by Alice Walker
What I am questioning is a nonblack scholar’s attempt to label something lesbian that the black woman in question has not. Even if Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot were erotically bound, what was their own word for it? (What would be the name that must have been as black and positive as “bull-dagger”—in more modern times—is black and negative?) Did they see it as a rejection of men? Did it (whatever they did alone together) infringe on their notion of celibacy? Was the “lesbianism” the simple fact that Jackson and Perot lived together? And would this mean that any two women who lived together are lesbians? Is the “lesbianism” the fact that Jackson and Perot lived with other women and founded a religious settlement comprised entirely of women (and their children)? If the “lesbianism” is any of these things, then the charge that the women were “closeted lesbians” was well founded. But the women did not accept this label when it was made, and I think we should at least wonder whether they would accept it now, particularly since the name they did accept, and embrace, which caused them so much suffering and abuse, was celibate Of course celibates, like lesbians, have a hard time proving they exist. My own guess is that, like Virginia Woolf, whom many claim as a lesbian but who described herself as a “eunuch,” the two Rebeccas became spiritual sisters partly because they cared little for sex, which Jackson repeatedly states.
The word “lesbian” may not, in any case, be suitable (or comfortable) for black women, who surely would have begun their woman-bonding earlier than Sappho’s residency on the Isle of Lesbos. Indeed, I can imagine black women who love women (sexually or not) hardly thinking of what Greeks were doing; but, instead, referring to themselves as “whole” women, from “wholly” or “holy.” Or as “round” women—women who love other women, yes, but women who also have concern, in a culture that oppresses all black people (and this would go back very far), for their fathers, brothers, and sons, no matter how they feel about them as males. My own term for such women would be “womanist.” At any rate, the word they chose would have to be both spiritual and concrete and it would have to be organic, characteristic, not simply applied. A word that said more than that they choose women over men. More than that they choose to live separate from men. In fact, to be consistent with black cultural values (which, whatever their shortcomings, still have considerable worth) it would have to be a word that affirmed connectedness to the entire community and the world, rather than separation, regardless of who worked and slept with whom. All things considered, the main problem with Lesbos as a point of common reference for women who love women is not, as I had once thought, that it was inhabited by Greek women whose servants, like their culture, were probably stolen from Egypt, but that it is an island. The symbolism of this, for a black person, is far from positive.
But this is a small complaint and perhaps an esoteric one. I simply feel that naming our own experience after our own fashion (as well as rejecting whatever does not seem to suit) is the least we can do—and in this society may well be our only tangible sign of personal freedom. It was her grasp of the importance of this that caused Rebecca Jackson to write down her spiritual “travels” that all might witness her individual path. This, that makes her an original. This, that makes us thankful to receive her as a gift of power in herself.
*Others included Sojourner Truth, Amanda Berry Smith, and Jarena Lee.
1981
ZORA NEALE HURSTON: A CAUTIONARY TALE AND A PARTISAN VIEW
I BECAME AWARE of my need of Zora Neale Hurston’s work some time before I knew her work existed. In late 1970 I was writing a story that required accurate material on voodoo practices among rural Southern blacks of the thirties; there seemed none available I could trust. A number of white, racist anthropologists and folklorists of the period had, not surprisingly, disappointed and insulted me. They thought blacks inferior, peculiar, and comic, and for me this undermined, no, destroyed, the relevance of their books. Fortunately, it was then that I discovered Mules and Men, Zora’s book on folklore, collecting, herself, and her small, all-black community of Eatonville, Florida. Because she immersed herself in her own culture even as she recorded its “big old lies,” i.e., folk tales, it was possible to see how she and it (even after she had attended Barnard College and become a respected writer and apprentice anthropologist) fit together. The authenticity of her material was verified by her familiarity with its context, and I was soothed by her assurance that she was exposing not simply an adequate culture but a superior one. That black people can be on occasion peculiar and comic was knowledge she enjoyed. That they could be racially or culturally inferior to whites never seems to have crossed her mind.
