When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip

The road trip provided the perfect opportunity for Zora and Langston to compare notes from their Southern travels, exchange ideas, and explore, along the back roads, the characteristics of African American culture that informed their greatest work. In the 1930s, Zora would play a major role in canonizing black Southern folklore, and the picture she painted of rural Southern life would be reinforced by Hollywood’s image of Southern Negroes in rags, the rural focus of the Federal Works Progress Administration in the 1940s, the search for forgotten bluesmen in the 1950s, and the murders of civil rights workers in the 1960s. Six years later, Zora would pen one of the most vivid descriptions of this great exodus in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine:

Earlier in 1927, Langston had published some poems that took place in the South, poems like “Song for a Dark Girl,” about a lynching, and “Mulatto,” about the rape of a black woman by a white man.

Source: longreads.com