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Extract from Anything We Love Can Be
Saved: A Writer's Activism by Alice Walker published by The Women's Press Ltd, 1997.
THE RESURRECTION OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND HER
WORK
An
address delivered at the First Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival, Eatonville,
Florida, January 26,1990
My first visit to Eatonville was on August 15, 1973, seventeen years ago. I was
twenty-eight, my daughter, Rebecca, three. Sometimes she tells me of the pain
she felt in childhood because I was so often working and not to be distracted,
or off on some mysterious pilgrimage, the importance of which, next to herself,
she could not understand. This trip to Eatonville, not one of whose living
inhabitants I knew, represented such a pilgrimage, one that my small,
necessarily stoic child would have to wait years to comprehend.
But at the time, I felt there was no
alternative. I had read Robert Hemenway's thoughtful and sensitive biography of
Zora Neale Hurston, after loving and teaching her work for a number of years,
and I could not bear that she did not have a known grave. After all, with her
pen she had erected a monument to the African-American and African-Amerlndian
common people both she and I are descended from. After reading Hurston, anyone
coming to the United States would know exactly where to go to find the remains
of culture that kept Southern black people going through centuries of white
oppression. They could find what was left of the music; they could find what
was left of the speech; they could find what was left of the dancing (I
remember wanting to shout with joy to see that Zora, in one of her books,
mentioned the "moochie," a dance that scandalized-and titillated-the
elders in my community when I was a very small child, and that I had never seen
mentioned anywhere); they could find what was left of the work, the people's
relationship to the earth and to animals; they could find what was left of the
orchards, the gardens, and the fields; they could find what was left of the
prayer.
I will never forget reading Zora and
seeing for the first time, written down, the prayer that my father, and all the
old elders before him, prayed in church. The one that thanked God that the
cover on his bed the night before was not winding sheet, nor his bed itself his
cooling board. When I read this prayer, I saw again the deeply sincere praying
face of my father, and relived my own awareness of his passion, his gratitude
for life, and his humbleness.
Nor will I forget finding a character in
Zora's work called Shug. It is what my "outside" grandmother, my
grandfather's lover and mother of two of my aunts, was called. It is also the
nickname of an aunt, Malsenior, for whom I was named. On any page in Zora's
work I was likely to see something or someone I recognized; reading her tales
of adventure and risk became an act of self-recognition and affirmation I'd
experienced but rarely before.
Reading her, I saw for the first time my
own specific culture, and recognized it as such, with its humor always striving
to be equal to its pain, and I felt as if, indeed, I had been given a map that
led to the remains of my literary country. The old country, as it were. Her
characters spoke the language I'd heard the elders speaking all my life. Her
work chronicled the behavior of the elders I'd witnessed. And she did not
condescend to them, and she did not apologize for them, and she was them,
delightedly.
It was very hot, my first visit to
Eatonville. As hot in Florida as it had been in Jackson, Mississippi, which I'd
left early that morning, and where my small daughter remained, in the care of
her father and her preschool teacher, Mrs. Cornelius. I thought of Rebecca as
Charlotte Hunt and I drove about Eatonville and, later, Fort Pierce on our
mission. I wanted to mark Zora's grave so that one day all our daughters and
sons would be able to locate the remains of a human mountain in Florida's and
America's so frequently flat terrain.
Today, knowing as I do the vanity of
stones, their true impermanence, the pyramids notwithstanding, I would perhaps
do things differently, but at the time my passionately held intention to erect
a reminder of a heroic life indicated the best that I knew. And we were successful,
I think, Charlotte Hunt and I , for we lifted from ourselves the pall of
embarrassment at our people's negligence. We acted for Zora, yes, but in a way
that relieved us of the shame of inactivity. Paying homage to her,
memorializing her light, her struggle, and her end, brought us peace.
At least it brought me peace. I should
perhaps not attempt to speak for Charlotte, who volunteered to be guide and
companion to me. And yet I felt that Charlotte, too, loved Zora's spirit and
was no less concerned than I that her body not seem to have been thrown away.
But what is a dead body, what are bones,
even of a loved one? If you mixed Zora's bones with those of Governor Bilbo,
for many years an especially racist oppressor of black people in Mississippi
and, psychologically, of the whole country, the untrained eye would not be able
to tell them apart. And nature, in Its wisdom, has made sure that one thing
required of all dead things is unfailingly accomplished. That requirement is
that they return to the earth, which in fact, even as living bodies, they have
never left. It matters little, therefore, where our bodies finally lie, and how
or whether their resting places are marked - I speak now of the dead, not
of the living, who have their own needs and project those onto the dead-for our
ultimate end, blending with the matter of the earth, is inevitable and
universal. I hope, myself, to become ash that is mixed with the decomposing
richness of my compost heap, that I may become flowers, trees, and vegetables.
It would please me to present the perfect mystery of myself, prior to being
consumed by whomever, or whatever, as rutabaga or carrot. Sunflower or pecan
tree. Eggplant.
The spirit, too, if we are lucky, is
sometimes ground to ash by the trials of life and tossed on the collective
soul's compost heap. That is what has happened to what we have come to know as
Zora. That is why we are here today, honoring her, startled, perhaps, by the
degree of nourishment each of us has gained from her, startling in our
diversity.
Zora Hurston's ash was diamond ash.
Diamonds, you know, start out as carbon,
or coal, deep in the folds of the earth. Over eons enormous pressure builds up
and crushes the coal into diamonds, the hardest crystals known. Then some of
us, like Zora, are crushed further, by the lies of enemies and the envious
hostility of friends, by injustice, poverty, and ill health, until all that is
left is diamond ash. For many years now, thanks to Robert Hemenway, thanks to Mary
Helen Washington, thanks to Charlotte Hunt, thanks to Sherley Anne Williams,
thanks to feminist and womanist scholars around the world, and thanks to
millions of readers, Zora's diamond ash, her spirit, has been blowing across
the planet on the winds of our delight, our excitement, our love.
And this is only right; it is the
universe's justice. And it proves something that I think many of us here very
much needed to see proved, twenty-odd years ago, when the commonest response to
a comment about Zora was the question Zora Who?: that love and justice and
truth are the only monuments that generate ever-widening circles of energy and
life. Love and justice and truth the only monuments that endure, though trashed
and trampled, generation after generation. We have, together, accomplished the
resurrection of Zora Neale Hurston and her splendid work, and can now tell our
children what we have learned from this experience. Our children, who are by
now grown up enough to fly off on mysterious pilgrimages of their own. We can
say with conviction that anything they love can be sheltered by their love;
anything they truly love can be saved. First in their own hearts, and then in
the hearts of others. They have only to make their love inseparable from their
belief And both inseparable from hard work.
We can tell them that on the day that we
love ourselves, and believe we deserve our own love, we become as free as any
earth beings can ever be. And that we begin to see that, though our forms may
differ, as an oak tree differs from a pine, we are, in fact, the same. Zora is
us. That is why, reading her, we smile or cry when she shows us our face.
I will close with this prayer Zora
collected, perhaps hoping that when black people read it, it would evoke for
them one of the most longed for and truest images not only for the African-American
face but of the African-American psyche. For, like all spiritually authentic
peoples, our ancestors understood that they did not need to be taught how to
pray; that prayer, like poetry and music, of which it is mother, creates itself
out of the lived experience, the pain and passion of the human heart.
Typically, when poor black people sank to their knees, they created not a
Lord's Prayer, but a People's Prayer. I always weep when I read this, so
bear with me.
...
You have been with me from the earliest rocking of
my cradle up until this present moment.
You know our hearts, our Father,
And all de range of our deceitful minds.
And if you find anything like sin lurking
In and around our hearts,
Ah ast you, my Father, and my wonder-workin' God,
To pluck it out
And cast it into de sea of fuhgitfulness,
Where it will never rise to harm us in dis world
Nor condemn us in de judgment.
Your heard me when Ah laid in hell's dark door
With no weapon in my hand
And no God in my heart,
And cried for three long days and nights.
You heard me, Lawd,
And stooped so low
And snatched me from the hell
Of eternal death and damnation.
You cut loose my stammering tongue;
You established my feet on de rock of salvation
And yo' voice was heard in rumblin' judgment.
I thank Thee that my last night's sleepin' couch
Was not my coolin' board
And my cover
Was not my windin' sheet.
Speak to de sinner-man and bless 'im.
Touch all those
Who have been down to de doors of degradation.
Ketch de man dat's layin' in danger of consumin' fire;
And, Lawd,
When Ah kin pray no mo',
When Ah done drunk down de last cup of sorrow,
Look on me, yo' weak servant who feels de least of all.
'Point my soul a restin' place
Where Ah kin set down and praise yo' name forever
Is my prayer for Jesus' sake
Amen and thank God.