THERE MUST BE THOUSANDS of people scattered around this country, each one of whom thinks only she or he knows how major and unique a writer Alice Walker is.
Even “writer” may be too distant a word. Traveling and listening over the years, I’ve noticed that readers of Alice Walker’s work tend to speak about her as a friend: someone who has rescued them from passivity or anger, someone who has taught them sensuality or self-respect, humor or redemption.
“I’ve been a much better person,” explained an angry young novelist to a roomful of his peers, “since I’ve been under the care and feeding of Alice Walker’s writing.” That was the only introduction he gave before Alice rose to read her work to a formidable audience—and he was right. By the time she had finished reading a moving short story about the death of an obscure, heroic, much-loved old man, the room had lost its lethal edge of competition and anger.
“While I’m reading her novels, I’m completely unaware of her style,” said a literary critic who is a writer herself. “It’s like a glass that contains whatever she wants you to see. Yet I can read a few paragraphs of hers and know immediately: That’s Alice.”
“She’s certainly not the only writer who sees personal cruelty and social injustice,” explained a woman who has grown old in the struggle for civil rights in general and black women’s dignity in particular. “But she’s the only writer I know who sees it all—what happens to black people here, to women everywhere; the outrages against history and the earth; everything. Yet she has also taught me that cruelty turns back on itself, which gives me faith to keep on fighting. She takes people who seem completely irredeemable, and then writes about their redemption. That gives me faith in change, and allows me to change, too. When I read something by Alice, I’m never quite the same person when I finish as I was when I began.”
I’ve heard many such comments over the past decade or so. Because people know I work for Ms. magazine where Alice Walker has published and been a contributing editor over the years, I’m the accidental recipient of personal testimonies wherever I go. When readers suspect that I might know Alice herself, the comments turn to questions: When is a new story coming out? Why aren’t her books in more bookstores? Interestingly, I don’t hear the usual celebrity question: What is Alice Walker really like? Readers feel they already know her personally from her writing. But the countless lives touched by her work form a small, secret, far-flung network that reaches almost every campus and town.
Of course, the existence of such readers, even if they are unknown to each other, means that Alice Walker is not really a secret writer. Her three novels, three books of poetry, and two collections of short stories have sold and been reviewed respectably. She has also edited a reader of the work of Zora Neale Hurston, the black folklorist and once forgotten writer of the 1930s, and written an introduction to Hurston’s biography. For young readers, she has published a biography of Langston Hughes. Her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble, won the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her second novel, Meridian, is often cited as the best novel of the civil rights movement, and taught as part of American history as well as literature courses. Revolutionary Petunias, her second book of poetry, won the Lillian Smith Award and was nominated for a National Book Award.
But her visibility as a major American talent has been obscured by a familiar bias: white male writers and the literature they create are the norm, so black women (and all women of color) are seen as doubly removed and “special.” Only lately has the work of novelists like Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou begun to be read beyond the restrictions implied when the adjectives black woman modify writer. (Only white men require no adjectives. Perhaps we should begin to speak of Norman Mailer et al as white male writers.) In fact, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Ntozake Shange, and other valuable current American writers are still missing the mainstream (and the mainstream is missing them) because of this bias against the universality of what they have to say. So are all those Zora Neale Hurstons and Nella Larsens of the past whose works have been allowed to go out of print and out of mind.
Even with Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and other new courses that ought to be called remedial studies, it’s going to take a while to change the academic and cultural belief that American readers will cross boundaries of country, time, and language to identify with Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, but can’t be expected to walk next door to meet Baldwin or Ellison; that women can and should identify with male leading characters, but there’s something perverse about expecting male readers to see life through a woman’s eyes. Of course, Alice Walker creates male protagonists, too, as she did in her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, but there she ran into a parallel bias. Yes, male artists can create women, but how can a woman writer have the authority to create a believable man?
As usual, people are ahead of their leaders, and readers are ahead of academics and critics. It’s true and important that a disproportionate number of people who seek out Alice Walker’s hard-to-find books are black women. After all, she comes at universality through the path of this experience and is even brave enough to write about such delicate themes as interracial sex in America or women’s oppression in Africa. (“Do you have any idea what she means to us?” a Spelman College student once asked me with tears in her eyes.) But women of many different backgrounds also feel personally connected to Alice Walker. The struggle to have work and minds of our own, our physical vulnerability, our debt to our mothers, the realities of childbirth, friendships among women, the destructiveness of loving men who treat us as less than themselves, sensuality, violence—all these are major themes of her fiction and poetry. In The Third Life of Grange Copeland, she exposed violence against women, years before we had begun to tell the truth in public about beatings by husbands and lovers. Her novel paid a critical price for being ahead of its time. In fact, she speaks the female experience more powerfully for being able to pursue and describe it across boundaries of race and class.
And she never gives in. No female character is ever allowed to disappear behind a sex role, any more than she would allow a black character to sink into a stereotype of race.
As the young novelist said, “I’ve become a much better person,” and that seems to be a frequent reaction of her readers who are black men. They comment on her loving use of black folk English, her understanding of what goes right and wrong between men and women, and her clear-eyed rendering of the rural black South in which many of them grew up.
It’s true that a disproportionate number of her negative reviews have been by black men. But those few seemed to be reviewing their own conviction that black men should have everything white men have had, including dominance over women, or reflecting their fear that black women’s truth telling would be misused by a racist society, or their alarm at her “lifestyle,” a euphemism for the fact that Alice was married for ten years to a white civil rights worker. Those who made that last point were usually critics, as Alice has written, “who were themselves frequently interracially married and who, moreover, hung on every word from Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, John A. Williams, and LeRoi Jones, to name a few, all of whom were at some time in their lives interracially connected. … I, a black woman, had dared to exercise the same prerogative as they.”
On the other hand, as Alice also points out, “At least those black reviewers take me seriously enough to get mad at. Most of the white ones just seem perplexed.”
As for white male readers, their first stumbling block seems to be a conviction that her books “aren’t written for us.” Once they read Alice’s work, however, they often cite an increased understanding of black rage or a new conviction that they themselves have been deprived of seeing the world whole; an irony considering the fears expressed by those black male critics. Susan Kirschner, an English professor who made a study of all the reviews of Meridian, concluded that the only critic to examine seriously the moral themes of the novel, not just respectfully describe its plot, was Greil Marcus, a white male reviewer writing in the New Yorker.
After all, who could fail to share the rage of the poet who wrote these lines:
i sit for hours staring at my own right hand
wondering if it would help me shoot the judge
who called us chimpanzees from behind his bench
and would it help pour sweet arsenic
into the governor’s coffeepot
or drop cyanide into yours.
you don’t have to tell me;
i understand these are the clichéd fantasies
of twenty-five million longings
that spring spontaneously to life
every generation.
it is hard for me to write
what everybody already knows;
still, it appears to me
i have pardoned the dead
enough.1
And who could resist this rebellious spirit:
In me there is a rage to defy
the order of the stars
despite their pretty patterns.
To see if Gods who hold forth now
on human thrones
can will away my lust
to dare
and press to order the anarchy
I would serve.2
And who would not long to say these freely given words:
I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.
To examine the dark mysteries
of the blood
with headless heed and
swirl, to know the rush of feelings
swift and flowing
as water.
The source appears to be
some inexhaustible
spring
within our twin and triple
selves;
the new face I turn up
to you
no one else on earth
has ever
seen.3
I’ve suspected for a long time that a convention of the network of Alice Walker readers might look surprisingly big and diverse. It might look something like the country.
Her readers may be about to find their numbers greatly increased. The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s third and latest novel, may be the land of literary event that transforms a small and intense reputation into a popular one.
For one thing, the storytelling style of The Color Purple is irresistible.
The speaker is Celie, the downest and outest of women. Because she must survive against impossible odds and has no one to talk to, she writes about her life with great honesty and down-home realism in the guise of letters to God. When she discovers that Nettie, her much-loved sister, is not dead after all but is living in Africa, she begins to write letters to Nettie instead. (Clearly, the author is telling us something about the origin of God—about when we need to invent an unseen powerful friend and when we don’t.) The point is that, whether anyone ever reads her words or not, Celie must confirm her own existence by writing what she thinks and feels. Like a Scheherazade whose enemy is everywhere but inside her own head, she is writing her story to save her life.
The result is a dead-honest, surprising, lyrical novel that is the successful culmination of Alice Walker’s longer and longer trips outside the safety of standard English and into the speech of her characters. Here, she takes the leap completely. There is no third-person narrator to distance the reader from feelings and events. We are inside Celie’s head, seeing through her eyes, experiencing her suffering and humor, and observing the world with a clarity that may only be possible from the bottom up.
Moreover, Celie turns out to be a no-nonsense storyteller with a gift for cramming a complicated turn of events and the essence of a person’s character into very few words. Like E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime, the rhythm of the telling adds to the momentum of suspense. What that book did with the pace of episodes and chapters, Celie does with the choice of a line, a phrase, a verb. It’s the fast, compressed land of novel that could be written only by a poet. If God were getting these letters, God would definitely be hooked.
With this novel, reviewers should understand why Alice Walker has always preferred to describe her characters’ speech as “black folk English” and not “dialect,” a word she feels has been used in a condescending, often racist way. When Celie talks or records the talk of her friends, there are no self-conscious apostrophes and contractions to assure us that the writer really knows what the proper spelling or grammar should be, and no quotation marks to keep us at our distance. Celie just puts words down the way they sound and feel. She literally writes her heart out. Pretty soon, the reader can’t imagine why anyone would bother to write any other way.
As always with Alice Walker’s work, a pleasure of The Color Purple is watching people redeem themselves and grow, or wither and turn inward. It depends on the ways they do or don’t work out the moral themes in their lives. As always, however, this morality is not a set of external dictates. It doesn’t matter if you love the people society says you shouldn’t love, or do or don’t have children with more than one of them. It doesn’t matter if you have money, go to church, or obey the law. What matters is that you are not cruel or wasteful; that you don’t keep the truth from those who need it, suppress someone’s will or talent, take more than you need from nature, or fail to use your own talent and will. It’s an organic morality of dignity, autonomy, nurturing, and balance.
What also matters is the acknowledgment that everybody, no matter how mean or passive they may seem on the outside, has redemptive possibilities on the inside.
Perhaps that’s why Alice puts us in Celie’s unlikely hands. As the teenage daughter in a dirt-poor southern family, she is hardworking, spiritless, silent, and not pretty. In the first few pages, she is. raped more than once by her mother’s husband, forced to leave the school she loves because she is pregnant, deprived even of the two children who are born of those rapes, and married off to a widower who uses her as a worker to take care of his many children. Her life seems hopeless, joyless, and over.
In fact, the main danger of this book is that its first few pages will cause readers to put it down in despair.
But her violent stepfather’s warning after he rapes her to “tell no one but God” is the event that starts her secret letters. She writes down everything, survives her husband’s routine beatings by becoming “like a tree,” and breaks the chain of cruelty by refusing to inflict her own suffering on another woman.
Celie saves herself through small feats of empathy and courage. She resists her husband, the widower Mr. ___, a man so stony and cruel that she refuses to write his name. (By the end of the novel, Mr. ___ has become a rather nice man named Albert. Such are Alice Walker’s powers of redemption.) Celie also is forced by him to nurse back to health Shug Avery, the woman her husband really loves; a local singer with the talent of Bessie Smith and the independence of Zora Neale Hurston. The love that Celie also comes to feel for Shug is returned in ways both sisterly and sensuous. When Celie discovers that Mr. ___ has intercepted all the letters from her sister Nettie in Africa, allowing her to think that Nettie is dead, Celie’s rage finally breaks through her passivity. She wants to kill him, and is only kept from doing so by Shug, who punishes him in more effective ways. Eventually Celie discovers that standing up to him, laughing at him, and just leaving him alone with his own sins for a while can cause him to change, too.
