title, purslane, a common weed. Typical of all plants called weeds, purs-
lane (also rendered ‘‘pusley’’ in speech) appears suddenly wherever there
is sun and disturbed soil; it is opportunistic, prolific, ordinary, and there-
fore not welcome. Harris continued the botanical allusion in her second
book,Portulaca(published by Doubleday in ), a thinly disguised auto-
biographical novel in which a naive farm girl, Nancy, becomes a writer and
sophisticated town-dweller. Nancy had appeared with a slightly different,
countrified name inPurslane. Now, having become cultivated in the urban
and urbane sense, she has changed from weed to portulaca, which is a do-
mesticated ornamental plant, a cultivar derived from the wild purslane.
Readers and reviewers who were gardeners must have recognized the au-
thor’s meaning immediately.
tThen there was Zora Neale Hurston (–), a force of nature and
gardener extraordinaire. Zora was born in eastern Alabama, but her father,
a carpenter and Baptist preacher, found new roots in Eatonville, Florida, a
new, all-black town in Orange County, near Winter Park and Orlando. So
there she grew up, in a big house full of siblings. Outside were palms, pines,
and live oaks; a lake with alligators; exaltations of colorful birds; and lush
gardens by every house. Like Bernice Kelly, she rambled, played, and ab-
sorbed nature. And when she eavesdropped on elders telling stories, she
was surrounded again by nature and all its critters. Much later, in her
autobiography, she exclaimed, ‘‘It did not surprise me at all to hear that the
animals talked.’’ Observing nature’s own genius for recycling, too, she de-
clared—in the context of her doctrineless religious beliefs—‘‘I know that
nothing is destructible.’’^24
Zora’s childhood idyll ended in her teens, when her beloved mother died
and her father married a disapproving woman. Zora was sent away to school
in Jacksonville. But when her father’s support failed, she fled to Memphis to
live with an older sister, then—now and almost forever after on her own—
to Baltimore and, finally, New York. In her twenties but pretending to be
younger, she finished high school and began college. She studied at Bar-
nard under the tutelage of the great American anthropologist ‘‘Papa Franz’’
Boaz and graduated in . Now she would collect folkways, folksongs,
and folklore, not in the southern Pacific islands or Asia but in her own old
country, among southern black people, who remained rural and isolated—
‘‘primitive,’’ as described by the terminology of the white world at the time.
Zora needed a car and money to go collecting, however, and decades before
the appearance of foundations and agencies that supported research, this