But we see something else: the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving. Growing in love, deepening in understanding. Cudjo’s wisdom becomes so apparent, toward the end of his life, that neighbors ask him to speak to them in parables. Which he does. Offering peace.
She often spoke to falling seeds and said, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground,” because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed.
The sunlight where I had lost them was still of Midas gold, but that which touched me where I stood had somehow turned to gilt.
I dreamt of traversing the globe in fancy boots, only to discover I was a mouse on a treadmill.
And listenin’ tuh dat kind uh talk is jus’ lak openin’ yo’ mouth and lettin’ de moon shine down yo’ throat.
How can a nation speak with one voice if they are not one? Don’t forget, now. If you do, you encourage all the stupid but greedy and ambitious to sprout like toadstools and that’s the end of right and reason in the state. Coddling and wheedling is not going to stop these destroyers. To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.
All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue.
World gone money mad. The pinch of war gone, people must spend. Buy and forget. Spend and solace. Silks for sorrows. Jewels to bring back joy.
She must look on herself as the bell-cow, the other women were the gang.
Maybe he ain’t nothin’, she cautioned herself, but he is something in my mouth. He’s got tuh be else Ah ain’t got nothin’ tuh live for. Ah’ll lie and say he is. If Ah don’t, life won’t be nothin’ but uh store and uh house.
SISTER TAYLOR Brother Mayor, I ain’t one of these folks dat bite my tongue and bust my gall – Whuts inside got to come out!
There was no doubt that the town respected him and even admired him in a way. But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. So when speakers stood up when the occasion demanded and said “Our beloved Mayor,” it was one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes like “God is everywhere.
She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether.
He figures that it makes a big man out of him to be passing and passing laws and rules. He thinks that makes him look more like a king. Long time ago he done passed all the laws that could do anybody good. So now he sits up and studies up laws to do hurt and harm, and we’re the only folks in Egypt he got the nerve to put ’em on. He aims to keep us down so he’ll always have somebody to wipe his feet on. He brags that him and the Egyptian nation is eating high on the hog now.
Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by “the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal.
And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the “arrogance” of whites assuming that “black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.
He cut nine hairs out of the mole on her head for luck and went off happy.
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes... Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Ah hears what they say ’cause they just will collect round mah porch ’cause it’s on de big road. Mah husband git so sick of ’em sometime he.
Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered.