Review by Jessina Emmert
Project Authored by Sondra Bickham
Jessina Emmert (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Kansas. She holds a certificate in African American Studies and has a concentration in American Studies. Her research focuses on Black women in nineteenth-century New Orleans. She is currently working on her dissertation titled “Fancy Movements: Black Women and Performance in New Orleans,” which examines the spatial movements and activities of fancy girls in nineteenth-century New Orleans.
Beyond NOLA is an intricate digital humanities project that centers the city of Bogalusa, Louisiana as a significant site for Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic fieldwork and writing. Sondra Bickham Washington skillfully uses the digital platform Scalar to merge archival research and geography to excavate the understudied history of Bogalusa and to illustrate the close interactions Hurston had with the city’s residents. Beyond NOLA is an interdisciplinary project situated at the intersections of digital humanities, African American studies, geography, and literature. Washington extends the work of Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall’s text Ain't I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon, which foregrounds Huston’s time in Louisiana to the city of New Orleans. More specifically, Beyond NOLA pieces together Hurston’s forgotten time in the ‘Magic City’ by tracing her difficult geographic journey and illuminating her lively encounters with Bogalusa’s sawmill workers and the famous conjure man known as ‘Doctor Redmond.’
The project’s strength lies in mapping Hurston’s geographic footprints and illustrating the psychological toll that Hurston’s journey to Bogalusa had on her. Washington urges us to reflect on the different challenges and perils an unmarried Black woman had to face as she traveled through the Deep South. Through the use of photographs and historical maps, this project’s emphasis on Hurston’s embodied experience on her journey expands our understanding of Black women’s geographies and their navigations of different environmental and racialized spatial configurations at the turn of the twentieth century. In the module ‘Hurston’s Route to Bogalusa,’ StoryMap is used as an interactive tool to trace Hurston’s geographical footsteps. This illustrative section not only follows Hurston’s geographical footprints from New Orleans to Bogalusa, but the interactive map pays homage to the geographic difficulties that Hurston may have encountered.
The importance of Hurston’s time in the Magic City is marked throughout the project’s seven sections. The extent of information provided in each section is immense, and the combination of archival materials, historical maps, photographs, letters, and segments of Hurston’s writing work together to center the city as an important site not just for her research, but also as a location that provided employment opportunities for countless other Black Americans, including laborers, professional class, and entrepreneurs. Through the combination of these elements, Beyond NOLA brings the active Black community of Bogalusa to life, with Washington giving special attention to Doctor Redmond, one of the most renowned conjure men of the time. The illustration of Hurston’s field notes and the in-depth research about Doctor Remond provide a sense of familiarity with Bogalusa and the environment that Hurston surrounded herself in.
Beyond NOLA is an innovative digital humanities project that creatively expands the scholarship on Hurston. This project successfully takes the brief information about Bogalusa that Hurston mentions in Dust Tracks on a Road and Mules and Men and effectively maps her time in the Magic City. The overgeneralization of Hurston’s work in Louisiana erases the labor, detail, and commitment she put into her work in Bogalusa. However, Beyond NOLA rectifies Hurston’s forgotten history. It is undoubtedly a commendable digital humanities project from which scholars and students in various fields will gain invaluable knowledge and insight.