Ink Fails: For Valerie J. Boyd

The printer didn't work.

Valerie J. Boyd was getting ready to give her first public talk on Wrapped in Rainbows, her brand-new biography of the great Zora Neale Hurston at Hurston's Alma Mater, Barnard College in the City of New York. This was a major event coordinated by Monica Miller celebrating the 75th anniversary of Hurston at Barnard. Valerie's shero Alice Walker was the keynote speaker at this homecoming festival to Hurston's brilliance. So Valerie had carefully typed out the key insights about Hurston's life she wanted to share with the hundreds of people who had gathered for the event.

And the stupid printer wouldn't work.

And so, she had no choice. She took a deep breath and spoke directly from her heart. She spoke about how she felt Zora Neale Hurston's ancestral collaboration over the years that she researched and wrote Wrapped in Rainbows. She talked about how there are some things you can't explain away with the word "coincidence." She talked about love, how she and Zora Neale Hurston had actually cultivated a loving relationship across the barrier of death and generations. How she felt chosen. How sometimes you just have to listen and surrender. Later she would wonder if Zora even played a role in blocking the inner workings of the printer that day. On the stage in Barnard Hall, a building where Zora herself once sat listening as a student, Valerie J. Boyd let go and spoke from her heart.

Directly into mine.

I had never heard anyone speak in mixed company about ghosts. I was looking at a black women speaking with complete conviction, passion and rigor about what I felt but didn't have words for yet: ancestral assignment.

It wasn't until I was at Emory, stewarding the archival papers of my dear mentor Cheryll Greene and saw Valerie in the temporary reading room researchers had to use while the Manuscript and Rare Book Library got renovated that I was able to say thank you. Of course I was too nervous to interrupt her so it took days. She was reading and re-reading Alice Walker's journals working on the forthcoming Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker. When I finally introduced myself she asked how long I would be in Atlanta and if we could go to lunch. Her whole manner taught me that I should never have been nervous. So many can testify to her generous and eager mentorship as one of her favorite forms of creative practice, especially the graduates of the program in Narrative Nonfiction Valerie created at UGA.

And so of course I said yes to every opportunity to collaborate including that forthcoming collection of essays and the recent issue of Bitter Southerner. And of course I reached out to her for advice when I was writing the book proposal for my very first biography, the forthcoming Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. At the beginning of the pandemic we talked for hours over zoom and telephone. She offered advice on practical narrative concerns (like chronology and differentiation) but most of all she encouraged me over and over again to trust myself. "Because Audre trusts you," she insisted.

I have so many more questions Valerie. I was supposed to send you this most recent draft. I was looking forward to the day I could put the hardcover book in your hands and hug you and thank you again. You didn't see what I wrote about you in the acknowledgements. I love you so much. And I know that you know. I appreciate you letting me gush out my gratitude every time we spoke. And I hear you even now. You are telling me to hang the art on my walls. You are telling me to use a more active verb. I hear you still saying the first thing I ever heard you say. Death is no barrier to guidance and love. And still. Valerie. And still.

I love you in the place of surrender. I love you in the place we can't describe. I love you in the place where machines break and ink fails and we have no choice but to trust our hearts.