ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston's writing in the context of the transformation of the southern lumber industry in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Her observation of that participation caused her to rethink the folklore model, and she eventually developed pieces of a more historical and dialectical approach to the study of African American culture. The chapter demonstrates that African Americans became central actors in the creation of modern American culture without leaving the South. Even as white textile workers remained skeptical of social transformation, black lumber workers embraced the improved transportation and communication networks, permanent reliance on wages, and participation in commercial popular culture that were central to the experience of modernity. By disseminating the images through popular culture, musicians stripped them from their social and historical context, thereby allowing them to be interpreted as representative of rural African American culture in general.