The first time I heard Zora’s name, I was auditing a black-literature class taught by the great poet Margaret Walker, at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi. The reason this fact later slipped my mind was that Zora’s name and accomplishments came and went so fast. The class was studying the usual “giants” of black literature: Chesnutt, Toomer, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, with the hope of reaching LeRoi Jones very soon. Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall (unequaled in intelligence, vision, craft by anyone of her generation, to put her contributions to our literature modestly), and Zora Neale Hurston were names appended, like verbal footnotes, to the illustrious all-male list that paralleled them. As far as I recall, none of their work was studied in the course. Much of it was out of print, in any case, and remains so. (Perhaps Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker herself were exceptions to this list, both poets of such obvious necessity it would be impossible to overlook them. And their work—owing to the political and cultural nationalism of the sixties—was everywhere available.)
When I read Mules and Men I was delighted. Here was this perfect book! The “perfection” of which I immediately tested on my relatives, who are such typical black Americans they are useful for every sort of political, cultural, or economic survey. Very regular people from the South, rapidly forgetting their Southern cultural inheritance in the suburbs and ghettos of Boston and New York, they sat around reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, listening to each other read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained. For what Zora’s book did was this: it gave them back all the stories they had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed (told to us years ago by our parents and grandparents—not one of whom could not tell a story to make you weep, or laugh) and showed how marvelous, and, indeed, priceless, they are. This is not exaggerated. No matter how they read the stories Zora had collected, no matter how much distance they tried to maintain between themselves, as new sophisticates, and the lives their parents and grandparents lived, no matter how they tried to remain cool toward all Zora revealed, in the end they could not hold back the smiles, the laughter, the joy over who she was showing them to be: descendants of an inventive, joyous, courageous, and outrageous people; loving drama, appreciating wit, and, most of all, relishing the pleasure of each other's loquacious and bodacious company.
This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora’s work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature. (In my opinion, only Du Bois showed an equally consistent delight in the beauty and spirit of black people, which is interesting when one considers that the angle of his vision was completely the opposite of Zora’s.) Zora’s pride in black people was so pronounced in the ersatz black twenties that it made other blacks suspicious and perhaps uncomfortable (after all, they were still infatuated with things European). Zora was interested in Africa, Haiti, Jamaica, and—for a little racial diversity (Indians)—Honduras. She also had a confidence in herself as an individual that few people (anyone?), black or white, understood. This was because Zora grew up in a community of black people who had enormous respect for themselves and for their ability to govern themselves. Her own father had written the Eatonville town laws. This community affirmed her right to exist, and loved her as a
n extension of its self. For how many other black Americans is this true? It certainly isn’t true for any that I know. In her easy self-acceptance, Zora was more like an uncolonized African than she was like her contemporary American blacks, most of whom believed, at least during their formative years, that their blackness was something wrong with them.
On the contrary, Zora’s early work shows she grew up pitying whites because the ones she saw lacked “light” and soul. It is impossible to imagine Zora envying anyone (except tongue in cheek), and least of all a white person for being white. Which is, after all, if one is black, a clear and present calamity of the mind.
Condemned to a desert island for life, with an allotment of ten books to see me through, 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, as she acted out many roles in a variety of settings, and functioned (with spectacular results!) in romantic and sensual love. There is no book more important to me than this one (including Toomer’s Cane, which comes close, but from what I recognize is a more perilous direction).
Having committed myself to Zora’s work, loving it, in fact, I became curious to see what others had written about her. This was, for the young, impressionable, barely begun writer I was, a mistake. After reading the misleading, deliberately belittling, inaccurate, and generally irresponsible attacks on her work and her life by almost everyone, I became for a time paralyzed with confusion and fear. For if a woman who had given so much of obvious value to all of us (and at such risks: to health, reputation, sanity) could be so casually pilloried and consigned to a sneering oblivion, what chance would someone else—for example, myself—have? I was aware that I had much less gumption than Zora.