That’s only a sample of the plot. No Russian novel could outdo it for complicated family relationships, wide scope, and human coincidence. To these novelistic pleasures, add a sense of humor and an expectation of justice that are very American, plus succinct discussions about the existence of God, the politics of religion, and what’s going on in the daily news, all of which are pure Alice. (There are also many surprises that, as in life, seem inevitable in retrospect.) But whatever else is going on, the plot and its ideas keep unfolding with an economy of words that follows Picasso’s rule of art. Every line is necessary. Nothing could be deleted without changing everything.
Once Nettie’s letters have been recovered, they expand the story beyond the rural South to England and to Africa. Her personal, blow-by-blow account of what happens when a British rubber plantation buys the village where she lives as a missionary explains more about the intimate workings of colonialism than many academic tomes have accomplished. This chapter should be included in international economics courses for that reason. The author’s sense of moral balance and retribution is so contagious that we find ourselves wondering if England might not now be paying for its past colonial sins in an only slightly larger version of Celie’s husband paying for his cruelty to Celie.
By the end of the novel, we understand that this poor, nameless patch of land in the American South is really the world—and vice versa. Conversations between Celie and Shug have brought us theories of philosophy, ethics, and metaphysics, all in language of storytelling and the heart. The color purple, the most rare color in nature, has come to symbolize the miracle of human possibilities.
In the tradition of Gorky, Steinbeck, Dickens, Ernest Gaines, Hurston, Baldwin, Ousmane Sembene, Bessie Head, and many others, Alice Walker has written an empathetic novel about the poorest of the poor. Unlike most novels that expose the injustice of race and class, however, The Color Purple doesn’t treat male-female injustice as secondary or natural. And unlike many would-be feminist novels, it doesn’t exclude some women because of race or class. Equally unusual among books about the poor and powerless, it is not written about one group but for another, about the poor but for the middle class. It is populist, in the best sense. The people in it will read and enjoy it, too.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the country this novel couldn’t reach.
Alice and I are sitting in her quiet apartment in San Francisco, drinking tea and tiptoeing around the edges of an interview. We have shared work, parties, and marches for a decade, but the truth is that this is only the second or third time we have talked by ourselves. Like so many others, I think I know her from her work—but do I?
For instance, this is the first time I have been in a totally Alice-created environment. There is one small room with a large wooden work shelf where she writes; one bedroom that her twelve-year-old daughter Rebecca has painted with a motif of rainbows; Alice’s own bedroom filled almost wall-to-wall with an ornately carved, old-fashioned wooden bed; a kitchen stocked with fresh herbs and pottery made from Mississippi clay; and a living room with a big couch, plants, quilts, an old rocker, and many, many books.
In spite of the big city outside, Celie, Nettie, and Shug would all feel at home here. It’s warm, peaceful, and solid, with rural southern photographs and women’s art on the walls for Celie, many books and African prints for Nettie, and enough bright colors and sophistication to please the blues singer in Shug.
“The people in the book were willing to visit me,” explained Alice, “but only after I stopped interrupting with poetry readings and lectures and getting on some plane.” Even more than most novelists, she feels that her characters have a separate life, that they come alive in her head and walk around on their own. “They took a lot of quiet and attention. For a while when Rebecca first came back from staying with her father, I thought even she might be too much. Then she came home from school one day looking all beat up and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mom. You should see the other guy!’ Right away, Celie liked her.
“If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind. It makes you believe the world was created in silence.”
It’s a surprise to hear Alice sounding so uniquely like herself. In the three years since she moved away from New York where I live, her characters’ voices have become more familiar to me than her own. I realize that they are the parts—but Alice is the whole.
“Writing The Color Purple was writing in my first language,” explained Alice, the youngest of eight children from a sharecropping family in Georgia. “I had to do a lot of living to get the knowledge, but the writing itself was easy. There was a moment when I remember feeling real rage that black people or other people of color who have different patterns of speech can’t just routinely write in this natural, flowing way.”
She seems all of a piece with her past, yet no one else in her small town or big family had ever become a poet or a writer. It made me wonder if she, like many creative people, had ever felt so different that she believed she had been “found” or adopted.
“Sometimes I thought I’d gotten into the family by mistake,” she admits. “I always seemed to need more peace and quiet than anybody else. That’s very difficult when you’re living with ten people in three or four rooms. So I found what privacy I had by walking in the fields. We had to get our water from a spring, so that was a time to be alone, too. I spent so much time out of doors that when I started writing—and I found myself writing my first book of poems, Once, under a tree in Kenya—it seemed quite normal.
“I also had terrific teachers. When I was four and my mother had to go to work in the fields, my first-grade teacher let me start in her class. Right on through grammar school and high school and college there was one, sometimes even two, teachers who saved me from feeling alone; from worrying that the world I was stretching to find might not even exist.
“Of course, the schools were all black, and that gave us a feeling that they really belonged to us. If they needed desks or a stage, the men in the community built them. My parents gave what they called get-togethers to raise money for the grammar school when I was there. There was a lot of self-help and community.
“My teachers lent me books—Jane Eyre was my friend for a long time. Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard. My mother was working as a maid, so she was away from six-thirty in the morning until after dark. Because one sister was living up North and the other one had become a beautician, I was supposed to take care of the house and do the cooking. I was twelve, coming home to an empty house and cleaning and fixing dinner—for people who didn’t really appreciate the struggle it was to fix it. I missed my mother very much.”
Echoes of Alice’s stories and characters are all there. Like Celie, she began to write as a way of surviving.
“From the time I was eight, I kept a notebook. I found it lately and I was surprised—they were horrible poems, but they were poems. There’s even a preface that thanks all the people who were forced to hear this material—my mother, my teacher, my blind Uncle Frank.”
Like the first-person voice in many of her poems and stories, she had a mother whose courage and wisdom she counted on. She still does. Nearly seventy and still living in the same small town in Georgia, her mother only recently became too weak to keep working. Alice visits her often. She counts the two gifts her mother once scrimped and saved to give her, a suitcase and a typewriter, as clear permission to adventure and to work. Her father, who died nine years ago, was a troubled and complicated man to whom she was very close as a child, but who didn’t understand the woman she became.
In her essay, “My Father’s Country Is the Poor,” she writes about this separation that neither of them wanted, a distance between parent and child that extreme poverty and sacrifices for the progress’ of the next generation often create.
Like Meridian, the central character of her second novel, she won a scholarship and went away to Spelman, a black women’s college in Atlanta. For Alice, that opportunity was partly an ironic result of a childhood accident that shadowed her life and left her “handicapped.”
At the age of eight, while playing with her older brothers, she was wounded by a shot from one of their BB guns. It blinded her right eye. A local doctor predicted that she would eventually lose the sight in her other eye as well, and though he was proved wrong, she lived with that fear for many years.
She also lived with scar tissue that grew over the injured eye like a giant cataract. “I used to pray every night that I would wake up and somehow it would be gone,” she remembers. “I couldn’t look at people directly because I thought I was ugly. Flannery O’Connor says that a writer has to be able to stare, to see everything that’s going on. I never looked up.
“Then when I was fourteen, I visited my brother Bill to take care of his children in the summer. He took me to a hospital where they removed most of the scar tissue—and I was a changed person.
“I promptly went home, scooped up the best-looking guy, and by the time I graduated from high school, I was valedictorian, voted ‘Most Popular,’ and crowned queen!”
She is laughing at herself, but much of the fear of those earlier years is still there. Alice has just explained one of the few mysteries about herself that her writing does not: why she never seems to know that she is beautiful.
Perhaps those childhood years also explain why she can write from inside the head of someone like Celie, someone society has discarded as poor, black, and ugly besides.
“I used to have a dream in which there was a bus coming down the road,” Alice said thoughtfully, “and the bus driver would get out where I was waiting with my bag. He would hold his hand out for the fare—and I would put an eye in it.
“Of course, that’s really true. If I had not lost the sight of one eye permanently, I wouldn’t have qualified for the half scholarship and free textbooks that the Georgia Department of Rehabilitation gives people who are ‘handicapped.’ The other half of my tuition came from Spelman because of my excellent high-school grades, emphatic recommendations from my principal and teachers, and the fact that I was high-school valedictorian—and not too black. A high school teacher of mine swears she got into Spelman because her folks were too poor to attach a photograph to her application. But in a literal sense, it cost an eye to get out.”
