The grave is calling to us.

On a hot summer day, Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple, set out to meet the person who had so intrigued her with her work - Zora Neale Hurston.

"Zora", she shouted. "Are you out there?".

In the black town where the author grew up, and wrote extensively about, Alice was looking to find traces of her that would reveal the connection that bonded them together.

But there was no Zora. She had departed 13 years ago, and now there was no trace of her.

Just then, she stepped on some mud and it slipped her a few inches beneath the ground. She was determined to believe that this was Zora, answering her calls.

And thus she proceeded to mark that grave as the "Genius of the South".

There are times — and finding Zora’s grave was one of them — when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on, do not make sense because they bear no relation to the depth of emotion that one feels...It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because I have come to know Zora through her books and she was not a teary person herself; but partly, too, it is because there is a point at which even grief feels absurd.

Even with all its romanticism, this is a sad story about a woman who gave so much to American literature and Black artists, some of which I will illustrate in this account.

Like many other colored women and artists, I found Zora through her work, and on the pages I found realities I could never myself imagine. Things that were right there, but just a little out of reach. Thoughts she shaped into words that held the gospel of art for the colored artist.

And there she was, lying under an unmarked grave. Forgotten because she didn't fit in the history makers' pages.

A long walk from Zora's grave, lie many unmarked ones on a stretch of land in Mobile, Alabama.

People who must have had their own geniuses, their own culture, their own minds. Poets, Artists, Painters, Writers - there could be so many of them resting underneath the soil, remembered only in spirit.

In Netflix's documentary Descendants, this graveyard and the community of Africatown, speak about the ghost stories of their ancestors.

One of whom was Cudjo. The last survivor of the slave ship Clotilde. People say he would cry, and cry for days because he missed home. One of the women from the town reads from Zora's Barracoon -

All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold. The Kings and Captains whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo. The thoughts of the “black ivory,” the “coin of Africa,” had no market value. Africa’s ambassadors to the New World have come and worked and died, and left their spoor, but no recorded thought.

With these things already known to me, I once more sought the ancient house of the man called Cudjo. This singular man who says of himself, “Edem etie ukum edem etie upar”: The tree of two woods, literally, two trees that have grown together. One part ukum (mahogany) and one part upar (ebony). He means to say, “Partly a free man, partly free.” The only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home; the horrors of a slave raid; the barracoon; the Lenten tones of slavery; and who has sixty-seven years of freedom in a foreign land behind him.How does one sleep with such memories beneath the pillow? How does a pagan live with a Christian God? How has the Nigerian “heathen” borne up under the process of civilization?

I was sent to ask.

Zora had recorded what is since known as the only surviving record of the slave trade, the only man who remained in this foreign land, after being bought off and displaced from his home.

She had spent hours in conversation with Cudjo in 1928. Recording his words in his own voice, in the book that was only published in 2018.

I wonder if Zora hadn't illustrated these ideas so many years ago, would Viola be winning that Oscar for portraying a black woman in a simple story about people? Would a film like Black Panther have existed?

Would Adjoa Andoh be playing lady danbury, taking control of her life and the ton? Would colored artists be creating for creating, and creating for themselves?

Would black people have finally found their own voice, instead of being speakers of someone else's truth?

We don't really know that. But much is to be accredited to the vigour with which Zora wrote about the Black voice.

Zora has been known to be the first black female filmmaker, but with really less recognition. Especially owing to her work in preserving the culture, traditions and arts that were cultivated in the Black communities.

She would often record the songs and verses she heard there in her own voice, as an attempt to memorialise them.

She had also been the only reporter who took account of the infamous Ruby vs State of Florida case. It serves as an honest and reflective evidence of how Black people have been and are treated in the Judiciary system.

How could a woman prove herself when she wasn't even deserved a fair trial?

In the early 1900s, this incredible work that she was doing held little value. Somehow, this effort to record Black art in its authentic voice was not good enough for her peers, the haywards of the Harlem renaissance.

She found it exceptionally difficult to sound her voice and to tell the stories she wanted to tell, simply because she did not fit in the white man's idea of what a woman, especially a black woman, was meant to be.

Publishing houses and theatrical promoters are in business to make money. They will sponsor anything that they believe will sell. They shy away from romantic stories about Negroes and Jews because they feel that they know the public indifference to such works, unless the story or play involves racial tension. It can then be offered as a study in Sociology, with the romantic side subdued. They know the skepticism in general about the complicated emotions in the minorities. The average American just cannot conceive of it, and would be apt to reject the notion, and publishers and producers take the stand that they are not in business to educate, but to make money. Sympathetic as they might be, they cannot afford to be crusaders.

For centuries we have continued on this belief surrounding minorities. People who are not the rulers, the shakers, the movers of the world, are simple not there.

Each one of us is fit neatly into pre-defined boxes, drawn with the same chalk on the same paper with the same strokes.

To them, we are one and all the same.

But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem. That they are very human and internally, according to natural endowment, are just like everybody else. So long as this is not conceived, there must remain that feeling of unsurmountable difference, and difference to the average man means something bad. If people were made right, they would be just like him.

Even though it is a well known fact, Zora's affirmation of the large gap between the white person and people of color was met with strong opposition.

Why?

Sure, Zora was human too. Every word and every essay that came out of her brilliant mind wasn't all perfect.

She was quoted to have believed in, and seen a zombie even.

But that cannot come even close to discrediting her life's hard work.

Just this year, Harvard is facing legal charges against their preference to legacy admissions. And what must be the underlying message?

Ivy leagues house a majority of white students. The system is rigged in their favor. Yet, we speak of equality in education.

As large as 79% of teachers in America are white and non-hispanic. The heroes, the legends, the celebrities, the role models - every one of the people we hope to look upto, don't look like us. Even in 2023.

So was Zora really wrong in exclaiming that Black voices needed to be preserved?

How about the intellectual lynching we perpetrate upon ourselves? Let any Negro do anything but pat himself on the back for being almost just like a white person or if that cannot be achieved, almost like someone who is almost like someone who almost acts like a white person and the cliche who got nothing out of college but a degree seize the rope and faggot and make for the nearest tree, discouraging original thought in thousands of immature Negro minds. And that is the tragedy. The world’s most powerful force is intellect. The only reality is thought.

By ignoring her cries, the white overlords have made sure that our progress is slowed.

So many more like her are silenced under unmarked graves.

And we continue the race to catch up to a car that started years before us. Realising that we are not even on the right track.

How has this Race attitude affected the Arts in Florida? In Florida as elsewhere in America this background has worked the mind of the creator. Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, “Ah this is a beautiful song inside me. I feel the morning star in my throat. I will sing of the star and the morning.” Then his background thrusts itself between his lips and the star and he mutters, “Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and I shall be considered forgetful of our past and present. If I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.” So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again to the detriment of art. To him no Negro exists as an individual—he exists only as another tragic unit of the Race.

Who is this person of color? What are his thoughts?

Where is he going?

What does he want to say?

Let's make space for these questions and more, and give stage to the stories of people as they are meant to be.

We must do so. Not because it is required by the minority itself, but because by suppressing this voice, we are holding too much back.

Look at how much the Black voice gifted to the American language. How much flavour the cultured ingredient brings to our table.

This is not just the story of the black race. It's the story of the Nagas, the muslims, the Gonds, the Manganiars and more.

We must go back in search and find these people.

REFERENCES

(Hurston et al., 2022, Art and Such*)

(Hurston et al., 2022, What White Publishers Won’t Print)

BBC, Podcast, Great Lives

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), “Public School Teacher Data File,” 2017–18

Legacy admissions: Harvard accused of favouring mostly white students, By Sam Cabral, BBC News

YOU DON’T KNOW US NEGROES, And Other Essays, By Zora Neale Hurston, Edited by Genevieve West and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Descendant, Directed by Margaret Brown on Netflix

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, By Zora Neale Hurston