Walker, Alice

By: Nellie Y. McKay

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Walker, Alice

Sex:  Female

Born:  Eatonton, Georgia, United States
9 February 1944

Activity/Profession:  Fiction Writer, Civil Rights Activist, Educator, Poet, Essayist

(b. 9 February 1944),
writer.

In the 1970s, Alice Walker was among the group of writers who irrevocably ended the two hundred years of intellectual indifference with which Americans as a whole viewed black women writers. Poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, and essayist, Walker was only twenty-six years old when her stunning debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, appeared in 1970, alongside first major works by such subsequent luminaries as Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison. In addition to contributing to that dramatic moment in the nation's history, Walker remained one of the most prolific and versatile within the group. Over three decades, she produced seven novels, three collections of short stories, eight volumes of poetry, seven of essays, three children's books, an anthology of selected works by Zora Neale Hurston, and a documentary on genital cutting in African cultures. With offers of “more honorary degrees than she has the energy to accept” and major prizes that include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a National Book Award, there is no doubt of her standing among America's great writers.

Alice Walker, the eighth and youngest child of sharecroppers Minnie and Willie Lee Walker, was born and grew up in Eatonton, Georgia. The Walkers were not only very poor but also forced to live under white economic domination and the constant threat of racial violence. Walker was eight years old when an unfortunate accident left her partially blind and insecure about her physical appearance. Once vivacious, she became reclusive and, as often happens to children psychologically or physically wounded at an early age, she retreated into reading and writing, composing her first poetry in that period. In spite of her self-doubts, she graduated from high school as valedictorian and prom queen of her class.

Alice Walker, poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, and essayist, photographed c. 1988. Her career has been especially notable for her commitment to writing about the lives and experiences of African American women.

Austin/Thompson Collection, by permission of University of Pennsylvania, Schoenberg Center

view larger image

In 1961, Walker's high school successes opened the doors of Atlanta's Spelman College, one of the nation's elite institutions of higher education for young African American women. At that time, Atlanta was a hotbed of civil rights activities, and she, succumbing to the seductive energy the movement generated among her friends, participated in marches and demonstrations for black freedom and equality. But while social activist professors on the faculty like Howard Zinn awakened some of the women at Spelman to the harsh realities of a racialized world, school authorities with opposing ideas on the “proper” training of Spelman's students enforced different standards of decorum on their impressionable youth. Feeling stifled in that environment, Walker transferred at the end of her sophomore year, scholarship in hand, to exclusive and less-restrictive Sarah Lawrence College for women in Bronxville, New York.

At Sarah Lawrence, Walker found new opportunities to enhance her intellectual growth. Between her junior and senior years, two experiences left their special marks on her: a visit to Uganda and an unwanted pregnancy. The trauma the latter caused led her to contemplate suicide, though she never acted on those thoughts. During her recovery from the abortion she chose instead, she wrote furiously. Later, she showed that work to a teacher, Muriel Ruykeyser, a well-known poet, who, impressed with Walker's talent, persuaded Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich to publish her first collection of verse, Once, in 1968.

Graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, Walker returned to the South to participate in civil rights activities in Mississippi. There, she met the civil rights lawyer, Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, and the two were married in New York in 1967. That year, she published her first essay, “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It,” and her first short story, “To Hell with Dying.” For the next seven years, Walker and her husband lived in Jackson, Mississippi, where she worked with Head Start programs, collected oral histories of black women, used a National Endowment for the Humanities grant (1968) to complete her first novel, gave birth to a daughter, Rebecca (1969), was writer-in-residence at Jackson State University (1969–1970) and at Tougaloo College (1970–1971), learned of Zora Neale Hurston from the black writer Margaret Walker, and soon became the standard-bearer in the rediscovery of Hurston.

