For almost two decades, Kristy Andersen searched for Zora Neale Hurston, scoured for the smallest details about Florida's audacious, celebrated author, long dead and once forgotten in a segregated graveyard in Fort Pierce.
Andersen chased Zora's elusive spirit along the dirt roads of Florida, through a small Alabama town, up the east coast to the Library of Congress in Washington, across the country to a scholar's house in Kansas City. Eight states in all.
She found Zora's essence rich in grays and sparkling with imagination, much of it now shimmering through AMERICAN MASTERS: Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun. The PBS documentary, on which Andersen worked for 18 years, airs in South Florida at 9 p.m. Wednesday on WPBT-PBS 2.
''I hope that after being with Zora so long, I was able to bring her alive,'' says Andersen, 56, who lives in Tampa. ``She is so difficult to understand. And the best way is to try to place her within her time.''
Andersen offers a layered portrait of Hurston -- writer, cultural anthropologist, avant-gardist, folklorist, playwright, grand Harlem queen, three-time bride. She was a chain smoker who carried a pearl-handled pistol and gallivanted through the South and the Caribbean on anthropological field trips exploring the history, traditions and soul of blackness.
''Zora was an exclamation point,'' says Miami author Edwidge Danticat.
Hurston was raised in Eatonville, just outside Orlando, the daughter of the mayor. Early on, she began to absorb the town, writing about race and class and love in the South.
She introduced the world to Eatonville and its vibrant rural culture in Their Eyes Were Watching God, her 1937 masterpiece of language, imagery and promise.
''It's an unbelievably bold book, one of the boldest books in the English language and now one of the most required books in high schools and colleges in the country,'' says Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University and author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. ``Zora went from being like the Toni Morrison of her time to being an unknown living in obscurity, to being completely revered again. She had an amazing literary trajectory.''
By her account, Hurston wrote the novel in seven weeks in Haiti. At its heart lies a tale of love found and lost, of inner peace, of making do in 1920s Florida.
Hurston told us about the ''lying porches'' where menfolk sat and spun fish tales, about monster hurricanes that ate whole towns and twin Chinaberry trees that offered shade and quiet, about children who played games and gardenias that bloomed.
In some ways, Andersen and Hurston were connected by place. Born 52 years apart, one black, one white, they were bound by Florida's lumbering heat, divine landscapes, restless summers.
''I felt this kinship to her and to her Florida because it was a special place. I moved to Lakeland from New Mexico when I was 10,'' Andersen says. ``I immediately saw some of the same things, smelled the orange blossoms, ran through the citrus groves. Our memories were so similar.''
WORKED IN FILM
Andersen had worked in film and broadcast production since 1974 in the Tampa Bay area and in Washington, D.C. She had produced an Emmy-winning documentary on sea turtles and was looking for a project.
After a friend suggested she take on Zora's story, Andersen bought Robert Hemenway's classic Hurston biography, first reading about her,then reading works by her.
Andersen fell in love.
''I don't think I would have done a documentary on a writer who was just a writer. All the materials related to Zora really moved me to think visually and aurally,'' Andersen says. ''Zora's story was compelling.''
Hurston was born Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Ala. She came to Eatonville -- the country's first incorporated black town -- with her parents as a baby and stayed until her mother died when she was 13.
She eventually went upstate to live with relatives, still grieving but full of the wonder of black civic achievement and the quirks of Southern living, recurring themes in her later writings.
After earning a degree in anthropology from Barnard College, Hurston began collecting and chronicling folk stories throughout the South. She visited churches and turpentine camps and jook joints and the occasional hoodoo ritual.
Hurston published several short stories, a novel, (Jonah's Gourd Vine) and a collection of black folklore(Mules and Men).
HARLEM RENAISSANCE
By the time Their Eyes was published, she had elbowed her way into the rarefied circle of artists, intellectuals and writers who formed the Harlem Renaissance. Still, she was criticized by her Northern peers -- most famously Richard Wright -- who didn't understand or appreciate the novel's Southern dialect and sensibilities and lack of Negro political outrage.
