in 1994, at ohio state university, i learned two important things: the depth of african american writers, and website design. the internet was still very young. most content was for tech nerds, the military-industrial complex, and usenet communities (dinosaurs left over from 1979). email, back then, required a program called eudora. and file-sharing required an archaic protocol called gopher.
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i was studying literature. and realized that unless you were interested in the core canon of white male english-speaking authors -- shakespeare, dickens, whitman, frost, twain, hemingway (and lessers like bradbury, clarke, orwell, and asimov, who did science fiction, favored by those tech nerds) -- the "world wide web" (it was called by all three names then) was not for you.
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in this context, an african studies professor at ohio state taught us about zora neale hurston, a black woman who wrote books in the 1930s. in the 1930s, if you were a rich white male in america, literature was a reasonable career choice. if you were not, it was foolhardy or even crazy. no black woman had ever made a living in literature (if anyone has evidence otherwise, please tell me).
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zora neale hurston grew up in eatonville, a black-founded, black-run town in central florida. she judged her ability based on her achievement in an environment of equal opportunity. once she left her hometown, her confidence was strong enough to weather the criticism and racism that came her way. and her books, they sure sound confident. she's audacious, funny, agressive, intellectual, and emotional. she wrote in african american vernacular, she held up black folktale structures as equal to the western tradition (inspiring henry louis gates' theories). this all challenged the white literary establishment as well as the male-dominated harlem renaissance. she was praised by the legendary langston hughes and even co-wrote a play with him. who knows what happened next, because for years after, langston talked shit about her every chance he got.
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zora lauded the creative initiative of black communities in florida, haiti, harlem, jamaica, alabama, and new orleans. she became a pan-african dissenter from african american politics. in 1955 she wrote an editorial opposed to school desegregation, and she claimed the path to success was separate and equal -- with equal money and well-trained teachers, black children (in her theory) would achieve more than in a classroom dominated by racist white students and teachers (fifty years after brown v. board of education, her fears proved true: black children today experience racial micro-agressions that build up and lead to higher dropout rates, low college admissions). feared by the republicans she supported, and ostracized by the democrats and socialists she criticized, she was zora faded into obscurity and poverty. she was buried in florida without a funeral or even a headstone.
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so in 1995, i traveled with friends in florida to visit her grave. alice walker had placed a modest marker there. i wanted to share the joy of reading zora's trans-racial humanity, paradoxically integrated with black cultural wealth. in 1995, i built a website. to give a sense of how far back this was in internet-years: that website was hosted by prodigy, which gave subscribers 5mb of storage (for $24.99/month). (prodigy was slowly transitioning services from their proprietary dial-in system to a web-based connection that utilized netscape-style browsing. prodigy was also still fighting off an upstart called america online. i don't even know what year prodigy went extinct.)
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it wasn't much, but at the time -- before corporate sites or google or online video even existed -- it was a beautiful fan website. if you'll tolerate me patting my own back, i did a good job. it filled a need, as zora neale hurston was hardly mentioned on any webpage. immediately, attention came. not in the form of institutions. zora was never about institutions.
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i was emailed by dozens, later hundreds of individuals. people who had heard of zora from a friend, or an alice walker article, or a rare teacher, and sought more information. their libraries, they said, told them very little. their textbooks ignored her. richard wright and langston hughes claimed she was crazy. professor Horace Newsum and black studies librarian Lisa Pillow helped me gather information, which i typed and scanned for all the world to see. people on the internet, they mailed or emailed publications, photos, archival documents, which i incorporated into the site. it took many hours. i was developing my chernobyl honors thesis at the time, and working nights to pay for school. but little by little, the website grew.
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in 1997 this zora neale hurston site was still the only one on the internet, and was receiving hundreds of hits a day. soon after, literature-centered corporate websites came to dominate - amazon, borders, barnes & noble. while university-based resources developed, filling the need for scholarly information to reach a mass audience. they hired many professionals to build content, of course, and their designers got much more fancy than i. there was less room for an independent site. still, a large community of students and fans exchanged ideas on my site's discussion board, and shared a large selection of user-created essays about zora.
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interest in zora skyrocketed over the past decade. she was incorporated into high school textbooks, assigned in courses at hundreds of colleges, promoted by oprah winfrey. the height of interest was reached in and sustained since 2005, when oprah winfrey produced a tv version of their eyes were watching god, starring halle berry and introducing zora to millions.
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i never arranged any kind of advertising placement, but i could almost pay the site's fees with the tiny commission i got by sending book customers to barnes & noble.
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in 2007, barnes & noble terminated it's "affiliate" program for independent book fansites, closed my zora account and sent a check for $16 (largest check ever!). then last week, the company that hosted my web address (v3, it was called) went out of business and sold the domain rights to a new company. this meant the zora website, at i.am/zora, disappeared. not cool. so i emailed the new domain owners:
subject: i.am domain help
to: FortuneCity
08:19 AM 3/21/2008 -0700
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i had an
account with a company that does not exist anymore.
you apparently now
control the domain: http://i.am/zora
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i
know my account information, but your login screen does not offer my domain as
an option.
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what should i do to re-activate my web forwarding account?
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thank you - Kip Austin Hinton
they promptly responded:
so my zora neale hurston website not only is out of service, it cannot be reactivated at it's established address. i.am no longer exists as a domain, no matter who i pay. it's listed under the established address on dozens of other websites, including the university and book corporation websites that marginalized it. zora's niece, publisher, and literary agent all refer people to my site. as of last week, they refer people to a dead end.subject: Re: i.am domain help
To: kip hinton
Friday, March 21, 2008 10:22:44 AM
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Thank you for
your mail. We recently upgraded our web forwarding service but elected to stop
providing services under your domain.
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We apologize for any
inconvenience this may have caused you. I suggest you try our new service and
choose from dozens of terrific short URLs including go.to/yourname and
come.to/yourname.
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Regards
The FortuneCity Team
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just like in the late 1990s, i'm busy these days. i don't know where to put the site, i don't know what name to find, whether i should buy my own domain. harpercollins owns the now popular zoranealehurston.com, with content much paralleling my own (much older) site. they do not have a discussion board or forum, though. this means there is little-to-no user content. it is very professional, but less democratic. should i offer my content to them?
should i offer it to ohio state's black studies website, or some other university organization? -
should i rebuild it on an independent domain name, to be determined?
(any suggestions?)
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for now, my zora website is in a coma. for now, most of the content can be accessed at this less graceful address:
http://bridgeportdrafting.com/zora/
thanks to everyone who used the zora website over the past 12 years. thanks most of all to zora herself, "sharp n sassy" as they come.
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