Zora Hurston and the Ruby McCollum Story

The following is copyrighted material from the Prologue to the forthcoming publication, Zora Hurston And The Strange Case Of Ruby McCollum.

In the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston, the famous African-American anthropologist and celebrated writer of the Harlem Renaissance, studied the practice of “paramour rights” in the timber camps of North Florida. This unwritten law of the antebellum South allowed a white man to take a “colored” woman as his concubine and force her to have his children. Twenty years later, Hurston accepted an assignment from the Pittsburgh Courier to cover a murder trial in the small North Florida town of Live Oak, where Ruby McCollum, a wealthy African-American woman, had shot Dr. C. Leroy Adams, her white senator-elect lover.

At the time, the Courier was the country’s most widely circulated black newspaper, and Hurston expected the upcoming trial to be an unprecedented forum for a “Negress” to testify in her own defense after being forced, through paramour rights, to bear a powerful white man’s children.

Eager to begin her writing assignment, Hurston traveled to Live Oak, only to find that presiding judge Hal W. Adams had issued a gag order banning all but defense attorneys and close relatives from visiting the defendant. When Hurston sought interviews with locals during the course of this Kafkaesque trial, the entire town—white and black alike—seemed complicit in what she called a “conspiracy of silence, operating behind a curtain of secrecy.”

After the trial, Hurston appealed to renowned author William Bradford Huie to take up the case where she had left off. But when Huie visited Live Oak, he encountered the same conspiracy of silence. For over half a century since then, the case has haunted countless curiosity seekers, who continue to visit Live Oak hoping to hear “the real story,” only to find that the conspiracy of silence continues to this day.

Reading Dust Tracks on a Road, I realized that what made Ruby’s case so compelling was right there in Hurston’s stated motivation for writing her own life story: “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” Hurston’s insight gives Ruby’s plight a universality that appeals to our deepest fears of being wronged without legal recourse and left without a voice.

In creating Hurston’s “voice” for my latest manuscript, Zora Hurston And The Strange Case of Ruby McCollum, I have tried to be true to the voice in her newspaper coverage of the trial, and to her worldview as expressed through the totality of her surviving works.

Ruby McCollum’s story is supplemented from my memories of the event and its aftermath, interviews with my family members and others who were willing to share information, and hundreds of hours spent searching through newspapers and public documents of the time.

Undoubtedly, Hurston unearthed much of this same information during her stay in Live Oak, but many of her letters were totally or partially burned during the housecleaning after her death, including a 1953 letter to the Courier, blasting the paper for misquoting her. That half-burned letter is preserved in the Florida Archives at the University of Florida.

It is equally intriguing that none of Hurston’s surviving letters mention reading Huie’s Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail. This was uncharacteristic of Hurston, who had earlier corresponded with Huie to praise his Execution of Private Slovik.

We will never know whether there ever was such a letter or, if so, what Hurston might have thought of Huie’s take on Ruby McCollum’s story.