Needed some stamps so at the post office I bought a pane of Toni Morrison stamps. Came home and read an Alice Walker essay about Zora Neal Hurston, which took me to the Harlem Renaiisance (early 1920’s to mid-1930’s), one of the two eras in American culture I would like to time travel back to (the other being the Los Angeles jazz scene from the late 1940’s to the mid-1960’s). And so I started reading a Zora Neale Hurston novel. Here are three lines of a longer exposition about a train, from Jonah’s Gourd Vine:
“the train schickalacked up to the station and stopped.”
“the engine’s very sides seemed to expand and contract like a fiery-lunged monster.”
“the train kicked up its heels…until it had lost itself down its shiny road and the noise of its going was dead.”
(I’d love to have known Zora Neal Hurston. She and I have anthropology studies in common, among other interests. Her life and her writings are fascinating.)
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