Undeterred, Hurston published several other works, including her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), but none ever as well known as Their Eyes.
By the time Hurston died in 1960 -- broke and alone -- all her books were out of print.
In the summer of 1973, writer Alice Walker found Hurston's final resting place, bought her a headstone and had it inscribed ''A Genius of the South,'' then wrote an essay about it for a national magazine.
''Alice Walker gave Zora back to us,'' says Danticat, who wrote the foreword for a recent edition of Their Eyes.
Andersen had planned to give Zora a year or so of her time. Of course, that was before Zora bedazzled her, before Zora taunted her with secrets, before time got away.
Seduction was just Zora's way. Stories abound of her inimitable ability to disarm people, black and white (many of whom became her patrons). Of her exuberant entrances. Of her self-bestowed title, Queen Zora.
Andersen was pregnant with her son when Zora, as fussy and demanding as any infant, came into her life.
''I had no idea I was giving birth to twins! Little Anders and his sister, Zora!'' Andersen says, only half joking. ``I kept looking for anything I could find about her. One thing led to the next.''
Each nugget was more delicious than the last: The notation in a family Bible of Zora's birth in Notasulga, -- she had always proclaimed herself Florida born. A certificate of Hurston's third marriage in Daytona Beach in 1940. Footage of Hurston beating a tambourine at a holiness church service in South Carolina, languishing in boxes since 1940.
At the Smithsonian, Andersen stumbled across 130 pages of typed notes -- unpublished folktales and accounts of lynchings. She turned her findings over to the Hurston estate, and the notes eventually formed the basis of 2002's Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States.
''Zora put up a lot of obstacles for future biographers,'' says Danticat, who also graduated from Barnard. ``She made it so everybody had their own piece of Zora. You have to share to get the whole.''
FUELED BY DETAILS
Andersen needed each detail she gathered, needed each one as fuel to keep working as time trudged on, and her early financing ran out. Some days, some years, she was working as hard on securing more money -- from grants, private donations, foundations, her own pocketbook -- as on finding Zora. In the end, the project would cost $1 million.
Over the years, Andersen also struggled with the race issue. Should a white woman tell Zora's story?
'I tried not to think about that aspect of it, but it just kept coming up. At some point Henry Louis Gates just said, `Do it. It's a great project that needs to be done. Period,' '' Andersen says. ``And the thing is, Zora crossed all racial lines.''
So Andersen never strayed far. There was the occasional detour, including a teaching stint at Disney.
''Kristy was so honest about what she was doing. She talked about the financial challenges, about how long it was taking but also about her commitment to get this done,'' says Danticat, who in March won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her family memoir Brother, I'm Dying. ``For Kristy, this has been a long journey, and she has lived bravely with Zora.''
Danticat and other Zoraphiles, including Gates, Walker, Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West and Maya Angelou appear in the documentary, each proffering a different Zora.
The film's narrative uses a re-enactment of Hurston's 1943 interview with radio pioneer Mary Margaret McBride as the vehicle to tell the story. And it includes rare footage of Hurston's lively visit to trance services at Commandment Keeper Church in Beaufort, S.C.
Andersen says one of her great challenges was chronicling Zora's various wanderings and squeezing her full life into 90 minutes.
''It was difficult to make this into something cohesive, something that made sense. There was a point in her life in which she lived in Eau Gallie, Belle Glade and Cape Kennedy all around the same time,'' she says. 'We sat there trying to figure out how to deal with her wanderlust and ended up saying, `Oh, hell. We will just say she lived in the area.' ''
Eighteen years is such a long time.
Enough for Andersen's boy to become a freshman at the University of Miami.
For Dorothy West to die, two years after her interview.
For the prestigious Library of America to publish an anthology of Zora's work.
For two more biographers to publish Zora's story.
For Oprah Winfrey to produce the film version of Their Eyes.
For Hurston finally to take her rightful place in American literature and history.
For Andersen to deliver her Zora.
Video | Trailer for PBS American Masters' 'Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun'