She interviewed the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, helped define a literary era, and revolutionized cultural anthropology. She also died in poverty, working as a maid, and was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated Florida cemetery, where a yardman set her unpublished manuscripts on fire until a passing friend beat out the flames. This episode traces how the same country produced both halves of that sentence. Raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of America's first all-Black incorporated towns, where the mayor, teachers, and business owners all looked like her, Zora Neale Hurston grew up with an unshakable confidence that never internalized second-class citizenship.

That confidence carried her through audacious survival moves, including enrolling in high school at 26 by claiming to be 16, and on to Barnard College,  ...