Thank you so much. This panel, i let myself in enough income a century and more. I have the pleasure of introducing the moderator for todays discussion, jasmine griffin. She is an author at five books for the focus of your steadiest cultural history. Shes a professor clever university of english and africanamericans daddies. Her current book is titled toward an intellectual history of the women. Ladies and gentlemen, Farah Jasmine griffin. Thank you and good afternoon. I know youre here because you love her sin. Cant hear . That better . Already. Ill keep talking until you can hear me. Ill try to speak a little more loudly. Is that any better . I know youre here because you love Zora Neale Hurston, not because this is one of the only airconditioned venues today. It is wholly appropriate today that we have this panel on someone here in harlem, which is a place for she calls home, a place that inspires mr. Roemer, a place that started her career. This year will mark the 100th anniversary of her earth and she continues to be a writer in a figure who mesmerizes us. We are fortunate to be joined by a group of people who had been quite a bit of time speaking about someone in the context in which he lived and worked. After some ultra brief introduction to open it up and have a discussion and then we will open it up to you. First speaker is transcendent, a beloved friend in college and in many ways like herself, she writes in multiple forms. Shes an accomplished poet here shes the author author of a beautiful novel that i recommend you read if you have time or even if you dont have time. She was also a literary scholar having written one of the most important on Toni Morrison. She teaches at barnard college. She will be our first speaker. Cheryl wall is a leading scholar. I cant they give anyone who knows more about zora huston. Shes the author of black women writers, lineage in tradition and women in the harlem renaissance and shes a beloved Professor Rutgers University in New Brunswick department of english. Our final speaker is transfixed. Many of you may know mitch. He has quite a profile as a curator of important cultural figure in our art scene. A writer, a scholar of hurston. He is the coeditor of a special issue. As well as contributing editor at the James Baldwin revealed. Please show me in welcoming these extraordinary speakers and writers. Back there is never enough time to talk about zora hurston. I would simply question that would now meet our panel to give Opening Statements at out there thought on Zora Neale Hurston. If you are able to consider this question in the context, although whatever you say i think will actually interest the question. Why should we still read Zora Neale Hurston 100 years after her birth . Start with you that. First i want to say how wonderful it is to be on the panel and particularly because this panel [inaudible] i really am pretty themed im just going to join the glory [inaudible] is so important to us particularly because there are two in her life that often says something about the way we read between her and her writing. Her mother who encouraged her and her father who said dont get too uppity because to make light folks nervous and able take it. And those two may seem to be a think about someone jumping in the form of all the forms of writing, which went for the anthropologists coming to fiction writers come in the sas, the singer and the other was the person who had to negotiate those scary hurdles senator ring , the systems on containment that her father warned her about. I think that when we read hurston now, we often can played with her writing. This is absolutely an ethical issue to read her surmountable assay as the writer and read her writing and we may see some wonderful things as were doing that. One of the earlier panels to get children to read your reading is a form of listening and hurston understood this so powerfully. If we are nervous about president obama and nervous about being too black in the eyes of the congress, we also cant be nervous about what seems to be impossible, improbable brief speech. I dont think president obama would ever yell when she won second prize for her play. She wasnt a mirror. This maybe was a different time. I think what she did what she found a way to negotiate the literacy and behave very better father said she needed to observe and i think young people today remains a critical issue to keep showing up again and again and again. That is not a name shot. Good afternoon. I am happy to be with all of you and i do believe with farah. Thank you for moderated discussion. The title of detail i love myself for some name that i think is a wonderful starting to point because we take it for granted in this area of children being raised to have selfesteem , the children necessarily have selfesteem. Someone came up in a time when nobody loved white people. Most black people did not love her people and the fact that she did without hesitation in fact sets her apart. I believe that is the first lesson we can learn and one of the reasons we continue to read her. I imagine most of you have read their eyes are watching god is the pleasure of reading. I laughed out loud every time i read it, even though i fretted a few dozen times. I do try to read sub six out loud. They will say i cant understand. I cant read this. And i tell them, go home, read it aloud just as it is written. And if you do that, you will hear the beauty and the humor in that language. To follow up on the comment, zora hurston listens to the way ordinary black people spout that she wasnt ashamed of how we speak. She loved how we speak. She decided on the first page that people on the porch passed through their amount if there is nothing black people couldnt talk about and didnt have an opinion about. She took it seriously added time when that was not the norm. Sometimes even today, we are good to play, play sports. She took our opinions seriously. I do believe that is something we can and should continue to emulate. It gives us pleasure. It brings us joy. She has much to teach us about loving ourselves. I think that is a really important question why zora hurston wrote that 100 years after her birth. For me, it came into my life in a 16 minute in the country for four years. I was reading the deleted as they see trump. All these really european tax. So she became in a moment in my life, which in some ways, why are you building the library . I went to the library and that excavated things that were nourishing to me and ive Read Everything in the early part and a late teens. What i found was this example because she was incredibly productive. But she was also contradictory. In a profound way she was a republican. She was doing all these things. She said that in 1943 letter, shes going to go the way of her online. She is fiercely independent, a sovereign south which is also important for reading everything together so much as a kind of early literary process, but also something to get me through a different kind of education was that, like she says, basically that history is what shes made of, where shes been, what shes done. So for me, she serves as a model now despite that was kind of tragic, but she is someone who said she was for social justice at the same time kind of anachronistic. You couldnt pin her down. And so, that bottle is a very different spirit. She is also one of the most really have minds and hilarious figures of the elderly and 20th century. She is just that good again, because of where she died, she reminds me a little bit of black women remains to my mind last week, which is kind of stunning and ill say this. Ive heard about it. Kimberly crenshaw asked people to stand up with the names of the black men who were killed. Everyone stood up and remaining up and when they made the black woman was killed, everyone took their seats. And so, i think her voice a feminist impulse and literature with kind of ugly correspondence they are that is timely, contemporaneous and reminds us of the work we do. So that is my opening. Thats wonderful. Theres so many of ways they can go with what it should be said. Two things im hearing that i would like to follow up on his one year back in sherrill, but also rich. If you could talk about hurstons use of language, what she does that is so unique and rare and also we can think about something rich set and follow it up with the contradiction. Her contradictions are so fascinating and you know, also art inquiries as well. Lets start with the language and maybe talk about her contradictions. I have to Pay Attention to write something more. I was thinking, you know, in this wonderful new book put out, i love myself and im lobbying, the intruder as they is by alice walker. Hurston still makes many of us nervous and uncovered her boat and she talks about the friend who says they dont think i would have liked her. The reason they wouldnt have liked her is because of her behavior at a price event when she had received that second prize for color strip. I was one a call at color count. She walked into that surprisingly and yelled at me about the prize for walkers friend comment is was just really assigned they wouldnt like us. But i think that is important. She does not too near and she just does what someone else had done earlier and american muslims for which he receives and was elevated to the highest. Im speaking of course of walt whitman. So the selfproclaimed world. Well, he cleared the air and was lauded for her. I think it was all who live clearing the air. The way she did it was sent with a certain kind of masculine provided. I think she did it in a way, their eyes are watching god, the beautiful language. So i just want to read this. There is this moment where you see her achieving. This actually so many, but this is one. Shes moving between the poles on the other polls that are so parallel that her parents laid out for her. What is proper for a College Educated propriety of expression, they are all fair. She says i can do it. And then the simultaneity and legitimacy of the other way of knowing that she carries. And also what i would like to say or instances when she finds her own other ways are very important. She writes my search for many it seems to me in too many strange places and adventures. This is a straight forward sent to establishing, foreshadowing. The past tense can contain, can stabilize and secure. My life was in danger and they continues her brother ordinary progress. And then in the way of storytelling, there is a shift from the personal to the general and we glimpsed the language she has learned from anthropology. It is the language that we will criticize for an anthropology itself had to unlearn those terms. She writes primitive minds are quick to sunshine and quick to anger. Anthropology begins this interest, but her writing is already in that double quickness. Quick to sunshine, quick to anger. The security is so noticeably stabilize. She writes some little word to move to love for sticking a knife between your ribs. Someone is close by looking and raked areas you feel and perhaps move toward her, too. The past is now. It is here. Im going to make me a graveyard of my own. It is also staking out the future. Im then im going to make. Hurston is in polk county where the water tasted like cherry wine with the trees of acts of muscle. Did you see beginning to lose their proper boundaries and in one of those fake sawmill turpentine railroad jobs places with a lot of flags. And then she sent the song has issued me. Narrow margins in she margins in a the pros and what i would like to call it the next margin of obedient and the right margin of adventure. She makes it visible and audible. She put exclamation marks. And it is a broad and the word that is saying something that is holding the place for the word that is yet to come. Id like to think that is where you see the left and the right the writer inventing. We make brief affair. We may feel the breath and it may not be. It may not be the hurston what we want to make stable because she sure doesnt want to be stable. I just want to bring that language device. She brings all of everything she has to bear to reading someone to reading someone commits a thank you for sharing your reading with us. To bounce off the bat, a couple things stand out. First of all, in polk county, florida a oneman traveling by herself, a one man who is a student and there she is a democrat working cant in polk county where she doesnt just show up and say im here to teach you. She doesnt