Once More, Zora Neale Hurston

I remain fascinated by Zora Neale Hurston. Pretty strange for an old white guy, huh? Reading A Society of One from The New Yorker, this passage caught my attention:

...It is important not to blink at what she had to face and how it made her feel. Envy, fury, confusion, desire to escape: there is no wonder in it. We know too well the world she came from. It is the world she rebuilt out of words and the extraordinary song of the words themselves—about love and picking beans and fighting through hurricanes—that have given us something entirely new. And who is to say that this is not a political achievement?....

 I guess I had to get old, to finally facing the responsibilities of writing fiction beyond just telling stories to make a buck, to having the time to fill in the holes of education, before I came to see that with words we can make a better world, to honor the people we write for and about. Hurston was one of several who taught me this lesson.

sch 7/3/22