But the whole town got vain over it.
For Zora Neale Hurston has been “rediscovered” in a manner unprecedented in the black tradition:.
It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker’s depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of “racial health – a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.
Ah’m hard of understandin’ at times.
De first street lamp in uh colored town. Lift yo’ eyes and gaze on it. And when Ah touch de match tuh dat lamp-wick let de light penetrate inside of yuh, and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
Zora and her daughters are a tradition-within-the-tradition, a black woman’s voice.
He had a bow-down command in his face, and every step he took made the thing more tangible.
Then he took off with ponderous flight and circled and lowered, circled and lowered until the others danced in joy and hunger at his approach.
It was just a handle to wind up the tongue with.
Using “the spy-glass of Anthropology,” her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that “both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.
The myths she describes so accurately are in fact “alternative modes for perceiving reality,” and never just condescending depictions of the quaint.
Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston’s ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.
He’s got uh throne in de seat of his pants.
Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions.
That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment.
If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk.
That which she silences or deletes, similarly, is all that her readership would draw upon to delimit or pigeonhole her life as a synecdoche of “the race problem,” an exceptional part standing for the debased whole.
What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world.
These two “speech communities,” as it were, are Hurston’s great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.
Rumor, that wingless bird, had shadowed over the town.