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• 1 media/Hurston Route to Bogalusa 1930 Official Louisiana Highway Map.png 2023-01-22T14:12:31+00:00 Perilous Paths and Unknown Dangers 193 Hurston’s Journey(s) to the Magic City of the Deep South plain 8346 2025-03-10T21:06:26+00:00

  My search for knowledge of things took me into many strange places and adventures. My life was in danger several times. If I had not learned how to take care of myself in these circumstances, I could have been maimed or killed on most any day of the several years of my research work.— Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

  Hurston’s path to Bogalusa and her reasons for singling out the city remain enigmatic in her writing. As she was prone to do in some of her autobiographical and creative compositions, Hurston offers starkly differing accounts of the circumstances immediately preceding the Louisiana portion of her research across her work. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, she claims to have left a Florida sawmill camp in the dead of night mere minutes after a jealous, knife-wielding woman attempted to attack her. Yet, in her folklore collection Mules and Men, she describes beginning her research trip to Louisiana after rising one morning in good spirits following a restful night’s sleep. Nevertheless, whatever events prompted her arrival in the state, and however speedily she responded to those situations, her letters reveal that within the first two months of her arrival,¹ she planned to conduct fieldwork in Bogalusa. Hurston provides very little information regarding what prompted her interest in the Washington Parish city and none about the route(s) she traveled or how much time she spent there. However, archival records from various repositories supplement her references to Bogalusa and rectify some of these uncertainties.

  Rumblings of a Magic City

  Hurston’s awareness of Bogalusa reveals no great feat of research. As the home of the world’s largest pine sawmill, the city had attracted widespread attention for decades prior to her arrival, from both families and entrepreneurs across the country and especially throughout the state. Although it was incorporated in 1914, Bogalusa began gaining national renown even before brothers Frank H. and Charles W. Goodyear purchased the 90,000-acre tract of undeveloped land that would eventually become the home of the Great Southern Lumber Company.  

  Over time, as Bogalusa business owners designed the town for industry, practicality, and opulence, newspapers nationwide circulated stories of its achievements and attracted more potential employees and residents. Ultimately, whether through journalistic accounts, the grapevine, or both, Hurston and other African Americans would have heard about the “Magic City” situated only about seventy miles north of New Orleans. Built to accommodate 15,000 people, Bogalusa touted its “business section; plots for public buildings, such as a city hall, a hospital, and schools; and several parks,” as well as a segregated “colored quarters . . . [designed] in an attempt to avert racial conflicts as much as possible.”² Certainly, the new city offered the potential for professional and economic advancement, but it also anticipated more of the racial violence plaguing the country.
  
  In fact, in his 1950 history of Bogalusa, Charles Goodyear recalled that there had been “lynchings of Negroes in the Parish,”³ and he acknowledged one such event in the city. Although he omitted both the lynching victim’s name and the date of the event, Goodyear situated the explanation among other information related to the year 1907, suggesting that the murder occurred around that time. According to Goodyear,

  It was during the construction period that Bogalusa had its only lynching. A Negro, suspected of assaulting a white woman, was led through the streets with a rope around his neck. Shortly after, his body, riddled with bullets, hung from an oak tree outside the town. . . . For generations, Southerners had taken the law into their own hands. Vengeance generally followed their exaggerated sense of personal honor. The lynching and the growing doubt as to the guilt of the Negro brought upon Bogalusa a notoriety that momentarily deterred the better class of workers from settling in the community with their families.⁴

  Despite such persistent threats of racial violence and the lack of justice afforded to wrongfully accused Black citizens, company executives and city planners needed African Americans to ensure the success of their ventures, and they expected that “probably 40 percent of the city’s population would be colored.”⁵ So, Black people took their chances in the city and spread the word, as per usual, and by 1920, they constituted one-third of the population of Washington Parish. 

