Zora Neale Hurston

Hello.

Today I had book club where we discussed Zora Neale Hurston, previously Zora Neal Lee Hurston, but she dropped the Lee and added an E to Neal, probably due to her 3 marriages. She was from Georgia, and moved down here to Seminole county/Maitland area. I can't remember the name of the "ville" but there's a week of devotion to this author in the form of a festival, where the University of Central Florida and local libraries work together to show the movie, have people read the books, have a walking tour of (Eatonville! That's it.) and other fun literary stuff. I guess the movie has Halle Berry playing Janie in Their Eyes Were Fixed on God, which was her most popular novel and the movie's story, and also most like Zora's own life. Amy, the librarian who leads my writing group, and also who led our book club today, praises Hurston as her most favorite black female writer---even more than Toni Morrison! Can you even believe that?? (Big intake of breath.) Anyway, the book is great. It's written, as most of Hurston's books, in a southern black dialect that some at-that-time modern black people would have loved to see disappear, right along with the reality that was slavery. The story illustrates the very real culture and events depicting life for blacks at the end of slavery. This town, that is still here in the county that I happen to have just moved to 6 months ago, is declared as the first all-black city, with a black mayor, etc, in the history of the country. People from all the southern states moved down here to live in it. Hurston's character, Janie, comes from Georgia, while Hurston's real-life people claim to come from Alabama. The story basically goes along through Janie's 3 marriages. Everything about Janie is daring for that time period. The book, and her other works, did not do well before she died in 1960. It took time for the non-feminist world to catch up to her. University classes regularly read this book as a window into Florida and southern and black history. No coincidence then that this author is praised around here in February every year, as the shortest month of the year is declared Black History Month. There's a bone for "their community." Proof that racism is dead.

The book club discussion frequently went back to the "dialect" and the "black accent" and some readers absolutely could not read past page one, and chose to download the audio book onto their devices. Whether the club members were from the south or not, most agreed that hearing the words as they are written is much easier to understand than reading them off of a page. A few times, I found myself wondering if the discussion were of a southern white woman of that time period, and that white woman was married controversially 3 times, if the discussion would go where it went. I don't think any of these women are intentionally racist,  but I could see their, and my own, white privilege flag waving proudly. What I mean to say is, if a black woman walked into the room, or had stood at the doorway and considered entering, she would have heard what I sensed, and upon noticing the black woman, as light or as dark as you please, all of us would have back-pedaled a little and felt the need to explain their previous spoken sentences.

There was an interesting mix of feminist, girl-power praise for the book, which, like I said, was way ahead of it's time, black, brown, yellow or white, off-set by quite an opposite view. Some thought the book created fewer options for women and situations that boxed Janie in too much. It was written in a time when officially blacks and whites should be able to go to school together and pee in the same toilets. But unofficially, women were not legally allowed to vote, denied ownership of property and definitely living a stranger in a man's world. One could argue that at that time no women living in America or anywhere else could imagine the benefits I enjoy today as a woman. Not in their wildest dreams.

Or maybe I am wrong. Maybe Flora Neale Hurston dreamed of a time when a woman could start and own a business, decide to get married or to not, decide whether or not she would have children, or make all kinds of decisions about her body freely, work the same business and education jobs as any man, and travel and spend her money as she damn well wished. Perhaps she did imagine a world where the framed boxes white men put everything and everyone into would fall and all people could decide for themselves how they wanted to live their lives. I wonder if she had the capacity to imagine every person valuing every other kind of person as a human being and respected and loved them as equal, and that respect and love translated into laws and governments of equality. Hmm.

zorafestival.org