More love for Zora

Zora Neale Hurston devotees should seek out a wonderful tribute book that came out in 2004, by her niece, Lucy Anne Hurston.   “Speak, So You Can Speak Again,” (Doubleday, $30) is 36 pages, and includes a CD with 25 tracks, the first half a series of segments from a 1943 radio interview, on which Zora tells tales with a melodic Southern accent about her childhood — “I thought the moon followed me around like a puppy dog” — and about her early poverty while she was trying to get her first novel published, about her visions and topics such as Haitian zombies and Bahamian jumping dances.

  The highly stylized pages include pockets with removable copies of manuscripts in Zora’s hand, or typewritten by her with notes.  It’s a readable and entertaining glance at a singular life, touching down in the writer’s hometown of Eatonville, Fla., and in Harlem — one of the pockets is a copy of her “Harlem Slanguage,” defining words like “Diddy-wah-diddy, a far place, measure of distance. (2) Another suburb of Hell, built on since way before Hell wasn’t no bigger than Baltimore.”

 It’s an excellent complement to Robert Hemenway’s “Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography,”  and Hurston’s own “Dust Tracks on a Road.” 

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