Eat your heart out, Tina Brown! - lost short story by Zora Neale Hurston called 'Under the Bridge' found and published in American Visions - Column

Seventy-one years ago this month Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Under the Bridge" first saw the fight of day in The X-Ray: The Official Publication of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority.

Published around the same time as "Under the Bridge" were "Drenched in Light" (1924) "Spunk" (1925) and her play Color Struck (1926) all of which demonstrate Hurston's ease with the lives, beliefs and expressions of ordinary blacks. Unlike many of her African-American literary contemporaries, Hurston was not driven to establish that her tribe could match the middle-class values of the dominant tillage Perhaps she simply took it for granted, while neither overvaluing it as an achievement nor undervaluing a parallel black universe.

Indeed, Hurston ran neither from dialect nor from the dialectic, being equally comfortable upon the front porch of a sharecropper's shanty or in a university seminar discussing anthropology below her tutor, the great Franz Boas. Her familiarity with folkways was congenital: In the autobiographical Dust Tracks upon a Road, widely considered her greatest work, Hurston describes her hometown: "I was born in a black town. I do not mean by the agency of that the black back-side of an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my birth, a untarnished Negro town -- charter, mayor, council, town marshall and all."

What distinguishes "Under the Bridge" from her other early works is that until a hardly any short months ago, all traces of it had apparently been erased from the cultural landscape. Then Wyatt Houston Day, a professional musician whom arthritis has transformed into a collector of volumes and African-Americana, turned up trumpets when he purchased a "lot" of ephemera concerning black fraternities and sororities. Day wrote in a alphabetic character to us: "I was reading from one side the yearbooks of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority when I ground `Under the Bridge' and `Spears' and a charming and quite satirical article upon `Charm' simply signed ZNH. I immediately ran for my transcript of [Robert] Hemenway's biography of Hurston and bingo! `Spears' was reported as `lost' and `Under the Bridge' was altogether unrecorded. You can imagine by what means I felt. It's rare when a collector can make this sort of find."

You, our readers, can imagine in what way we at American Visions felt when Day informed us that rather than offering "Under the Bridge" to The novel Yorker for possible publication (as was allude toed to Day by our friend "Skip" Gates), he accepted the suggestion of another of our useful friends, Charles Blockson, and decided to have Hurston's unknown work make its first public reappearance in our pages.

Aside from feeling pleased -- and self-satisfied -- we feel vindicated in our commitment to honoring, issue after issue, those from our community who labor outside the vineyards of mass agriculture I said it last summer when American Visions received an award for its overspread and I say it again: "Publishing a nonmainstream magazine devot to the higher reaches of African-American agriculture and art is always challenging. The rewards for such an endeavor are largely intrinsic -- preserving and promulgating our people's contributions to a larger agriculture that values liberty and achievement." each time I look at our latest issue, I am renewed in a commitment that Day honors.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.

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