RIDING THE TORTOISE A poem based on the life of Zora Neale Hurston “I shall try to lay my dreaming aside. Try hard. But, Oh, if you knew my dreams! My vaulting ambition! How I constantly live in fancy In seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world, But conscious all the time of being A mouse on a treadmill. Madness ensues. I am beside myself with chagrin half of the time; The way to the blue hills is not on tortoise back, It seems to me, But on wings. I haven’t the wings, And must ride the tortoise.” ZORA NEALE HURSTON For a woman whose nightly private theatre of dreams Were filled with premonitions Of success, of danger, of heartache Zora Neale Hurston had the tortoise vision right- A mighty talent full of ambition Who crept slowly on her journey from The sunshine state, to the big apple, to the city of jazz And all around And back again All the while losing the sprint To the hares of a different race. If she were here now Zora would be up on the tables The type of woman who never had a tab Didn’t need one- beers offered all night from Bartender’s hands to patron’s hands to listeners hands Into Zora’s. Zora who was here to entertain, here to immerse herself into You and your life and You and your culture You and your zombies Your hoodoo Your history Your blackness Your voice Anything that covered what other people, white people, weren’t saying For you About you As she said - she knew black people to “Love and hate and fight and play and strive and travel and Have a thousand and one interests in life like all other humans.” Racial injustice, it turns out, is not the only topic set at every table. Zora could be one with you Because she WAS you Coming from nothing And surviving anyway. And while she found fame She didn’t get much further than the nothing She came from She once described poverty like “Dead dreams dropping off the heart like Leaves in a dry season and Rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long In the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.” If Zora were here she’d say Black Lives Matter? What’s that as a question As a thought As a concept, now here I fought for that then And you’re still here exchanging words And fists And bullets and bullets and bullets and She’d say haven’t we moved on? Haven’t we found a way to pass the time With conversation and culture other than This? Nineteen hundred and thirty eight she said “Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Up springs the song to his lips But it is fought back.” She fought for her poems and songs And voice to be heard over the din Of white writers before her And male writers beside her But the trick was on them Zora, navigating the landscape of words From the Harlem Renaissance through The Great Depression and out the other side Having convinced everyone she was Ten years, or twelve years, or fifteen years Her junior Rabbit out of hat Abracadabra. She crafted works with titles That feel like a home you never knew you missed Like Moses, Man of the Mountain Sweat Mule Bone Jonah’s Gourd Vine Tell My Horse Their Eyes Were Watching God “Sweat sweat sweat!” she said “Work and sweat, cry and sweat Pray and sweat.” Hurston rarely stopped sweating- A train of ambition crossing the country & the world Ever-reaching out for that next story That next work, that next culture to open Their doors and say, come in, come in And tell our tale for us In our words In our vernacular Welcome, come in, have a seat She did all of this And she did it mostly alone Through sickness and health she married her work Wedded bliss lasting longer than the few times She gave commitment a try- Dashing off days later On the road again to someone else’s home If she came to our homes, now I imagine she’d write about us Slowly moving backwards- Riding tortoises in reverse- Toward the life she propelled from And ask us why? And we’d point to him and say He’s why. And she’d reply, as she said before “Under our Constitution, There is no royal ruler. Every American is part of the king That rules over this nation. I just think it would be a good thing For the Anglo-Saxon to get the idea Out of his head That everybody else owes him something Just for being blonde.” Rule your ruler, she’d say. Don’t let me watch you march backward. Anthropologist Feminist Author Poet Playwright Teacher Daughter Human Zora. .