In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1983. The collection is primarily famous for two things: coining the term “womanist” (Walker’s alternative to “feminist,” specifically rooted in Black women’s experience and traditions) and recovering Zora Neale Hurston from decades of neglect.
The title essay is Walker’s most influential piece of criticism. She asks: what happened to the creative genius of Black women who were born into slavery and its aftermath? If a Phillis Wheatley had been born in 1800 instead of 1753, or if the anonymous Black women who created the spirituals had had access to paint, canvas, and the freedom to use them — what would they have made? Walker’s answer is that Black women’s creativity found expression in the forms available to them: quilting, gardening, storytelling, cooking, the arrangement of domestic space. Walker’s own mother’s garden — a yard of dazzling flowers cultivated in the margins of sharecropping labor — becomes the emblem of this suppressed creativity.
The essay on Hurston, “Looking for Zora,” describes Walker’s 1973 journey to Eatonville, Florida, to find and mark Hurston’s unmarked grave. Hurston — author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, trained anthropologist, central figure of the Harlem Renaissance — had died in poverty in 1960, was buried in a segregated cemetery, and had been virtually forgotten by the literary establishment. Walker’s pilgrimage and subsequent championing of Hurston’s work were directly responsible for the Hurston revival that made Their Eyes Were Watching God a canonical American novel.
Collecting In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1983): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
- Signed: $150–$400