Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves
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When people ask what I would tell my younger self, the budding writer at the beginning of her career, it is always the same: I wish I could have prepared myself for what happens to a writer when she is brutally honest, when she speaks truth to power in a raw and emotional way. The literary establishment continues to privilege work that’s just a touch removed, “refined” they would call it. Writers who tone down their anguish, their rage, their nontraditional, “deviant” choices are perceived as more skilled, more worthy of critical acclaim. This often has a lot to do with racism and sexism, and the stories we are “allowed” to tell as people of color. The classification of the first-person narrative of resistance as non-literary is not a new phenomenon, nor is the marginalization of powerful autobiographical stories that demand engagement. I wish I had known all this, not because I would have done things differently, but because I would not have been so surprised by some of the dismissive responses to my work. I would have been more prepared.
No matter the response, though, I still and will always believe that representation of all kinds is essential. My work—the memoirs, anthologies, novels, television pilots, magazine articles—is just one long attempt to make sure that people from different backgrounds are seen and heard, especially people who are in some practical way challenging the status quo, and offering different interpretations of what it means to be a human being right now. What it means to be a feminist, for example; what it means to be a man in a culture that demands toxic masculinity. What it means to spend your days challenging the racism coded into artificial intelligence, to be pansexual and polyamorous, to be the third generation in your family to struggle with schizophrenia, to embark on the arduous search for your identity as a transracial adoptee. To have a family member in prison.
It’s so important that these perspectives are included in the discourse of American and global culture. If we don’t unearth these stories, if we don’t inject them into every corner of the conversation, vast swaths of the population will continue to be ignored, erased, unconsidered; the work of the pioneers laboring quietly to change the world, to enlarge our understanding through their choices and deeds, will be lost.
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I feel fortunate that my writing and editing have given me a way to amplify these stories (and others!), while also allowing me to mark seminal turning points in my own life. For instance, at a certain point, I had a very strong sense that a large segment of my generation lacked an accurate narrative, a reassuring reflection. Every story about being multiracial was tragic, encased in rape and enslavement and suicide. I felt the need for a story to meld my own fragmented, multiracial self, and knew I wasn’t alone. From there, I was compelled to make space, to write into being a racially complicated self that was painful, yes, but also coherent and true and contemporary and victorious. Three years later, I published my first memoir, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. I can’t say it definitively helped thousands and thousands of mixed race people, but I know it helped me, and I know it helped at least a few others, and that connection, that catharsis, mattered.
The same was true with my second memoir, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. I grew up with many women—children of the women’s movement—who felt that having a child was one of the least empowering paths they could take. They were painfully conflicted about choosing children instead of their careers, even when filled with a profound longing to give birth. This was my story, too. I had been raised to think I would lose my identity, my self, my sovereignty if I became a mother. What else to do but write about this dilemma? Give it air and shape and a space to breathe, to work itself out. It has always been this way: I feel that I am connected to others and we are having an unspoken shared experience. Our story hasn’t been written yet; we have yet to name the experience and coalesce the community. That’s when I think maybe I have something to offer. Maybe I can help write our way out of this corner.
Perhaps this is why, even though I have always considered myself an introvert, I love talking to people who go straight to the heart of their stories, who tell me their deepest truths. I don’t want to know where you went to school or what you do for a living as much as I want to know what happened to you and who you think you are as a result. I want to know what you have built with the sticks and stones you were given. My writing has always come out of a longing for the real thing: the blood, the ore of the human experience. I want to know how we are all related.
I feel very connected to the legacy of Black women writers who, by telling their own stories and the stories of others, have created a rich body of work that reveals the complexity of Black women’s lives. Our work is making sure that our stories are told and told true. Our work is making sure our artistry is cultivated and expressed, shared and appreciated. Our work is honoring our genius when no one else does. Our work is refusing to surrender, refusing to be silenced, refusing to be rendered simplistically. Our work seems endless, and probably is. But our stories are at the core of our identity, and if they don’t exist, in some critical way we won’t exist, either. We won’t have the glue that holds us together, and gives us perspective on our lives through the lens of history. We have no way to join the Sisterhood.
I honor this mission and try my best to live up to the standard set by my foremothers. I hope my readers see themselves in my writing and feel less alone. I hope each of my books creates a point of connection for people who may not have found one another otherwise. I hope my work is catalytic and inspires readers to reflect deeply on their experiences, and in turn, live with greater self-awareness and courage. At the end of the day, the job of the Black woman writer is the same as the work of the well-read Black girl. We are to be curious and determined, committed to life and all of its many permutations. We are to look to the words of our sisters for knowledge and uplift, camaraderie and support. We are to seek beauty and find ourselves. We are to live and tell the story.
