“Eatonville, Florida.” A Poem by Joshua Bennett
From the Collection We (the People of the United States)
for Zora Neale Hurston
For our purposes, we begin with the eternal feminine
and its string of beads, end with you
as a girl in Eatonville, days before you board
a boat to cross the river, leapfrogging the invisible
partition that separates your hometown from
Jacksonville and its caverns full of cash;
the haywire soundscape you once adored,
and a private school scholarship to supercharge
your future. The tenor of the underlying metaphor
becomes clear only once I am older, preparing
to teach your essay to a classroom full of engineers,
their palms pressed directly to the pulse of whatever
our species is soon to become. Your journey was a map
of the modern mind’s uncountable transformations:
traversing the water from home, a place named
for the man who helped your ancestors set its silver-gray
foundations, to the big city bearing a sigil of wholesale
slaughter, thousands destroyed in the name of a nation’s
blood-drenched invention. Cosmic Zora, we call to you now
from across the flecked darkness, arms filled with pages
blank as bone, searching for the words we need
but cannot hold and remain as we are.
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From We (the People of the United States) by Joshua Bennett. Copyright © 2026. Available from Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Joshua Bennett
Dr. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT.
