By Zora Neale Hurston, 1937
This book took me the longest to read of any of the books I’ve read so far this year, despite it being one of the shortest books I’ve read this year. The main reason for this was the amount of vernacular in the text. I read aloud to myself for concentration and comprehension purposes. My new habit. Interestingly, pronouncing the words as Hurston spells them vernacularly seemed to involuntarily influence my own accent on the words in the dialogue written “properly.” This made me feel silly. Aside from slowing down the reading process, reading aloud to myself forced me to engage with the overall voice in the narrative. Reading about the book, I learned an aspect that seems to be widely appreciated about the work is the use of the vernacular and poetic narration. As a white person I think reading this book helped me understand better the intimate relationship Black people have with the natural world, as Hurston shows in poetic vision of life in Janie’s mind. The images of the lake in the hurricane and the architecture of the folklore Hurston builds her story around overcame the my own awkward comprehension of the language used in the book. There’s a Hollywood film adaptation of this story. The trailer for the movie has that song I’m Like a Bird by Nelly Furtado in it.