I saw myself, found myself, and remade myself over and over learning and discovering Zora Neale Hurston. She became and has become a continuing source of possibility and pride for me. When I think of Zora—and we call her Zora, using her first name only because we want to claim her as sister, mother, friend—I always remember that the Black people chronicled in her novels, folklore, journalism, anthropology, and plays offer to the world a people who are a symphony, not some trembling minor key.
Like Zora I lost my mother at a young age and warred with a father I loved, it seemed, more than life. Like Zora I stepped over the ashes and debris of loss and struck out on my own, carrying grief and anger on my shoulders. Like Zora I lived full to bursting with a universe of dreams and desires to prove to myself and the world. And like Zora everything I proved in the end was made possible by the people who loved me.
Zora’s mother told her to jump at the sun. My mother told me that one day I would write a book. My father told me stories of Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass years before I learned about them in school. Zora’s voracious appetite for life and experience rebuked, with every barrier she stormed, the idea that Black women are only or forever have to be “the mules of the world.” In Zora’s blueprint and following her lead, we could be and are artists, anthropologists, philosophers, disturbers of the peace, not afraid to open our mouths or put a foot in that mouth, pull it out, and keep on steppin’.
In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora allowed me to see the contradictions and complexity of Black life and Black female visions and virtues. Yes, Janie Crawford has “the look,” straight hair, light skin, but her status as sexual trophy offers her no stairway to heaven. Zora fills her characters’ mouths with the most damning and scathingly satirical colorist comments one could imagine. It was the courageous lambasting of colorist orthodoxy that opened a space for me, a dark brown woman, in the novel.
Zora did not
teach me how to write. She taught me how to live, how to laugh, and how to love. Her canon is a master class in the art of living. And it is only through tackling and striding naked and unafraid into the territory, the geography of life and its awful realness and concreteness, that we build an imagination that can find life on a page and withstand the assault of indifference or misinterpretation. Dream a World. Imagine a Life. Be Here Now. That is what Zora mirrored for me to see in myself.
Just think of it. Zora never married, at a time when that was what women “were supposed to do.” She had obviously “married” herself, had signed, sealed, and delivered her heart, her loyalty, and her love to herself and her people. Since childhood she had been wedded to curiosity, performance, the life of the mind, imagination, discovery, and the need to make a difference in a world sorely in need of her special remedies.
Like her longtime compatriot and then “enemy” Langston Hughes, Zora saw herself as guardian of the culture, the realities, the conundrums and contradictions of the folk. For Hughes the “folk” of Harlem comprised his congregation. Zora was rooted in Eatonville and the rural Black South, in the lives of the people whose accents and malapropisms and homespun motherwit and common sense left what Zora called “the niggerati” at the worst ashamed and at the best unimpressed. Zora had not lived, had not researched, had not opened herself up until she had gotten “down and dirty” in a juke joint in Polk County, Florida, or lost herself and found her soul in a voodoo ritual in Haiti.
I am sure the roots of the intense love and the intense anger Hurston and Hughes felt toward each other grew out of the recognition of how alike they were. Both had been orphaned in different ways, and each simply knocked on the door of the whole wide world and claimed everybody in that world as kin.
In the 1930s and 1940s, against the backdrop of lynchings and segregation, Zora Neale Hurston proclaimed herself an artist, anthropologist, thinker, novelist, a kind of literary extreme adventurer. Her art was her life, and it made her life a decisive act of art. And unlike a child, her art never let her down, was always obedient, as long as she nurtured it and slammed the door in the face of despair. I remember reading that in the last days of his life Richard Wright, under surveillance by the French government and the Americans because of his anti-colonial writing, unable to join his wife and daughters in England, wrote over four thousand haikus. Near the end of her life Zora worked as a domestic, struggled to “make ends meet,” yet was nourished by ideas and inspiration for new works.
Zora Neale Hurston was one of a legion of Black writers resurrected and reintroduced as a result of the cultural power shifts and changes wrought by the civil rights, Black Power, and women’s movements. Zora was gone, out of print for a while, but you can’t keep a good woman down, and when her time had come, really come (because in her first debut she was ahead of her time), Zora was the drum majorette leading the parade of unleashed Black voices.
How did I discover Zora? How did she become such an integral part of my creative life? I read Alice Walker’s groundbreaking 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” in which she claimed Zora, a fellow Southerner, as her literary ancestor. And as soon as Their Eyes Were Watching God was reprinted and available, I read it and discovered one of the most revolutionary, authentic, and lyrical voices I had ever encountered. I then read all the books she had written, then gushing into print, and read everything about her that I could find. Her life was as dramatic as the books she wrote, and in everything she wrote she paid homage to the town, the people, and the family that gave her the stories she would relentlessly explore.
