For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Ella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Boomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well-read at all.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose