Wading through verdant grass and waist-high weeds, careful not to step on snakes and other Central Florida wildlife, her sneakered foot gains purchase in the dirt clods. She discovers it when she presses into a sunken-in part of the terrain, almost in the center of the circle, where they told her the unmarked grave might be.
In 1973, young writer Alice Walker (pre-Color Purple) traveled to Eatonville, Florida, to visit Zora Neale Hurston’s birthplace and her final resting place in service of placing a tombstone on her grave. In 1945, fifteen years before her death in 1960, Hurston petitioned W.E.B. DuBois to fund a cemetery to bury “the illustrious Negro dead,” disallowing them to “die in inconspicuous forgetfulness,'' which “allows our people to forget…and their spirits to evaporate.”
We must read Black often to remember and keep their spirits with us. Alice Walker honored her memory and helped to revive Zora Neale Hurston’s works, which has inspired generations of readers and writers thereafter.
Reading Black not only prevents Black author obscurity but reconciles and ratifies our life experiences. Read Black to get resounding confirmation, a better sense of self, comfort, insight, laughter, community, surprise, and beauty.
We can't predict each challenge we might face, but we can prepare ourselves through the worlds we learn from and take refuge in. We can fortify our knowing, being, and doing. We can be inspired, comforted, and understood. The Black imagination is a conduit for revelation, memory, and comprehension.
Exploring Black life singularly and collectively is a hallmark of Black works. You must read Black to focus inward, to examine life at more than a cursory glance. Reading Black prompts an eyes-wide-open examination, a reckoning through story, a magnification of experience. This resonates with the reader and lets them know that they are not alone and their truth is real. Blackness has prepared us for this investigation of our covering, its experiences, and its consequences.
In 1928’s How it Feels to Be Colored Me, Zora Neale Hurston said she wasn't mournful about her Blackness, lamenting it:
I am not tragically colored. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that somehow nature has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less.
You will often lose yourself in this maze of life, and in your hunger for connection, you can find company and self-discovery while reading Black works.
Traverse through sentiment, time, landscape, and movement in Toni Morrison and Alice Walker’s novels. Navigate Octavia Butler’s rich characters and their rich worlds. Reflect on a beauty in Blackness that Ta-Nahesi Coates reveals, not unlike that in the canon of James Baldwin’s works.
Hopscotch truth and being in Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes’ and Gwendolyn Brooks’ poems. Heal through the words of bell hooks/Gloria Naylor/Jesmyn Ward. Gorge yourself on the truth of Maya Angelou’s wisdom.
Feel the rhythm in the dialect of Eatonville’s residents in Zora Neale Hurston’s novels and short stories.
Explore the distances each character travels in Ntozake Shange and August Wilson’s plays. Connect history to reality in the works of Lorraine Hansberry. Chase truth in Ralph Ellison’s works. Seethe and rejoice with Nikki Giovanni.
Begin and read, read and read again. Read Black often.
A once-in-a-century pandemic provided context for pervasive racial injustice and disparity. While many of us knew and felt and lived this truth behind the veil, the double-consciousness of Blackness that W.E.B. DuBois wrote about more than a century ago, many had no idea. Until George Floyd’s last words became a rallying cry, the need to read Black often was not readily apparent.
This thing that we struggle through, seek meaning from, and try to build resilience and betterment out of can be understood through the prism of Black writers. Who else has been borne into the belly of a mother country, already hating them, still building pride and understanding, and searching for wisdom and meaning in their experiences? Unlocking that understanding is as simple as turning the page.
James Baldwin’s beautiful words indict and encourage. Ralph Ellison’s insight, “I’m invisible understand, simply because you refuse to see me,” resonated 70 years ago as much as it does now. Dr. DuBois’s concept of the veil still exists. The demons our forebears wrestled with still chase Black folks today, but their words serve as remedy to our aching souls.
They serve as a reminder that someone lived this and they hear you. They see your stretching, feel you, want you to win, and wrap you in love. Life’s matrix is rendered incomprehensible without the gift of Black literary works. We use them as guides, medicine, and starstuff for alchemy. They serve in good times and bad. Read Black often to resurrect and to remember.
So much of our experience in the USA doesn’t make intuitive sense. Reading Black often is a way to make sense of it and to realize you’re not alone trying to reconcile the idiosyncrasies 💜