Wherever she was in the South, Walker was in close contact with the poorest and least educated African Americans. As she developed as a writer, she began to ponder the connections between poverty and cruelty, racism and gender oppression, in the lives of black sharecropping families. In The Third Life of Grange Copeland, she explored the complexities in these connections and confronted the question of how to change them in an effort to create a more wholesome environment for those who suffered their pains. Divided into three sections, the first part of the novel reveals the bleakness in the life of Grange Copeland that leads him to abuse his wife and children. In the second part of the story, Grange's son, Brownfield, repeats that negative pattern, going one step further by murdering his wife. But in the third part of the story, Grange Copeland realizes that hating white people will not bring him redemption and turns to seek wholeness in the acts of loving and caring for his granddaughter, his black heritage, and the land.

During the 1970s, a productive and widely acclaimed Alice Walker was constantly in the American literary spotlight. In 1971, she left the South for Massachusetts with a two-year fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute. While there, she also lectured at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She published her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, and her second book of poems, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems in 1973. Revolutionary Petunias received the Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council. In August 1973, in an action designed to symbolically recover a precursor into the canon, Walker placed a gravestone on the spot in Florida where she believed Zora Neale Hurston was buried. In 1974, In Love and Trouble was nominated for the National Book Award and received a Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Walker's children's biography, Langston Hughes, An American Poet (1974), won the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award that year, and two stories from In Love and Trouble, “Everyday Use” and “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,” appeared in Best American Short Stories.

“Everyday Use” holds a special place of importance in Walker's oeuvre as one of the earliest of her writings in which she places black women at the center of their narratives and allows them to speak from their own points of view. However, her intentions went far beyond simply giving voice to black women. More significantly, it fulfilled her need to identify an articulated heritage of creativity in their lives that had been passed down from one generation to another and had sustained them over time. At this point in her career, she identified three kinds of black women she saw missing from black literature: those who were exploited physically and emotionally to the point of being driven into madness; those who suffered psychological violence and were alienated from their culture; and those who despite oppression achieved some wholeness and participated in creating non-oppressive spaces for themselves and others. As she looked around her, Walker realized that quilting was the medium in which poor black women had best demonstrated their skills and creativity over generations.

Set in the civil rights era, “Everyday Use” is the story of three generations of southern African American women: a grandmother already dead but still a living presence, the mother in the story, and her two daughters. One young woman leaves home for the city and becomes a success in the cosmopolitan world, while the other daughter, physically disabled, remains home and claims her space with family and friends. Although the successful daughter denigrates her sister and the rest of the family for their backwardness, she returns to collect what she can from the newly in vogue artifacts of her heritage: rough benches made by her father, her grandmother's quilt, her uncle's handmade butter churn, and other items of everyday use that had passed down through the generations. These the sophisticated daughter identifies as black art worthy of display. She even chastises her family for not recognizing the aesthetic value of these items and instead treating them as functional objects. She will decorate her home with them.

However, the mother affirms their functional value in black culture and insists that useful heritage is not fixed in the past; only through use can its worth be renewed. Nevertheless, the stay-at-home sister gives this visitor her grandmother's quilt because, having learned how, she can make herself another one and thus contribute to the ongoing tradition of black women's creativity. Much was made of Walker's frequent use of quilting motifs. For her, quilting represented the creative legacy that African Americans inherited from their maternal ancestors, and she celebrates those ancestors for the passion and imagination they brought to their everyday lives in producing objects of great beauty and functionality from throwaway items.

Returning to New York City in 1974, Walker took a position as contributing editor at Ms.> magazine. The May issue of the publication carried her second most important and probably best-known essay on black women's creativity: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South.” In this work, Walker again advanced the idea of quilting as a metaphor of black women's creativity and introduced a second metaphor, the beautiful flower gardens her mother, a sharecropper, made time to create. These gardens, brilliant with colors, were her mother's original designs, “magnificent with life and creativity.” Working among her flowers, the tired sharecropper appears “radiant” as she orders the world in the “image of her personal conception of ‘Beauty’.” Admirers from all over the county come each year to admire the beauty of her gardens. To her daughter, her mother's gift to her is a legacy of respect. In “search of my mother's garden,” Walker writes, “I find my own.” Walker closed the essay with the observation that women like her mother were artists, poets, and painters in their own right, who discovered creative outlets of their own in spite of the hardships of their lives. Since 1974, “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens,” often reprinted, inspired numbers of foremost literary artists and critics, black and white, women and men, to explore these cornerstones of African American and American women's culture.

In 1976, Walker's marriage ended in divorce, but her productivity continued to flourish. In that year, she published her second novel, Meridian, and moved from the East to the West Coast. In 1978, she received a Guggenheim Award, published her third book of poetry, Good Night Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning, and edited an anthology, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing …. Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Her second collection of short stories, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, appeared in 1981, and, to great acclaim, her inimitable The Color Purple in 1982.

Walker's novel not only drew the attention of large numbers of intellectuals, making it an instant literary classroom favorite, but it also propelled her into popular culture across lines of race and class. By 1985, when a movie version directed by Steven Spielberg was released, Walker had become a household name. Not since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940 had a novel by a black writer been so controversial. Some readers praised Walker for her originality and courage in tackling some of the most difficult issues in black life, and praised the work for its unflinching look at incest and wife beating as well as for its articulation of lesbianism. Others condemned the novel for the same aspects and felt Walker had betrayed the black community by speaking so publicly on those issues. Black men, in particular, felt demonized by her treatment of the male characters in her book.

The Color Purple, the first epistolary novel by an African American woman, is the story of Celie, a poor, uneducated, “ugly” black girl in the South, who is transformed from a fourteen-year-old victim of incest to a successful businesswoman by the time she is in her forties. Celie belongs to the third group of women Walker earlier identified as the subjects she wanted to write about in her novels. With the help of another woman, Celie rises above the male oppressions that attempt to destroy her life, and in so doing, she creates spaces for other black women. In the relation-ships among these women, the strength of the community is in the power of female bonding portrayed through love of different kinds—heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, and platonic—which Walker uses to explore women's spiritual and emotional development. By the end of the novel, having written herself into being, Celie emerges as a voice and a presence, in control of her own narrative, a new model of self-defined black womanhood.

Walker's fame continued to rise in the 1980s. In 1983, her second collection of essays appeared, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, which included her original essay “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.” By that time, many women of color, disillusioned and angry because of their perceptions of racism and classism among white feminists and embedded in the ideology of white feminism, did not identify with the feminist movement. Walker intervened by suggesting the term “womanism” as a substitute. Womanism can be understood as the feminism of women of color. A womanist, Walker explained, loves women, womanhood, and women's culture. At the same time, she is committed to the welfare of all people and claims the diversity of the black race, valuing African American experience in general and African American womanhood in particular, including her own. Most importantly, womanists resist sexist dogma and racial oppression wherever they see it. Many women of color came to identify themselves as womanists, rather than as feminists.

Walker's literary production did not slow down as the twentieth century came to an end. Her last publications of the 1980s were a volume of poems, Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful (1984); a collection of essays, Living by the Word (1988); and a novel, The Temple of My Familiar (1989). Between the 1990s and 2004, she released four novels, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004); three collections of poetry, Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991), A Poem Traveled Down My Arms: Poems and Drawings (2003), and Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (2003); two of essays, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult—A Meditation of Life, Spirit, Art and the Making of the Film The Color Purple Ten Years Later (1996), and Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997). Included in this list of publications were two multi-genre collections: Banned (1996) and Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit after the Bombing of the World Trade Center (2001).

These later writings show commitment to writing about the lives and experiences of African American women. Much of this work can be characterized as explorations on the borders that separate conventional “serious” literature and a willingness to enter the new markets that have opened up for black women writers embarking on a different kind of search for happiness. A woman with many talents, in everything that she did, Walker has maintained a strong identification with the human spirit.

See also Fiction and Poetry.

processed xml | source xml