bloganuary-2024-07 – “It's Amy,” I said.

What could you do differently?

What could I do differently? Or what I am going to do differently? The latter. Due to the current prompt being underwhelming, regularly scheduled prompt response is being replaced by a birthday wish for Zora Neale Hurston.

Born on this day in Alabama in 1891, Ms. Hurston was a part of the Harlem Renaissance. She was an author, a filmmaker and an anthropologist.

I first learned of Ms. Hurston in an undergrad American literature class via introduction to my favorite novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. I often refer to her as a true wordsmith. I feel as though her words are able to cast spells and almost hypnotize. Sublime words that dance around the reader’s head. I can see her words. They are the color of honey.

I am forever grateful to the graduate student who taught that American literature class years all those years ago.

Happy Birthday, Ms. Hurston.

Some of my favorite quotes by Ms. Hurston:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Goodreads

He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom-a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Goodreads

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 gulf of formless feeling untouched by thought

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall In company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small, things priceless and worthless. A first water diamond, an empty spool bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. in your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held so much like the jumble in the bags could they be emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place, who knows?

Zora Neale Hurston, How it Feels to be Colored Me
Goodreads

Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear.”