Alice Walker, Bloom Ed

VODE0N
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

African American
Poets: Wheatley– Samuel Taylor John Keats
Tolson African Coleridge Jamaica Kincaid
American Poets: Joseph Conrad Stephen King
Hayden–Dove Contemporary Poets Rudyard Kipling
Edward Albee Julio Cortázar Milan Kundera
Dante Alighieri Stephen Crane Tony Kushner
Isabel Allende Daniel Defoe Ursula K. Le Guin
American and Don DeLillo Doris Lessing
Canadian Women Charles Dickens C. S. Lewis
Poets, 1930– Emily Dickinson Sinclair Lewis
present American E. L. Doctorow Norman Mailer
Women Poets, John Donne and the Bernard Malamud
1650–1950 17th-Century Poets David Mamet
Hans Christian Fyodor Dostoevsky Christopher
Andersen W. E. B. DuBois Marlowe
Maya Angelou George Eliot Gabriel García
Asian-American T. S. Eliot Márquez
Writers Ralph Ellison Cormac McCarthy
Margaret Atwood Ralph Waldo Carson McCullers
Jane Austen Emerson William Herman Melville
Paul Auster Faulkner Arthur Miller
James Baldwin F. Scott Fitzgerald John Milton
Honoré de Sigmund Freud Molière
Balzac Samuel Robert Frost Toni Morrison
Beckett The William Gaddis Native-American
Bible William Johann Wolfgang Writers
Blake Jorge Luis von Goethe Joyce Carol Oates
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Bradbury The Lord Byron George Orwell
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Robert Browning Ernest Hemingway Porter
Italo Calvino Hermann Hesse Marcel Proust
Albert Camus Hispanic-American Thomas Pynchon
Truman Capote Writers Philip Roth
Lewis Carroll Homer Salman Rushdie
Miguel de Cervantes Langston Hughes J. D. Salinger
Geoffrey Chaucer Zora Neale Hurston José Saramago
Anton Chekhov Aldous Huxley Jean-Paul Sartre
G. K. Chesterton Henrik Ibsen William Shakespeare
Kate Chopin John Irving William Shakespeare’s
Agatha Christie Henry James Romances
James Joyce George Bernard Shaw
Franz Kafka
Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley Ivan Turgenev Walt Whitman
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Mark Twain Oscar Wilde
John Steinbeck John Updike Tennessee Williams
Jonathan Swift Kurt Vonnegut Tom Wolfe
Amy Tan Derek Walcott Virginia Woolf
Alfred, Lord Alice Walker William Wordsworth
Tennyson Henry Robert Penn Warren Jay Wright
David Thoreau H. G. Wells Richard Wright
J. R. R. Tolkien Eudora Welty William Butler Yeats
Leo Tolstoy Edith Wharton Émile Zola
Alice Walker
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the
Humanities Yale
University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker—New Edition
Copyright ©2007 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom
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Alice Walker / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom.

p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern criticial views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9611-6 (hardcover : alk.
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1. Walker, Alice, 1944- —Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom,
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Alice Walker’s Men: Profiles

in the Quest for Love and Personal Values 5
Louis H. Pratt
“All Saints Should Walk Away”:

The Mystical Pilgrimage of Meridian 19
Joseph A. Brown
Alice Walker: The

Achievement of the Short Fiction 33
Alice Hall Petry
Coming to Voice in Alice

Walker’s Meridian: Speaking Out for the Revolution 51
Lynn Pifer
Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art 69

Felipe Smith
Alice Walker’s Vision of the

South in The Third Life of Grange Copeland 89
Robert James Butler
vi Contents
Alice Walker: In Praise of Maternal Heritage 101

Gail Keating
Alice Walker’s The Temple

of My Familiar as a Pastiche 115
Bonnie Braendlin
Visual Marker’s: Art and Mass

Media in Alice Walker’s Meridian 133
Deborah E. Barker
Teaching Alice Walker’s “Everyday

Use”: Employing Race, Class, and Gender 155
Marcia Noe
Telling a Critical Story: Alice

Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 169
Laurie McMillan
Reanimating the Trope of the Talking

Book in Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea” 187
Deborah Anne Hooker
Alice Walker 207
Chronology
Contributors 209
Bibliography 211 215
Acknowledgements
Index 217
Editor’s Note
My Introduction amiably questions Walker’s firm assumption that

her books do not engage in any contest with Hurston’s.
Linda Selzer reasonably examines the issues of race and
domesticity in The Color Purple, after which Marcia Noe and Michael
Jaynes zealously expound the everyday, ideological use of Walker’s
writing.
Meridian, Walker’s most ambitious novel, is related by Deborah
A. Baker to the prevalence of visual dominance in our mass media, while
Bonnie Braendlin defends the experimental The Temple of My Familiar,
a New Age pastiche.
Gail Keating exalts Walker as a high priestess of black
maternalism, after which Robert James Butler more temperately
considers The Third Life of Grange Copeland.
For Felipe Smith, Walker is a redeemer, while Lynn Pifer joins
the chorus of hosannas for Meridian.
Walker’s prowess as short story writer is recognized by Alice Hall
Petry, after which Louis H. Pratt finds Walker’s male characters to be
generally a motley ensemble of sexism and racism.
Mystical messiahship is granted to Meridian by Joseph A. Brown, S.
J. while Deborah Anne Hooker acclaims Walker as an ecocritic.
vii
HAR OL D BL O OM
Introduction
A L I C E WA L K E R ( – )
A contemporary writer who calls herself “author and medium” is by

