In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  —Robert Hemenway

  “What is your name?” I ask the woman who has climbed into the back seat.

  “Rosalee,” she says. She has a rough, pleasant voice, as if she is a singer who also smokes a lot. She is homely, and has an air of ready indifference.

  “Another woman came by here wanting to see the grave,” she says, lighting up a cigarette. “She was a little short, dumpty white lady from one of these Florida schools. Orlando or Daytona. But let me tell you something before we gets started. All I know is where the cemetery is. I don’t know one thing about that grave. You better go back in and ask her to draw you a map.”

  A few moments later, with Mrs. Patterson’s diagram of where the grave is, we head for the cemetery.

  We drive past blocks of small, pastel-colored houses and turn right onto Seventeenth Street. At the very end, we reach a tall curving gate, with the words “Garden of the Heavenly Rest” fading into the stone. I expected, from Mrs. Patterson’s small drawing, to find a small circle—which would have placed Zora’s grave five or ten paces from the road. But the “circle” is over an acre large and looks more like an abandoned field. Tall weeds choke the dirt road and scrape against the sides of the car. It doesn’t help either that I step out into an active ant hill.

  “I don’t know about y’all,” I say, “but I don’t even believe this.” I am used to the haphazard cemetery-keeping that is traditional in most Southern black communities, but this neglect is staggering. As far as I can see there is nothing but bushes and weeds, some as tall as my waist. One grave is near the road, and Charlotte elects to investigate it. It is fairly clean, and belongs to someone who died in 1963.

  Rosalee and I plunge into the weeds; I pull my long dress up to my hips. The weeds scratch my knees, and the insects have a feast. Looking back, I see Charlotte standing resolutely near the road.

  “Aren’t you coming?” I call.

  “No,” she calls back. “I’m from these parts and I know what’s out there.” She means snakes.

  “Shit,” I say, my whole life and the people I love flashing melodramatically before my eyes. Rosalee is a few yards to my right.

  “How’re you going to find anything out here?” she asks. And I stand still a few seconds, looking at the weeds. Some of them are quite pretty, with tiny yellow flowers. They are thick and healthy, but dead weeds under them have formed a thick gray carpet on the ground. A snake could be lying six inches from my big toe and I wouldn’t see it. We move slowly, very slowly, our eyes alert, our legs trembly. It is hard to tell where the center of the circle is since the circle is not really round, but more like half of something round. There are things crackling and hissing in the grass. Sandspurs are sticking to the inside of my skirt. Sand and ants cover my feet. I look toward the road and notice that there are, indeed, two large curving stones, making an entrance and exit to the cemetery. I take my bearings from them and try to navigate to exact center. But the center of anything can be very large, and a grave is not a pinpoint. Finding the grave seems positively hopeless. There is only one thing to do:

  “Zora!” I yell, as loud as I can (causing Rosalee to jump). “Are you out here?”

  “If she is, I sho hope she don’t answer you. If she do, I’m gone.”

  “Zora!” I call again. “I’m here. Are you?”

  “If she is,” grumbles Rosalee, “I hope she’ll keep it to herself.”

  “Zora!” Then I start fussing with her. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day. In fact, I’m going to call you just one or two more times.” On a clump of dried grass, near a small bushy tree, my eye falls on one of the largest bugs I have ever seen. It is on its back, and is as large as three of my fingers. I walk toward it, and yell “Zo-ra!” and my foot sinks into a hole. I look down. I am standing in a sunken rectangle that is about six feet long and about three or four feet wide. I look up to see where the two gates are.

  “Well,” I say, “this is the center, or approximately anyhow. It’s also the only sunken spot we’ve found. Doesn’t this look like a grave to you?”

  “For the sake of not going no farther through these bushes,” Rosalee growls, “yes, it do.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say, “I have to look around some more to be sure this is the only spot that resembles a grave. But you don’t have to come.”

  Rosalee smiles—a grin, really—beautiful and tough.

