As we read in Elizabeth McHenry and Shirley Brice Heath’s work, Zora Neale Hurston was an influential author, although this has not been the first time that I have encountered her work. In my sophomore year of high school, my English class assigned to us Their Eyes Are Watching God, the novel which Hurston is most famous for. At the time of reading, I had never left the country, knew mostly only my own community, and so when the class protested the way in which the novel was written, I went along a bit. A quarter into the novel, however, I found that as long as I made an effort with reading the dialogue, it wasn’t as difficult as it first seemed.
I mention all of this because as McHenry and Heath’s work mentioned, Hurston wrote in the dialect of the people she saw around her; she captured the genuine way in which they spoke in hopes of preservation and rebellion. My teacher at the time made sure to teach us about this purpose, about how the writing and story went against many of the popular practices at the time. Other African American authors around the time of the Harlem Renaissance criticized her for portraying black people as uneducated, while white reviewers had few criticisms.
I found this reading interesting because of how much I recalled about the novel and how my view on writing styles has changed, how I can now value it more for the piece of literature that it is. I hope that others have a similar experience, as it has broadened my world view and allowed me to look back on past events with new input.
