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perfect story, I think), The Radiance of the King , by Camara Laye, and Maru , by Bessie Head. These writers do not seem afraid of fantasy, of myth and mystery. Their work deepens one’s comprehension of life by going beyond the bounds of realism. They are like musicians: at one with their cultures and their historical subconscious.
    Flannery O’Connor has also influenced my work. To me, she is the best of the white southern writers, including Faulkner. For one thing, she practiced economy. She also knew that the question of race was really just the first question on a long list. This is hard for just about everybody to accept, we’ve been trying to answer it for so long.
    I did not read Cane until 1967, but it has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately , could not possibly exist without it. Cane and Their Eyes Were Watching God are probably my favorite books by black American writers. Jean Toomer has a very feminine sensibility (or phrased another way, he is both feminine and masculine in his perceptions), unlike most black male writers. He loved women.
    Like Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston was never afraid to let her characters be themselves, funny talk and all. She was incapable of being embarrassed by anything black people did and so was able to write about everything with freedom and fluency. My feeling is that Zora Neale Hurston is probably one of the most misunderstood, least appreciated
writers of this century. Which is a pity. She is great. A writer of courage, and incredible humor, with poetry in every line.
    When I started teaching my course in black women writers at Wellesley (the first one, I think, ever), I was worried that Zora’s use of black English of the twenties would throw some of the students off. It didn’t. They loved it. They said it was like reading Thomas Hardy, only better. In that same course I taught Nella Larsen, Frances Watkins Harper (poetry and novel), Dorothy West, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, etc. Also Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf—not because they were black, obviously, but because they were women and wrote, as the black women did, on the condition of humankind from the perspective of women. It is interesting to read Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own while reading the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, to read Larsen’s Quicksand along with The Awakening . The deep-throated voice of Sojourner Truth tends to drift across the room while you’re reading. If you’re not a feminist already, you become one.
     
    J.O.: Why do you think that the black woman writer has been so ignored in America? Does she have even more difficulty than the black male writer, who perhaps has just begun to gain recognition?
     
    A.W.: There are two reasons why the black woman writer is not taken as seriously as the black male writer. One is that she’s a woman. Critics seem unusually ill-equipped to intelligently discuss and analyze the works of black women. Generally, they do not even make the attempt; they prefer, rather, to talk about the lives of black women writers, not about what they write. And, since black women writers are not—it would seem—very likable—until recently they were the least willing worshippers of male supremacy—comments about them tend to be cruel.
    In Nathan Huggins’s very readable book, Harlem Renaissance , he hardly refers to Zora Neale Hurston’s work, except negatively. He quotes from Wallace Thurman’s novel, Infants of the Spring , at length, giving us the words of a character, “Sweetie Mae Carr,” who is allegedly based on Zora Neale Hurston. “Sweetie Mae” is a writer noted more “for her ribald wit and personal effervescence than for any actual literary work. She was a great favorite among those whites who went in for Negro prodigies.” Mr. Huggins goes on for several pages, never quoting Zora Neale Hurston herself, but rather the opinions of others about her
character. He does say that she was “a master of dialect,” but adds that