And so she went off to Spelman as the beginning of a long journey, then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York on another scholarship, then traveled to Africa and back like Nettie, and worked in the civil rights movement in Mississippi like Meridian. She was writing all the while.
There is another mystery of the visible Alice that only her writing explains. Sitting across from me now, she is soft-spoken, gentle, reticent. I have seen her sit for hours without speaking in a meeting about whose subject I know she cares—“an unlikely warrior,” as one writer called her. Yet the rage, retribution, and imaginings of righteous murders that are in her writing are also in her. You just have to know her long enough to see the anger flash.
I remember listening to Alice after she had met with editors from the New York Times Magazine to discuss an article they had assigned her on the New South. They asked for a rewrite because she had not included “enough white people” in her essay. Having made this mistake, they compounded it by noting that, after all, she had been “married to a white man.”
“He’s not a group,” she told them fiercely. “He’s Mel—a person.”
She later fired off a letter to the unfortunate editors. It referred to her seven years in Mississippi facing southern sheriffs with hoses and dogs, and made clear that on the whole, compared to their lunch meeting, she preferred the dogs.
“It’s true that I fantasize revenge for injustices,” she said, smiling at my memory of her letter’s fierceness, and not regretting it one bit. “I imagine how wonderful it must feel to kill the white man who oppresses you. My dream used to be sitting in some racist politician’s lap with a hand grenade and blowing us both up.”
It’s significant that, even in her most murderous rages, she can’t imagine killing another human being without killing herself. Like the title figures in both Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland, she can support murder of an enemy for righteous reasons, but only at the price of one righteous life. That sense of moral balance is the restraint on her desire for revenge.
“Lately,” she added, “I’ve come to believe that you have some help when you fight. If a country or person oppresses folks, it or he will pay for it. That happens more often than not. Years after the Indians died on the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson, who had been president at the time, had to be wrapped like a mummy to keep the flesh on his bones.
“I think black people’s absence from the antinuclear movement has to do with that belief in justice, too. Since white men lived by raping the earth and then by threatening us all with the bomb—why not let them die by it? On the other hand, we don’t want to die with them. That’s why we’re now beginning to work against nuclear war, too.”
This lust for justice comes from a woman whose childhood was filled with stories of past lynchings, and who later felt even those stories had been incomplete. (“When young black girls were raped and killed and dumped in the river,” she explains, “no one said they were lynched. But they were.”) At twelve, the same little white girls who had been her daily playmates were suddenly supposed to be called “Miss”—a change she refused to make. That strength and self-respect were created in a small community where almost everyone—ministers, teachers, neighbors—was black. White adults were seen not as individuals, but as a group of distant adversaries.
Yet when she was a college student, she refused the honor and badly needed money of a major prize from Spelman because she felt its black president had fired Howard Zinn, a white professor, for being too leftwing, too involved in the civil rights movement, too willing to make his students laugh, too “incorrect.”
After Sarah Lawrence, where she found support for her writing but the alienation of being in an almost totally white society for the first time, she spent a summer traveling in Africa on a fellowship, looking for a spiritual home. But she was often seen more as a peculiar kind of American than as a returning daughter. She also felt the suffering of women and the condescension of many men.
An unpublished short story from that period, “The Suicide of an American Girl,” describes the meeting of a young black American and an African student. Because he is attracted and angered by her independence, he rapes her. As a land of chosen sacrifice to his need for power, the girl doesn’t resist. But after he is gone, she turns on the gas and quietly waits for death. It’s a conflict of wills and values that Alice would no longer resolve by giving up. In her most recent book of poetry, Goodnight Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning, as well as in The Color Purple, she writes about the fate of specific African women with irony and anger. “We’re going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people—especially black women,” she now says firmly. “We’ve been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here.”