  “Naw,” she says, “I feels sorry for you. If one of these snakes got ahold of you out here by yourself I’d feel real bad.” She laughs. “I done come this far, I’ll go on with you.”

  “Thank you, Rosalee,” I say. “Zora thanks you too.”

  “Just as long as she don’t try to tell me in person,” she says, and together we walk down the field.

  The gusto and flavor of Zora Neal[e] Hurston’s storytelling, for example, long before the yarns were published in “Mules and Men” and other books, became a local legend which might… have spread further under different conditions. A tiny shift in the center of gravity could have made them best-sellers.

  —Arna Bontemps, Personals

  Bitter over the rejection of her folklore’s value, especially in the black community, frustrated by what she felt was her failure to convert the Afro-American world view into the forms of prose fiction, Hurston finally gave up.

  —Robert Hemenway

  When Charlotte and I drive up to the Merritt Monument Company, I immediately see the headstone I want.

  “How much is this one?” I ask the young woman in charge, pointing to a tall black stone. It looks as majestic as Zora herself must have been when she was learning voodoo from those root doctors down in New Orleans.

  “Oh, that one,” she says, “that’s our finest. That’s Ebony Mist.”

  “Well, how much is it?”

  “I don’t know. But wait,” she says, looking around in relief, “here comes somebody who’ll know.”

  A small, sunburned man with squinty green eyes comes up. He must be the engraver, I think, because his eyes are contracted into slits, as if he has been keeping stone dust out of them for years.

  “That’s Ebony Mist,” he says. “That’s our best.”

  “How much is it?” I ask, beginning to realize I probably can’t afford it.

  He gives me a price that would feed a dozen Sahelian drought victims for three years. I realize I must honor the dead, but between the dead great and the living starving, there is no choice.

  “I have a lot of letters to be engraved,” I say, standing by the plain gray marker I have chosen. It is pale and ordinary, not at all like Zora, and makes me momentarily angry that I am not rich.

  We go into his office and I hand him a sheet of paper that has:

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  “A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH”

  NOVELIST FOLKLORIST

  ANTHROPOLOGIST

  1901 1960

  “A genius of the South” is from one of Jean Toomer’s poems.

  “Where is this grave?” the monument man asks. “If it’s in a new cemetery, the stone has to be flat.”

  “Well, it’s not a new cemetery and Zora—my aunt—doesn’t need anything flat, because with the weeds out there, you’d never be able to see it. You’ll have to go out there with me.”

  He grunts.

  “And take a long pole and ‘sound’ the spot,” I add. “Because there’s no way of telling it’s a grave, except that it’s sunken.”

  “Well,” he says, after taking my money and writing up a receipt, in the full awareness that he’s the only monument dealer for miles, “you take this flag” (he hands me a four-foot-long pole with a red-metal marker on top) “and take it out to the cemetery and put it where you think the grave is. It’ll take us about three weeks to get the stone out there.”

  I wonder if he knows he is sending me to another confrontation with the snakes. He probably does. Charlotte has told me she w
ill cut my leg and suck out the blood if I am bit.

  “At least send me a photograph when it’s done, won’t you?”

  He says he will.

  Hurston’s return to her folklore-collecting in December of 1927 was made possible by Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, an elderly white patron of the arts, who at various times also helped Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Richmond Barthe, and Miguel Covarrubias. Hurston apparently came to her attention through the intercession of Locke, who frequently served as a kind of liaison between the young black talent and Mrs. Mason. The entire relationship between this woman and the Harlem Renaissance deserves extended study, for it represents much of the ambiguity involved in white patronage of black artists. All her artists were instructed to call her “Godmother”; there was a decided emphasis on the “primitive” aspects of black culture, apparently a holdover from Mrs. Mason’s interest in the Plains Indians. In Hurston’s case there were special restrictions imposed by her patron: although she was to be paid a handsome salary for her folklore collecting, she was to limit her correspondence and publish nothing of her research without prior approval.

