Story in Harlem Slang

 In Story in Harlem Slang—the only piece of fiction she published during her brief period in the limelight— Zora Neale Hurston uses her career as a folklorist to celebrate the community’s linguistic expression. For her non-Harlem (and mostly white) audience, she included an appendix at the end of the story, reprinted as the last three pages of the selection below. In an anthology published in 1990, Alan Dundes remarks on “how a good many of the slang items are still current” and notes that one reason is that it has often taken decades for slang from Harlem to reach “middle-class white Americans.” Since the emphasis is on wordplay and banter, the story’s plot is simple: a man named Marvel (nicknamed Jelly), originally from Alabama, runs into his friend Sweet Back, and the two boast and joke around a bit before encountering a young woman from Georgia. One theme of the story, notes Hemenway, recurs in much of Hurston’s writing: “that the North was no utopia, just as the South was not necessarily hell.”

BlackMass Publishing, 2023
Softcover, 16pp 
215 x 139mm