  Although Hurston might have heard about Bogalusa after her interactions with New Orleanians, it is possible that she knew of the city before venturing to the state due to the Great Southern Lumber Company’s expansive marketing campaigns. Just four years prior to her arrival, the company department of publicity had circulated a multimedia resource titled Bogalusa: The City of Families and Factories, which incorporated images and descriptions of the various programs and amenities offered in the place it called “the home of Opportunity.”⁶ (One year prior to Hurston’s visit, the Bogalusa Chamber of Commerce published a similar booklet titled Facts about Bogalusa: The City of Assured Growth, which likely reinforced the sawmill’s efforts to attract newcomers and potential business owners to the city.) Perhaps in anticipation of Black people’s reluctance to uproot and relocate to a historically violent, company town, a small portion of the company publication highlighted “Bogalusa’s Colored Section,” which provided churches, schools, housing, a baseball park, and a YMCA for Black residents. Unsurprisingly, these offerings pale in comparison to the residential, commercial, and recreational properties afforded to White residents, as the booklet noted that only the homes “occupied by white persons [had] all the conveniences of any modern city home.”⁷ Still, company officials asserted, “Everything is done to keep our negro citizens healthy, happy, and productive. . . . They are encouraged to develop pride of race and in every other way to promote their individual welfare.”⁸ The circulation of this publication is difficult to determine, but it is clear that word about the city’s so-called “colored” amenities spread fast, as newspaper accounts published throughout the South during that time report largely attended Fourth of July celebrations attracting African Americans from across and beyond the state. It is likely that just as Hurston had heard about the Black population of Louisiana, she would also have learned about the African American community residing in Bogalusa and the city’s economic and industrial growth.

  “Going Out to Bogaloosa”

  Once aware of Bogalusa’s vibrant Black community and its potential for her ethnographic research, Hurston embarked on her first excursion to the city, traveling from her rental on 2744 Amelia Street in New Orleans, according to her October 1928 letter to poet Langston Hughes. Preferring personal automobiles to trains, which were available (see image below) although she believed were more dangerous, Hurston avoided the railways and drove her “shiny gray Chevrolet” about seventy miles northeast in search of folklore and a conjure man,⁹ whom she identified in a subsequent letter as Doctor Redmond. Because guides such as the Negro Motorist Green Book were not yet available, Hurston most likely depended on road maps and word of mouth to locate the city.
  
  Today, the journey from New Orleans to Bogalusa takes a little more than one hour by automobile, and drivers can choose one of several time-efficient routes. However, Hurston’s options were much more limited, since none of the current major roadways existed in 1928. Up until the 1950s, neither the interstate system nor the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, a 24-mile bridge linking the northern and southern shores of the state’s largest lake, existed.¹⁰ Additionally, the I-10 Twin Span, a 5.5-mile bridge connecting Slidell to New Orleans East, was not built until 1963. So, as Hurston had done countless times before, she traveled along US and state highways to reach Bogalusa.
  Although she could have chosen from several routes, historical maps reveal the most plausible pathway available with much of the journey occurring in very rural portions of the state. According to the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development official highway map published in 1930, a little more than one year after Hurston conducted fieldwork in Bogalusa, the most feasible route would have been traveling northeast on US Highways 11/90 and then continuing north along various paved, serpentine state roadways to Bogalusa, including Hwys. 58, 484, and 7. Aside from Slidell, which had a population between 2,500 and 5,000, the other towns she would have encountered along the way—Alton, Pearl River, Talisheek, Bush, and Sun—were home to less than one thousand residents each,¹¹ and were and still are predominantly White according to 2020 census data.¹² Over time, highway numbers and routes changed slightly, but current tourism and mapping information reinforces the validity of the route described here and depicted in the StoryMap featured in the next chapter.¹³
  
  Whether due to the isolation or unwelcoming residents, this route would have provided few opportunities for rest or fuel stops along the way, and no known evidence suggests that Hurston made such detours or interacted with any of the towns’ residents. On the contrary, Hurston proclaimed to have driven more than a hundred miles nonstop throughout the night in her autobiography,¹⁴ Dust Tracks on a Road, and the journey to Bogalusa from New Orleans covers a much shorter distance. By this time, Hurston was a seasoned traveler throughout the South, and she easily could have traversed the seventy miles from Orleans to Washington Parish without stopping and with very little planning. Despite the swiftness and route of her expedition, the potential dangers facing her were apparent and widely known. Still, Hurston deemed Bogalusa and the cultural material it offered important enough to take her chances on the road.

