The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Walker’s second venue of literary activism was her course at Wellesley College on black women writers—the first of its kind. Wellesley, like Radcliffe, was diversifying; it was no longer the staid, all-white school where Swan had done her undergraduate degree in the early 1940s. But, as Olsen could have pointed out, a more diverse student body didn’t necessarily translate into a more diverse English department or course syllabus. Walker’s course was thus significant in its insistence that literature by black women deserved the same attention as Beowulf or the Romantic poets. Her syllabus, a mixture of poetry and prose, featured the works of Phillis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Nella Larsen, as well as Walker’s friends and contemporaries June Jordan and Toni Morrison. Like Howe and Olsen, Walker developed assignments that encouraged her students to write personally about their own lived experience with racism. Reading texts by women like them, about lives like their own, students felt that Walker had “unearthed a part of our history that we had been denied.”

  The comment is surprisingly apt, for Walker herself was, at that very moment, searching for another part of that hidden history—this would be her third form of activism. While at the Institute, she’d become interested in the African American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. A graduate of Howard and Barnard and a student of the acclaimed anthropologist Franz Boaz, Hurston had been a key figure in Harlem Renaissance circles, stunning men with her beauty and angering them with her refusal to conform to their literary and social expectations. She published seven books before her death at age sixty-nine; the two most prominent were Mules and Men, a collection of folktales published in 1935, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel written swiftly during a research trip to Jamaica and published in 1937. Written in a black vernacular, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman who comes into her own only after surviving two marriages, domestic abuse, a hurricane, and the gossip and vendettas of her friends and acquaintances. The novel is one long flashback, its formal innovations—linguistic and temporal—evidence of Hurston’s modernist sensibilities, as well as her studies in ethnography. Though white critics generally admired the novel, it was controversial among black readers and critics because of how it represented the black community. By the time of her death in 1960, all of her books were out of print. With the help of donations, she was buried in an unmarked grave.

  Walker didn’t discover Hurston until she entered the Institute. Inspired by one of her mother’s stories, Walker was at work on a piece of short fiction that incorporated vodou (the story would become “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff” and be published in 1973). In the process of researching for the story, she came upon a footnote, in a work by a white author, that pointed her in the direction of Hurston’s anthropological work. “Zora, who had collected all the black folklore I could ever use,” she wrote later about that discovery. “Having found that Zora…I was hooked.” Hurston was an inspiration, a role model, and, to Walker, a criminally under-recognized writer. Their Eyes Were Watching God was a masterpiece; Walker later claimed that there was no book more important to her. Just as Olsen had been inspired by Rebecca Harding Davis and decided to recover Life in the Iron Mills, so too did Walker commit herself to resurrecting Zora Neale Hurston.

  On August 15, 1973, just weeks after finishing her two-year term at the Institute, Walker took a flight from Boston to central Florida. From the air, the state looked flat and unchanging, the varieties of its terrain flattened by distance. The air on the ground was hot and humid, but Walker, born to sharecroppers in Georgia, was used to the summers of the American South. She picked up Charlotte Hunt, a white graduate student and her traveling companion, and the two women—scholars, detectives, adventurers—drove to Eatonville, Florida, Hurston’s hometown (she was born in Alabama, but the family moved to the historically black town of Eatonville when Hurston was quite young). There, they queried city hall bureaucrats and old friends of Hurston’s hoping to find information about how the writer had lived and where she might be buried. Throughout the trip, Walker pretended to be Hurston’s illegitimate niece. This was a lie, of course, though an unthreatening one, but it also reflected Walker’s understanding of artistic lineage, of how black women writers of the past enabled—indeed, gave birth to—those of the present.

  Their search took them to Seventeenth Street, in Fort Pierce, Florida, where a cemetery called the Garden of Heavenly Rest can still be found. Walker—her skirt hitched to her waist, insects and sandspurs stinging her bare limbs—weaved her way through the overgrown weeds, clutching a hand-drawn map and looking for Hurston’s unmarked grave. In one retelling, she claimed that some kind of ancestral spirit led her to a sunken spot of earth; in another, she credited Rosalee, a local woman, with helping her affirm the spot. Satisfied, Walker drove to a local tombstone maker, determined to mark Hurston’s resting spot so future visitors could find it. The tombstone she wanted was too expensive, so she settled for a cheaper stone. She asked for the following words to be etched on it:

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  “A Genius of the South”

  Novelist Folklorist

  Anthropologist

  1901–1960

  Even though she got Hurston’s birth year wrong (Hurston was born in 1891), Walker ensured that history would not forget Hurston. The tombstone still stands today.

