When: Halloween, October 31, 2026
2:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Where: The Community Artists' Collective
4111 Fannin Street, Suite 100A
Houston, TX 77004

The Vibe: Light refreshments, craft exercises, heavy communal spirit, open scripts, and live sonic disruption.

"She knew the dead don't stay behind doors on All Hallows; they walk right through the porch-talk and the drumbeat, dancing in the marrow of our vernacular."

Step back onto the front porch with us this Halloween.

After the rich, soul-stirring warmth of our first gathering, we are right back at it—and what time could be more fitting than All Hallows' Eve? For those who know, Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic work didn't just capture folklore; it mapped the living, breathing architecture of Afro-Diasporic ancestral veneration and retention. The spirits of the crossroads, the rootworkers, and the storytellers are right here in the room with us.

For this second installment in our Road to 40 programming, we are diving once again into Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s legendary Mule Bone. But this time, we are raising the volume and working with our hands.

Alongside our participatory group reading—where we’ll keep marking up scripts and speaking our vernacular out loud—we are bringing in live community jazz musicians to improvise, tune, and sound the landscape live. They will sonically conjure the dust, the humor, and the deep southern air of Hurston’s world, fusing the spoken word with the pulse of jazz improvisation. We will also have light refreshments and hands-on craft exercises available for all who join the circle.

We are keeping the energy deep, warm, and unapologetically grounded in the work of cultural preservation.

Come ready to read, create, listen, and let the jazz sound the landscape with us.

What ghosts of our cultural memory come alive when we let musicians improvise the space between the written lines?