For a long time I sat looking at this fear, and at what caused it. Zora was a woman who wrote and spoke her mind—as far as one could tell, practically always. People who knew her and were unaccustomed to this characteristic in a woman, who was, moreover, a. sometimes in error, and b. successful, for the most part, in her work, attacked her as meanly as they could. Would I also be attacked if I wrote and spoke my mind? And if I dared open my mouth to speak, must I always be “correct”? And by whose standards? Only those who have read the critics’ opinions of Zora and her work will comprehend the power of these questions to riddle a young writer with self-doubt.
Eventually, however, I discovered that I repudiate and despise the kind of criticism that intimidates rather than instructs the young; and I dislike fear, especially in myself. I did then what fear rarely fails to force me to do: I fought back. I began to fight for Zora and her work; for what I knew was good and must not be lost to us.
Robert Hemenway was the first critic I read who seemed indignant 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. No one expected it to. And I do believe that now, in the seventies, we do not expect (though we may wish and pray) every black person who speaks always to speak correctly (since this is impossible): and if we do expect it, we deserve all the silent leadership we are likely to get.
During the early and middle years of her career Zora was a cultural revolutionary simply because she was always herself. Her work, so vigorous among the rather pallid productions of many of her contemporaries, comes from the essence of black folk life. During her later life she became frightened of the life she had always dared bravely before. Her work too became reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid. (This is especially true of her last novel, Seraphs on the Sewannee, which is not even about black people, which is no crime, but is about white people for whom it is impossible to care, which is.)
A series of misfortunes battered Zora’s spirit and her health. And she was broke.
Being broke made all the difference.
Without money of one’s own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence. This is one of the clearest lessons of Zora’s life, and why I consider the telling of her life “a cautionary tale.” We must learn from it what we can.
Without money, an illness, even a simple one, can undermine the will. Without money, getting into a hospital is problematic and getting out without money to pay for the treatment is nearly impossible. Without money, one becomes dependent on other people, who are likely to be—even in their kindness—erratic in their support and despotic in their expectations of return. Zora was forced to rely, like Tennessee Williams’s Blanche, “on the kindness of strange
rs.” Can anything be more dangerous, if the strangers are forever in control? Zora, who worked so hard, was never able to make a living from her work.
She did not complain about not having money. She was not the type. (Several months ago I received a long letter from one of Zora’s nieces, a bright ten-year-old, who explained to me that her aunt was so proud that the only way the family could guess she was ill or without funds was by realizing they had no idea where she was. Therefore, none of the family attended either Zora’s sickbed or her funeral.) Those of us who have had “grants and fellowships from ‘white folks’” know this aid is extended in precisely the way welfare is extended in Mississippi. One is asked, curtly, more often than not: How much do you need just to survive? Then one is—if fortunate—given a third of that. What is amazing is that Zora, who became an orphan at nine, a runaway at fourteen, a maid and manicurist (because of necessity and not from love of the work) before she was twenty—with one dress—managed to become Zora Neale Hurston, author and anthropologist, at all.
For me, the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote is her autobiography. After the first several chapters, it rings false. One begins to hear the voice of someone whose life required the assistance of too many transitory “friends.” A Taoist proverb states that to act sincerely with the insincere is dangerous. (A mistake blacks as a group have tended to make in America.) And so we have Zora sincerely offering gratitude and kind words to people one knows she could not have respected. But this unctuousness, so out of character for Zora, is also a result of dependency, a sign of her powerlessness, her inability to pay back her debts with anything but words. They must have been bitter ones for her. In her dependency, it should be remembered, Zora was not alone—because it is quite true that America does not support or honor us as human beings, let alone as blacks, women, and artists. We have taken help where it was offered because we are committed to what we do and to the survival of our work. Zora was committed to the survival of her people’s cultural heritage as well.