  —Robert Hemenway

  You have to read the chapters Zora left out of her autobiography.

  —Student, Special Collections Room Beinecke Library, Yale University

  Dr. Benton, a friend of Zora’s and a practicing M.D. in Fort Pierce, is one of those old, good-looking men whom I always have trouble not liking. (It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.) He is shrewd, with steady brown eyes under hair that is almost white. He is probably in his seventies, but doesn’t look it. He carries himself with dignity, and has cause to be proud of the new clinic where he now practices medicine. His nurse looks at us with suspicion, but Dr. Benton’s eyes have the penetration of a scalpel cutting through skin. I guess right away that if he knows anything at all about Zora Hurston, he will not believe I am her niece. “Eatonville?” Dr. Benton says, leaning forward in his chair, looking first at me, then at Charlotte. “Yes, I know Eatonville; I grew up not far from there. I knew the whole bunch of Zora’s family.” (He looks at the shape of my cheekbones, the size of my eyes, and the nappiness of my hair.) “I knew her daddy. The old man. He was a hard-working, Christian man. Did the best he could for his family. He was the mayor of Eatonville for a while, you know.

  “My father was the mayor of Goldsboro. You probably never heard of it. It never incorporated like Eatonville did, and has just about disappeared. But Eatonville is still all black.”

  He pauses and looks at me. “And you’re Zora’s niece,” he says wonderingly.

  “Well,” I say with shy dignity, yet with some tinge, I hope, of a nineteenth-century blush, “I’m illegitimate. That’s why I never knew Aunt Zora.”

  I love him for the way he comes to my rescue. “You’re not illegitimate!” he cries, his eyes resting on me fondly. “All of us are God’s children! Don’t you even think such a thing!”

  And I hate myself for lying to him. Still, I ask myself, would I have gotten this far toward getting the headstone and finding out about Zora Hurston’s last days without telling my lie? Actually, I probably would have. But I don’t like taking chances that could get me stranded in central Florida.

  “Zora didn’t get along with her family. I don’t know why. Did you read her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road?”

  “Yes, I did,” I say. “It pained me to see Zora pretending to be naïve and grateful about the old white ‘Godmother’ who helped finance her research, but I loved the part where she ran off from home after falling out with her brother’s wife.”

  Dr. Benton nods. “When she got sick, I tried to get her to go back to her family, but she refused. There wasn’t any real hatred, they just never had gotten along and Zora wouldn’t go to them. She didn’t want to go to the county home, either, but she had to, because she couldn’t do a thing for herself.”

  “I was surprised to learn she died of malnutrition.”

  Dr. Benton seems startled. “Zora didn’t die of malnutrition,” he says indignantly. “Where did you get that story from? She had a stroke and she died in the welfare home.” He seems peculiarly upset, distressed, but sits back reflectively in his chair. “She was an incredible woman,” he muses. “Sometimes when I closed my office, I’d go by her house and just talk to her for an hour or two. She was a well-read, well-traveled woman and always had her own ideas about what was going on….”

  “I never knew her, you know. Only some of Carl Van Vechten’s photographs and some newspaper photographs … What did she look like?”

  “When I knew her, in the fifties, she was a big woman, erect. Not quite as light as I am [Dr. Benton is dark beige], and about five foot, seven inches, and she weighed about two hundred pounds. Probably more. She …”

  “What! Zora was fat! She wasn’t, in Van Vechten's pictures!”

  “Zora loved to eat,” Dr. Benton says complacently. “She could sit down with a mound of ice cream and just eat and talk till it was all gone.”

  While Dr. Benton is talking, I recall that the Van Vechten pictures were taken when Zora was still a young woman. In them she appears tall, tan, and healthy. In later newspaper photographs—when she was in her forties—I remembered that she seemed heavier and several shades lighter. I reasoned that the earlier photographs were taken while she was busy collecting folklore materials in the hot Florida sun.