In Mississippi in the late 1960s, Alice began to write about the life stories of ordinary black women in the South; women like her own mother. While registering voters and working for welfare rights, she collected the folklore stories they told, and recorded the details of their days. It was during this research that she discovered the work of Zora Neale Hurston, a relief from white writers who often recorded black folklore with condescension. Hurston’s work became an important influence in Alice’s life. So did her effort to bring that work back into print and public attention. She sought out the obscure, segregated cemetery where Hurston had been buried after dying in poverty in a welfare home, and bought a tombstone to honor her unmarked grave.
It was during those Mississippi years that she met Mel Leventhal, the civil rights lawyer who was her husband for ten years, and who is the father with whom Rebecca now spends half her time. They remain friends in spite of divorce.
“Mel and I had been living together perfectly happily for almost a year,” she explains, “but we could see that, given the history, we couldn’t go off into the world and do political work unless we were married. We could challenge the laws against intermarriage at the same time, in addition to which, we really loved each other. Love, politics, work—at was a mighty coming together.
“He was also the first person who consistently supported me in my struggle to write. Whenever we moved, the first thing he did was to fix a place for me to work. He might be astonished and sometimes horrified at what came out, but he was always right there.”
Though she says she can’t imagine marrying again, she has been living companionably for several years with Robert Allen, a writer and an editor of The Black Scholar. They keep separate apartments but share their weekends in the country.
Once The Color Purple was sent into the world, Alice began traveling occasionally for poetry readings and lectures. As a Distinguished Writer in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Berkeley, she taught a course, The Inner Life—Visions of the Spirit, and she also taught creative writing for a semester at Brandeis University. As a teacher, critic, and editor, she introduces American students and readers to such important African authors as Bessie Head and Ama Ata Aidoo. She insists that black writers be included in Women’s Studies courses, and that Black Studies not neglect women.
But teaching and poetry readings are mainly ways of financing another long period of silence. (“Everything,” she says, “comes out of silence.”) She is looking forward to another novel.
In the meantime, she has collected her essays for the book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: A Collection of Womanist Prose. (She prefers “womanist” to “feminist” on the grounds that it sounds stronger and more inclusive.) She is also as politically active as a solitary person who dislikes meetings can be. With novelist Tillie Olsen, Alice co-sponsored a San Francisco meeting of the Women’s Party for Survival, a protest against nuclear weapons. This concern for the fragility of our future is a theme of her new poems.
“Books are by-products of our lives,” she explains. “Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?”
All this talk about activism suddenly reminds me of my trip with Alice to Atlanta in the early 1970s, for a march to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday. I lost Alice in the crowded streets but found a group of Spelman students who had been searching for her. They knew every word of her work and had come to Atlanta in the hope of meeting her. They had even gone to her childhood home in Georgia, just as Alice had sought out the birthplace of Zora Neale Hurston.
The parallel had given me a chill then, when Alice’s work was less well known. Even now, the thought wouldn’t disappear: Could Alice Walker and her work be lost, too? Like Hurston, she had been introduced to us when her productive years happened to coincide with a movement for social justice, but what would happen when that coincidence was gone? Was Ralph Ellison right in saying that Americans reject serious novels until their time has passed and they have lost their moral cutting edge?
Perhaps we need to campaign just as energetically to get and keep good books in print as to get and keep good leaders in power. If critics and academics have too much invested in safer and more distant literary pantheons, we will have to create our own networks and publishing houses, as many feminists and others are now doing, as well as pressuring to change those that already exist.
If so, I suggest one populist criterion for what is published: Could we trust a particular writer to understand the complexities and realities of our own lives? Can she or he see us clearly, without bias for or against us, and with a compassionate heart?
I think we can trust Alice Walker to know us. And we can change for the better if we know her.
—1982
1. “January 10, 1973,” Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See you in the Morning (New York: Dial, 1979).
2. “Rage,” Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973).
3. “New Face,” Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973).
In 1983, The Color Purple won the American Book Award, and became the first novel by a black woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize. It has been translated on every continent, introducing the speech of country people to some foreign readers for the first time. In 1985, it was made into a classic movie, a process that is the subject of her latest book, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult. Since this essay, she has also created two novels, a book and film on female genital mutilation, more essays, and many poems. I hope this is the answer to the question above: Alice Walker’s work cannot be lost to the world.
—1995