In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Read Free

had made them unique.
    Zora, of the sandy-colored hair and the daredevil eyes, a girl who escaped poverty and parental neglect by hard work and a sharp eye for the main chance.
    Zora, who left the South only to return to look at it again. Who went to root doctors from Florida to Louisiana and said, “Here I am. I want to learn your trade.”
    Zora, who had collected all the black folklore I could ever use.
    That Zora.
    And having found that Zora (like a golden key to a storehouse of varied treasure), I was hooked.
    What I had discovered, of course, was a model. A model, who, as it happened, provided more than voodoo for my story, more than one of the greatest novels America had produced—though, being America, it did not realize this. She had provided, as if she knew someday I would come along wandering in the wilderness, a nearly complete record of her life. And though her life sprouted an occasional wart, I am eternally grateful for that life, warts and all.
    It is not irrelevant, nor is it bragging (except perhaps to gloat a little on the happy relatedness of Zora, my mother, and me), to mention here that the story I wrote, called “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,” based on my mother’s experiences during the Depression, and on Zora Hurston’s folklore collection of the 1920s, and on my own response to both out of a contemporary existence, was immediately published and was later selected, by a reputable collector of short stories, as one of the Best Short Stories of 1974.
    I mention it because this story might never have been written, because the very bases of its structure, authentic black folklore, viewed from a black perspective, might have been lost.
    Had it been lost, my mother’s story would have had no historical underpinning, none I could trust, anyway. I would not have written the story, which I enjoyed writing as much as I’ve enjoyed writing anything in my life, had I not known that Zora had already done a thorough job of preparing the ground over which I was then moving.
    In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.
    To take Toni Morrison’s statement further, if that is possible, in my own work I write not only what I want to read—understanding fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction—I write all the things I should have been able to read. Consulting, as belatedly discovered models, those writers—most of whom, not surprisingly, are women—who understood that their experience as ordinary human beings was also valuable, and in danger of being misrepresented, distorted, or lost:
    Zora Hurston—novelist, essayist, anthropologist, autobiographer;
    Jean Toomer—novelist, poet, philosopher, visionary, a man who cared what women felt;
    Colette—whose crinkly hair enhances her French, part-black face; novelist, playwright, dancer, essayist, newspaperwoman, lover of women, men, small dogs; fortunate not to have been born in America;
    Anaïs Nin—recorder of everything, no matter how minute;
    Tillie Olson—a writer of such generosity and honesty, she literally saves lives;
    Virginia Woolf—who has saved so many of us.
    It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about. Whether we are “minority” writers or “majority.” It is simply in our power to do this.
    We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott