Occupied territory and a number of battles took place. I imagined that it in some way affected her. Or their family members that had your version of the conversation . I found a lot of conversations in the details but knew nothing about the murder story. The descendents of the victims want to mention how her great aunt was murdered. It was different than that which happened so there were a lot of gaps and missing records. Would they have an observation or opinion of the new podcast journalism like this serial is that a flash in the pan would you think that type of reporting will stand up to the bricks and mortar for those like yourselves a. The way the first season grabbed hold of it they will constantly be trying another one of. That brings us to a conversation. Its in the social status class and while and grace. Look at the tremendous disagreement in the country becausitwas by the policemen ofk people. It was the divisive conversation that we are having over culpability and what needs to be done. Arent we just as divided over whether or not justice is something shared equally by their race is notherace is now . One of the things that was the tragedy for me at the case as a historian it was hard to see how much of what i was studying and looking at for the way the black community and the policing communities wouldve interacted was made with the same sort of crisis moment that we are at today. So once they decided this is a black suspect in the Violent Crime then as now is interracial meaning black people for mostly black an people and white peoplo mostly white people. Right, so they go into the community and are charged with the task on hunting of negroes so they basically scooped up the block and intimidate and interrogate folks but it also wasnt uncommon to be stopped or detained by police for walking down the street in neighborhoods they believed they didnt belong. There is an example in the book of a man that was stopped and detained because he was big, black and had a record. So theres all these ways that racial profiling and getting these confessions held true but even in certain respects i think in particular the way wilson was taken advantage of by the authorities, folks have described him as slow. He was barely 18yearsold an ad one point they gavione point thl during his interrogation and his confession is what sort of stands up and holds against him. The recent documentary that got a big splash on netflix he ends up getting embroiled in this case that has him still incarcerated so they are shocked at the amount related to race and class that had not changed. We have time for one more question in the audience. Lets get the microphone over. The research determined the insane asylum legislature merged . You cant write a book about texas without someone doing a political joke. I completely lost my train of thought. Is there anything that you go back to read. Both or what are we reading now . Im looking forward to summer because theres a couple of books that are exciting. One is by harris and its called Something Like sex workers and psychic runners thats looking at a black women in crime in new york i want to get my hands on that. It was wholly without black women on chain gangs so theres a couple of neat books coming out that i cant wait to read. Shes just a little bit obsessed. [laughter] ive completely forgotten the name of the book. The arab journalists doing significant social changing things. They will pile up on my bedside table and i wont read them. The trashy true crime histories and throw us all and i want to thank both skip and calling for joining us and wish you well on your books i have in hardcover and tablet. Youre supposed to be off signing books and im supposed to be out telling everyone to buy a book and get it signed. Thank you very much. Plus the saturday night at ten eastern after words. The senior fellow rosa brooks looks at the changes in the approach to fighting the war as well as the berlin ongoing conflict in her book how everything became war and the military became everything, tales from the pentagon. Shes interviewed by kathleen hicks, former secretary defense for policy and Senior Vice President and director of the International Security program at the center for strategic and international studies. The congress isnt going to wake up one morning and say lets triple the budget. Its going to continue to be apt to take on this wide range of tasks but make sure the military is good at it. Sunday at noon eastern, live from Hillsdale College in michigan with author and radio host Dennis Prager the author of the nine questions people ask about judaism, happiness is a serious problem, still the best hope and the ten commandments. Join in the conversation with your phone calls from noon to three eastern. Former White House CorrespondentKate Anderson broward profiles the first ten ladies in her book first wifirst when integrating r of america is modern first ladies. She speaks of politics and prose bookstore in washington, d. C. Mary roach on the science used to improve the effectiveness and safety of the military and by the public lost faith in the political leaders and Jean Edward Smith on the president ial tenure of church w. Bush and biographer jon meacham do with president ial politics. Now i discuss in a prominent figure in the harlem renaissan renaissance. At the harlem book festival we examine the writing and influence on literature. This is just over an hour. Welcome once again to the next panel discussion. May wmay we have you listening please. Thank you. I love myself when im laughing a century or more, a century and more. I have the pleasure of introducing the moderator for todays discussion. Shes an author of five books and focus of her study is cultural history. Shes a professor at the Columbia University of english and African American studies. Her current book is towards an intellectual history of black women. Ladies and gentlemen, brooke i l keep talking until you can hear me. Is it Getting Better . Okay. Good. I know you are here because you love her hurston. Its a place that she called home and that inspired her work and started to catalyze her career. This year will mark the 100th anniversary of her birth and she continues to be a writer and figure that mesmerized us. We are fortunate to be joined by a group of scholars and thinkers and writers who have spent quite a bit of time thinking about hurston and the context she lived and worked. Then we will open up and have a discussion and open up to you. The first speaker is Yvette Christianse was a beloved friend and colleague and like herself, she writes in multiple forms from an accomplished poet, the author of the beautiful novel of that which i recommend you read if you have time and you dont havif youdont have time. And shes also a scholar, a literary scholar having written one of the most books on Toni Morrison and she teaches at barnard college. Cheryl wall is a leading scholar and i dont know anyone that knows more than the cheryl wall who is also a very significant and important critic and leader in our field. Shes the author of were either lying black women writers, lineage and literary tradition and women and the renaissance and shes a beloved professor at Rutgers University department of english. And our final speaker is rich blint. Many of you may know rich. Hes profiled as a curator and important political figure, writer, scholar and if cheryl is the leading scholar, bridge is one of the leading causes of James Baldwin county is the coeditor of a special issue of the african america africanamet came out in winter 2013 that you can still get it as well as a contributing editor of the James Baldwin reviews the please join me in welcoming these extraordinary thinkers and writers. [applause] theres never enough time to talk about Zora Neale Hurston. I thought i would open with a leading question that would allow the panelists to say, give Opening Statements about their thoughts on Zora Neale Hurston if they would share their opening thoughts and if you are able to consider this question in the context so whatever you u say will address this question. Thats why should we still read a Zora Neale Hurston 100 years after her birth. I want to say how wonderful it is to be on a panel particularly because it is sponsored by the press. [inaudible] i am just going to join this style. I think that its important to us particularly because there are two things that existed in her life but also says something about the way that we agreed between her and her writing and those are marked by her parents. Her mother encouraged her and her father who said i dont get too uppity because you will make white folks nervous and they wont like it. One is about jumping in all of the forms of writing that went from reporting and inventing, the anthropologist, the picture greater, the essayist, the singer and the other had to negotiate those hurdles, the interest and containment that her father warned her about. I think when we read it now particularly for those of us there werthat were teachers we n complete her with her writing. I think it is an ethical issue to greet her as the inventor and writer. We may see some wonderful things as we are doing that. One of the earlier panels was about trying to get children to read. Reading is a form of listening and she understood this so powerfully. If we are nervous about president obama and hes nervous about being too black in the eyes of congress we cant be nervous about what seems to be impossible, improbable route of speech. I dont think that he would yell as she did when she won second prize for her play. She wasnt demure. Maybe this was a different time. I think what she did was found a way to negotiate a in the way that her father said she needed to observe the. Those of us now it remains a critical issue in the writings showing us again and again and again. Good afternoon. Im happy to be with all of you. We are all people that loved Zora Neale Hurston. I think that its a wonderful starting point because we take it for granted in this era of children being raised to have selfesteem. Most black people didnt love what people and the stuff she did and without hesitation that set her apart and thats the first thing we can learn. I laugh out loud every time i read it. There are lines i hear and i do try to read that out. Every time i teach the novel a couple students will raise hands and say i cant understand this dialect. I cant read this and i told them go home, read it aloud just as it is written. If you do that you will hear the duty and the humor in that language. If that didnt just happen in the comment as she listened to the way ordinary black people spoke. She wasnt ashamed of how they speak. She loves how we speak. They passed nations through their mouth. There was nothing they could talk about and didnt have an opinion about. They took it seriously at the time that wasnt the norm. She took the opinion seriously and i believe that is something that we can and should continue to emulate. So two things, it gives us pleasure and brings us joy because she has much to teach us about loving ourselves. [applause] after her birth. Ive just been in the country for four years and was leading the classes so she became at the moment in my life which in some ways i went to the wider antiexcavated things and what i found was an example because she was incredibly productive and her outfit but she was also contradictory. Shes going to go the way of her own mind, so independent, and what was stunning to me in this early simulation and something to get me through a different kind of education was a [inaudible] basically they contemplate the history of what shes made of, what shes done, and for me she serves as a model now in that way which is kind of tragic that she is someone who says she was for social justice and at the same time its kind of anachronistic around. So thats why its important today and shes also one of the most Brilliant Minds and hilarious figures in the mid20th century. And again, she reminds me that black women remain in my mind you are at this last week which is kind of stunning and i will say this, ive heard about it where kimberly asked people to stand up for the men who were killed and everyone stood up and when they named the black women who were killed, no one knew the names. So i think Zora Neale Hurston with her voice around her and the feminist impulse in literature people Pay Attention to and it reminds us of the work, so thats my opening sound off. There are so many ways that we can go. Two things im hearing that i would like to follow up on, one, if you can talk about the use of language and what she does that is so unique and rare and also we can think about that contradiction that so fascinating and also sustained our inquiry so lets start with the language and contradictions. Could i just take a few minutes [inaudible] i just was thinking in this wonderful new book that was put out, i love myself and im laughing t from the introductory essay is by alice walker and she opens it with an account that still makes many of us nervous and uncomfortable and she talks about this and this i dont sayt think i would have liked her. The reason they wouldnt have liked her is because of her behavior at an event when she had received the second prize. He walked into the event and yelled the name of the prize and this was just a sign they wouldnt like her but i think that is what is important. She does not than your and what someone else had done in the american letters and for which she has been elevated to the highest status speaking of course of walt whitman who had the self proclaimed. He cleared the air and i think that kirsten was always clearing the air there was a certain kind of masculine bravado and she did it in that way that in the eyes of what the grandmother teaches and beautiful language. So i just want to read this. Theres this moment where you see her achieving so many but just one, shes moving between the poles that are still parallel to those that her parents laid out and that is what was proper for a College Educated at god for, the propriety of expression got the grammar, the syntax, they are all there. She says i can do it and then she sits at the legitimacy and the other way of knowing she carried the normality and then also there are instances she finds her own in other ways. She writes my search for things to me to many strange places and adventures and this is a straightforward sentence of establishing and foreshadowing and it is a test that is past tense that contains and stabilizes and then she says several times it continues a rather ordinary process. Then in the way of storytelling and theres a shifthat there ise personal to the general. It was like sticking a knife between your ribs. Somebody was suddenly close by looking right there. And you feel as you perhaps move toward her too. In the past is now, it is here, it is saying im going to make me a graveyard of my own. It is prison and it is staking out the future. Im, i am, i am, and im going to make. The person with such knowledge is with water that tasted like cherry wine where they break trees. Here you see the past that is beginning to lose the proper boundaries. And were in one of those wayward job places where they lack. And then they set the song as i should be, narrow margins and she sucks them in from the margin opposed pros and what id like to say the left margins of obedience in the right margin of adventure. She makes the language of visible and audible. She put exclamation marks and all in the it is a word that is saying something that is holding the place for the word that is yet to come. And i like to think that that is where you see the writer inventing, making another place. Now we may breathe with her, we may feel the breath, we may assume that it is nursed and singing that song and it may not be. Even if it is, it may not be the hurston we need to make stable, because she is sure as hell does not want to be stable. But but i just wanted to bring that language to us [applause]. She brings everything she has to bear for reading hurston. Just to bounce off of that, couple of things stand out. First of all heres hurston in polk county florida, a woman traveling by herself, a woman who is a black student who is a student at barnyard and at a Migrant Worker camp that she doesnt just show up and say im here to teach you she does not show up to say i am here for an hour, and afternoon, she stays overnight and for days and she with this group of people working with them as they work. She joins the community and i am always humbled by hurstons example of a scholar. Where in the academy we stick and we do work hard, and we do take our work seriously. But this level of commitment is beyond anything that any of us is asked. So here she is going then i could talk about how she has won the language of her education and then the language to which she grew up in the language of the people that she is working with come i want to introduce one of her classmates from howard university. And and this woman lived in Jacksonville Florida where the one of the brothers ran a Grocery Store for many years. This woman remembered dora but she did just want me to know that after howard, she really went backwards with. [inaudible] i knew what she meant was that hurston had started or rather, resume speaking in a way that she had spoken before she got to howard. And for this woman, that that was a sign of her going backwards, for hurston it was a sign of her coming more fully into herself. She reviews this idea that black people spoke the way they did. And by that i mean to be specific, rural southern black people spoke the way they did because they did not know any better, they had not had enough education, you know they spoke the way they did because they thought through their words and their words were in fact beautiful. And this idea of how to i get that on the page, that was not an easy thing. I love the way that event has taken that passage to say that hurston uses that word and she does it in multiple places in her writing, sometimes to help us hear a preacher and his wisdom in the served men. Some time to help us to the rhythm of the folksingers because it is not easy to render the oral culture literally. That takes a lot of skill as any of us know that we just try to transcribe the conversation we had with her friend on the phone last night, it would be a challenging thing to write that in a way that somebody else can read it and understand it. But hurston had that commitment to capture that lyricism, that beauty on the page. I think again that is one of the things that draws us back to her language. I am thinking that both the language in the contradiction go handinhand for me, write a . The not separate. In this moment for me and im thinking more about to begin about what you said, 1943 they wrote a letter and that letter selected in the Foundation New orleans. And that she is going through a lot of stuff. Shes like telling off elegantly as she wanted to do thinking about language, Certain Community of literary figures, men mostly. But mostly. But black writers who want to join the wagon of the moment. Whats interesting is that she is prissy and then she backs up a little bit. She talks about about the religion of the anglosaxon, of america which is with James Baldwin. She also suggested suggested different pieces of her work which correspond, can you guys hear me . Which correspond with with the expression in the 1930s that how she braces that will to adorn, that is just part of the black light. But in the beginning of that letter, she talks about ike characteristic, she talks about metaphor being primitive. For me its somebody with a proverb with a big life in a tall tale is that its a real embrace of a sophistication of black language. Like you suggested a way that tends to come out of privileging a certain way of reading, to illustrate she says whats easier than to explain. So think of how the critics for her who say that language is embarrassing. She, herself in a moment that is really complicated is suggesting that metaphor is primitive. When for me, and jamaican language for instance, which you bordered the language here, you move in high cotton. Think of how amazing, to china turn your hand in you know its a certain kind of sophistication and then its all assign a primitiveness. But she also in another moment i shared with the students, she aligns on page 87, i think you should look this up. She says theres something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams a watching on the heart like weeds in a dry season. And in the underground cave, the song men in sickly air, people can be sleeved shipped in huge. You know what im saying. Thats a hurston breaking it down. Whether she was a conservative republican, but also in that letter she talk for the first time and i think in a scholar who is so binary about her complex history, maybe intellectually, because she says it about im concerned with social justice, but there are no mourners. She knows that black folk are like, louis the fourteenth. On assignment. Assignment. You cant buy me a black man who is not [inaudible] so there is a contradiction between between black people are and how we are treated. And so she does not want to go along with the moment of literature people when the action of trying to write yourself International Narrative never heard it is diminishing. She often suggests that and affirm on a money and some she throws parties, and come out of compromising. But she said also that she is not, do this. She does it for the cheap saw how she lives her political life and what she says seriously, deeply is contradictory to one person which through investigation and so will say about the language and that i will leave it there. While this is, we brought this up a couple times. The first is a side saying that we are referencing many different hurston text. Theres a few writers as prolific as she is. Most are familiar with her novel. But she was a journalist. She was a was a playwright, she was a choreographer, and if you want to get a taste of the full range of hurston before digging into the book, this addition for many of us was the bible before her other works were available it is a great collection of the range of her writing, autobiographical, so thats a good place to start them from there you can go into a maybe one day you can say on page 82, this is what happened. [applause]. Is of this one is correct to me and saying its on page 87. [laughter] but one of the things that they alluded to was the political conservative is him and i think we would not do her justice if we did not talk about her politics. One of the things and i think if we only take one thing from hurston, it is her as a literary figure in the language she bequeathed up because Everything Else is there. Hurston has the kind of conservatism that changes i would say becomes more staunch and what we identify as political conservativism toward the end of her life. At the beginning her life it is not something that is not necessarily shared by many black people. But it is never, and you can correct me if you think im wrong, her political conservativism is never anti black. And she kinda justifies it in a pro blackness. But 11 thing that may be can talk about little bit is that since her death, she has been claimed by