Every Tongue Got to Confess by Zora Neale Hurston
By Nava Atlas | On July 8, 2017 | Updated August 23, 2025 | Comments (2)
From the 2001 HarperCollins edition of Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States by Zora Neale Hurston. African-American folklore was Zora Neale Hurston’s first love.
Collected in the late 1920s, Every Tongue Got to Confess is the third volume of folk-tales from the celebrated author of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
These hilarious, bittersweet, often saucy folk-tales — some of which date back to the Civil War — provide a fascinating, verdant slice of African-American Life in the rural South at the turn of the twentieth century.
Arranged according to subject — from God Tales, Preacher Tales, and Devil Tales to Heaven Tales — they reveal attitudes about slavery, faith, race relations, family, and romance that have been passed on for generations. They capture the heart and soul of the vital, independent, and creative community that so inspired Zora Neale Hurston.
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See also:
Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston
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In the forward, John Edgar Wideman discusses the impact of Hurston’s pioneering effort to preserve the African-American oral tradition and shows readers how to read these folk-tales in the historical and literary context that has — and has not — changed over the years. And in the introduction, Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan explains how these folk-tales were collected, lost, and found, and examines their profound significance today.
In Every Tongue Got to Confess, Hurston records, with uncanny precision, the voices of ordinary people and pays tribute to the richness of Black vernacular — its crisp self-awareness, singular wit, and improvisational wordplay.
These folk-tales reflect the joys and sorrows of the African American experience, celebrate the redemptive power of storytelling, and showcase the continuous presence in America of an Africanized language that flourishes to this day.
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Quotes from Every Tongue Got to Confess
“At the bottom in the gut of jazz if you listen closely you can hear—no matter how complexly, obliquely, mysteriously stylized—somebody talking, crying, growling, singing, farting, praying, stomping, voicing in all those modes through which our bodies communicate some tale about how it feels to be here on earth or leaving, or about the sweet pain of hanging on between the coming and going.”
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“Why had the training I’d received in the so-called “best” schools alienated me from my particular cultural roots and brainwashed me into believing in some objective, universal, standard brand of culture and art—essentialist, hierarchical classifications of knowledge—that doomed people like me to marginality on the campus and worse, consigned the vast majority of us who never reach college to a stigmatized, surplus underclass.”
Thanks I need this book where to buy it and how much it’s cost
Hi Monica — if you scroll down to almost the bottom of the post you’ll see links to the book on Bookshop.org and Amazon. I see that there are various prices, ranging from full price for the new book, down to $6.95 for a used copy.