  “No Telling What the Road Held”

  Through her unyielding motivation to undertake and complete unprecedented and potentially harmful activities in pursuit of advancing academic scholarship and preserving cultural material, and the brilliance she displayed in weaving together vibrant stories from her ethnographic fieldwork, Hurston has reached superstar status within literary and academic communities. At times, many scholars and writers ascribe magical or superhuman qualities to her accomplishments, but it is important to remember her vulnerabilities and sacrifices when considering her achievements and reviewing her travel routes. Certainly, Hurston exhibited great bravery and adaptability in her research methodology. As Carla Kaplan notes, “Evidently, [Hurston] cut an unusual figure: a single, black woman, driving her own car, toting a gun, sometimes passing for a bootlegger, offering prize money for the best stories and ‘lies.’”¹⁵ Though lively, this account fails to address the dangers and obstacles Hurston faced in pursuing her work.
  
  At the time of her fieldwork in and around Louisiana, Hurston was a thirty-seven-year-old, five-foot four-inch, 130-pound, single Black woman traveling along the dark and dangerous roads of the Jim Crow South and through predominantly White towns that were commonly known for being unfriendly to African Americans.¹⁶ Further, as one of the three US states with the highest numbers of lynchings, Louisiana was “a particularly terrifying” place for Black people during the early twentieth century, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. Between 1877 and 1950, the EJI reports that 4,084 racial terror lynchings occurred across the country, with twenty-four in Tangipahoa Parish, the western neighbor of Washington Parish, and St. Tammany Parish, through which Hurston likely traveled to reach Bogalusa.¹⁷ In its 2017 publication, Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans, the EJI reported one very brutal lynching that occurred in Bogalusa less than a decade prior to Hurston’s visit:

  On August 31, 1919, in Bogalusa, Louisiana, when a black veteran named Lucius McCarty was accused of attempted assault on a white woman, a mob of 1500 people gathered and shot him more than 1000 times. The mob dragged his body behind a car through the town’s African American neighborhoods and then burned his corpse in a bonfire.¹⁸

  This lynching differs in date and details from the one Charles Goodyear mentioned in his Bogalusa Story, which reinforces the longstanding belief within African American communities that many more unreported lynchings and instances of racial violence occurred throughout the country. A 1935 edition of The Afro-American, a weekly newspaper claiming to have the “largest audited circulation of any Colored newspaper in the United States,” confirmed this sentiment, as it reported 5,071 cases of lynchings in America.¹⁹ Nevertheless, at a time when Hurston would have been much more vulnerable due to her race, gender, and solitude, she armed herself with information and a handgun, charted a course along some of the country’s most dangerous roadways, and sacrificed her safety to unearth and preserve the African American cultural history that Bogalusa offered.

  As if in anticipation of naysayers and perhaps even some enthusiasts in her academic and literary lineage who might minimize the challenges she endured while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the South’s “out of the way places,” Hurston intersperses some of her most concerning hardships with humorous narratives about her adventures on the road. In Wrapped in Rainbows, biographer Valerie Boyd noted, “With her car, her camera, and no worries about money, she was able to move about freely and collect copiously.”²⁰ Yet, Hurston’s storytelling in Mules and Men highlights the limitations of and persistent challenges to that freedom. Regarding experiences immediately preceding her Louisiana research, but much like the conditions she faced while traveling to Bogalusa, Hurston states the following:  

  The asphalt curved deeply and when it straightened out we saw a huge smoke-stack blowing smut against the sky. A big sign said, “Everglades Cypress Lumber Company, Loughman, Florida.” We had meant to keep on to Barrow or Lakeland and we debated the subject between us until we reached the opening, then I won. We went in. The little Chevrolet was all against it. The thirty odd miles that we had come, it argued, was nothing but an appetizer. Lakeland was still thirty miles away and no telling what the road held. But it sauntered on down the bark-covered road and into the quarters just as if it had really wanted to come.²¹

  Certainly, this recollection offers a bit of the creative storytelling for which Hurston is well known, in this case personifying her automobile to embellish her vivid narrative. Yet, the message hidden beneath the striking imagery and prose is that, at times, her vehicle’s performance or malfunctioning could thrust her into more dangerous situations as she attempted to fulfill her research requirements. When she traveled without sufficient directions or knowledge of what might lie ahead, a flat tire or some minor car trouble could leave her even more vulnerable and subject to the whims of strangers.

