Member-only story
My Eyes Were Watching Zora
A Taliswomen Short
My rural Texas childhood was spent almost exclusively around white people; multiculturalism for me meant The Cosby Show and a Benetton ad. That changed in college. Education, as it was meant to, cracked me open and transformed me; it thrust me into depths I’d never suspected existed.
In a Black Women’s Literature class, I discovered Zora Neale Hurston. Her beautiful novel Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the tale of Janie Crawford, a young Black woman in rural Florida. In its way, Janie Crawford’s life was as foreign to me as the life of Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennett was — but while those two characters’ lives were polar opposites, each was governed by the whims of men and the patriarchy at large. That I recognized.
I was devastated to learn Zora was buried in an unmarked grave; elated that Alice Walker remedied that.