feminists, by black conservatives, by black nationalists, by leftists, and most recently by libertarians. So how can anyone person leave a legacy that is up for grabs in that way . Do you have thoughts on that . I was going to say that i think that speaks to what you are saying about hurston and what were all saying that hurston is this contradictory person. Now i think she would say do i contradict myself . I contradict myself. Did that condition of being contradictory a thing for hurston be in the human condition. So she is not going to apologize for. Just in terms of her conservatism at the end of her life and even at the 1940s is politically very troubling to put it mildly. But it grows out of a booker t. Washington perspective that is the perspective to which she was raised and she was educated in the eatonville florida. And thats where she grew up and she was seriously proud. The people founded the school had been educated at the tesco g institute. The whole philosophy was selfhelp, play yourselves up by your bootstrap. So that is way ship and race. I agree with you that at that time, at the turn of the 20th century that is not an unconventional philosophy for black americans in general. I think many, most black americans would have been dorsi. Hurston is not able to do, it seems to me is to evolve. So by the time she writes politically she evolves as an artist. So by 19541954 when she writes letters to the editor of the sentinel, saying this about the board of education decision it really is an insult to black people. We do not need black children to be in school with white children in order to learn something. We were learning just fine and eatonville. Locally, personally that may have been true, poetically, collectively collectively that is just a reactionary position. How can that be defended . It can be explained and i think it can be explained by her bir graffiti. But i do not think that is what we take away from hurston. Thats not what i take away from hurston. I think the contradiction of how we know hurston is still important in my. So thank you for coming back to it a little bit. Whats important i think about it is that it shows up in so many ways and theres no way to reconcile her republicanism except to say that we are all differently equipped. The way i reconcile it against, pick of her literary output in so many ways and so she turns up in all these other ways which in moments our black naturalist. So youre kind of jarred by that stuff. It goes back to what was said at the beginning. You. You are never one unsure that she loved black people. So youre kind of confused and disoriented but youre never concerned by it. What what i realized what she called bill letter was the american refusal to deal with black there really knew who black people were and i would certainly endure in that moment when she won second place when they just walked in and then walked out. So she is that autonomy, that sovereignty that recognize and embrace inferiority. It is not granted by people as a matter then being excluded from citizenship. And how its perceived in the imagination is how come i dont let her off the hook, but she is so nourishing and all that she is done. She also kept working up until her death. So after it has been published the kind of minor work. But we can walk in both and say think simultaneously. So the contradiction its why the contradiction of american lives already. So they talked about violence on one hand and at the same time so a party that remand romanticize its incredible that we get that stuff. Im not on it actually was the debate between the boy in washington. And the mother saying, jump and the father saying, exit the status quo. And it is important because it is the issue that comes up again and we shove it away. I think its a boldly defined outline but i think her mothers family did think that they were better than the fathers family. So i did think she also inherited some of those intentions. I look at that later in the book. She said that was the response of a subway and she makes it completely unacceptable about my people embarrassing me, Something Like i cannot remember the exact language. I look away and one should not. Because i think that there many hurstons. Thats what bothers us. She is not the proper past tense. She is not contained, stable, stable, she is constantly remaking herself. Because they want more space for her yet. She was not yet, i think that we also have to understand her as someone who is in process. Yes as she got older i think there is nowhere else for her to go. So to say that, i think that her writing is full of all of these conflicts. And we should read not only the eyes can write just one small thing, what is it mean that her contradiction wasnt brought up in 1940, what does that mean it mean that she was found out working as a maid and at the same time trying to make a living as a writer. So for her, that to me is given all that she produce, given all the things, she was always struggling to literally be herself. So the contract dictions of a certain kind of thing that should be appropriate for someone who did that kind of work and she was discovered this way is really kind of shocking to me. 1 foot now, on both sides. [inaudible] the contradiction, nobody has said it more, ultimately the champion in the editor of the volume that we are here to recognize but did it mean to be an artist in my mothers time . My grandmothers time which what did he mean for black woman to be an artist . There were there were no models . There were no space, so this process of constantly inventing her self, trying to claim a space to speak at all was an ongoing struggle and one, again i think of her traveling those back roads of alabama florida, louisiana, by herself, in search of black people and black peoples culture, at a time a time when nobody is