Life's Pleasures Quote by Zora Neale Hurston

Trusting someone else to hold your spiritual leash, Hurston warns, is like hiring the fox as your security system. The line snaps with folk economy: no abstract theology, just barnyard physics. A fox eats chickens. Power behaves like power. The humor is sharp because it refuses to dignify exploitation with mystery; it names it as appetite.

Hurston is targeting dependence disguised as devotion. “Somebody else’s gods” isn’t only a jab at organized religion; it’s a critique of borrowing any authority structure that was built to manage you - the planter’s God, the missionary’s God, the respectable society’s God, even the polished “civilized” God offered as an upgrade from one’s own traditions. The subtext is political: if your moral universe is outsourced, your conscience becomes a tenant. You’re living under rules written by people whose interests may be predatory, then acting surprised when the rules protect the predator.

Context matters. Hurston wrote from the pressure points of the early 20th century: Black life in the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance’s debates over authenticity, and a cultural marketplace eager to “interpret” Black folkways for profit and control. As a dramatist and anthropologist of Black vernacular culture, she understood how belief can be weaponized through story, ritual, and respectability. The proverb-like phrasing is itself a flex: she elevates folk speech into a tool of skepticism.

What makes it work is its refusal to romanticize dependence. It doesn’t argue you out of submission; it embarrasses you out of it.