or so years of her life. As she sits on her back porch, retelling her long story
to her friend Pheoby, it is apparent that her life has come full circle. At last
she is content, for even with her great loss, she has found herself.

Hurston's use of black folk dialect in her books was another indication of
Nommo transformed and synthesized in the African's New World reality.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his theory of Afro-American literary criticism, The
Signifying Monkey, discusses one of Hurston's purposes in her ingenious use
of dialect in Their Eyes Were Watching God:

We can assume safely that one of Hurston's purposes in the narrative strategies at play
in Their Eyes Were Watching God was to show James Weldon Johnson and Countee
Cullen, and just about everybody else in the Negro Renaissance, that dialect not only
was not limited to two stops -- humor and pathos -- but was fully capable of being used
as a literary language even to write a novel. Dialect, black English vernacular and its
idiom, as a literary device was not merely a figure of speech; rather, for Hurston, it
was a storehouse of figures. ³⁷

Just as she was able to "signify" to her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries
on the literary worth and power of the black southern speech which was often
ridiculed by members of the so-called black elite which she referred to as the
"Niggerati," her message can be just as poignant today. Ebonic ³⁸ speakers of
the 1990s and twenty first century, in classrooms and communities throughout
the United States, have probably sensed a similar lack of respect for their so-
called "non-standard" speech patterns. Hurston's legacy is an empowering one
if used to increase the self-worth of her descendants or to gain respect for
their language.

The necessity for this kind of classroom instruction became abundantly
clear almost a decade ago when linguist William Labov discussed the topic in
an article he wrote for the National Council of Teachers of English's English
Journal. While his purpose, like that of other linguists who participated in the
controversy which resulted from varying points of view, was to demonstrate
the viability of Black English as a means of communication, his Eurocentric
reference point detracted from his position. Instead of assessing the viability
of ebonies (Black English) based on the unique characteristics of its own
structure, or how it functioned as a means of communication, he gave his
endorsement based on its ability to duplicate the perceived characteristics of
what he termed "Standard English." ³⁹ Anything categorized as "non-standard"
is automatically acknowledged as inferior.

This was definitely not the case when Hurston demonstrated her point of
view more than forty years earlier. Hemenway explained it best when he
wrote the following:

her fiction exhibited the knowledge that the black masses had triumphed over their
racist environment, not by becoming white and emulating bourgeois values, not by
engaging in sophisticated programs of political propaganda, but by turning inward to
create the blues, the folktale, the spiritual, the hyperbolic lie, the ironic joke. These
forms of expression revealed a uniqueness of race spirit because they were a code of
comminution -- interracial propaganda-that would protect the race from the

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