For what can excuse a man in the eyes of other men for lack of strength?
It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh.
Now, Pheoby, don’t feel too mean wid de rest of ’em ’cause dey’s parched up from not knowin’ things.
Jeff Bruce threw in. “Speakin’ of winds, he’s de wind and.
Tain’t no trouble tuh say whut’s already so.
The wind through the open windows had broomed out all the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness.
God was grumbling his thunder and playing the zig-zag lightning thru his fingers.
It was an innocent question, made reasonable by the body of confused and often contradictory rumors that make Zora Neale Hurston’s own legend as richly curious and as dense as are the black myths she did so much to preserve in her classic anthropological works, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and in her fiction.
The dark obscurity into which her career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent political stances rather than any deficiency of craft or vision.
Nanny’s head and face looked like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm. Foundation of ancient power that no longer mattered.
Hurston embodied a more or less harmonious but nevertheless problematic unity of opposites.
The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry.
Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home.” Janie made her face laugh after a short pause, but it wasn’t too easy. She had never thought of making a speech, and didn’t know if she cared to make one at all. It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things. But anyway, she went down the road behind him that night feeling cold.
This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.
One mornin’ soon, now, de angel wid de sword is gointuh stop by here.
Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition.
How could the recipient of two Guggenheims and the author of four novels, a dozen short stories, two musicals, two books on black mythology, dozens of essays, and a prizewinning autobiography virtually “disappear” from her readership for three full decades?
Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them. She.
She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb to painless heights from his dung hill.
For the first time she could see a man’s head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted out of the tunnel of his mouth. She saw he was hurting inside so she let it pass without talking.