Some years ago I started writing a novel, a murder mystery set at a mythical university in Brookline, Massachusetts. In the early versions of the novel, the female protagonist was an assistant professor of English whose claim to tenure was a well-received biography of Hurston entitled The Mark of Zora. The title of my imaginary character's imaginary biography of the "real-life" Zora Neale Hurston indulged my fondness for wordplay in its riff of the Douglas Fairbanks and Tyronne Power films of the 1920s and 1940s, The Mark of Zorro. But all punning aside, taking Zora's mark—assessing her influence on American letters and African American culture—has been no small task. Indeed, even though we have been in hot pursuit of her for decades, Hurston has proven to be even more elusive than the masked bandit of similar name.

The hot pursuit and the story of Hurston's journey from obscurity to academic, popular, and postage-stamp notoriety make a reassessment of her life and work both timely and essential. I have lingered long over the question of what new insights I might bring to this reassessment, particularly since I am not, as many other contributors are, a Hurston scholar. I finally surrendered the idea of saying something new and decided instead to revisit an issue that has been of interest to me for some time—a phenomenon that I have elsewhere labeled "Hurstonism": the conspicuous consumption of Zora Neale Hurston as the initiator of the African American women's literary tradition.[1] I have long been fascinated by the relationship between the arrival of black women and black feminism in the academy in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the reclamation and rise of Hurston as an intellectual subject and a feminist icon. Where would Hurston and black feminist studies be without each other, and how would Hurston wear the feminist mantle?

Those of us of certain age remember literary, historical, and cultural studies BZ—that is, Before Zora. We remember a time when studying and teaching anyone other than great white men—with a black male genius like Richard Wright or an exceptional white woman like Harriet Beecher Stowe thrown in for good measure—was, in the words of Barbara Christian, "academically dangerous," a potential career killer, because it bucked both canon and convention.[2] Despite the dangers, the work of doing black women got done—the books got written, read, and critiqued.

This, then, is the first point I want to make, my opening gesture toward taking Hurston's mark: the absolute necessity of separating legacy from legend. The legend of Zora is of biblical proportions: what once was lost now is found. But painting this big picture of a single lost-and-found figure has not only obscured the larger legacy of black women writers, it also has distorted Hurston's individual literary history. In maintaining that Hurston was a literary genius lost in time and place, we as critics and scholars may have buried our subject in a way that her own community did not.

That is to say, by some reckonings Hurston was never quite as lost as legend would have it. It is certainly true that all seven of the books she published during her lifetime were out of print at the time of her death in 1960 and remained so well into the 1970s. It is also true that the often politically incorrect Hurston was passed over by the literary reconnaissance missions of the radical Black Arts Movement and that her work was demeaned and dismissed on the rare occasion that it did receive mention in mainstream literary criticism and in male-dominated African American literary studies. Yet and still, out of print and disparaged are not the same as lost and forgotten. Some evidence (interviews, anecdotes, and library records) suggests that even as she lay in an unmarked grave, even when her books were out of print, even when she was ignored in the public arena, Hurston was still being read, remembered, and revered in certain circles—among the folk, for example, especially among the southern black women folk about whom she so often wrote.

I wish I could offer myself as proof of this claim. I wish I could say that I grew up reading Zora Neale Hurston, that I sharpened my writer's ear and my critic's eye on Hurston's colorful, down-home use of language and her crayon enlargements of life. But true-blue Hurstonism is, at least in part, a regional thing, I think, and I am from the wrong region. Hurston was nowhere to be found in the overwhelmingly white small-town school system I studied under in southeastern Massachusetts in the 1950s and 60s. But when I went to church in the more racially diverse neighboring cities of Brockton and Boston, I kept meeting black girls named "Zora." Perhaps because I had been endowed with the common, plain-Jane name of "Ann," even as a child I was fascinated by the unusual and oddly beautiful name "Zora." Zora Gayle, a black girl in my Sunday school class, was the Zora I knew best and envied most, at least as far as her name was concerned. Zora Gayle. I had not heard of Hurston and would not for decades, but Zora Gayle sounded like a writer's name to me, and more than anything else I wanted to be a writer.

I cannot prove any connection, of course. I cannot document that these young Zoras (or my older Boston cousin Neal Hogan) were named after Hurston, but I do know that their parents, unlike my own, were newly from the South and were, therefore, products of segregated educational systems, including historically black colleges and universities, that valued and taught on a regular basis the same African American literature that was not an integral part of northern elementary, high school, or college curriculums prior to the civil rights activism of the 1960s.

