“Now you cookin’ with gas”: Zora Neale Hurston and her legacy 1891—1960

It is often only posthumously that the significance of a woman’s legacy is revealed and accorded the canonical and cultural significance it deserves. This was certainly true of Hurston’s death, in 1960, quite literally stands as a metaphor to that sad tradition. Walker revealed the location of Hurston’s burial plot in the segregated section of a cemetery in the small Florida town of Fort Pierce in 1973, during the time she wrote her now-famous article for Ms. Magazine entitled “Looking for Zora.” Walker’s discovery not only revitalized long-overdue interest in Zora Neale Hurston’s work, the quest itself also established a pathway toward recognizing the many vestiges of Hurston’s intellectual significance – her writings, her anthropological work, her contributions to African-American culture and folklore, black self-determinism and feminism – and how the multiple iterations of her intellectualism now serves to inspire and define a black national consciousness more broadly.