Second paragraph of third story (“A Bit of Our Harlem”):

The boy approached the table where the girl sat with the air of a homeless dog who hopes that he has found a friend.

Collection of the short stories written by Hurston in the 1920s and 1930s, all about the contemporary experience of black Americans, mostly set either in Harlem or in Eatonville, Florida, her home town. Several of these stories were unpublished in her lifetime, perhaps intentionally so; they are good honest reportage of her people’s life, some better than others. There’s a lot of marital infidelity, a lot of smart children; they all worked well enough for me apart from the biblical pastiches which are anyway mercifully short. Published only last year. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that list is A Hero Born, by Jin Yong.

Strongly recommended to me by sashajwolf, and very much worth reading. Hurston combines the research instincts of the anthropologist with the communication skills of a born story-teller, and looks in detail at local cult practices, especially regarding the undead, in Jamaica and especially in Haiti. It was especially interesting to reread this the week that Doonesbury reran the plot sequence where Duke becomes a zombie in the service of Baby Doc Duvalier, written fifty years later. Whether or not Gary Trudeau was aware of Hurston’s research, she has fundamentally informed the English speaking world’s take on zombies. Quite apart from that, it is a fantastic book, perhaps a little optimistic in the description of the status of American women, but otherwise very much taking Jamaica and Haiti on their own terms and in their own words. There are about twenty pages of musical transcriptions of traditional Haitian chants to the various deities.

Really it’s worth remembering that the supposedly well-ordered pantheons of European and Asian theologies all were in practice probably a lot more like the chaotic deities of Haiti which Hurston chronicles so well. What strengthens people’s belief isn’t really the intellectual coherence of their religious practice, it is how well it works to channel communal and social experiences which are difficult to deal with otherwise, and to give a sense of reassurance that the grottiness of this world may not be all that there is. Hurston conveys the Haitian experience of religion and belief very well.

I have to again complain about the presentation of the P.S. edition. The table of contents promises a foreword; there is none. There is an afterword by Henry Louis Gates, and then an after-afterword by Ishmael Reed which I suspect is the foreword misplaced. But the publishers really ought to have ensured that the contents page actually coincided with what is in the book.

Unpleasant things were ahead of Laura Lee Kimble, but she was ready for this moment. It might be the electric chair or the rest of her life in some big lonesome jail house, or even torn to pieces by a mob, but she had passed three long weeks in jail. She had come to the place where she could turn her face to the wall and feel neither fear nor anguish. So this here so-called trial was nothing to her but a form and a fashion and an outside show to the world. She could stand apart and look on calmly.

A couple of years back I was fascinated to read Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, and then back in January someone on my f-list posted a glowing review of this book (in a locked entry). This is, as I hoped, an awfully good collection. There are some journeyman pieces about love, lust and death in a small town; there are some awesome character sketches, a great story written in Harlem slang, and an unfinished novel telling the story of John the Baptist’s execution from Herodias’ point of view. I chose the quote above, from an account of a black person being wrongfully prosecuted for attacking a white man, for its eerie resonance with the racially charged trial currently taking place a hundred miles farther south. Some things take a long time to change.

The stories are topped and tailed by essays by Henry Louis Gates, but the gold nugget at the end, mysteriously not even mentioned on the contents page, is Alice Walker’s account, “Looking for Zora”, of how she tracked down Hurston’s grave in 1973, 14 years after her death in 1959. It’s an incredible tale of erasure, hidden history and exclusion. For the moment it’s online here and well worth reading. It finishes:

There are times — and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of them — when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of the emotion one feels. It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because I have come to know Zora through her books and she was not a teary sort of person herself; but partly, too, it is because there is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.

It is only later, when the pain is not so direct a threat to one’s own existence that what was learned in that moment of comical lunacy is understood. Such moments rob us of both youth and vanity. But perhaps they are also times when greater disciplines are born.

I found this a fascinating novel. The protagonist, Janie, is a black woman growing up in rural Florida some time around the late nineteenth / early twentieth century; Hurston tells us the story of her childhood, her three marriages, natural disaster, and trial for murder. A lot of the book – the first chapter, which frames the rest of the story which is told as flashback, and Janie’s second marriage – is set in Eatonville, the first of the historic black towns which I wasn’t really aware of until I read Beverly Jenkins. Hurston was also an anthropologist and has a convincing ear for dialect. (She also integrates it far better into her narrative than, say, Stephen Crane.) Strongly recommended.