Often propelled by educational opportunities growing out of the civil rights movement, black women began entering the mainstream academy in small but unprecedented numbers in the late 1960s. One of these women was the writer Gayl Jones, another "genius of the South," to borrow from the epitaph Alice Walker had inscribed on Hurston's gravestone. Jones came north to New England in the late 1960s to attend Connecticut College; we met in graduate school at Brown University in 1971. Hurston was not yet officially on anyone's syllabus at Brown, as I recall, but for Gayl, who was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, Their Eyes Were Watching God was a don't-leave-home-without-it foundational text, one that she was generous enough to share with me. It was clear, however, that the copy of Their Eyes Gayl lent me in 1971 had never been private property. It was a communal text, a book that had been passed from sister to sister to daughter to neighbor to friend. I suspect that it was in this way that Their Eyes Were Watching God remained in circulation in many private venues, even when it was out of print in the public domain.

I tell this story to make the point that decades before Oprah's Book Club, black women were not only reading, they were reading each other. They carried this process of reading and sharing into the university in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poet and novelist Sherley Anne Williams, who came into the northern academy by way of Fresno, California, describes this book-sharing process in her preface to the 1978 University of Illinois reprint of Their Eyes Were Watching God, where she tells of first encountering Zora Neale Hurston in graduate school in the late 1960s:

Afro-American literature was still an exotic subject then, rarely taught on any regular basis. Most of the works of the writers we studied had been out of print for a long time, and students relied on lectures, anthology selections (when available), what samplings could be garnered in a Saturday spent in a rare-book collection or an evening in the reserve book reading room, and Robert Bone's The Negro Novel in America for our impressions of William Wells Brown, Frances Harper, William Attaway, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston. . . . The few personal or library copies of this or that were shared around, but there were about forty students in the class. By the time a person got the book, it had usually been discussed at least four weeks prior, and the owner needed it back to write a paper. So, like many students in the class, out of sheer frustration I ended by concentrating on contemporary authors (i.e., Wright, Ellison, Baldwin), whose works were more readily available.[3]

Williams goes on to explain, memorably, that when it did finally become her turn to read Their Eyes Were Watching God, she "became Zora Neale's for life"; for, "in the speech of her characters," she writes, "I heard my own country voice and saw in the heroine something of my own country self."[4]

In "Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View" (which originally appeared as the foreword to Robert Hemenway's 1977 biography of Hurston), Alice Walker tells a similar story of first hearing "Zora's name" while "auditing a literature class taught by the great poet Margaret Walker." (It is worth noting that Margaret Walker, author of the Civil War epic Jubilee [1966], is also a great novelist.) But Hurston and other black women writers were merely "verbal footnotes" to the class, Walker explains, which focused not on Jessie Fauset or Nella Larsen or Ann Petry or Paule Marshall, but on "the usual 'giants' of black literature: Chesnutt, Toomer, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin," whose work was in print and thus more readily available.[5] It was later, while doing research on voodoo practices for a short story she was writing, that Walker actually discovered Zora through her volume of folklore, Mules and Men, a book Walker says she immediately shared with relatives who found in its pages the forgotten stories of their own southern roots. And much like Williams, Walker adds that she found in Mules and Men and in Hurston's other works something healthy, whole, familiar, and uncompromisingly black; and she, too, became committed to Zora's work for life. "Condemned to a desert island for life, with an allotment of ten books to see me through," she writes, "I would choose, unhesitatingly, two of Zora's: Mules and Men, because I would need to be able to pass on to younger generations the life of American blacks as legend and myth; and Their Eyes Were Watching God, because I would want to enjoy myself while identifying with the black heroine, Janie Crawford. . . . There is no book more important to me than this one."[6]

Hurston had a career-altering, if not life-changing, effect on many black women who came of age as students and teachers of literature in the middle decades of the last century. If we had had good dollar sense back then, many of us who began our teaching careers in the early 1970s would have taken out stock in Xerox, because we spent out our youth standing over copy machines reproducing begged, borrowed, and stolen editions of books like Their Eyes Were Watching God in order to make these out-of-print texts available to our students.

To a certain extent, we worked on instinct—often in isolation—in a critical vacuum, without scholarship on the materials we brought into our classrooms and with no one's seal of approval. We were like smugglers: It was as if we were doing something not only dangerous, as Barbara Christian has said, but also illicit. So how then did Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mules and Men, Dust Tracks on a Road, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, and dozens of other languishing texts go from being Xeroxed facsimiles, taught primarily by black female graduate students, visiting lecturers, part-time adjuncts, and newly-minted assistant professors, to being quasi-canonical, multiple-editioned best-sellers, seemingly on everyone's syllabus, with a massive, if sometimes indiscriminate, body of readings that even includes critical anthologies edited by the likes of Harold Bloom?

I think this is a useful example of the extent to which texts are "produced" less by their writers than by their readers, which is to say that texts become what their interpretive communities say they are. There was a developing body of criticism by men—white and nonwhite—on the works of black men: Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison all had their champions or, more importantly, their critics. But before black women entered the professoriate in the 1960s and 1970s, Hurston and African American women writers like her had little or no academically valorized interpretive community. And here I mean to distinguish quite pointedly between audience—those who read—and scholar-critics—those who write about, as well as teach, what they read.

