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.1 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.”2
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.
- 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). [↩]
- Walker, 86. [↩]
