“I was glad when someone told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore’.” Specifically, that someone was Franz Boaz, who was Zora Neale Hurston’s thesis adviser as she worked on a Master’s degree in Anthropology. This is not exactly a rendering of her thesis, but covers a lot of the same ground. I first read this book in college, when I took a class called “African-American Literature” — a cursed class taught by a grad student from another university hired on a temporary basis […]