In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker Page B

that Zora’s life ended in poverty and obscurity; that her last days were spent in a welfare home and her burial paid for by “subscription.” Though Zora herself, as he is careful to point out in his book Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, remained gallant and unbowed until the end. It was Hemenway’s efforts to define Zora’s legacy and his exploration of her life that led me, in 1973, to an overgrown Fort Pierce, Florida graveyard in an attempt to locate and mark Zora’s grave. Although by that time I considered her a native American genius, there was nothing grand or historic in my mind. It was, rather, a duty I accepted as naturally mine—as a black person, a woman, and a writer—because Zora was dead and I, for the time being, was alive. Zora was funny, irreverent (she was the first to call the Harlem Renaissance literati the “niggerati”), good-looking, sexy, and once sold hot dogs in a Washington park just to record accurately how the black people who bought the hot dogs talked. (A letter I received a month ago from one of her old friends in D.C. brought this news.) She would go anywhere she had to go: Harlem, Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda, to find out anything she simply had to know. She loved to give parties. Loved to dance. Would wrap her head in scarves as black women in Africa, Haiti, and everywhere else have done for centuries. On the other hand, she loved to wear hats, tilted over one eye, and pants and boots. (I have a photograph of her in pants, boots, and broadbrim that was given to me by her brother, Everette. She has her foot up on the running board of a car—presumably hers, and bright red—and looks racy.) She would light up a fag—which wasn’t done by ladies then (and, thank our saints, as a young woman she was never a lady) on the street.
    Her critics disliked even the “rags” on her head. (They seemed curiously incapable of telling the difference between an African-American queen and Aunt Jemima.) They disliked her apparent sensuality: the way she tended to marry or not marry men, but enjoyed them anyway—while never missing a beat in her work. They hinted slyly that Zora was gay, or at least bisexual—how else could they account for her drive? Though there is not, perhaps unfortunately, a shred of evidence that this was true. The accusation becomes humorous—and of course at all times irrelevant—when one considers that what she did write was one of the sexiest, most “healthily” rendered heterosexual love stories in our literature. In addition, she talked too much, got things from white folks (Guggenheims, Rosenwalds, and footstools) much too easily, was slovenly in her dress, and appeared maddeningly indifferent to other people’s opinions of her. With her easy laughter and her Southern drawl, her belief in doing “cullud” dancing authentically, Zora seemed—among these genteel “New Negroes” of the Harlem Renaissance— black. No wonder her presence was always a shock. Though almost everyone agreed she was a delight, not everyone agreed such audacious black delight was permissible, or, indeed, quite the proper image for the race.
    Zora was before her time, in intellectual circles, in the life style she chose. By the sixties everyone understood that black women could wear beautiful cloths on their beautiful heads and care about the authenticity of things “cullud” and African. By the sixties it was no longer a crime to receive financial assistance—in the form of grants and fellowships—for one’s work. (Interestingly, those writers who complained that Zora “got money from white folks” were often themselves totally supported, down to the food they ate—or, in Langston Hughes’s case, tried to eat, after his white “Godmother” discarded him—by white patrons.) By the sixties, nobody cared that marriage didn’t last forever.