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196 410 Afterwordthe end of the Korean War, when she was the dominant blackwoman writer in the United States. The dark obscurity into whichher career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent politicalstances rather than any deficiency of craft or vision. Virtuallyignored after the early fifties, even by the Black Arts movement inthe sixties, an otherwise noisy and intense spell of black image- andmyth-making that rescued so many black writers from remainderedoblivion, Hurston embodied a more or less harmonious butnevertheless problematic unity of opposites. It is this complexitythat refuses to lend itself to the glib categories of "radical" or "conservative,""black" or "Negro," "revolutionary" or "UncleTom"—categories of little use in literary criticism. It is this samecomplexity, embodied in her fiction, that, until Alice Walker publishedher important essay ("In Search of Zora Neale Hurston") inMs. magazine in 1975, had made Hurston's place in black literaryhistory an ambiguous one at best.The rediscovery of Afro-American writers has usually turnedon larger political criteria, of which the writer's work is supposedlya mere reflection. The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscoveryof Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated itprimarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry. Alice Walker'smoving essay recounts her attempts to find Hurston's unmarkedgrave in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemeteryin Fort Pierce, Florida. Hurston became a metaphor for the blackwoman writer's search for tradition. The craft of Alice Walker,Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara bears, inmarkedly different ways, strong affinities with Hurston's. Theirattention to Hurston signifies a novel sophistication in black literature:they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinshipinherent in such relations but because she used black vernacularspeech and rituals, in ways subtle and various, to chart the comingto consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other