Zora Neale Hurston

THEORY

“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. 

-- How it Feels to be Colored Me 

“Hurston’s motives for presenting Black folklore were in part political. She wanted to refute contemporary claims that African American’s lacked a distinct culture of their own. Her novels depict the unconscious creativity of the African American proletariat or folk.” (Mambrol)