This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month.

“Drenched in light,” is the title of a story that Zora Neale Hurston wrote about an imaginative young Black girls who danced in her magic, turned a tablecloth into a shawl and refused to dim her shine.  We could think of little Isis as a peek into Hurston’s own childhood or a precedent for “black girl magic.”

However, like Zora Neale Hurston, even as a little girl, Isis has a complex relationship to race, genius and sources of support.  In the story, Isis escapes her grandmother’s home, where her family wants her to stop playing and get to these chores, at the whim of some white people who happen to be driving down the road and enjoy her precocious antics, but of course cannot and will not sustain her life long-term the way her grandmother does.  Hurston herself dealt with the consequences of refusing Black respectability norms and the privileges and extractions that came with of white patronage. Hurston’s short story, and the story of her life have much to teach those of us who strain against perceived limitations that permeate our communities of accountability and/or navigate the constrictions and downright indignities of using funding or institutional from sources controlled by those with greater privilege than us to amplify our magic and do our urgent passionate brilliant work.  Sounding familiar yet?

Collectively, those of us drenched in the light of Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy can support each other to evolve with our communities and to generate sustainable resources for respectful creative action.  But I also want to think about the desire to be drenched in light more metaphorically.  As we know Zora Neale Hurston’s name was tarnished in multiple scandals, her relationship with her main patron was compromised and after doing incredible artistic and anthropological work in the United States and the Caribbean and writing one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty and obscurity.  Her grave was unmarked until Alice Walker, who chose Hurston as an ancestral inspiration, went to Florida to ensure her resting place would be known and remembered.  (In fact, this weekend Alice Walker, Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd and Hurston’s niece Lois Hurston Gaston are in Eatonton Florida celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts! How beautiful to know that in the end Hurston’s legacy is indeed illuminated and accessible to those most accountable to her work and vision!)

The fact that for years Hurston’s name was forgotten and that she died in poverty however is still painfully ironic.  Especially since Zora Neale Hurston wrote a famous letter to W.E.B. Du Bois (who she felt used the scandal around a false accusation of her to punish her for her defiance of the norms and agenda he espoused for Black creative practice) where she proposed the collective funding of a “cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead,” so that none of our Black geniuses would have the fate that she ultimately suffered.

In a society where institution-building is the way those with means live forever (think about the names carved in the buildings in your town and on university campuses, the surnames of the foundations and awards we may all be applying for etc.), how many of us see alliance with a powerful existing institution or even creation of an exciting new initiative as a way to keep our names in the light, not simply for reasons of ego, but for economic reasons.  As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha has written in her crucial book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, part of the way ableism impacts activists and artists is that we fear that if we can’t constantly produce and show up doing awesome things we will be forgotten.  And that forgetting means no grants, no job offers, no invitations to speak on campuses, no excited fans and interns, no community support.  And our supposedly community-accountable work can get off track when we believe (and for good reasons in the age of social media) that our livelihoods depend on building a personal brand.  Brilliance Remastered believes that Zora Neale Hurston’s phrase can educate us about the abundance of light, the collective warmth that we can offer to each other as communities in transformation.  And we believe that work takes strategies for collaboration, and inner work to unlearn internalized capitalism, tokenization and fear of irrelevance and action to build lives of sustainable inspiration.

What is one form of support that has warmed your heart when you least expected it (it can be a form of support you gave or received or both)?

Towards the warmth and light our communities need to grow, we offer this guided meditation chant inspired by Zora Neale Hurston.  May you know that the light of the ancestors, the living and those to come beams all through you.  You are loved.

And if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.

And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs