[Miss Hurston's goal in her nonfiction] was not merely to collect folklore but to show the beauty and wealth of genuine Negro material. In doing so, she placed herself on the side of those who saw nothing self-defeating in writing about the black masses, who, she felt, are more imaginative than their middle-class counterparts. Consequently, few of the latter are included in her works. Often, her characters work and live in sawmill camps. Some are sharecroppers. Some work on railroads. Most are uneducated and provincial. A statement from her short story, "John Redding Goes to Sea," sums up their way of life: "No one of their community had ever been farther than Jacksonville. Few, indeed had ever been there. Their own gardens, general store, and occasional trips to the county seat—seven miles away—sufficed for all their needs. Life was simple indeed with these folk."… To the anthropologist, their economic and cultural isolation made them the proper source for folk materials in their purest form. (pp. 425-26)
Her decision to write about the ways of the folk necessitated her use of their dialect as a means of achieving verisimilitude. Of course, the careful student of a writer must always remember that the writer's rendition of a dialect may or may not be authentic. Many writers are merely following a literary tradition—that of attributing certain speech patterns to a given social or ethnic group for artistic reasons…. [Most] of Miss Hurston's characters are represented as being speakers of Black Dialect, and … she herself abandons her use of the General Dialect when she pictures herself as a researcher among those who speak the variant dialect…. (p. 426)
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