Summary Of Zora Neale Huston's Legacy

For your research and advocacy of Zora Neale Huston’s legacy and your passionate exchange with me, I thank you. Bear with me as I share a short story: Several years back, while spending the day riding shotgun with a friend and with Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka, I had a conversation with Ms. Sanchez in which she asked me to talk with and tell the stories of the important women writers of color of her generation before they all passed on. Mr. Baraka, whom I’d met several years earlier as a teen and aspiring writer at his home in Newark (while visiting one of his kids), insisted that I’d promise to do this work, too. That day I videotaped the two “playing the dozens,” and later, while shopping for dresses, I listened from inside a fitting room in small

When you commented, here, on Ms. Hurston’s circumstances during the last years of her life, I thought about Ms. Sanchez and what she’d said about my adding to the voids of well-established narratives. Ms. Hurston sang and even danced lived, too. Some of those stories are ones to which I was privileged. I even met the “garbage” man who cleaned out her place after she died and preserved much of what is archived at a Florida University. A brief time after, I co-wrote a piece about one of Zora’s Howard professors with his daughter. More relevant and present time to our exchange, Monday evening, I’d pulled out a large expandable folder and skimmed years of research I’d gathered on Ms. Hurston’s life, including primary source documents, transcripts, recorded interviews, and personal letters to me about the author. I remembered why I’d never done much anything with the material. I had become critically ill while at Yale and have spent well over a decade working to get where I am, today, writing once more. The timing of our debate and my having found my research on Ms. Huston is as it should have been,