on a road to Zora

Painted on the wall of Third Street Stuff and Coffee, my favorite coffee shop in Lexington, is this Zora Neale Hurston quote: “She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.”

By the time I visited Third Street for the first time, right at the start of my junior year of college, I had read Their Eyes Were Watching God twice. That day, I sipped my Seabiscuit (an almond and vanilla latte) and reviewed some articles for the Kentucky Kernel. A column written by Sarah Ladd taught me, for the first time, about Alice Dunnigan.

It took me a while, I think, to draw connections between Alice and Zora. At the time, I had already read Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” but I don’t think I had yet read “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” an essay that is incredibly important to me and to my passion for Alice Dunnigan. If you haven’t read it, you should do so here.

This year, I’ve expanded my Zora reading—I read and loved Jonah’s Gourd Vine in the spring, and this week I read her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, which confirmed again that she was a genius. On the very first page of Maya Angelou’s introduction, I noted something that was relevant to my Alice book, then it happened again and again throughout Zora’s prose.

“Booker T. Washington said once that you must not judge a man by the heights to which he has risen, but by the depths from which he came,” Zora wrote, and I was certain that Alice had shared the same quote in her autobiography.

So I just opened my copy of Alone atop the Hilltop (the abridged version of her autobiography), which is never far from reach, and flipped through the opening pages. I thought I remembered that Alice used the quote in one of the chapters about her early life.

I was right. Chapter two is titled, “The Family Tree and Its Bittersweet Fruit,” and it begins: “Frederick Douglass once said, ‘Do not judge me by the heights to which I have risen, but by the depths from which I have come.’”

Oh no, I thought. Who actually said it?

I Googled it; it’s a Frederick Douglass quote. No doubt it’s something that Washington repeated, though, and Zora didn’t have Google as a research tool. Another quote I loved from her autobiography: “Research is a formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

This week, a few days after I finished Dust Tracks on a Road, we traveled to Florida, Zora’s home state. She was born in 1891 and was raised mostly in Eatonville, one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States. Overcoming familial and financial challenges to further her education, Zora eventually became a renowned anthropologist and writer. But by the time of her death in 1959, she was largely unknown and alone. What Alice Walker was searching for in her essay is Zora Neale Hurston’s grave; because Zora died without the necessary funds, she was buried in an unmarked grave, in a segregated cemetery. Through dedicated work by Alice Walker and many others, Zora Neale Hurston has become known again.

Sound familiar?

“It is never too late,” wrote Dr. Nancy Dawson in a piece about Alice Dunnigan, “to reclaim history’s heroines lost between the pages of books, coffee-stained newspapers and timeworn relics.”

During our visit to Jacksonville, Florida, this week, my husband and I went to Chamblin’s, a massive store with used and new books. Biographies and memoirs stretched along the outside wall of the entire first floor. I checked first to see if Alice Dunnigan’s autobiography was there; it wasn’t. I found many good books to buy, some relevant to my Alice book—books about race in the south, about journalists—and some purely for fun.

I was looking for Zora, too. I had checked her memoir out from the library, and since I planned to use it for reference, I wanted to buy my own copy and transfer over my little sticky notes. I searched the autobiography section and the African American studies section, too, with no luck.  

Hopefully, the memoir had been on those shelves before, and someone else had already taken Zora home.