|
Michael McLeod
Ok just checking in. Terrible sore throat from my covid bout - it felt at first like I popped a handful of red-hot charcoal briquets into my mouth and swallowed them -- but not nearly as painful now, no other symptoms, fingers crossed that this watered-down covid strain subsides and leaves it at that. So, hopefully, all I have to worry about is the hurricane headed straight for me here in Orlando, which sounds a lot more dramatic than it is. Hurricanes accumulate power over warm water. Once they hit land, that power and those winds diminish rapidly. I will hear lots of scary noises and my power will go out but I will be fine. If you don't see me post in the near future it will be because of that loss of power and internet going out, which most likely will happen.
Now for the bright side: I cannot go through a hurricane without quoting Zora Neale Hurston, the fabulous black author of the 1920s who lived right down the road from me, in Eatonville, which is just five miles away from the single story and quite sturdy concrete block home where I am writing this.
I love and honor Hurston first as an African American literary pioneer and second for having invented a phrase that encapsulates how scary it is to be in a situation where you hope to be spared to survive -- and that is all you have: hope.
The phrase is: “Their eyes were watching God.”
You may remember I referred to it several years ago, the last time I wrote about going through a hurricane, in a story I wrote for a local magazine and posted here.
That sublime Hurston phrase -- you'll understand just how sublime once I explain -- served as the title of a novel she wrote based on her experiences growing up in what was then the all black community of Eatonville in the 1920s. She uses the phrase just one time in the novel. It appears in a chapter that depicts the fearfulness of a small group of the town’s residents as they silently face a moment when they know their survival is not up to them -- a moment when they can only hope to be spared as they weather the wrath of a hurricane, huddled at night in a flimsy, lantern-lit shanty of the era that could be easily swept away, and them with it, by the storm.
Here is the paragraph where she used that beautiful phrase, which so marvelously captures the sense of helplessness and hope we all experience at one time or another:
"The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in their shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls.....They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God."
Maybe this sounds prideful but when I see someone put words together that well, my heart turns to me and says: "That's our tribe."
|
