Rose Marshall’s Essay on Hurrying the Spirit: Following Zora

Zora Neale Hurston was alternately sassy, brassy, and classy!! She was chittlins and caviar, rhinestones and mink. She drove impolitely, smoked from cigarette holders, and danced on table tops. She directed college drama productions; worked as a wardrobe mistress; measured heads on the streets of Harlem, then drove South to check out the turpentine camps. Zora was….just Zora—a gifted wordsmith who wrapped the dialect of African Americans around her tongue, played with words, and sifted "de folk" until she could put her foot upon an image and bring it to life! The same glorious genius, the same enthusiasm and fascination with words and images and rhythms so evident in Hurston’s works also permeate Thompson’s Hurrying the Spirit: Following Zora.

Dorothy "Dot" Perry Thompson’s poetry drips with memories—memories recalled in her South Carolina childhood, in Zora’s Florida, and throughout the South—memories of sassy-mouthed, up in your face women who can work a mojo or chop cotton or sashay into a night club and "turn it out." Her love affair with music and dance and color and rhythm and movement and laughter resonates throughout Hurrying the Spirit. Words, words, words—the nouning of verbs, the verbing of nouns so redolent of Zora’s listening hear, her turn of phrase—are peopled with sisters and brothers who dip their watering cans in wells and streams and mighty oceans and "come up full" in spite of apparent drought.

As Thompson navigates the streets and shops of Zora’s childhood hometown, like Zora, Dot learned to assume the dual role of insider on the one hand, and listener-observer on the other. She is both a participant--with her own stories to share--as well as the collector of tidbits, tales, images and impressions which are the inspiration for this volume honoring Hurston. In Hurrying the Spirit, Thompson colors "molasses-hued" boys and dirt-black boys who "lap the sunshine with their tongues." In her poetry, we see Uncle Monday, Father Abraham, High John De Conquer, and Zora herself. Like Hurston, Thompson "pulls the covers up over the souls" of African American sons and daughters and gives them a laugh and a song to cover hurt and cruelty and racism and sexism.

Thompson may have swallowed Zora; she may have stepped out on Zora’s horizon to see where language can go, but she does so in her own arresting style. She goes to Georgia to make the supernatural believable—to conjure, hoodoo, work a mojo, and "root out" Joe Willie Jakes. She goes and sits on the porch with Miz Lorene, and she goes to the juke joint to check out the silk black brother driving the canary sports car. She goes to "copy color" left in the skies by sisters and brothers whose worlds are not black or white or gray. Like many African American poets before her, Thompson understands oral heritage and shows a unique understanding of the link between what Jerry W. Ward Jr. calls "orality and literacy." Note, for example, her poem "Joe Willie Jakes;" because of its sensory appeal and musical refrain, it is a perfect performance poem-- one designed to be read aloud.

Thompson may bow before Zora’s altar, but she writes her own songs, plays her own ditties, dances her own fingerpopping jigs, paints her own catty-cornered tableaus, and lives her own tall tales as she hurries the spirit of foremothers and forefathers and tantie and Saturday night jitterbugs down in the bottom. Her vamp, whose "pretty has lasted past hard times," is found all over Zora’s Florida and Harlem and Haiti and New Orleans. Like Hurston, Thompson signifies; she puts her own "foot in the road and totes her own messages" about following the spirit. [from Seraph]

Thompson, like High John, is a "bottom fish!" Thanks Zora.

Rose Parkman (Davis) Marshall

November 7, 2001

(Marshall, a reference librarian at the University of South Carolina, is author of Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide, Greenwood Press, 1997.)