Alice Walker gained interest in Zora Neale Hurston's work in 1970. At the time she was writing a story for her black literature class at Jackson State College which "required accurate material on voodoo practices among rural southern blacks of the thirties" (Walker 63). When she read several books and essays written by white anthropologists and folklorists, Walker was appalled by their analysis of black people who practiced voodoo. These scholars thought that blacks were inferior, peculiar, and very humorous. Walker did not agree, so she continued her research. When she finally discovered Hurston's book Mules and Men she used it as a reference for her story. The book was a very reliable source. She enjoyed it so much that she started reading other works by Hurston. Having read some critical reviews, Walker wanted to know what others thought about Hurston as a black feminist writer.
Alice Walker wrote that Hurston "immersed herself in her own culture" (Walker 63). Hurston was born in Eatonville, a little town in Florida. Three of her works, "Sweat," "The Gilded Six Bits," and Their Eyes Were Watching God, are set in the village of Eatonville where the houses were built on isolated roads. The characters lived far away from their neighbors and the nearest stores. White critics referred to the language that the characters used as "that comical nigger dialect." Hurston's narrators spoke in Standard English, the language most of the critics understood. While other black writers were writing about racism, Hurston "was the only writer in the 1920s and "30s from a southern background who evaluated her southern exposure. She realized the richness of her racial heritage, and built her fiction on it" (Walker 64).
When Hurston was thirteen years old her mother died. Her world dimmed overnight and her mother's sudden death disturbed her schooling. She was passed around from relative to relative; and after her father remarried he disowned her.