As a counterpoint to the out-of-print primary sources and dearth of secondary scholarship they encountered in attempting to teach African American women's literature, the first generation of black female academics set out to produce their own body of literary criticism. There was a certain immediacy to this critical activity initially in that it focused more on the present—Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade (later Bambara)—than on the past—Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, even Zora Neale Hurston. Early anthologies such as Toni Cade's The Black Woman (1970), Mary Helen Washington's Black-Eyed Susans (1975) and Midnight Birds (1980), and Sturdy Black Bridges (1979), edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, all primarily showcased the poetry and prose of contemporary, living black women authors who literally wrote volumes in the 1970s—in both senses of the word. (Collectively, Morrison, Walker, Jones, and Bambara, for example, published some 15 major works of fiction and poetry between 1970 and 1982.) The first generation of women scholars—many of them new assistant professors at colleges and universities that had never before had black women on their faculties—became the primary interpreters of this emerging canon of contemporary writing by and about black women.

Like its more developed white feminist counterpart, the burgeoning black women-identified criticism (the word "feminist" was rarely used initially) that attended this work was corrective as well as interpretive in that it sought, on the one hand, to deliver black women writers from the historical mishandling of male critics like Robert Bone, Darwin Turner, and David Littlejohn, and, on the other, to recast recent literary history—the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, in particular—in women-centered, rather than misogynist, terms. Its third project was to establish itself as a politics of reading separate and distinct from the mainstream white feminist criticism it accused of neglect—benign and otherwise—even as it began to adopt some of the same principles and protocols of that criticism, including, most formatively, the search for female models and precursors, black versions of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Articles and essays about Zora Neale Hurston, penned primarily by young African American women writers and scholars, began appearing, mainly in small black journals, in the early 1970s. Chief among these early critiques was an essay by Mary Helen Washington, "The Black Woman's Search for Identity: Zora Neale Hurston's Work," which appeared in Black World in 1972.[7] The August 1974 issue of Black World featured a cover story on Hurston by a writer named Ellease Southerland, along with an article on Hurston and Richard Wright by the poet June Jordan, and an essay on contemporary black women writers—Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Paule Marshall, also written by Mary Helen Washington, a frequent contributor to Black World, who was then completing her doctorate and teaching at the University of Detroit. Other essays on Hurston appeared sporadically in publications like Negro American Literature Forum, Studies in Black Literature, and even in the more mainstream journal Modern Fiction Studies between 1972 and 1975.

For the small diaspora of black women teaching at colleges and universities across the country, these critical commentaries on Hurston and other black women writers were like life preservers. They validated what we thought we knew and what we wanted our students to know; and although we often worked in isolation, they helped us see that we were not alone—or crazy. Yet, for all their importance at the time, these early critiques and commentaries have been largely written out of the Legend of Zora, overshadowed by Alice Walker's more public reclamation of Hurston as her authorial ancestor in her tide-turning essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," which first appeared in the mainstream feminist magazine Ms. in 1975. "Looking for Zora," as the essay was renamed when it was reprinted in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens in 1984, recounts the details of Walker's 1973 pilgrimage to Eatonville, Florida, where Hurston famously grew up, and Fort Pierce in St. Lucie County, where the penniless Hurston was infamously buried in an unmarked grave, paid for by the charity of friends and local school children. As Walker later explained, it was the heart-rending story of a great writer's impoverished circumstances and pauper's burial, as recounted by Hemenway, that sent her on the mission to find and honor Hurston's gravesite. "Robert Hemenway was the first critic I read who seemed indignant that Zora's life ended in poverty and obscurity," Walker wrote in 1976. "It was Hemenway's efforts to define Zora's legacy and his exploration of her life," that led her "to an overgrown Fort Pierce, Florida graveyard in an attempt to locate and mark Zora's grave" in 1973.

Hemenway, whose exquisitely researched literary biography was not published until 1977, may have sent Walker to Fort Pierce four years earlier, but it was "Looking for Zora"—the article and the effort: that is, the recovery of Hurston as a project of black feminist literary historiography—that became the blueprint for the canon construction and tradition building that would dominate the rest of the 1970s and much of the 1980s.

Although figuratively motherless writers, scholars, and critics had been following maternal dust tracks throughout the decade, the quest for both a literary matriarch and a matrilineage was most fully articulated in 1977 by Barbara Smith in her pivotal essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," which first appeared in the lesbian feminist literary magazine Conditions: Two. Writing from what she described as a black lesbian feminist perspective, Smith argued for a critical practice that assumes the interrelatedness of racial and sexual ideology and the existence of an identifiable tradition of black women writers, glued together by the authors' shared lived experience, their "common approaches to the act of creating literature," and "their use of specifically black female language."[8]

No maternal ancestor fit this new black feminist ideal quite as neatly as Hurston, whose prose brimmed with the authentic black female language and traditional black female activities—rootworking, herbal medicine, conjure, midwifery—that Smith cited in her essay as emblems of a black feminist literary continuum. Smith also asserted that a black feminist critic should "think and write out of her own identity."[9] Williams and Walker were hardly alone in finding shades of their own country selves in Hurston's most memorable character, Janie Crawford, who began to take on not only a heroic stature but also a kind of "every-woman" status in the emerging black feminist literary criticism.

Once critical of the term and its white female practitioners and theorists, this canon building and its attendant criticism by the turn into the 1980s began to announce itself as overtly feminist, due in no small measure, I would argue, to Barbara Smith's delineation of what a black women's critical praxis should look, act, and sound like in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." As Cheryl Wall has pointed out, Smith's critical manifesto gave name, shape, and substance to the perspective from which young black women artists and intellectuals had been writing and thinking since the late 1960s and early 1970s.[10] Additionally, in its insistence on a single black women's literary tradition, held together by shared black female experience and uniquely black female language, Smith's essay helped direct more attention toward Zora Neale Hurston. The publication of Hemenway's biography, also in 1977; the reissuing of Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1978; and the appearance of Walker's edited collection I Love Myself When I Am Laughing in 1979 not only brought Hurston back into print, they also worked further to affirm and confirm her as the not-so-long-lost foremother of contemporary black women writers and the cornerstone of a black feminist literary tradition that, ironically, sometimes seemed to reach back only as far as Janie Crawford's front porch.

This history is, of course, a quick-and-dirty gloss. The ties that bind Zora Neale Hurston and black feminist literary studies to each other are much more finely intertwined and deeply rooted than I am able to unravel in the limited space I have here.[11] I marvel at what has happened to Hurston, to black women's literature and criticism, to feminist studies, and to the academy in the 30 years since Alice Walker took us along on her historic journey to Eatonville and Fort Pierce. But I also think that amid the tributes and celebrations there is cause for a cautionary tale of a different kind and the need for not only a reassessment of Hurston's legacy, but also a rededication to the black feminist critical enterprise. This rededication might well begin with an effort to save Hurston from the Legend of Zora—that is, from our own iconic inclinations, which repeat the Great Man, Great Woman, Great Books methodologies of the exclusionary mainstream canons we set out to revise.

Zora Neale Hurston was a phenomenal woman, but she is not a phenomenon. We do her and the field a disservice when we treat her as a picked-to-click anomaly, a solitary genius who somehow miraculously gave birth not only to herself but also to Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and the entire tradition of black women writers. The late Barbara Christian warned us about the dangers of an exclusionary critical practice in her own black feminist manifesto, "The Race for Theory," first published in 1989. Then the diversion that left some texts, even some of those by Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor, in want of first, not to mention second and third, readings, at least according to Christian, was the rise of theory for theory's sake in the late twentieth-century academy.[12] Today's diversion may well be the cult of celebrity.

What does it mean that Hurston's stock continues to rise at the same time that black feminism's status in the academy is waning? How can we continue to claim, critique, catalog, and canonize centuries of work by and about black women, both before and after Hurston, without iconizing individual writers (and their work) as sacred texts, while under-reading others? Perhaps this is another lesson we can take from the wisdom of Alice Walker: To achieve the best of all possible understanding of our literary history, we must cultivate all our mothers' gardens.

Endnotes

1. See Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). [Return to text]

2. Barbara Christian, Ann duCille, Sharon Marcus, Elaine Marks, Nancy K. Miller, Sylvia Schafer, and Joan Scott, "Conference Call," differences 2 (Fall 1990): 61. [Return to text]

3. Sherley Anne Williams, foreword to Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1937; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), vi–vii. [Return to text]

4. Ibid., vii. [Return to text]

5. Alice Walker, "Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View" (1979), reprinted in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 84. This essay, apparently written in 1976, first appeared as the foreword to Robert Hemenway's book Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). [Return to text]

6. Walker, 86. [Return to text]

7. See Mary Helen Washington, "The Black Woman's Search for Identity: Zora Neale Hurston's Work," Black World 21 (August 1972): 519–27. [Return to text]

8. Barbara Smith, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," reprinted in The Truth that Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 10–11. [Return to text]

9. Ibid., 11. [Return to text]

10. Cheryl A. Wall, "Taking Positions and Changing Words," introduction to Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 4–5. [Return to text]

11. For a fuller, though by no means comprehensive, examination of this history, see Ann duCille, "Anxious History and the Rise of Black Feminist Literary Studies," in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. Ellen Rooney (London: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). [Return to text]

12. Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 225–37. [Return to text]