Rootedness—The History of Private Life
I could blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a
profound rootedness [emphasis added] in the real world
at the same time with neither taking precedence over
the other. It is indicative of the cosmology, the way in
which Black people looked at the world. We are very
practical people, very down-to-earth, even shrewd peo-
ple. But within that practicality we also accepted what I
suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is
another way of knowing things. But to blend those two
worlds together at the same time was enhancing, not
limiting. And some of those things were “discredited
knowledge” that Black people had; discredited only
because Black people were discredited therefore what
they knew was “discredited.” And also because the press
toward upward social mobility would mean to get as far
away from that kind of knowledge as possible.—Toni Morrison, “Rootedness:
The Ancestor as Foundation”1
ZORA NEALE HURSTON is a much-misunderstood historical figure. She faithfully chronicled black life—most notably the lives of working- and lower-class black women and men, especially in the rural South, but her very role as chronicler has been used to denounce her as a traitor to her race. Although her works stand among the richest documentary sources on black life, labor, and culture in the early twentieth-century South, most
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