Missing Witches - Missing Witches - Zora Neale Hurston： I Want To Collect Like A New Broom

00:00:00.000 Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material

00:00:10.720 that went to make me. Time and place have had their say, so you will have to know something

00:00:15.740 about the time and place where I came from in order that you may interpret the incidents

00:00:20.340 and directions of my life.

00:00:22.240 it's tempting just to read zora neale hurston's autobiography dust tracks on a road allowed to you

00:00:31.240 hear now in its entirety the way her use of language and sense of humor wind their way around

00:00:37.600 her life story brings life and depth and movement to every detail it's the same spirit she brings

00:00:44.340 to her research of caribbean and african-american religion and folklore anthropologically teasing

00:00:49.820 out the spirits within words and deeds. She remains a controversial and prolific figure,

00:00:56.020 even almost 70 years after her death. Her latest book was published posthumously just last year

00:01:01.980 in 2018. Barracoon, based on her 1927 interviews with Cujo Lewis, the last living survivor of the

00:01:10.060 Middle Passage Atlantic slave trade, is a testament to the power of gathering and telling stories,

00:01:16.140 keeping those stories alive. She said, I want to collect like a new broom.

00:01:24.300 Brings a whole meaning to a witch's flight, right? She called herself pagan and rewrote the tale of 0.85

00:01:30.760 Moses from a black rural American perspective. She threw around the n-word with a deliberate 0.59

00:01:36.760 near joyful irony. She claimed and reclaimed and felt proud and entitled and was not humble.

00:01:45.180 But perhaps her most defining characteristic is her curiosity.

00:01:50.020 Hurston wrote,

00:01:51.300 Research is formalized curiosity.

00:01:54.020 It is poking and prying with a purpose.

00:01:56.780 It is seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and that they dwell therein.

00:02:04.300 I mean, those three sentences could easily have been the missing witch's motto, right?

00:02:09.480 I was full of curiosity, like many other children.

00:02:12.440 I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest.

00:02:16.760 I got few answers from other people, but I kept right on asking because I couldn't do anything else with my feelings.

00:02:22.920 But no matter whether my probings made me happier or sadder, I kept on probing to know.

00:02:28.920 In her book, Zora Neale Hurston's Final Decade, Virginia Lynn Moylan writes,

00:02:34.180 Hurston's favorite place in town was the front porch of Joe Clark's General Store,

00:02:38.840 the hub of the town's social life, where the master storytellers spun their tales and the

00:02:44.200 adult gossip often included sly references to the physical condition of women, irregular love

00:02:50.020 affairs, or male potency. Children were banned from hanging around the porch too long, but Zora

00:02:55.140 would risk a whipping to hide around the side and listen to the tales, the gossip, a singing

00:03:01.260 liner's work song, or the soulful melodies of Bubber Mim's guitar. She was mesmerized by the

00:03:06.920 menfolk's lying sessions, otherwise known as folktales, about creation, servitude, love, death,

00:03:13.680 nature, and the why of things. Tales in which God, Devil, Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, Ciscat, Br'er Bear,

00:03:21.840 Br'er Lion, Tiger, Buzzard, and all the woodfolk walked and talked like natural men. 0.93

00:03:29.600 Zora would take a whipping, and she really pushed that willingness to sacrifice for her curiosity

00:03:35.500 as far as she could, devoting much of her life to the almighty research. She gathered tales both

00:03:41.540 formally in interviews and casually in the living room of friends to be written into her novels and

00:03:46.800 essays and stories. She said, I had things clawing inside of me that must be said. Alice Walker,

00:03:55.520 Pulitzer Prize winning literary giant in her own right, most famously as the author of The Color

00:04:00.580 Purple, wrote extensively on Hurston. One of our favorite pieces comes from Dedication on

00:04:06.640 Refusing to be Humbled by Second Place in a Contest You Did Not Design, which serves as the

00:04:12.240 introduction to a Hurston anthology Walker edited. The anthology's title comes from the response

00:04:17.360 Hurston gave upon seeing the results of a portrait photo shoot. She said, I love myself when I am

00:04:23.320 laughing, and then again when I am looking mean and impressive. Walker covers a lot in her brief

00:04:30.060 dedication, better and more eloquently and thoughtfully than we could ever hope to do

00:04:34.640 ourselves. We're super grateful to Alice Walker for writing it and very happy we found it. So

00:04:39.580 here's a few big chunks. A friend of mine called one day to tell me that she and another woman had

00:04:44.860 been discussing Zora Neale Hurston and had decided they wouldn't have liked her. They wouldn't have

00:04:49.360 liked the way when her play Colorstruck won second prize in a literary contest at the beginning of 1.00

00:04:54.480 her career, Hurston walked into a room full of her competitors, flung her scarf dramatically over

00:04:59.740 her shoulder and yelled, color struck, at the top of her voice. Apparently, it isn't easy to like a

00:05:07.420 person who is not humbled by second place. Zora Neale Hurston was outrageous, it appears, by

00:05:13.180 nature. She was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different from what one might have 0.98

00:05:18.320 wished. Because she recognized the contradictions and complexity of her own personality, Robert

00:05:23.300 Hemingway, her biographer, writes that Hurston came to delight in the chaos she sometimes left

00:05:29.880 behind. Yet for all her contrariness, her chaos, her ability to stir up dislike that is as strong

00:05:37.380 today as it was 50 years ago, many of us love Zora Neale Hurston. We do not love her for her

00:05:43.400 lack of modesty. That tends to amuse us. An assertive black person during Hurston's time

00:05:48.120 was considered an anomaly. We do not love her for her unpredictable and occasionally weird 1.00

00:05:52.700 politics, they tend to confuse us. We do not certainly applaud many of the mad things she

00:05:58.320 is alleged to have said and sometimes actually did say. We do not even claim to dislike her.

00:06:03.820 In reading through the 30-odd year span of her writing, most of us, I imagine,

00:06:08.640 find her alternately winning and appalling, but rarely dull, which is worth a lot.

00:06:15.380 We love Zora Neale Hurston for her work, first, and then again, as she and all Eatonville would

00:06:20.900 say, we love her for herself, for the humor and courage with which she encountered a life she

00:06:27.040 infrequently designed, and for her absolute disinterest in becoming either white or bourgeois,

00:06:32.680 and for her devoted appreciation of her own culture, which is an inspiration to us all.

00:06:38.940 I think we are better off if we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period, rather than

00:06:44.060 as the artist politician most Black writers have been required to be. This frees us up to appreciate

00:06:49.580 the complexity and richness of her work. We live in a society as Blacks, women, and artists whose

00:06:56.200 contests we do not design, and with whose insistence on ranking us we are permanently at war. To know

00:07:03.040 that second place in such a society has often required more work and innate genius than first,

00:07:09.180 a longer, grimmer struggle over greater odds than first, and to be able to fling your scarf

00:07:15.540 about dramatically while you demonstrate that you know, is to trust your own self-evaluation

00:07:21.460 in the face of the great white Western commercial of white and male supremacy, which is virtually

00:07:28.960 everything we see outside and often inside our own homes. That Hurston held her own literally

00:07:35.660 against the flood of whiteness and maleness that diluted so much other black art of the period in 0.60

00:07:41.300 which she worked is a testimony to her genius and her faith. As black women and as artists,

00:07:47.600 we are prepared, I think, to keep that faith. There are other choices, but they are despicable. 0.80

00:07:54.740 Zora Neale Hurston, who went forth into the world with one dress to her name and who was permitted,

00:07:59.800 at other times in her life, only a single pair of shoes, rescued and recreated a world which

00:08:06.020 she labored to hand us whole, never underestimating the value of her gift, if at times doubting the

00:08:12.520 good sense of its recipients. She appreciated us, in any case, as we fashioned ourselves.

00:08:19.620 That is something. And of all the people in the world to be, she chose to be herself,

00:08:24.720 and more and more herself. That too is something. So this book is dedicated to Zora Neale Hurston.

00:08:33.800 And so, like Walker, we dedicate this episode of the Missing Witches podcast to Zora Neale Hurston, and to the curious and the confident. 0.99

00:08:44.860 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 0.99

00:08:51.140 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:08:54.320 Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891. 0.94

00:08:57.520 Some markers have her born in 1901, but it's largely agreed that she had at some point lied about her age.

00:09:02.980 perhaps to be able to return to high school. Her family moved to Eatonville, Florida when Hurston

00:09:07.480 was only three, so she considered this place her home and set many of her stories there.

00:09:12.220 In 1942's Dust Tracks on a Road, she describes an early childhood chasing the horizon and being

00:09:18.120 chased by the moon. She took her time learning to walk, she says, but once she started,

00:09:23.060 she didn't stop. The strangest thing about it was that once I found the use of my feet,

00:09:28.520 they took to wandering. I always wanted to go. I would wander off in the woods all day alone,

00:09:34.640 following some inside urge to go places. This alarmed my mother a great deal. She used to say

00:09:40.720 that she believed a woman who was an enemy of hers had sprinkled travel dust around the doorstep the

00:09:45.700 day I was born. That was the only explanation she could find. And this seems almost prophetic,

00:09:52.780 that at one year old, little Zora's life would already be characterized by this mixture of

00:09:58.080 magic powder and the need to know and go. A lot of her later childhood reads like a fairy tale.

00:10:06.020 Not the pretty princess kind, but the old ones where wicked stepmothers do terrible things to

00:10:10.980 children and idyllic youth is cut short by a cold reality. Hurston's mother, Lucy, the woman who had

00:10:18.420 instructed her to jump at the sun, died. Her father quickly, very quickly, remarried and little Zora

00:10:27.260 was shipped off to boarding school. She stayed there until her father just stopped paying her

00:10:32.960 tuition. She started working as a maid at 14, but by her own account never kept a job for very long.

00:10:39.800 That curiosity leading her life again and again, she said, no matter how I resolved, I'd get tangled

00:10:46.160 up with their reading matter and lose my job. One of the most serious objections to me was that

00:10:52.020 having nothing, I still did not know how to be humble.

00:10:57.260 We can't help but think of our beloved witch, Ipsita Roy Chakravarti's appreciation of arrogant

00:11:02.480 women, or even the Angela Davis quote, well-behaved women seldom make history.

00:11:07.960 Missing witches maintain that witchcraft is activism and activism is witchcraft, but we 0.93

00:11:12.280 didn't create the synonymous relationship between powerful women, witchcraft, and dissidents. No, 0.99

00:11:18.200 those labels were and are thrust upon us for us to reject, ignore, or embrace.

00:11:25.060 But it seems like there's a certain aspect of witchcraft or being a witch that almost won't

00:11:30.040 allow us to be sheepish or apologize for not fitting in. Part of being a witch, I think,

00:11:35.800 is allowing yourself to take up space, to exist with freedom and authenticity. And for Zora,

00:11:41.760 there is a steadfast relationship between her curiosity and her confidence. She didn't just

00:11:47.140 have questions, she felt she deserved answers, and, empowered to ask her questions, was brave

00:11:53.080 enough to seek those answers at almost any cost. In another Disney-esque twist, she worked for a

00:12:00.280 time with a traveling theater company, eventually ending up in Baltimore. There, she was a

00:12:05.240 manicurist, tried waitressing, got appendicitis, and had to have surgery. When I was taken up to

00:12:11.660 the amphitheater for the operation, I went up there placing a bet with God. I did not fear death.

00:12:18.160 Nobody would miss me very much, and I had no treasures to leave behind me, so I would not go

00:12:22.660 out of life, looking backwards on that account. But I bet God that if I lived, I would try to find

00:12:29.020 out the vague directions whispered in my ears, and find the road it seemed that I must follow.

00:12:36.320 How? When? Why? What? All those answers were hidden from me.

00:12:44.780 Of course, she did live through the surgery, and resigned to win that bet with God.

00:12:50.360 How then did I get back to school?

00:12:52.960 I just went. 0.99

00:12:55.160 Zora was notoriously charming, witty, driven, resourceful, and smart. 1.00

00:13:01.240 She worked her way through high school, prep school,

00:13:03.840 she earned an associate's degree at Howard University,

00:13:06.500 and studied at Bernard under the legendary Franz Boas,

00:13:09.980 a man who has since been dubbed the father of modern anthropology.

00:13:15.200 With her unquenchable thirst for stories, anthropology,

00:13:18.240 the study of human culture and society, made perfect sense. She was born for it. Boas sent

00:13:24.700 Hurston to do field research in Harlem, New York, and it was there that she met and began

00:13:29.160 collaborations with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. Hurston is perhaps most famously

00:13:34.420 associated with this, the Harlem Renaissance. If you've never heard of the Harlem Renaissance,

00:13:40.020 in short, it was a movement that reveled in its blackness. A black-fueled, black-themed 0.59

00:13:45.540 explosion of art, music, poetry, a new wave of social Afro-centrism that swept across the New 0.75

00:13:52.940 York of the 1920s. The Harlem Renaissance was an incarnation of black pride that spirit and

00:14:00.100 influence is still felt through American culture. Hurston and Langston Hughes, a side note, please

00:14:06.100 read his poetry and essays, and many others would gather at the home of writer Wallace Thurman.

00:14:11.340 They published a magazine together, and these gatherings soon became the talk of the town. 0.98

00:14:16.540 We know that Zora saw the glories of Black culture and was not humble, so it's fitting 0.55

00:14:21.400 that she became somewhat of a poster child for what Alain Leroy Locke, the first African-American 0.89

00:14:26.740 Rhodes Scholar, hailed as, quote, the New Negro.

00:14:30.720 This term, popularized during the Harlem Renaissance, implied outspoken advocacy of Black history

00:14:37.240 and black dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to Jim Crow. A refusal to hide black identity,

00:14:44.400 blend in, or be self-effacing. This was a group who rebuked the values of the white bourgeoisie 0.77

00:14:49.960 and were not concerned with fitting in. Zora said, and I hope all you witches will carry this in your 0.91

00:14:56.440 hearts. Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes

00:15:03.520 me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me. In a way, this

00:15:10.860 statement kind of epitomizes the movement, soaked in black history, shining black excellence, and

00:15:15.980 not humble. But as Valerie Boyd points out in her Hurston biography, Wrapped in Rainbows,

00:15:22.580 though Hurston is often thought of today as a Harlem Renaissance writer, she actually did not

00:15:26.780 produce very much literature during the Renaissance, which began to crumble, most historians agree,

00:15:31.500 when the stock market crashed in 1929. The truth is, she published no books and only a few short

00:15:37.500 stories and plays during the Roaring Twenties. For the remainder of the Harlem Renaissance, 0.79

00:15:42.400 Zora Neale Hurston was rarely even in Harlem. Mostly, she was on the road.

00:15:48.980 So, although she wasn't publishing a lot, some of what we know about her thoughts and life was

00:15:53.640 gathered from letters she wrote to her friends from the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes,

00:15:58.040 County Cullen. Arriving in New Orleans on one of her collecting missions, she wrote to Hughes,

00:16:03.620 I have landed here in the kingdom of Marie Laveau, and I expect to wear her crown someday.

00:16:11.220 To writer and poet County Cullen, she wrote, I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard,

00:16:18.900 in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

00:16:24.560 In Haiti, she wrote her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, while collecting stories for what

00:16:31.700 would become the book, Tell My Horse. If you're a fan of this podcast, you know that we don't make

00:16:36.540 much of a distinction between magic and science. Rituals are methods, and words cast spells.

00:16:41.440 All is part of natural and cosmic law. But here's an example of that from Tell My Horse.

00:16:47.860 They take dirt from a graveyard to maim and kill, and the principle behind this practice

00:16:53.680 is more subtle than the surface shows. It is hardly probable that more than one percent of

00:16:59.760 the people who dig into an old grave to get a handful of dirt to destroy an enemy or the enemy

00:17:04.920 of a client know what they do. To most of them, it is a superstition connected in their minds with

00:17:12.900 the idea of ghosts and the belief in their power to harm. But soil from deep in an old grave has

00:17:19.420 prestige wherever the Negro exists in the Western world. In the United States, it is called goofer 1.00

00:17:25.500 dust, and there's a great deal of laughter among educated people over it. The idea of some old 0.99

00:17:31.420 witch doctor going to a cemetery at dead of night to dig arm-length deep in a grave for dirt with 1.00

00:17:37.720 which to harm and kill does seem ridiculous. Now, wait just a moment before you laugh too hard at 0.99

00:17:44.000 this old hoodoo man or woman of magic, Sir Spencer Wells, the disposal of the dead.

00:17:50.640 Shane found germs of scarlatina in the soil surrounding a grave after 30 years.

00:17:57.180 Dr. Marengo Ferrerio of Rio de Janeiro, if each corpse is the bearer of millions of organisms

00:18:04.040 specific of ill, imagine what a cemetery must be in which new foci are forming around each body.

00:18:12.220 More than 20 years after the death of a body, Shane found the germs of yellow fever,

00:18:18.100 scarlatina, typhoid, and other infectious diseases. Pasteur

00:18:22.780 What outlooks are open to the mind in regard to the possible influence of the soil with the

00:18:28.780 etiology of disease and the probable danger of the earth of cemeteries?

00:18:34.420 So it appears that instead of being a harmless superstition of the ignorant, 0.99

00:18:38.180 the African men of magic found out the deadly qualities of graveyard dirt. 0.99

00:18:44.100 In some way, they discovered that the earth surrounding a corpse 0.86

00:18:47.300 that had sufficient time to thoroughly decay was impregnated with deadly power. 0.93

00:18:57.060 For the Missing Witches take on the Roots of Hoodoo, 0.62

00:18:59.520 check out our Mama Lola episode from Season 1,

00:19:02.020 or take a peek at the show notes for that episode for links to our favourite books on the subject.

00:19:06.140 But better yet, read Hurston's books. Specifically, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse. They are both

00:19:13.080 packed with folktales and magic songs and recipes retold in ways that only Zora could conjure.

00:19:20.220 She talks about the passage of time as when the moon had dragged a thousand tides.

00:19:27.140 Stories made poetry in her thoughtful and lyrical telling.

00:19:30.960 She married and divorced twice. Her one true love was that formalized curiosity.

00:19:38.820 I want to collect like a new broom.

00:19:43.200 So, in truest Zora Neale Hurston fashion, that's what she did. Traveling, collecting, writing,

00:19:49.600 publishing. But she didn't just document the magic like some scholar outsider.

00:19:54.780 She was initiated and opened herself up to all that that entails.

00:19:58.960 In New Orleans, I delved into hoodoo, or sympathetic magic. I studied with the frisly

00:20:06.560 rooster and all of the other noted doctors. I learned the routines for making and breaking

00:20:11.540 marriages, driving off and punishing enemies, influencing the minds of judges and juries in

00:20:16.780 favor of clients, killing by remote control and other things. In order to work with these two

00:20:22.460 headed doctors, I had to go through an initiation with each. The routine varied with each doctor.

00:20:28.200 In one case, it was not only elaborate, it was impressive.

00:20:32.120 I lay naked for three days and nights on a couch, with my navel to a rattlesnake skin,

00:20:37.440 which had been dressed and dedicated to the ceremony.

00:20:40.940 I ate no food in all that time, only a pitcher of water was on a little table at the head

00:20:45.900 of the couch so that my soul would not wander off in search of water and be attacked by

00:20:50.340 evil influences and not return to me.

00:20:52.980 On the second day, I began to dream strange, exalted dreams.

00:20:56.800 on the third night I had dreams that seemed real for weeks. In one, I strode across the heavens

00:21:03.300 with lightning flashing from under my feet and grumbling thunder following in my wake.

00:21:08.780 In this particular ceremony, my finger was cut and I became blood brother to the rattlesnake.

00:21:14.380 We were to aid each other forever. I was to walk with the storm and hold my power and get my

00:21:21.820 answers to life and things in storms. The symbol of lightning was painted on my back.

00:21:29.260 This was to be mine forever. In another ceremony, I had to sit at the crossroads at midnight in

00:21:35.940 complete darkness and meet the devil and make a compact. That was a long, long hour as I sat

00:21:42.000 flat on the ground, there alone, and invited the king of hell. The most terrifying was going to a

00:21:48.120 lonely glade in the swamp to get the black cat bone. The magic circle was made and all of the

00:21:53.920 participants were inside. I was told that anything outside that circle was in deadly peril. The fire

00:21:59.740 was built inside, the pot prepared, and the black cat was thrown in with the proper ceremony and

00:22:05.160 boiled until his bones fell apart. Strange and terrible monsters seemed to thunder up to that

00:22:11.820 ring while this was going on. It took months for me to doubt it afterwards.

00:22:18.120 She didn't hoard what she collected either. Sharing what she had learned was as important

00:22:24.060 as the learning itself. She made her way from Louisiana to the Bahamas, and on her return to

00:22:29.860 New York in 1932, introduced Bahamian songs and dances to a New York audience. By 1934,

00:22:36.360 she was establishing a drama school, quote, based on pure Negro expression. Traveling, collecting,

00:22:43.220 writing, publishing, traveling, collecting, writing, publishing, these four words characterized

00:22:48.120 most of Zora's life throughout the 30s and 40s. California, Harlem, Honduras, Florida, Jamaica,

00:22:55.880 fellowships, patrons, and research grants enabling her ever-growing search for the answer to an

00:23:00.620 impossible mystery. She wrote, belief in magic is older than writing, so nobody knows how it started.

00:23:08.580 but she kept looking and listening driven by curiosity and everywhere she found music and

00:23:15.780 magic everywhere she found music and magic until 1948 there was a scandal she was falsely accused

00:23:27.220 of a terrible thing and i say falsely because 100 of the evidence spoke to her innocence

00:23:32.640 and her accuser admitted that he was lying but despite her clear innocence a mix of personal

00:23:38.380 vendetta and salacious profit-driven tabloid reporting ensured that the story had already

00:23:44.360 spread. She felt suicidal, betrayed by her community, and eventually left Harlem for good.

00:23:50.940 Every strong woman is a witch, and all are hunted. Hurston returned to Florida and spent the 1950s

00:23:58.280 working as a writer, librarian, and substitute teacher. In 1959, she had a stroke. The story

00:24:07.040 goes that in 1960, Hurston died, when her heart failed, in a county welfare home. Her body buried

00:24:16.080 in an unmarked grave and personal effects set to be burned. The fire had been lit. But as the

00:24:24.200 faiths would have it, a friend, Patrick Duval, was passing by the place where she had lived,

00:24:28.860 and he stopped and put out the fire, rescuing her papers from being burned as if at the stake.

00:24:37.040 Let's return to Alice Walker here for a minute because she is the one who found and marked

00:24:41.540 Hurston's grave in 1973. Walker and Hurston are so linked that we almost can't speak about one

00:24:48.320 without bringing up the other. To put it our way, Hurston went looking for the witches she'd been

00:24:54.200 missing, and Walker did the same. She discovered Hurston while doing research on voodoo in the

00:24:59.140 American South for a short story. Thaddeus Davis recounts Walker's telling of this discovery in his

00:25:04.660 essay, The Polarities of Space. Walker initially encountered Zora Neale Hurston not as a novelist

00:25:11.240 of the Harlem Renaissance, but rather as a folklorist and researcher. She remembered that

00:25:15.900 discovery resulting from her need to include accurate material on voodoo practices among

00:25:21.720 rural southern blacks of the 30s. But she found no one she could trust. A number of white racist

00:25:28.160 anthropologists and folklorists of the period had, not surprisingly, disappointed and insulted me. 0.54

00:25:34.200 They thought blacks inferior, peculiar, and comic, and for me, this undermined, no, destroyed the relevance of their books.

00:25:42.840 Fortunately, she discovered Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men, and with that collection documenting Hurston's recording of the culture and folklore of her all-black Florida town, Eatonville,

00:25:53.480 she also discovered an anthropologist whose material was authentic, and that authenticity of her material was verified by her familiarity with its context.

00:26:03.360 Walker's usage of context signals her understanding of how Hurston dealt with ideas and with what and how black people thought.

00:26:10.920 More importantly, since Walker sought an authoritative rejoinder to the negative and inaccurate views promulgated by white anthropologists and folklorists,

00:26:20.240 Hurston's documentation and contextualization of black Southern life had a powerful effect.

00:26:25.640 Walker says I was soothed by her reassurance that she was exposing not simply an adequate

00:26:31.180 culture but a superior one. That black people can be on occasion peculiar and comic was knowledge 0.99

00:26:38.040 she enjoyed. That they could be racially and culturally inferior to whites never seems to 0.97

00:26:44.140 have crossed her mind. Alice Walker is credited with breaking Hurston into a more mainstream

00:26:50.580 knowledge when Ms. Magazine published her essay describing her search, aptly titled

00:26:55.360 Looking for Zora. If you're at all interested, you should really read this piece. It's available

00:27:01.600 online and we've linked to it in our show notes for this episode. And so Walker and Hurston became

00:27:08.240 woven together with Hurston serving as a posthumous mentor for Walker. In her essay, June Jordan and

00:27:15.640 Alice Walker's Quest for Redemptive Art and Politics, Cheryl Wall writes about this Hurston-Walker

00:27:21.880 dynamic. If you're not familiar with the poet June Jordan, just know that she said this,

00:27:27.920 to tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself,

00:27:35.180 and that's political in its most profound way. In her essay, Cheryl Wall writes, Hurston,

00:27:43.800 the first Black anthropologist to conduct fieldwork on voodoo, or as she preferred,

00:27:48.720 hoodoo, provided the information that Walker needed to complete her story. More importantly,

00:27:54.460 she became the model who affirmed Walker's choice of vocation. Hurston, who was fond of the Black

00:27:59.940 English word bodacious, that's bold plus audacious, offers Walker a literary legacy as well as a model

00:28:08.160 for living a free life that is marked by unwavering dedication to one's work.

00:28:13.140 Alice Walker once said,

00:28:17.160 We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away,

00:28:23.880 it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again and again for

00:28:29.940 the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone. Walker and Hurston and Patrick Duvall

00:28:39.040 and others like them are the unwitting forebearers of the Missing Witches project. We give them mad 1.00

00:28:44.060 love and respect as we go digging, collecting bones of our own. Ancestors' bones. Witches' bones.

00:28:51.360 Building skeletons bone by bone. One more shout out to Alice Walker. She wrote a glowing review 1.00

00:28:59.060 of one of Missing Witches' favorite books, Monica Sho's The Great Cosmic Mother. Walker called it

00:29:04.420 one of the most important books she'd ever read. So if you're listening, thanks again for that,

00:29:10.160 Alice Walker. We at Missing Witches encourage you all to be bold, audacious, bodacious, curious,

00:29:20.140 confident, and not humble. Gather bones and seek truth and speak the buried truths that you discover

00:29:27.640 in the boneyard. Be brave. Have the nerve to walk your own way. Do your magic, knowing that someday,

00:29:35.660 somewhere, a curious witch will find it and feel it. We'll leave you to make your own dust tracks 0.99

00:29:42.740 on a road with one last passage from Zora's autobiography. The springing of the yellow line

00:29:49.860 of morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough for me. I know that nothing is destructible

00:29:57.620 things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still

00:30:04.860 be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth

00:30:11.280 in the glory of change. I was when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with

00:30:18.220 the earth to father-son and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire and

00:30:24.160 disintegrated in infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble in space.

00:30:29.880 Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever-changing, ever-moving, but never lost.

00:30:37.680 So what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men?

00:30:43.140 The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger rings.

00:30:47.960 I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance. 0.99

00:30:54.160 You must be a witch. 0.88

00:30:58.660 Thanks for listening to the Missing Witches podcast. 0.99

00:31:01.400 Be sure to come back Wednesday where we meet another bold and audacious witch,

00:31:06.360 Athena Holmes, on Witches Found.

00:31:09.440 In the meantime, hit us up at missingwitches at gmail.com

00:31:12.760 or on social media at missingwitches.

00:31:15.200 And blessed be.

Missing Witches - April 07, 2019

Missing Witches - Zora Neale Hurston： I Want To Collect Like A New Broom

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