Harlem Literature

The readings for this day are Introduction: The Vernacular Tradition, Characteristics of Negro Expression, You May Go But This Will Bring You Back, and Dust Tracks On a Road. I loved You May Go But This Will Bring You Back by Zora Neale Hurston. The title of this peice left me scratching my head and pondering if it meant what I thought it meant which was about her man that left but after thinking twice missed what he had at home. What he had at home was a real woman, a pretty woman, a phenomenal black woman, a very sensual and beautiful woman. An excerpt I read from the autobiography, Dust Tracks On a Road, I didn't particularly like because it was written in first person and it was long and drawn out. I'm not a big fan of Zora Neale Hurston, some of her work is interesting but it does not move me. Introduction: The Vernacular Tradition is introducing readers to the oral tradition of black expression like church songs, blues, ballads, sermons, stories, and hip hop songs. The vernacular tradition is a very large part of our culture and helps to develops us as African Americans. The vernacular tradition started in Africa with the art of story telling and the songs that were sang before our forceful removal and migration to America on slave ships. This was very rich and powerful. Characteristics of Negro Expression describes our characteristics of expression like drama, will to adorn or to enhance the English language, the angularity that we use in our dancing, the assymetry that we use in our negro paintings, our dancing, the negro folklore that we tell in stories, our vibrant culture heroes that are in our stories, imitation which is our love of mimicry for art purposes, absence of the concept of privacy which is funny because it simply means that we can't keep a secret which is a broad stereotype that I believe is false because not all of us tell secrets (I call it "diarrea of the mouth"), the jook which is the first night clubs that were created in the past for African American pleasure where they can go after the world has just beaten them down, and last but not least our rich dialect that is passed down from generation to generation. Around our professional colleagues we talk proper but once we leave that office or school and go back to our hometown our street talk and dialect that we use comes out automatically without failure. As soon as I go back home to Georgia I find myself using some of the "slang" terminology I grew up using.