Love in the Afternoon

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

That's how Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God begins, and I could still hear my Multicultural lit instructor Eisa Nefertari Ulen's voice when I decided to crack it open again this summer.

Zora's work made me walk upright, like in those old V-8 commercials. I've discovered that while some girls gather notions about love from romantic comedies or women's magazine's, mine were coming from books.

Set in Florida (spanning Orlando, Palm Beach, and the muck of the Everglades), Hurston wrote Eyes in 1937 during a prolific seven weeks in Haiti.

Exploding the myth of the "tragic mulatto", Hurston gives us Janie Starks, married off at 17 to a crusty, land-owning older man.

By the time Janie meets 28-yo Tea Cake Woods, she's a 40-yo widow with two loveless marriages behind her. What happens in that final act, including a torrential Hurricane Katrina-like storm, stuck with me like a stubborn kernel in the tooth.