Years later, a novelist and memoirist in my own right, I visited Turkey as a cultural ambassador for the State Department, where I lectured on American literature and African American writers in public venues, as well as in literature classes at the Istanbul University. I met with writers and intellectuals, many of whom had been arrested for the intent or impact of their works. Several of the professors who invited me to speak in their classes about African American literature had studied in the United States and there had been introduced to the work of Hurston. They returned to Turkey with worn but treasured copies of Their Eyes Were Watching God and introduced the book to their students, the majority of whom spoke and read English.
In my lectures, when I referenced Zora, the students told me that they admired her writing, but they also valued the way that in Their Eyes Were Watching God, they felt “seen” and validated. In Zora’s story of Black folk and Black life in a small Southern town, they saw and heard echoes and remnants of their own rural family and kin. Zora validated the intelligence and creativity of ordinary, easily overlooked, and forgotten people, and this touched the students deeply. For them, Eatonville was Haynye or Altintas, the Turkish villages that their parents spoke of, and where they visited grandparents. The significance of community, the power of the communal space, and enduring oppression with grace were themes that they told me coursed through their lives. I went to Turkey knowing what Zora meant to me; I returned aware that she belonged and spoke to the world.
Just as Zora had followed me to Turkey, when I later created and co-founded an organization to foster community and enlarge opportunities for Black writers, I literally called forth her spirit and her name. The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation was purposely named for two brilliant Southern writers who in the 1930s publicly sparred with each other. Founded in 1990, in the midst of a bitter and very public literary battle of the sexes between Black male and Black female writers over feminism, imagery, and audience, I chose to name the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation after a male and a female Black writer as a way of declaring a kind of literary truce.
Both writers traveled all over the wide world, and both found in their Southern experience a doorway into all the universal stories of oppressed people. Readers needed the anguished howl of Wright’s men and the humor and resilience of Hurston’s women to understand what Black people had lived through and known and become. I called on Zora’s spirit of activism, her vision, and her “race woman” perspective in working to institutionalize the important cultural work of the foundation.
Zora made me more than a novelist; she made me a woman of letters, writing fiction and nonfiction because I saw how she sprinted across the borders that supposedly sequestered these genres from each other. Zora wrote until she died, and her writing gave meaning and girth and depth to the life she lived. Not “tragically colored” but magnificently human and brazen and wise and foolish and made of some secret recipe the world had never known.
I see Zora in myself because she knew I wanted to fly so she showed me how to unfurl my wings, and I wanted people to listen, so she modeled being a woman with a mission, a woman on a mission.
Thank you, Zora, for surviving false accusations, poverty, patronage, being buked and scorned, lauded and lifted, speaking your mind, love found, love lost. Rest in peace, and keep rising, sending new missives forth like smoke signals, like the beat of those drums you heard in Jamaica. Like the still fiery drumbeat of your heart.
WELL-READ BLACK GIRL RECOMMENDS:
BOOKS ON BLACK FEMINISM
Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins
The Crunk Feminist Collection by Brittney C. Cooper, Robin M. Boylorn, and Susana M. Morris
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
When and Where I Enter by Paula J. Giddings
Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought by Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology by Barbara Smith
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker
Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace
When I was seven years old, a white store clerk looked at my green-eyed, light-skinned mother and said, “You are so beautiful.” Looking down at me and noticing my mother holding my hand, she surveyed my dark brown skin, brown eyes, and asked, “Are you adopted?”
At the age of seven, I knew my dark brown skin wasn’t beautiful.
My big belly and wide hips didn’t fit into regular dress sizes made for “normal”-sized girls, so when my mother took me shopping for Easter Sunday, we spent hours at Montgomery Ward, Sears, and JCPenney looking for the perfect dress. I remember going to the plus size section of these stores feeling like I was being punished. Clothes that fit me were always in the back corner of the store, and there were never as many options available for me as there were for thinner girls. Once, when a store clerk offered to help my mom look for a size, she said with pity, “I don’t think we carry hard-to-fit sizes here.”
By the fifth grade I knew my body was the wrong kind of body.
This isn’t to say that I had a depressed childhood. The constant affirmations from my mother, the women at church, the ladies sitting on their porches watching and gossiping nurtured and fortified me. My house, elementary school, and church were all nestled in the black community of North East Portland. It felt like everyone knew one another—kids who grew up on the same block or just around the corner from one another also went to the same school, the same church. We were a spectrum of browns, we were big hips and thin waists, pressed hair, Jheri curls, and Afro puffs. We were fish fries and cookouts, ribs and collard greens. Many of us were in Portland because someone in our family migrated west in the forties to work the shipyards during World War II. Our community’s roots reached back to Georgia and Kentucky, Louisiana and Arkansas. Somehow black people had found a way to make Oregon home.