Unpublished WPA Stories: Florida Folklore. Negro Legends.
Two Unrecorded Texts
Original Typescripts
Hurston, Zora Neale. Florida Folklore. Negro Legends. Submitted by Zora Neale Hurston / Not Edited. 1938.
17 leaves; typescript; numbered in pencil. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
Original ribbon typescript for these unrecorded pieces Hurston submitted to Florida WPA editor Stetson Kennedy for inclusion in the WPA Guide Book Series volume on Florida. The 17 pages are numbered 39 through 64 incomplete, with a pencil note, “p. 46-54 missing,” and pages 56 through the end are numbered in type, 19-27. Kennedy writes on the verso of the final page:
This manuscript was submitted by Zora Neale Hurston to the WPA Florida Writers Project in 1938, for possible inclusion in the WPA Florida Guide (Oxford). The typescript came to me as project director of Folk Studies. 10/20/97. Stetson Kennedy.
The first seven pages present he opening of Negro Legends, a third-person narrative describing, in atmospheric language, a series of myths, legends, and folklore associated with Hurston’s home. Typed and double-spaced, they include the following sections; the typed page numbers are given below, followed by the pencil numbers:
Untitled introduction (1-2 / 39-40)
Diddy-Wah-Diddy (2-3 / 40-41)
Zar (4 / 42)
Beluthatchie (4 / 42)
West Hell (4-6 / 42-44)
Heaven (incomplete, 6-7 / 44-45)
When the text picks up again, it is with a different typeface; the typed numbers (18-27) are at the upper right of each page, rather than in the center as before; and the pencil used for the manuscript numbers (55-64) is visibly sharper. Section breaks are marked with a series of dashes, rather than titles; and there is a liberal use of dialogue and dialect, absent from the opening pages.
Unknown manuscripts of two unrecorded texts, these were obtained from Kennedy by a collector in Georgia; they come to us through dealer in African-Americana.
(#8451)
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