On Zora And Her Okra Raphael

Though a recorded account of her interactions with the last surviving person to survive the middle passage, Barracoon is a brilliant preamble to Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novels.

In her autobiography ( 1942’s Dust Tracks on A Road), Zora Neale Hurston paid extravagant public praise to Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic rewrite of the first books of the bible. Her novels, however, tell of a more complex literary relationship. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, she made Milton’s Adam an Alabama cad preacher who couldn’t keep it in his pants, descending from spirituality because he cannot see himself as fallible. In Moses Man of The Mountain, Hurston reinterprets the arc of her title character as not a prophet undone by his moralistic rage but a black freedom fighter heartbroken when his people don’t want to be free. Most viscerally, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston drastically flips Milton’s scene with eve in the water. In beginning Janie’s epic journey to personal awakening, Hurston punctured Milton’s myth of eve as narcissus by showing just how fucking dangerous water was in Florida, and that, to survive, she-and so many women-had to have her head on a swivel.

Though a recorded account of her interactions with the last surviving person to survive the middle passage…