Dwight Garner at the NYT:
Zora Neale Hurston’s best-known sentence, judging by its appearance on coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets, is this one: “No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
As distillations of her sensibility go, that’s not terrible.
Hurston’s books, which include the classic novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937) and the memoir “Dust Tracks on a Road” (1942), are earthy, packed with rough pleasures, wide in their human sympathies and in close contact with the ebullience that can touch the margins of everyday existence.
What’s interesting about the “oyster knife” comment, read in context — it appeared in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” — is how expressive it is of her political views, which were heterodox. Were she living now, she might have a Substack.
more here.