Today’s game plan

Agenda

• Dialect Quiz
• Meet Zora Neale Hurston
• Begin reading Their Eyes Are Watching God
• Analyze opening metaphor

Learning Targets

• I can analyze a metaphor within a literary work.

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Meet Zora

Talented and scrappy, Hurston was the most successful and most significant African American female writer of the first half of the 20th century.

Over a career that spanned more than 30 years, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays.

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Beginnings & Eatonville

Born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. Her writings reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings. For Hurston, Eatonville was always home.

Established in 1887, the rural community near Orlando was the nation's first incorporated black township.

Eatonville

• In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority.
• There was evidence of black achievement all around her.
• Zora grew up in this culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land.
• Her mother died in 1904. Zora was only 13 years old. "That hour began my wanderings," she later wrote. "Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit."

Meet Zora

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PANwrq_OuPM

Opening Passage

Read the first two paragraphs of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

• What metaphors is Hurston using?
• What is she trying to say?

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Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.