EXCERPT from Marita Golden's Introduction to Gumbo

"Our mission is to tell the truth at whatever cost"
—Richard Wright

"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow damned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all."
—Zora Neale Hurston

The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation was started with seven hundred and fifty dollars and a dream. The money was mine. The dream belonged to every writer, everywhere, and it was the desire for recognition, support and community. The African American writer has of necessity, been visionary and witness, a channel for an individual sense of story even while recognizing that for Black people in America, writing is fighting. The most important and crucial lesson I have learned from other writers about the lonely, difficult, rewarding-beyond-measure, dangerous, amazing, misunderstood endeavor we undertake, is the lesson of courage. Courage not only in the face of a society and a world that often seeks to silence the complexity and beauty of the experience of African people, but courage in the face of the fear and narrowmindedness and orthodoxy that bedevils our own community. Writing IS fighting. But it is also building and loving and confirming and creating. It's a job. A lifestyle. An honorable and even sacred way of living in the world.

Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright exemplify all the contradictions, all the peaks, and the valleys of the writers life. They made their lives their epitaph, and their spirits remain vivid, combustible, energizing and inspiring, continually altering the world. The more I learn about the life of Richard Wright and every time I read or teach his autobiography Black Boy, I am rendered nearly mute with admiration for his guts, his bravery and the powerful things that words became when he used them. Every time I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, or just think about how Zora Neale Hurston strode through her life as though it was a gift not only for her but one she was bound to share, I know that I can face today and tomorrow. The world doesn't create many writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. The African American community in America did.

It was 1990, and I was a faculty member in the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Program at George Mason University. Like many MFA programs, ours received few applications from Black writers. As a member of a nationally respected graduate level creative wiring program, when I founded the Hurston/Wright Foundation, naturally I hoped that some of the winners of the Hurston/Wright Award for Black college fiction writers would apply to and enroll in the program at George Mason, where the foundation was housed, (in my office) for the first four years.

I was watching with enormous pride and excitement what can only be called the third major wave of literary activity after The Harlem Renaissance and The Black Arts Movement, and wanted to encourage emerging Black writers. I'd had a little success with a novel, Long Distance Life, and I wanted to "give back." So with seven hundred and fifty dollars I underwrote the first Hurston/Wright Award. With a cadre of several other "true believers" the foundation was incorporated and we set about changing the American literary landscape.

Because we wanted to give as much encouragement as possible, after the first year, we decided to choose three winners, not one. The support of HarperCollins, publishers, of Wright and Hurston, made this possible. In addition, from the very first award, the winners were invited to receive their prize at a ceremony at which they were recognized and honored by established writers. I wanted to create a ritual, a ceremony in which young Black writers were acknowledged and embraced by their peers, their elders, their fellow writers, on behalf of the Black community and the larger society. And so Nikki Giovanni, Maxine Clair, David Bradley, Colson Whitehead, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Gloria Naylor and others have spoken words of praise and encouragement to the winners. The prize winners check went into their bank account. The meaning and significance, the import of the awards ceremony went straight to the heart. I wanted to model encouragement of activities that still get short shrift in many pockets of our community—reading and writing. I wanted people to believe that it is as exciting for a young person to grow up to be a writer as it is for them to grow up to be Michael Jordan, or Mary J. Blige. I wanted to say to young Black writers that there was a group of people who believed in them, who would always "have their back."

I will never forget, how my father raised me on stories of Hannibal, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Cleopatra. These stories introduced me to larger than life heroes and heroines, and listening to my father, I subconsciously learned the tenants of good storytelling. My mother simply told me when I was fourteen, that one day I was going to write books. And because I was an obedient child I did. My parents were my first literary mentors. When I moved to New York City in the early seventies, Sidney Offit, who taught the first fiction class I ever took, poets Audre Lorde and June Jordan, novelist Paule Marshall, all gave me the charge to continue writing and to believe in myself. To this day I remember how much their words meant to me. The belief and support of this unofficial coalition shaped my sense of what was expected of me. I was to write, to fulfill my gifts. I was also expected to pass on the sense of possibility that I had received, to others.

The award came first and inspired the foundation. I named both for Hurston and Wright to bring together the spirits of two major American writers who simply couldn't stand each other's work. Wright thought that Hurston's stories of rural Black life, drenched in folk-lore, humor and emotional resilience, offered up characters who were buffoonish and played into the worst White stereotypes of Black life. Hurston felt that Wright, in his blistering condemnation of American racism, created Black characters devoid of humanity, dignity and pride.

Of course the tragedy of this particular literary spat is that only through a close and complete reading of both of these geniuses of the American south, do we get a clear picture of the African American experience and how it speaks to universal humanity.

When I started the foundation with Clyde McElvene, the bitter gender-based cultural battles over feminism and The Color Purple, movie and book, while past, still cast a pall over the Black writing community and echoed the ego/cultural battles of Hurston and Wright. Somehow we had survived a cultural/literary Battle of the Bulge, the kind that plagues intellectual/artistic communities.

Because of the significance of the foundation and the new award, I felt its name had to symbolize the best writing we'd created and invite Black male and female writers to "sit down together." As an inheritor of the literary legacy of Hurston and Wright, I felt myself "called" to unite them, to join their legacies and their artistic boldness. As an inheritor and protector of their legacy it was my job to go further,