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.1 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.
- Barbara Christian, Ann duCille, Sharon Marcus, Elaine Marks, Nancy K. Miller, Sylvia Schafer, and Joan Scott, “Conference Call,” differences 2 (Fall 1990): 61. [↩]
