the course of that month.⁷ The ethnographic methodology mentioned in her other publications reinforces the possibility of an extended or repeated Bogalusa visitation schedule. In this method, Hurston regularly applied her praxis of reading Langston Hughes’s poetry collection Fine Clothes to the Jew aloud to the community and organizing “lying contests,” as she called them, to circumvent the “featherbed resistance” that she and other outsiders commonly experienced upon entering unfamiliar Black communities. Due to the time commitment and personal familiarity necessary to stage events including meetings, readings, contests, interviews, etc., it is unlikely that she would have been able to successfully complete her research with only minimal exposure to new communities and contact with their residents, further pointing to the likelihood of a prolonged engagement between Hurston and Bogalusa.

In addition to documenting her fieldwork collection schedule in Bogalusa, Hurston’s notes indicate that she interacted closely with the city’s residents and sawmill workers (similar to those pictured in the adjacent image). Along with three other Louisianians referenced among her 122 sources in Appendix 2 of Every Tongue—N. A. James and Jerry Bennett, “born in Louisiana,” and Mrs. Fields, whom “1928 found . . . an invalid in New Orleans, Louisiana Hospital”—Hurston includes Ed Davis, a “school boy, 17 years old,” from Bogalusa.⁸ Yet, despite this apparent familiarity with the young man, Davis receives no credit for any of the folktales in the collection, which may indicate that Hurston either omitted or undervalued the material he provided. Hurston seemingly reinforces this perspective in a 1933 letter to Ruth Benedict, stating, “I have just finished looking thru [sic] the pages and comparing the stories with my original notes as to story-tellers. Believe that I have them all corrected at last.”⁹ Yet, an in-depth exploration of Hurston’s works proves that deadlines or other unknown issues might have played a role in the draft’s presentation. At the very least, a completed and closely proofread version of the collection would have addressed glaring inconsistencies in her research timeline, including the record offered in Appendix 1, which contradicts the dates and information included in some of her correspondence composed during that time. Significantly, Hurston dated her letters to Langston Hughes about Bogalusa in 1928, with one even postmarked in the city, which contradicts the timeline offered in the previously mentioned appendix asserting that her Bogalusa research occurred in November 1929. Indeed, she provides no mention of Bogalusa in any of her published letters after 1928, which suggests that notation of 1929 in Every Tongue is a typo and reinforces the possibility that Hurston’s review and completion of the project may have been rushed or that the lack of credit for Davis was an error. Although Hurston’s revision plan for the collection’s publishing process remains unknown, it is likely that glaring issues such as these might have been resolved, along with the missing attributions. Ultimately, this material evidence, including her published ethnographic scholarship and her postmarked letters, reveals that Bogalusa played a larger role in her thoughts, writing, and research than previously considered. 

Letters to Langston: An Account of the Magic City

Hurston’s correspondence to poet Langston Hughes during this time further establishes a sustained interest in Bogalusa and its importance in her “vacuum method” of data collection, a process of “grabbing everything” she could find on a particular topic and analyzing the information along the way. Her first known reference to the city appears in a letter to Hughes dated October 15, 1928, provided online by the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (see image 21r), which states,

I am going out to Bogaloosa [sic] tomorrow to see a supposedly great one [conjure man], and hope that he is not too hard to deal with. They certainly charge steeply. I have gotten everyone I have met yet, but they tell me he is enormously rich.¹⁰

This letter suggests that venturing to the city and investigating the “supposedly great” conjurer and his financially lucrative business were necessary components for advancing her hoodoo research. Importantly, it also reveals that she might have traveled to Bogalusa as early as October 16, 1928, by which point Hurston would have collected a great deal of folklore and conjure material. However, a preceding sentence in her initial letter about Bogalusa reveals she may have been doubtful of the city’s overall potential contribution to her research. In it, she stated, “The conjure business is looking up, and I expect little more than duplication from now on.”¹¹ Similarly, Hurston expressed skepticism in a later letter to Hughes:

I am getting on in the conjure splendidly. Tell me this, should I go to every one of them as I am doing, or merely learn what the greatest have to teach? I have been going to every one I hear of for the sake of thoroughness. This necessarily means duplication in detail, but it seems to me best as the little ones know some detail not known to the great.¹²

Such statements, which appear in various forms throughout many of her communications during this era, exemplify the types of extemporaneous, instinctive, yet mandatory decisions Hurston made to continue gathering information, even if seemingly redundant, while conducting fieldwork. Perhaps, and most importantly, her decision to continue her research interviews highlights her dogged commitment to the validity and credibility of her research methodology and dedication to present an honest representation of African American cultural practices in the state. Therefore, as the Bogalusa conjure man’s insignificance or greatness could only be determined by meeting and interviewing him, Hurston remained committed to her research methodology, “collect[ing] like a broom” despite her previous misgivings.¹³ Ultimately, her instincts to persevere and carry out fieldwork in Bogalusa proved beneficial, as the city ultimately impacted her work more than she originally anticipated.

Just one month after initially informing Hughes about Bogalusa, Hurston mailed him a postcard (seen here) from the Washington Parish city celebrating her findings there and detailing her close interactions and familiarity with both city residents and workers. On the back of the postcard, dated November 19, 1928, also available online (see images 22r and 22v), Hurston wrote in fading blue ink, “Read ‘Fine Clothes’ to enthusiastic bunch of lumber-jacks here Sat. Big colorful jook here. You’d love it. I am full of impressions.”¹⁴ A few days later, when back in New Orleans, Hurston mailed another letter to Hughes stating the following:

Saw the great “doctor” Redmond at Bogalusa. Income over 500 a day. He isa [sic] a rusty black nigger with a piece of greasy flannel around his neck. Never allows the patient to tell him one symptom. Looks at them and prescribes. Clientele mostly white. I could have married the old scalawag. Claims to cure appendicitis by making the patient pass it or bringing it out of the throat.¹⁵

These artistically fragmented sentences represent Hurston’s last known thoughts about Bogalusans and their wealthy conjure man, but library archives and other historical records offer much more information about Louisiana’s “Magic City” and the people Hurston encountered in the late 1920s. These new findings supplement her genre-bending academic publications and letters and reveal that Bogalusa plays a much more significant role in Hurston’s research than previously considered.