seeceeread 's review for:

Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States by Zora Neale Hurston

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If dat is my child, where is his gold teeth?  • Clifford Ulmer 

Kaplan's introduction situates this manuscript in time. Hurston wrote in the 1920s to her patron, her academic advisor, and some friends (she hadn't fallen out with Langston Hughes yet) about the incredible volume of material she had collected on trips throughout the south. She planned multiple books and shared different versions of this text for publication in 1929; each recipient had suggested edits and expectations. But, for reasons unclear, this was lost for decades and later recovered in a box of the papers of a colleague of Franz Boas. As such, we cannot be sure which iteration this reflects. Everything remains, though the identical tales were just published once, the first time they appeared. 

The book is an incredible testament to Hurston's ability to penetrate what she called the "featherbed of resistance" that her subjects posed. After driving miles and miles, entering working class and struggling communities, sleeping in her car until she could build relationships, Hurston finally sits down with each person to be sure that the stories they have by then recalled enough that she can tell them herself ... emerge fully in their distinct voices. Their idiosyncrasies – in grammar, accent, and construction sing across the hundreds of quick tales.