Zora Neale Hurston (1960).

McGrath, Campbell

    Zora: z to a; a name, an anagram, an enigmatic atlas.
   Youth, sweet and spurious as a pirate's treasure map,
   x marks the spot, X for Christ arisen in Eatonville,
   wandering tribes of the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi,
   voodoo children unshackled but still bound to that cross.
   Under the great green hands of the chinaberry trees
   tribulations shadowed my girlhood, but I
   sought always the light of knowledge, sought
   release from the strictures of social circumstance,
   queen of my own empowered imagination.
   Poverty rots the soul, powerlessness unmans us.
   Only in Harlem could I spar with equals,
   New York an apple of which I bit, and swallowed.
   My wings were ever the mockingbird's, my eyes
   loved mirrors, my pen drew ink from an echoing well,
   kin-pool, deep reservoir of African blood.
   Just as I learned to smile for white folks in Memphis
   I mastered the anthropologist's dialect at Columbia,
   hoodoo lingo of the academic idiolect,
   glorification of folklore into ethnographic gospel. O, but
   Florida, I could never escape your prodigal soil.
   Eau Gallie, my final home, a garden for gourds,
   despair, and forgetfulness, my memory and my works
   consigned to the oblivion of a debtor's bonfire
   because I chose to speak my people's truth unaltered,
   and so lay claim to all history's sorrows.