  “She had high blood pressure. Her health wasn’t good.… She used to live in one of my houses—on School Court Street. It’s a block house. … I don’t recall the number. But my wife and I used to invite her over to the house for dinner. She always ate well,” he says emphatically.

  “That’s comforting to know,” I say, wondering where Zora ate when she wasn’t with the Bentons.

  “Sometimes she would run out of groceries—after she got sick—and she’d call me. ‘Come over here and see ’bout me,’ she’d say. And I’d take her shopping and buy her groceries.

  “She was always studying. Her mind—before the stroke—just worked all the time. She was always going somewhere, too. She once went to Honduras to study something. And when she died, she was working on that book about Herod the Great. She was so intelligent! And really had perfect expressions. Her English was beautiful.” (I suspect this is a clever way to let me know Zora herself didn’t speak in the “black English” her characters used.)

  “I used to read all of her books,” Dr. Benton continues, “but it was a long time ago. I remember one about… it was called, I think, ‘The Children of God’ [Their Eyes Were Watching God], and I remember Janie and Teapot [Teacake] and the mad dog riding on the cow in that hurricane and bit old Teapot on the cheek… .”

  I am delighted that he remembers even this much of the story, even if the names are wrong, but seeing his affection for Zora I feel I must ask him about her burial. “Did she really have a pauper’s funeral?”

  “She didn’t have a pauper’s funeral!” he says with great heat. “Everybody around here loved Zora.”

  “We just came back from ordering a headstone,” I say quietly, because he is an old man and the color is coming and going on his face, “but to tell the truth, I can’t be positive what I found is the grave. All I know is the spot I found was the only grave-size hole in the area.”

  “I remember it wasn’t near the road,” says Dr. Benton, more calmly. “Some other lady came by here and we went out looking for the grave and I took a long iron stick and poked all over that part of the cemetery but we didn’t find anything. She took some pictures of the general area. Do the weeds still come up to your knees?”

  “And beyond,” I murmur. This time there isn’t any doubt Dr. Benton feels ashamed.

  As he walks us to our car, he continues to talk about Zora. “She couldn’t really write much near the end. She had the stroke and it left her weak; her mind was affected. She couldn’t think about anything
for long.

  “She came here from Daytona, I think. She owned a houseboat over there. When she came here, she sold it. She lived on that money, then she worked as a maid—for an article on maids she was writing—and she worked for the Chronicle writing the horoscope column.

  “I think black people here in Florida got mad at her because she was for some politician they were against. She said this politician built schools for blacks while the one they wanted just talked about it. And although Zora wasn’t egotistical, what she thought, she thought; and generally what she thought, she said.”

  When we leave Dr. Benton’s office I realize I have missed my plane back home to Jackson, Mississippi. That being so, Charlotte and I decide to find the house Zora lived in before she was taken to the county welfare home to die. From among her many notes, Charlotte locates a letter of Zora’s she has copied that carries the address: 1734 School Court Street. We ask several people for directions. Finally, two old gentlemen in a dusty gray Plymouth offer to lead us there. School Court Street is not paved, and the road is full of mud puddles. It is dismal and squalid, redeemed only by the brightness of the late afternoon sun. Now I can understand what a “block” house is. It is a house shaped like a block, for one thing, surrounded by others just like it. Some houses are blue and some are green or yellow. Zora’s is light green. They are tiny—about fifty by fifty feet, squatty with flat roofs. The house Zora lived in looks worse than the others, but that is its only distinction. It also has three ragged and dirty children sitting on the steps.

  “Is this where y’all live?” I ask, aiming my camera.

  “No, ma’am” they say in unison, looking at me earnestly. “We live over yonder. This Miss So-and-So’s house; but she in the horspital.”

  We chatter inconsequentially while I take more pictures. A car drives up with a young black couple in it. They scowl fiercely at Charlotte and don’t look at me with friendliness, either. They get out and stand in their doorway across the street. I go up to them to explain. “Did you know Zora Hurston used to live right across from you?” I ask.