their eyes were watching god by Zora Neale Hurston

The African-American argot is not a problem for me, although I wouldn’t recommend this book to those who don’t have a language-dexterity capability.  Hurston keeps the reader from straining by switching periodically to an omniscient narrator, who uses well-educated English.  This narrator is a brilliant poet and an artist, who paints beautiful, lively visions, captured momentarily in words.

This is an old book (1937).  I’m almost done - the reading seems to go fast, but these days Hollywood film [2005, Halle Berry] captures events in 3-4 minutes.  It’s a 200-page book, so the essence is in front of me, and I relish the read.  The author fully embraces a passion for life.  She appears to a keen awareness of all life surrounding her.  She is a guru of her times.

Once you’ve trained your BabelFish to handle Ebonics, the dialogue is just sometimes tedious; but the anticipation of the author’s true thoughts is worth the wait.  It’s a melodic love story spanning the protagonist’s lifetime.  Not quite a “coming of age” story; more of a “Let me grow in order to find myself” movie.

Is it racist?  Well, there aren’t many American books that use the argot of Boston Wasps or the Georgia Klan, but recently some authors have used New York and Chicago ghetto talk.  Nobody complains when the British perform Shakespeare with “as written” language.

Possibly she was just writing, in memoir style, about her own upbringing and using the language of those neighbors and family, close and dear to her.  She was smart enough, and well-educated sufficiently to see the arc of history and thus feel a need to document the vernacular of her birth place, before it disappeared.