no means idiosyncratic, and Alice Walker certainly seems to me a
wholly representative writer of and for our current era. The success
of The Color Purple is deserved; Walker’s sensibility is very close to the
Spirit of the Age. Rather than seek to analyze verse and fictional
prose that is of a kind I am not yet competent to judge, or a speculative
essay such as “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” which eludes me, I
will center here upon Walker’s medi- tations upon her acknowledged
precursor, Zora Neale Hurston. There is no book more important to me
than this one,” Walker wrote of Hurston’s mas- terwork, Their Eyes Were
Watching God. Perhaps the only literary enthusiasm I share with Walker
is my own deep esteem for that admirable narrative, about which I
have written elsewhere.
Walker associated her feeling for Hurston with her similar
veneration for famous black women singers, Billie Holiday and Bessie
Smith. That association is a moving trope or defense, since Hurston, like
Walker, was a writer and not a vocalist. Here is another tribute by
Walker to Hurston:
We live in a society, as blacks, women, and artists, whose

contests we do not design and with whose insistence on
ranking us we are permanently at war. To know that second
place, in such a society, has often required more work and
innate genius than first, a longer, grimmer struggle over
greater odds that first—and to be able to f ling your scarf about
dramatically while you demonstrate that
1
2 Harold Bloom
you know—is to trust your own self-evaluation in the face of

the Great White Western Commercial of white and male
supremacy, which is virtually everything we see, outside and
often inside our own homes. That Hurston held her own,
literally, against the f lood of whiteness and maleness that
diluted so much other black art of the period in which she
worked is a testimony to her genius and her faith.
As black women and as artists, we are prepared, I think,
to keep that faith. There are other choices, but they are
despicable.
Zora Neale Hurston, who went forth into the world with
one dress to her name, and who was permitted, at other
times in her life, only a single pair of shoes, rescued and
recreated a world which she labored to hand us whole, never
underestimating the value of her gift, if at times doubting the
good sense of its recipi- ents. She appreciated us, in any case,
as we fashioned ourselves. That is something. And of all the
people in the world to be, she chose to be herself, and more
and more herself. That, too, is something.
The strength of this rhetoric is considerable, and has the literary force of
a medium. Walker’s tribute to Hurston bears an eloquent title: “On
Refusing to Be Humbled by Second Place in a Contest You Did Not
Design.” To write a novel indeed is to enter a contest you did not design,
and to fashion yourself certainly is the ambition of every novelist or poet
aspiring to permanence. To write The Third Life of Grange Copeland,
Meridian, and The Color Purple is to have entered a contest Walker did
not design, an agon with Their Eyes Were Watching God. No feminist critic
will agree with that statement, which for them reflects my purely male
view of literature. Yet we do not live forever. Do we reread Their Eyes
Were Watching God or do we reread The Color Purple? And if we choose to
reread both, do we repress the comparisons that the two novels provoke
in regard to one another?
Walker’s most poignant paragraphs on Hurston come at the end of
her superbly personal essay, “Looking for Zora”:
There are times—and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of

them—when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on, do
not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth
of the emotion one feels. It was impossible for me to cry when I
saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because
I have come to know Zora through her books and she was
not a teary sort of person herself; but partly, too, it is because
there is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this
point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.
Introduction 3
It is only later, when the pain is not so direct a threat to

one’s own existence that what was learned in that moment of
comical lunacy is understood. Such moments rob us of both
youth and vanity. But perhaps they are also times when
greater disciplines are born.
This may not be Browning at the grave of Shelley, but it is close

enough. The pain is familial, since the literary mother, like the poetic
father, evokes in the ephebe all the terrible poignance of Freud’s
“family romances.” Michael G. Cooke, writing on Hurston, states the
particular dilemma of the black writer’s quest for a voice:
What gives singularity to the black writer’s burden in

searching for a voice is the twofold factor of frequency and
context. Either directly or in projection through a central
character, black writer after black writer, generation upon
generation, from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker, evinces
the problem of voice. And it is appropriate to regard the
most outspoken black writers of the protest movement as
bearers of the burden in another guise. Theirs is not so much a
free voice as the forced voice of reaction and resentment.
The School of Resentment, which has many factions both critical and
creative, does not regard voice as a problem, since the celebration of com-
munity necessarily decries individuated subjectivity while exalting collective
roarings (or murmurings) as the more moral mode. I fear that influence
and its anxieties do not vanish even in the presence of the most self-
abnegating of ideologies or idealisms. Our most distinguished critics of
Hurston evade this burden, but it is there nevertheless. Here is Elizabeth
Meese on “Orality and Textuality in Their Eyes Were Watching God”:
By extricating herself from cultural control, Janie/Hurston

creates culture. Through the retelling of Janie’s story, orality
becomes textuality. Textuality is produced by Janie’s learned
orality, her participation in the oral tradition of the culture.
She learns to be one of the people; thus, this is a story of her
acculturation into black womanhood and her artistic
entitlement to language. By chronicling Janie’s development,
Hurston transforms the status of narrative from the
temporality characteristic of oral tradition to the more
enduring textuality required to outwit time’s effect on
memory. In doing so, she presents feminist readers with a
map of a woman’s personal resistance to patriarchy, and
feminist
4 Harold Bloom
writers—in particular Alice Walker—with the intertext for later

feminist works.
If one is presented with an intertext, does one pay nothing for the
gift? