The marker Alice Walker erected at Zora's grave in Eatonville, FL, in 1973 says:

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

1901 1960

Novelist Folklorist

GENIUS OF THE SOUTH

Now there was a woman who worked. waitress, manicurist, librettist, lecturer, secretary/companion, producer, scenarist, domestic, novelist, drama coach, file clerk, storyist, traveloguist, playwright, cook. Fun loving and bodacious, Zora was not playing.

"I won't deny myself," she said in answer to various camp spokesmen (yeh, men) running out the party lines - CP, Black mandarin class, ("Negrotarians and the Astorperious set"), race protestors and Bohemians (the litterati and the "niggerati"), ramrod anthropologists - not to mention the stifling political and cultural (un)orthodoxies of the dominant class. The woman just would not behave. She had a mision. Knew what her work in this world was. Pursued it.

-from Forward Remarks by Toni Cade Bambara
'The Santified Church - The folkore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston
Atlanta, GA 08/10/1981
ISBN 1-56924-730-7

[The more I read about Zora Neale Hurston, the more I want to read her works]