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 1972.1 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.
- See Mary Helen Washington, “The Black Woman’s Search for Identity: Zora Neale Hurston’s Work,” Black World 21 (August 1972): 519–27. [↩]