show up to say i am here for an hour, an afternoon, she stays overnight and for days she goes with this group of people working with them as they worked. She joins the community and im always humbled by hurstons example as a scholar, where we speak and we do work hard and we do take our work seriously. But some of us commitment is just beyond anything that any of us have asked. So here she is going to talk about how she has the language of her education and the language of the people that she was working with. I once interviewed one of her classmates from Howard University in jacksonville, florida, where one of hurstons brothers had run a Grocery Store for many years. She didnt want me to know that after howard, zora really went backward. I knew what she meant was that hurston had started or rather resumed speaking in the way that she had spoken before she got to howard. For this one man, alice not a sign of her going backwards, but a sign of her coming more fully into herself. She refused this idea that black people spoke the way they did and by that i mean to be specific, rural southern black people spoke the way they did because they didnt know any better. They hadnt had enough education. They spoke the way they did because that is how they got through their words and their words were in fact beautiful and this idea of how do i get that on the page, that wasnt an easy thing. I love the way she is taken not passage and she does it in multiple places and her writing, sometimes to help his hero preacher in the survey. Sometimes to help us to help us here to read the other folk singers. Its not easy to render the oral culture is literate. That takes a lot of skill as any of us know and try to transcribe the conversation weve had with our friend on the phone last night. It will be a challenging day. So write that in the wake somebody else can read it and understand it. Hurston have that commitment to capture that erases them, that ud on the page. Again that is one of the things that tourists back to the language. I am thinking that both the language and the contradiction go handinhand for me. And this moment for me i am thinking more about what he said in 1943, Zora Neale Hurston wrote a letter at the Research Foundation in new orleans. And yeah, shes going through a lot of stuff. Shes so enough to look at me a thing about language, a Certain Community of literary figures, but black writers who want to join the bandwagon at the moment. What is interesting in saying all of that, she is, how do i say this, shes talked about how the virus only kind of the religion of the rings of america. She also said jazz in different pieces in her work, which kind of corresponds, which corresponds to the expression in the 1930s how to shoot as the will to adore them, just part and parcel of black life. But in the beginning of that letter, she talks about the metaphor being primitive. Someone for me with a proverb for the last of tall tales as they will embrace of the sophistication of black language. But she said just a way of privilege income they start way of reading not, to illustrate, she says is much easier than to explain. Think about the critics for her. She herself in a moment is really complicated. Suggesting that is primitive. In jamaican language, for instance, you move high cotton. Think about how amazing to kind of turn your hand. All the ways in which that is not at all a sign of permanent mass. But she also in another moment i shared with the students, on page 87, you can look this up, where she says theres something about positivity that smells like death in underground caves, the soul lives in the air. People can be [inaudible] do you hear what im saying . That is Zora Neale Hurston breakin at down. She talks for the first time and its kind of a binary about her complex since her dad, she has been claimed by feminists, but not conservatives, by black nationalist, by last days and most recently by libertarians. How can any one person leave a legacy that is up for grabs in that way . Do we have not thought not . I think that speaks to what you are saying and we were all saying that she has this contradict or a person. I think she would say do i contradict myself . I contradict myself, that is condition of being contradict jury is for her the human condition. So she is not going to apologize for it. It was at the end of her life and even in the 19 more days, politically very traveling to put it mildly. But it grows out of a booker t. Washington perspective that is the perspective with which she was raised and she was educated in eatonville, florida and of which she was proud. The people who founded the school and eatonville has been educated under booker t. Washington. The whole philosophy of eatonville with selfhelp, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. At that time, at the turn of the 20th century, that is not an unconventional philosophy for black americans in general. Most black americans would have endorsed that. Was that one is not able to do it seems to me is evolved. By the time she raised politically, by 1954 when she writes a letter to the editor of your offensive off same day as decision is an insult to black people because we dont need black children to be in school with black children in order to learn something. We are learning just fine in eatonville. Locally, personally that they have been true. Politically, that its just a reactionary position. How can that be descended . It can be explained. And i think it can be explained by her biography. But i dont think that is what we take away. I mean, the contradiction i think is so important to mind. So thank you for coming back to this a little bit. What is important about it is its a bit show up in so many ways as cheryl sein and theres no way to reconcile her republicanism except to say that we are all differently to quit. The way i reconcile that i guess because of her literary out to in so many ways. And so she turned that the now present you with, which in the early moments certainly you kind of charter. It goes back to the beginning. You are never unsure that she loves black people. So youre kind of come views and disoriented by it, youre never concerned by it. What i realized is a certain kind of black inferiority. They wa