  Along with the countless physical dangers, Hurston endured many mental and emotional challenges, often caused by those who should have been most supportive of her work. In a spring 1929 letter to one of her Columbia University anthropology professors, Hurston fortified herself with what she described as “feather-bed resistance” against her superior’s criticisms. Beginning the letter with a lengthy explanation of some opposing perspectives about the value of and preferred practices in African American cultural research, she subsequently confessed and minimized the complexity of her efforts on the road. To the professor, she stated, “Really, I am working very hard. These roads are some rough with palmetto roots, etc. But the little car gets me anywhere.”²² Despite the treacherous academic and artistic waters threatening to overtake her both emotionally and professionally, in this instance, she deemed it more important to downplay her struggles and combat any negative notions her mentor might have had about her capabilities and work ethic. Perceiving that her professor might have considered her complaints a reflection of incompetence or some other shortcoming, Hurston decided to mask her true feelings and assert that all was proceeding smoothly with her research plans. Thus, with the three-letter abbreviation “etc.,” she glossed over the potentially career-ending, life-threatening struggles making her research and existence “rough,” opting instead to reaffirm her perseverance, accomplishments, and expertise to a superior.

  In her gloss to the Columbia professor, Hurston omits the physical and psychological effects of her travels and experiences in racially perilous environments. Today, the general public is more aware of the complexities associated with mental health struggles, and many services exist to support people facing such crises. Yet, in Hurston’s time, she had to find her own methods of coping with these issues, one of which was through communications with her dear friend Langston Hughes. With him, she could let her guard down and admit that maintaining this balance while performing her research caused her a great deal of anxiety, and at times, demanded her dignity. In a letter to him, Hurston complained about her White benefactor Charlotte Osgood Mason, who funded much of Hurston’s ethnographic research, but attempted to overmanage her decisions and financial allowance, at times tracking Hurston’s spending down to the cent. When Hurston used some of her funding to purchase the vehicle that she used to collect stories across the South, she noted that Mason exploded and “asked ‘why couldn’t Negroes be trusted?’”²³ Regarding this exchange, Hurston stated, “I just feel that she ought not to exert herself to supervise every little detail. It destroys my self-respect and utterly demoralizes me for weeks. . . . I do care for her deeply . . . That is why I can’t endure to get at odds with her. I don’t want anything but to get at my work with the least possible trouble.”²⁴ While Hurston’s travels might appear to have been carefree, fun-filled pursuits, she confided in a dear friend about the adversities she suffered to complete her research. Sacrificing her safety, and at times her dignity, to document African American folklore and conjure practices throughout the South, she deemed Bogalusa’s cultural contribution important enough to endure any potential dangers and reprimands she might endure to unearth and record it.

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  Footnotes

  1. Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, October 15, 1928, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (Doubleday, 2002), 127.↵
  2. Charles W. Goodyear, A Bogalusa Story (WM J. Keller, 1950), 75–76.↵
  3. Goodyear, A Bogalusa Story, 76.↵
  4. Goodyear, A Bogalusa Story, 87.↵
  5. Goodyear, A Bogalusa Story, 76.↵
  6. Great Southern Lumber Company, Bogalusa: The City of Families and Factories, 1924, Great Southern Lumber Company Collection, Mss. 3225, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, 25.↵
  7. Great Southern Lumber Company, Bogalusa, 5.↵
  8. Great Southern Lumber Company, Bogalusa, 21.↵
  9. Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Scribner, 2003), 162.↵
  10. US Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, “History of the Interstate Highway System”; Robert Rhoden, “10 Things to Know about the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway,” NOLA.com, July 23, 2016.↵
  11. Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, “1930 Official Highway Map Front.” The back of this map, 1930 Official Highway Map Back, is also available from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.↵
  12. United States Census Bureau, “Pearl River Town, Louisiana.”↵
  13. Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, “Official Highway Map of Louisiana.”↵
  14. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Harper Perennial, 1990), 156.↵
  15. Carla Kaplan, “The Twenties,” in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (Doubleday, 2002), 52.↵
  16. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 164.↵
  17. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017), 4, 42.↵
  18. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans, (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017), 30.↵
  19. “Only 12 Convictions in 5,071 Cases of Lynching,” The Afro-American (Baltimore, MD), May 4, 1935, 15.↵
  20. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 168.↵
  21. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, ed. Arnold Rampersad (Amistad Harper Collins, 2008), 59.↵
  22. Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, Spring 1929?, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (Doubleday, 2002), 141.↵
  23. Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, Winter 1929/30, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (Doubleday, 2002), 156.↵
  24. Hurston to Hughes, Winter 1929/30, 156–57.↵