interested in that. Maybe somebody was able we could take a spiritual and maybe make it into a symphony, or we could take a folktale and maybe make it on the basis of a novel. And he or he or she said no. I want to honor these Cultural Expressions for themselves. So i think yes, i argue with door on a regular basis and has done so for many years. There are there are those moments when i sit back and i am really in all of the encourage, integrity of and the perseverance that took for her to do it she did. One last question before we ended up. That, we have been talking about, we all keep going about their eyes were watching god because it is so rich. But weve also been alluding to the other tax. If you you could leave our audience with something that you think they should read, not only their eyes, something that moves you and compels you that you keep going back to, what might that be . Read it all. But i really think on the road is extraordinary. But having said that,. I will leave it at that. Its on i think the significance of it shifty from the articles. I would recommend two things. One is the short story published in 1926 which is part of the language that is a concern, and part of gender politics and the psychology of marriage. A wonderful story. The second thing you dont have to read it all, just dipping, is which is her first volume of africanamerican foreclosure collected and edited by an africanamerican. Published in 1935 and youll find in that, some phrases and stories even that we have heard in our families and against stories that are laugh out loud funny, and some time deeply unsettling. It took me a long time to how to teach music and men. Because because you know god make me blessed. Thats not easy to teach in a classroom that say why would black people ask such a story . Why would that be a folktale. And then. And then with everything in your life with the early of the 20th century who you live, who you love, where you work, everything depends on whether your bracket blackandwhite. That does not just become a tale isnt that embarrassing, it is isnt this an example of people really trying to come to terms with what is xos dental in their lives. Nothing, nothing, no question is more important. So also i want to say read everything. I want to say probably because its like a pathology in some way. The first part of her dad is really rich but she is allusive in the second part. I think think mus and men is really good. But then theres kind of a recirculating is the first person to write this popular account of practices in haiti and jamaica. But i also think that like her essays which nobody talks about that much, why publishers wont publish in 1938 contrary to negro expression where she really details in the early part what makes why she is compelled to collect this literature. But read everything. You have time. They are reset all the other ones i love. But i think we see these contradictions. We see hurston the biographer, hurston who has who takes black people in the western hemisphere so seriously and is the first to say we do is a religion. And this is why. Why. These are components. And yet, hurston who has moments of american nationalism about the u. S. Occupation. Hurston who is so u. S. Centric do and how she sees the caribbean. So i think you get all the hurstons we have been talking about in and i agree with the characteristics, just because this just so wonderful to see you take so seriously and how you going to a blacks house and everything is on an angle or how we turn nouns into verbs. And right whenever i you hear someone use a word conversation i think of the world hurston. Thats not bad language, if there were doesnt exist we make it exist. Hurston has that which is so beautiful. Its like the black english, and hurston for me woods embodying that. Lets open it up. We have a few minutes for questions. Lets get them in. As the proud winner of the writing award at Columbia University for the institute of research in africanamerican history, i really appreciate this panel and what you bring with all the contradictions and talking about hurston. The original question about why its important makes me think about what is it about hurston today that is instructive for our understanding of say black women today . How does are a normal person present today . How is she a role model or how is it that her life can be instructive for us thinking about black womanhood today . I would say first of all the importance of knowing oneself and of claiming ones voice. That will talk about we talk about one must defer to the men in ones life are so that one can assert her own opinion. I think hurston is just modeling that for us all of the time. She is modeling it for us with the understanding that there are consequences. That there may be some go back, but the the importance of understanding who one is in expressing what one thinks is just paramount. She imagined black women free. And when you think about all the things that were around saying we werent, or that in their eyes, that nanny is a product of enslavement and she cannot imagine the possibility be on the legacy of slavery. And janie is like i just want to be free. I think that is what hurston gives us. At the same time because she got a great imagination and she can imagine us free and imagine herself free, she doesnt always see this it things that mitigate the quest for freedom for us. I think thats thats what she gives us. A willingness to imagine to put us there. This is what what it looks like black women are free. I think in a way it is almost easier and expected of us to say what you should do. But i would like to do is say how do we treat her now . And i have just one thing and i am saying this with their and trampling on this particular stage with these particular thinkers because they have written a about the daughter, the