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women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget.
The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road.
An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done ‘heard’ ’bout you just what they hope done happened.”
“Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn’t know Ah wuzn’t white till Ah was round six years old.
‘Dat’s you, Alphabet, don’t you know yo’ ownself?’ “Dey all useter call me Alphabet ’cause so many people had done named me different names. Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said: “ ‘Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight.
Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
Janie walked to the door with the pan in her hand still stirring the cornmeal dough and looked towards the barn. The sun from ambush was threatening the world with red daggers, but the shadows were gray and solid-looking around the barn. Logan with his shovel looked like a black bear doing some clumsy dance on his hind legs. “You don’t need mah help out dere, Logan. Youse in yo’ place and Ah’m in mine.”
“Mah mamma didn’t tell me Ah wuz born in no hurry. So whut business Ah got rushin’ now?
Two men who were sitting on their shoulderblades under a huge live oak tree almost sat upright at the tone of his voice.
He drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.
Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”
Zora Neale Hurston published seven books—four novels, two books of folklore, and an autobiography—and more than fifty shorter works between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean War, when she was the dominant black woman writer in the United States.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady
Hurston’s fame reached its zenith in 1943 with a Saturday Review cover story honoring the success of Dust Tracks. Seven years later, she would be serving as a maid in Rivo Alto, Florida; ten years after that she would die in the County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida.
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?
