The Lie She Told at Loughman

Hurston was thirty-seven, a Barnard graduate studying anthropology under Franz Boas, and this was her second run at collecting Southern folklore; the first had not gone well. On December 8, 1927 she signed a one-year contract with the New York philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason to gather folklore. The record disagrees on when she reached Polk County — PBS's American Experience says January of 1928, the University of Central Florida's Hurston chronology says March.

She stopped two women walking to the commissary and asked where she could get a room. One was Babe Hill, who sent her to her mother, Mrs. Allen, running the boarding house under the company's patronage. Hurston learned later that Babe had shot her husband to death during the Christmas holidays of 1926, been jailed in Bartow and let out after a few months.

That first night the house filled with men who had come to look at the new arrival. Almost nothing was said to her directly. Hurston wrote that she was looking at several hundred workers from all over the South and figuratively starving to death in the midst of plenty. James Presley came every evening with his guitar, and the men crowded in, bought soft drinks, and woofed at the stranger. She got nothing.

Babe's son, Cliffert Ulmer, told her why after the two of them drove down to Lakeland together. Strange women turned up in the quarters often enough, but they came plodding down the big road or counting railroad ties. They did not arrive in shiny gray Chevrolets. The car made her look prosperous, so the camp set her down as a revenue officer or a detective — and most of the men there were fugitives from justice or had done time.

That night Hurston told them she was a fugitive too. A bootlegger. They were hot behind her in Jacksonville and wanted her in Miami, and she was hiding out. Bootleggers always have cars. She was taken in.

The camp paid off twice a month, and pay night meant bonfires of faulty logs and slabs outside whatever house held the dance. The biggest that Saturday was at the Pine Mill. Babe was there, and Lucy, and Big Sweet, and East Coast Mary. Nobody asked Hurston to dance, not even Cliffert. She went outside to the fire where the men stood telling stories, and the talk went thin. A pencil-shaped man with a big Adam's apple bowed and asked what her entrimmins were, then her entitlum, and she understood he was asking her name. His was Pitts. He told her the men wanted to talk to her but had heard she was rich and had no nerve for it. Hurston looked at the bungalow aprons and the rolled-down paper bags some of the women wore on their heads, and counted what she had on: a dress from Macy's that ran her $12.74, among $1.98 mail-order dresses. She told them her man had bought it in Jacksonville when they were selling plenty and making good money, and resolved to fix the dress by morning. Then Pitts woofed at her and she laughed at it, and the whole fire laughed with her.

She asked James Presley whether he could play "John Henry." He said he would play it if she sang it. They put her up on the table. Joe Willard knew two verses and sang them; Eugene Oliver knew one; Big Sweet knew one. Willard lifted her down when it was over.

"I had to prove that I was their kind," Hurston wrote. "'John Henry' got me over my second hurdle."

After that, she wrote, her car was everybody's car. She told them what she was after, and the men could not at first conceive of anyone wanting to write down lies, which is what they called stories. Then they held a lying contest and posted notices for it. She went out with the swamp gang and collected the tales of Ole Massa and John, the enslaved trickster who talks his way out of work and finally out of bondage. Scholars credit Hurston as the first to record the John cycle.

She left most of her things at Loughman and ran down into the phosphate country around Mulberry, Pierce and Lakeland, collecting children's tales and games. A letter from Big Sweet called her back: Thelma and Cliffert were marrying on Saturday, pay night. Hurston arrived Friday.

At the Pine Mill dance a woman named Lucy came at her with a knife. Big Sweet flew at Lucy with an open blade and kicked her down somewhere about the knees. Crip, the new skitter man, hurled a doubled-back razor that missed Big Sweet's head and stuck in the wall, and Joe Willard went for Crip. Jim Presley punched Hurston and told her to run and ride. She fell out the door over a man lying on the steps, threw her bags in the car, and saw the sun come up on the road out.

The stories she carried out of the quarters were published as Mules and Men in 1935. Tiffany Ruby Patterson, the Vanderbilt historian who later went to Polk County for her own book on Hurston, was taken to the old mill grounds by a former resident and found the land returned to forest except for one patch of chalk-white earth, where local people believed the bodies of workers who had tried to escape were buried. In Eatonville, Patterson met a pastor who thought he knew someone who knew Big Sweet's real name. Patterson, a graduate student without money at the time, never got to that someone.