By Evelyn White–
January 28, 2025, will mark the 65th anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s death. Here’s an excerpt from my book, Alice Walker: A Life (2004) that recounts Alice’s reclamation of the author that she, now 80, celebrates as a literary foremother.
“Today, visitors to the Garden of the Heavenly Rest will find a well-manicured cemetery … . But on the sweltering day when Alice first visited the site, it was choked with waist-high brambles and weeds. Following the crude map she’d been given by the mortuary that oversaw Hurston’s funeral arrangements … Alice made her way through the tangle of brush. But finding any grave in the wild morass masquerading as a cemetery was a challenge, and Hurston lacked a headstone.
Frustrated, Alice finally called out Hurston’s name for ‘divine help.’ She moved forward and promptly found herself standing in a sunken rectangle ‘about six feet long and about three or four feet wide.’ Paying heed to the diagram, but more importantly, to her intuition and respect for ancestral spirits, Alice was confident that she’d found [Hurston’s] final resting place. She marked the location and fending off swarms of insects and sandspurs, marched back through the brush to buy a memorial plaque.
Unable to afford the majestic black headstone (‘Ebony Mist’) that she felt best reflected Hurston’s achievements, Alice instead chose a plain gray marker, for which she paid about $250. For the inscription, she selected ‘A Genius of the South,’ from the poem ‘Georgia Dusk’ in Jean Toomer’s Cane. Beneath that, she directed the engraver to carve. ‘Novelist. Folklorist. Anthropologist.’—testaments to Hurston’s genius in each realm.
‘It was what I could do, and what I could do was just what was required,’ Alice later remarked about an effort she considered ‘neither grand nor historic … . The profit was love.’
We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as Witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.”
Fort Pierce has since commemorated Hurston’s gravesite with an official Heritage Marker and created a public trail that features other notable places from her final years in the city.
Former “San Francisco Chronicle” reporter Evelyn C. White is the author of “Alice Walker: A Life.”
Arts and Entertainment
Published on January 16, 2025
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