All eyes on "eyes"; Oprah's adaptation of Zora's classic novel, starring Halle as Janie, is a historical moment for the worlds of television and literature.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON, WHO WAS prone to prophetic dreams and visions, undoubtedly foresaw the resurrection of her life and work as black women writers and scholars such as Alice Walker and Cheryl Wall have called it forth.

"I've been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots" she wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. "Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands."

This March, the most powerful woman in entertainment--black or white--will incarnate Hurston through the television adaptation of her classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films production of the TV movie will air March 6, on ABC, as part of the network's Oprah Winfrey Presents series. The project stars Academy Award winner Halle Berry in the lead role of Janie Crawford. The teleplay is written by Suzan-Lori Parks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and directed by independent filmmaker Darnell Martin. Winfrey, Quincy Jones and Kate Forte, the president of Harpo Films, are executive producers.

Although Hurston died in poverty and relative obscurity 45 years ago, her posthumous success has raised her to seeming celebrity status. The Harlem Renaissance writer's literary legacy includes five novels, a book of folklore, an autobiography, and articles and short stories.

Mary Helen Washington, a University of Maryland professor who has written extensively about African American women authors, once described Hurston as "the most prolific Black woman writer in America."

It's Spelled P.O.W.E.R.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, which Henry Louis Gates Jr., famed Harvard University professor, calls "a modern masterpiece" tells the story of Janie Crawford, whose independent spirit and desire for her own fulfillment run contrary to society's expectations of a 1920s black woman.

There have been numerous attempts to produce an adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God for the screen, beginning with Warner Bros. Studios reading the galleys of the book two months prior to its publication in 1937. A six-decade delay is lengthy, even by Hollywood standards. Why is a screen version finally being made?

"There's only one reason it's happening," Gates says frankly. "Her initials are 'Oprah Winfrey.'" Gates, who is also chair of African and African American Studies at Harvard, thinks that, "It's wonderful that Oprah Winfrey loves the novel as much as many of us do."

The Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd, author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Scribner, 2003) and assistant professor of journalism at the University of Georgia, concurs. "What I admire about what Oprah is doing with her movies is that she's choosing books she loves," Boyd says, adding that, "at this point, the most powerful women in the industry are Oprah Winfrey and Halle Berry. I think those two women are the only two (who could) get Eyes made."

In addition to acquiring the film rights to Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1997, Winfrey has also produced screen versions of The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor; and The Wedding (that also starred Halle), which was written by Dorothy West, Hurston's Harlem Renaissance contemporary; and of Beloved, Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Even as a first-time actor, Winfrey brought an Academy Award-nominated performance to the screen as the character Sofia in the film version of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple.

Winfrey has also used her long-running talk show to "get this country reading again" through the 1996 inauguration of her book club. According to a Television Week magazine special report on Winfrey in April 2004, "all 46 books she had featured in her book club to date reached the best-seller list. Even a simple mention by Winfrey has the ability to influence book sales.

Boyd recalls Their Eyes Were Watching God leaping into the top 20 on the Amazon.com sales list, the day after Winfrey made a brief on-air reference to Hurston and the book during an interview with Halle Berry last spring. The novel ranks secure in Amazon's 2,000 range.

That ability to generate enthusiasm is a quality, Hurston herself possessed not only socially, but also academically and artistically.

"I have a Zora room in my house," admits Ruby Dee, the award-winning actor and Hurston enthusiast. That room reflects all of Hurston's interests, including a black doll collection, candles and mirrors reminiscent of voodoo studies, and even the orange-and-purple banner from the very first Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Eatonville, Florida. Dee, who portrays Janie's grandmother, Nanny, in Winfrey's television production, also wrote and starred in the stage piece Zora Is My Name, an adaptation of various excerpts of Hurston's writings that aired on PBS's American Playhouse in 1990.

A family perspective on Hurston's life is also available through the multimedia compilation Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Doubleday, October 2004), by her niece Lucy Anne Hurston, a professor of sociology at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. "[Zora] has been written about in a scholarly academic way" she says. "I wanted to do something different. Being a social scientist, I collected materials. It increases the field and breadth of what's available for study."

The Risk of Popularity

Zora Neale Hurston was skeptical about what the publishers and producers of her time would make her work available for mass study. In her essay, "What White Publishers Won't Print," published in Negro Digest in April 1950, she writes that, "Publishers and producers take the stand that they are not in the business to educate, but to make money. They will sponsor anything that they believe will sell." Hurston's critique can still apply in contemporary Hollywood.

Although the television adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God is generally considered a good thing, a step in the right direction, a way to expose Hurston and her work to an even broader audience, Boyd acknowledges the inherent risk. "Whenever you popularize a piece of literature, there's a risk that it gets farther and farther away from the actual literature,' she explains. "People think they have a grasp on the story because they've seen the movie."

Gates is confident that Winfrey's artistic integrity will ameliorate any risk of dilution or distortion for mass consumption (and profit) that is inherent in the world of television production. "Some people come to a great novel through it's filming, and some go to the film after reading the novel," he says. "It doesn't really matter. More people, overnight, will know about Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God because of Winfrey's telefilm.

Although, according to Dr. Renee Shea, a College Board consultant, Their Eyes Were Watching God is now required reading at high schools throughout the United States, and passages from the novel, as well as from Hurston's autobiography appear on the AP English exams. Hurston attended Howard University' from 1919 to 1924, earning an associate's degree in 1920, Hurston eventually transferred to Columbia University's Barnard College and graduated in 1928. A 2003 conference held on the campus, "Jumpin' at the Sun: Reassessing the Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston," attracted more than 1,500 scholars, students, writers, visual and performing artists and general public fans of Hurston's writing.

Last November 16, the College Board Online hosted an interview and discussion with Boyd titled "Writing the Life of Zora Neale Hurston. A Conversation with Biographer Valerie Boyd." Boyd recognizes that there is a need "to get more people in on this conversation." She particularly feels that "it's important that black people are leading this conversation."

A Chance to Play Janie

Perhaps, this is what makes Winfrey's determination and success at putting black women writers' stories on screen so important, and, in particular, the adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God setting a precedent. Boyd points out that so many black actresses have wanted the chance to portray the Janie Crawford character because she "is one of the most fully realized female characters in American literature."

Dee laments that, "I outgrew my turn" to play Janie because the novel, she recognizes, "was the beginning of a heightened consciousness of the stuff that women are made of, particularly black women. [Zora] was a feminist before the time of the feminist movement. She showed us how glorious love could be in a partnership, as opposed to a master servant relationship."

Dee did have the opportunity to become Janie and then some in her 2000 award-winning unabridged reading and audio recording of Their Eyes Were Watching God, which HarperAudio rereleased on CD in November, 2000. The television version is a jewel in the crown of Hurston's realm of influence. "What's great is she's fallen out of the black canon or the women's canon," recognizes Lucy Anne Hurston. "She's come from the fringes right into the mainstream. [Television] puts Zora in a contemporary medium."

The broadcast, says Gates, "will be great for all of us who teach African American Literature."

And all of us who read it. Dee imagines that, "If God spoke, I think he would use Zora's prose. She's a divine creature with words." To those of us anticipating the television movie, Dee paraphrases Zora's words and desires in the novel's final line: "She calls our souls to come and see."

Sharon D. Johnson is a screenwriter and journalist in Los Angeles.