Zora Neale Hurston appears frequently in these essays, both as subject and side note, and is clearly a formative figure for Walker. Walker admires her not only for her fiction writing—she considers her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, to be an underrated 20th century classic—but for her work as an anthropologist and her independent and irreverent spirit. Walker explains that she first encountered her writing while working on a short story that involved voodoo practitioners; the existing studies that she found, mostly by white men, all struck her as simplistic and condescending. Only Hurston’s work seemed to treat the subject with both the respect and the fondness that it deserved.

Hurston is important to Walker as a role model, but also for her connection to the South (she grew up in an all-black community in Eatonville, Florida, the subject of much of her writing). Much as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also did for Walker, Hurston’s writing served to return the South to her. Walker writes of showing Hurston’s work to exiled Southern relatives in Boston, and how it caused them to recognize themselves and their ancestors:

For what Zora’s work did was this: it gave them back all the stories they had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed (told to us years ago by our parents and grandparents—not one of whom could not tell a story to make you weep, or laugh) and showed how marvelous, indeed priceless, they were (85).