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  During her second year at the Institute, while researching Hurston’s life and teaching under-studied black writers like Wheatley, Walker began to think about what other black women writers might be missing from the literary canon. She thought of her own mother, who ran away at seventeen to marry and who raised eight children. If she had any creative impulse, any suppressed artistic spirit, it came through in the rhythm of her storytelling and in the way she arranged flowers. This is what she had passed on to her daughter Alice, who would be recognized as an artist in a way her mother never was.

  That May, just weeks before the end of her fellowship at the Institute, Walker spoke at a Radcliffe symposium called “The Black Woman: Myths and Realities.” She’d been invited by Doris Mitchell, a Radcliffe dean and the first black administrator hired at Harvard University. Though officially in charge of recruiting black students, Mitchell had many other responsibilities: mentoring black students, counseling them when they were in distress, acting as a role model and—along with the newly appointed director of financial aid, Sylvia Simmons, also a black woman—as an “all purpose dea ex machina.” Black students were better represented now than they had been at the end of the 1960s—the class of 1976 had 45 black students out of 150 total—but black students still felt alienated at Harvard. They felt that their culture wasn’t appreciated, nor were their intellectual proclivities and interests. There were complaints about loud soul music, for instance, but not about loud country or classical music. Black students wanted to live together and dine together, but white students resented this seeming “separatist” behavior. And then there was the problem of the university’s majority-white faculty. In 1973, there were 13 black professors out of 760 total at the university—an increase from only 3 black professors in the spring of 1969. Working with white faculty members sometimes had negative consequences for black students: Mitchell told a reporter for The Radcliffe Quarterly a story about a faculty member writing a negative letter of recommendation for a black student who wanted to go to medical school. “Judging by white standards, perhaps she was less aggressive and self-confident,” Mitchell explained. “But if the advisor had taken into consideration the kind of academic, social, economic, and emotional struggle this girl had to make to be here at all and to be graduated with a pre-med concentration, she would have realized that this girl was much more mature than most of the white students.” Many black students described their Harvard experience of the early 1970s as “unreal.”

  “The Black Woman” would expose these black under
graduates to important, inspiring black women, who, in a series of conference talks, would help them reflect on their experiences and encourage them to pursue their dreams. Over the weekend of May 4 and 5, 1973, two hundred people crowded into Agassiz House, in Radcliffe Yard, where Fay House is, to hear fifty-two presenters undermine myths and present role models.

  Walker was the keynote speaker. She began by quoting Jean Toomer’s Cane, a lyrical, nearly uncategorizable book from 1923. Walker admired Toomer both for his language and for his love of the southern landscape; it was in his work that she would find her epitaph for Hurston, “a genius of the South.” But she was also troubled by what seemed, to her, like his failure to reckon with black women’s full humanity. In this epigraph, the speaker of Cane describes to a drowsy prostitute “her own nature and temperament” and instructs her on how to understand her emotions and fashion an inner life. The prostitute falls asleep while he’s speaking, a sign both of his pomposity and of her disinterest in anything having to do with Art.

  But Walker wanted to trouble the idea that women like this—black, southern, uneducated, sexualized—were not, in their own ways, artists. “For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists,” she insisted, “driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release. They were Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality—which is the basis of Art—that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane.” She cited their quilts, their spirituals, her mother’s bouquets. She cited too the writing of black women such as Phillis Wheatley, who, for much of her life, in addition to lacking money and a room of her own had not even legal ownership of herself. “It is not so much what you sang,” she said, addressing Wheatley directly, “as that you kept alive, in so many of our ancestors, the notion of song.” Walker was creating a literary tradition, a genealogy of authorship and influence, where none had been before.

  Near the end of her talk, Walker returned to Woolf’s Room of One’s Own, the urtext for feminist critics. She wondered how the genius that Woolf imagined had existed among working-class women must, too, have existed among enslaved people and among the wives and daughters of sharecroppers. Walker’s point was that black women’s historical oppression both resembled and was fundamentally different from the oppression suffered by the poor at the hands of the wealthy. Black women didn’t simply lack resources: they lacked autonomy, the recognition of their humanity. Their struggle was the worker’s struggle, and the woman’s struggle, but it was also something else.

  Walker’s talk, first delivered to a couple hundred people—mostly women, mostly black—soon reached a wider audience. It was published in the relatively new Ms. magazine, founded by Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, in 1974, under the title “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South.” (Walker would begin at Ms. as a contributing editor in December 1974.) It then served as the title essay for her first collection of nonfiction, published in 1983. In some important ways, then, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” resembled Olsen’s “Silences”: it was the work that best articulated her relationship to the literary canon and, crucially, sought to remake that canon so she and her literary predecessors could be included in it. Walker and Olsen sought to recuperate the voices of the silenced as well as explain their silencing. Both essays were influential and shaped reading and teaching practices in the years to come.