mother of us all, and i think its a problem for us not to keep throwing her into the recognizable woman to whom we can relate. As sister, rs mother. But i think that is in a way isnt that what we expect her to keep nurturing us. I think that she is doing something else, i think i think theres another role for the kind of woman that she knew her hurston was and is and what we have offered now. So i just just want to say that. I think it is very of porton. She is not a mothers. I just want say in addition to whats been said very dutifully, and what you just said about shes often nourishing us and not to complicate her personal life and professional life, i think as i said earlier something about how did she have to be in all the different ways i mentioned. Its because of a certain vulnerability about black women not being treated seriously. She had was a serious american writer. Like shes not just a black woman writer, she is a writer with extraordinary skills and quality. But she died and she was always fabulous, dont get me wrong. But theres somebody something about that demise. The fact that her biographer said about alice walkers placement in the rumor that no weight walker could know exactly where she was very. Think about that for second. Its an honorary gravestone. So her exit from this room in that way and in the nursing room, while she is still writing. It reminds me of the work that we all need to do about the understanding, what it means to be a black woman in america. It reminds me of how on fulfilled the democratic promise has been in that we really dont understand that black women are part of that in a significant way. Thats what she does to me. In addition in addition to all the stuff thats nourishing. I would say that in the contemporary moment we have to reckon with that. We really do. Is a contemporary of marcus garvey, based on your collective research, have you found any pan african influence were looming in her writing are being influenced by garvey during that time . That he published at least two poems in negro world. In the the newspaper that garvey published. So she was certainly on now, conscious enough of his work that she sent her poems to that publication. I do not think that, im not trying to suggest that shes a garvey eye because shes not, but she is interested as sarah says in this kind of african day Sport Community that there is at the end of watching it for example when jamie and tk go to the in their working as Migrant Workers, that is how a day Sport Community. Heard narrator so making us aware that bohemians in the community and their other people from the caribbean in the community and they are working cooperatively with each other. She does not pay enough attention to the capitalist system that theyre all working for, but among themselves theyre working with each other. So she does have that connection i think. Whats interesting is shes influenced by another jamaican and so she says and talking about her conservativism, she she says White Association is not important comments whats another white hive. Its a wonderful phrase and so she says if we must die, and she really just basically reproduce this in a poem she said and its really kinda radical. She said if 100 negroes were going to die that will do something. If you just want to jump in a certain kind of commercial bandwagon then im sitting this one out. So theres a real the casing talks about the history here in harlem and jamaica much like marcus garvey. [inaudible] it is hard to reconcile those two things. The only time she is critical of the u. S. In a real way is when she sees it engaging in a form of colonialism that doesnt want to call colonialism. Shes almost always, should never looking outside of the United States is a place for black americans. I wanted to thank the panelists, because what you will have to, you have galvanized me to go home and read one of her books behind the bed forever. So . Thats the 1i want to go home and ray. And i think of some things that she said, somewhere is ready she said ive been to hills kitchen and licked out all the pots. And im thinking that when language must not sweat, but i like the way hurston makes her language sweat. I love the way she does that. And i have a bottle tree in my front yard, its not a real rooster but its a ceramic rooster and you know she said about roosters, people roost in your yard because the lead out the weed out any bad thing in your yard. And im thinking of folks who have done a lot of Research Early on, peters of Writer College and whats the latest, ruth im thinking of her. So you are all just bring back my interest, when she died she was working on a biography of julius caesar, of king. My question is what, how is she playing how did she come about using that . Kirsten was always interested in the bible. Her first novel the title comes from a a verse in the bible. She is a baptist preachers daughter. She daughter. She is raised in the church she was always fascinated with religion. So i would not ever say that she was traditionally religious person, she just said that black people are christians really, her spirituality was hetero a. She was very much interested in the bible and i suspect it was that interest that led her to imagine writing a biography of king harry. Thank you. I also would like to say such a phenomenal panel of guests. Ice feel so honored and privileged. Im a fourth generation storyteller for children. Ive also with the arizona bureau. My question, ive, i have been fortunate to teach literacy to children from k12. I want to incorporate, i, i have hundreds of stories that ive written and adopted but i want to incorporate this incredible woman that we should develop audiences for our children. No im not up on all of her writings but with this panel are there any suggestions of writings that will at least embrace