Zora Neale Hurston

Janie full of that oldest human longing—self-revelation.

Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

It was like seeing your sister turn into a ’gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep seeing your sister in the ’gator and the ’gator in your sister, and you’d rather not.

Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her.

To my thinkin’ mourning oughtn’t tuh last no longer’n grief.

Work all day for money, fight all night for love. The rich black earth clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped.

Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double-consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.

Zora Neale Hurston, the “real” Zora Neale Hurston that we long to locate in this text, dwells in the silence that separates these two voices: she is both, and neither; bilingual, and mute.