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  Walker and Olsen met in 1974, when Walker happened to be visiting San Francisco and Olsen invited her to a party. The two writers hit it off. Their views on literature and life were similar: both prized equality and justice; both fused activism and art. Walker’s “womanism”—her term for a black woman–centered feminism that emphasized capability and strength—resembled, in some ways, Olsen’s communist humanism. (Walker once said that “womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.”) The two struck up a correspondence: as she did with most correspondents, Olsen alternated between sending sweet gifts and sharing alarming anecdotes about a “sort of breakdown” and other kinds of distress. Walker responded soothingly, demonstrating a patience with Olsen’s ups and downs that not everyone possessed. “I cherish the ins and outs of our friendship,” she once wrote. “It is such a living thing. It is just like life.”

  In addition to the letters they sent and the inspiration they offered each other, the two writers participated in a publishing project that would bring back lost literature by women. In 1972, the Feminist Press—founded in 1970 and managed by Florence Howe and Paul Lauter, fans of Olsen’s since her Amherst days—republished Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, with a long “biographical interpretation” by Olsen. The book was the press’s second published title; The New York Times urged readers to “read this book and let your heart be broken.”

  The press would go on to publish many more such important books—Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper—including a collection edited by Walker. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, a collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s writings, was published in 1979. Walker had fought tirelessly to insert Hurston into literary history. Finally, in collaboration with other politically conscious women, she had succeeded.

  CHAPTER 18

  The New Exotics

  BELATED LITERARY RECOGNITION was not uncommon in the 1970s. Dead women were earning long-overdue accolades. Rebecca Harding Davis. Zora Neale Hurston. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. There was even a second posthumous volume of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, called Winter Trees, published in 1971. Thanks to the agitation of feminists, both inside and outside the academy, women’s writing was newly popular. This proved to be a boon for female writers, young and old, who sought either initial recognition or long-awaited success. “Women have become the new exotics lately,” Kumin said to a group of college students in 1973. “They have it lots easier now because the white middle-class male has started feeling guilty for the way women have been treated. Women are in a position of enormous potential when it comes to the arts.”

  On May 7, 1973—ten years after she and Sexton sat side by side in a sun-filled seminar room, reading to their fellow Institute scholars—Kumin received a belated prize for her poetry: the Pulitzer, awarded to her fourth poetry collection, Up Country, published in 1972. Sexton was on the Pulitzer Prize committee in 1973, and she argued vehemently for Up Country, persuading her fellow judges, William Alfred and Louis Simpson, to award Kumin the prestigious, life-changing prize. Six years before, Kumin had rushed over to Sexton’s house in Weston to celebrate her friend’s winning the prize. Now, at forty-eight, Kumin herself was the winner. “I’m just absolutely knocked out,” she told a reporter, just after she’d heard the good news. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Portrait of Maxine Kumin by Barbara Swan, sometime after the Institute

  Her life changed. “Suddenly I was in business,” she later wrote, “the poetry business.” At the time she won the prize, Kumin was on leave from her job as a lecturer at nearby Newton College of the Sacred Heart. Since finishing at the Institute, she’d gone back to teaching: she’d taught at Tufts, as well as at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She was still writing prolifically, but she didn’t get reviewed as widely as some other poets. Now, anointed a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, she was wanted everywhere. She was invited to speak at Stephens College in Missouri, at the University of Texas at Austin, at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She was asked to teach a seminar at Columbia University—a big step up from Sacred Heart—and so she commuted every Tuesday from Newton to New York City. She was profiled in magazines, quoted in roundups (“Women of Letters,” “Poets and Wine”), and interviewed at length. She stopped enterprising reporters from photographing her domestic space, with its stacks of old New York
er magazines in the corners and sketches by Swan on the walls. “I really dislike all the fuss that comes with being ‘the poet,’ ” she explained.

  Unlike Sexton, Kumin had never sought fame—opportunity and respect, yes, but never the media spotlight. She had not set out to become a “lasting poet,” as Sexton had put it in her Institute application. She had been relatively happy with her life before the Pulitzer and would have been content to continue living and working in that way for another twenty or thirty years. But she soon learned that was impossible: she now belonged to the world of professional poets—Kumin jokingly referred to the industry as “PoBiz”—and would make her living through residencies and readings and lectures, all paid handsomely. She could be pickier about her teaching appointments and spend more time on the farm. She rechristened the place “PoBiz Farm” and posted a sign with this new name on the dirt road that led to the homestead. It was an ironic homage to the glamorous work that allowed Kumin to retreat from the literary world—leaving Sexton behind her.