Chapter 6: Zora Neale Hurston

### “Folklore as Foundation: Mining Community for Story”

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## In the Voice of Zora Neale Hurston

Listen, sugar, I’m going to tell you something about stories that most folks don’t understand: stories don’t belong to one person. They belong to everybody. They live in the air between people, in the conversations on porches, in the songs people sing while they’re working, in the tales grandmothers tell to keep children still on hot summer nights.

Your own story—the one you’re trying to write in your journal—doesn’t exist in isolation either. You’re made of all the stories that came before you. Your mama’s stories, your grandmama’s stories, your people’s stories going back generations. The way you talk, the way you think, the metaphors that come naturally to you—all of that comes from somewhere. From some community that shaped you, even if you didn’t know it was happening.

And if you want your journal to be real, to be true, to be alive—you need to tap into that. You need to remember that you’re not just an individual floating free in space. You’re part of something bigger. Part of a tradition. Part of a community. Part of a story that started long before you were born and will continue long after you’re gone.

Let me teach you how to mine that richness. How to bring your people’s voices into your journal. How to make your private writing part of the living tradition of story.

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## On Listening Before Speaking

Before I was a writer, I was a collector. I traveled through the South—through Florida and Louisiana and Alabama—listening to people tell stories. Old folks mostly, who remembered the old ways, the old songs, the old tales.

I didn’t go there to teach them anything. I went there to learn. To listen. To collect the words and phrases and stories that were dying out as the old people died and the young people moved to cities and forgot where they came from.

And here’s what I learned: the best stories weren’t in books. They were in living people’s mouths. In the way Aunt Sarah told about the time the preacher fell in the creek. In the way Big Sweet talked about her man who done her wrong. In the way the old conjure woman described how to make a goofer dust charm.

These stories had rhythm. Had music. Had life. Because they’d been told and retold, shaped by hundreds of tellings, worn smooth by use like a river stone.

Your journal needs that kind of listening in it. Not just you talking to yourself about yourself. But you listening to the voices around you. Your family’s voices. Your community’s voices. The way real people actually talk, with all their poetry and wisdom and humor.

Before you can write your own story truly, you need to listen to the stories that made you.

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## On The Voices You Come From

I grew up in Eatonville, Florida—all-Black town, nobody to tell us we couldn’t do anything, nobody to make us feel small. And the way people talked there! Lord have mercy, they could TALK.

They didn’t talk like white folks. Didn’t try to. They had their own way with words, their own rhythms, their own expressions that had come up from slavery times, from Africa before that, mixed with English and changed into something new and beautiful.

“She’s ugly enough to make a freight train take a dirt road.”

“He’s so low-down, he could sit on the curb and dangle his feet in the gutter.”

“She’s got a tongue that’s loose at both ends and tied in the middle with tangle soup.”

These weren’t quotes from books. These were things I actually heard people say. This was the living language of my community.

And when I wrote it down—when I wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men and all my other work—I wrote it the way people actually talked. Not Standard English. Not the way white folks thought Black folks should talk. The way we ACTUALLY talked.

Your journal should have this same honesty about language. Don’t clean up how your people talk. Don’t translate it into proper English. Write it the way it actually sounds. Because that’s where the life is. That’s where the truth is.

Who are your people? How do they talk? What expressions do they use? What stories do they tell? What wisdom do they pass down?

That’s your foundation. That’s your roots. Bring it into your journal.

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## On The Porch as Theater

In Eatonville, the porch of Joe Clarke’s store was where the community gathered. That’s where the lies got told—and “lies” is what we called the tall tales, the exaggerations, the competitive storytelling that went on every evening.

One man would tell a story. Another man would tell a bigger story. A third would top them both. They’d go back and forth, each one trying to tell the tale that couldn’t be topped, and everybody would be laughing and adding their two cents and the stories would get bigger and wilder until nobody could tell anymore where truth ended and invention began.

And you know what? That was ART. That was literature. It just wasn’t written down in books, so the scholars didn’t count it.

But I counted it. I wrote it down. I collected it. Because I knew it was precious.

Your journal can be a place where you collect the stories of your community. Not just your own experiences, but the stories you hear. The tales your family tells at reunions. The jokes your coworkers tell at lunch. The gossip at the beauty parlor or the barbershop. The legends about the neighborhood characters.

These stories are yours. They’re part of your inheritance. Write them down before they’re lost.

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## On Dialect and Respect

Now, I’m going to address something that made a lot of people uncomfortable then and still makes people uncomfortable now: I wrote in dialect.

The characters in my books and stories don’t speak Standard English. They speak the way Black Southern folks actually spoke. And some people—including some Black intellectuals—thought this was disrespectful. Thought I was making Black people look ignorant or uneducated.

But here’s what they didn’t understand: dialect isn’t ignorance. It’s a different language system with its own grammar, its own rules, its own internal logic. And it’s BEAUTIFUL.

When I wrote “Ah been a delegate to de big ‘ssociation” instead of “I have been a delegate to the big association,” I wasn’t making fun of how people talked. I was honoring it. I was saying: this is legitimate language. This is how real people really talk. And it deserves to be in literature.

Your journal is where you can honor the language of your people, whatever language that is. Southern dialect, urban slang, immigrant English, regional expressions—whatever way your people actually talk.

Don’t be ashamed of it. Don’t clean it up. Don’t translate it into something more “proper.” Write it the way it sounds. Because that’s where the music is.

When my grandmother said “I God” instead of “I swear to God,” when she said “I reckon” and “might could” and “over yonder”—that wasn’t ignorance. That was the English language shaped by centuries of Southern life, African American culture, and human creativity.

It was poetry. And I wrote it down.

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