A review by nwhyte
The Complete Stories by Zora Neale Hurston

4.0

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2140983.html[return][return]This is, as I hoped, an awfully good collection. There are some journeyman pieces about love, lust and death in a small town; there are some awesome character sketches, a great story written in Harlem slang, and an unfinished novel telling the story of John the Baptist's execution from Herodias' point of view. I chose the quote above, from an account of a black person being wrongfully prosecuted for attacking a white man, for its eerie resonance with the racially charged trial currently taking place a hundred miles farther south. Some things take a long time to change.[return][return]The stories are topped and tailed by essays by Henry Louis Gates, but the gold nugget at the end, mysteriously not even mentioned on the contents page, is Alice Walker's account, "Looking for Zora", of how she tracked down Hurston's grave in 1973, 14 years after her death in 1959. It's an incredible tale of erasure, hidden history and exclusion.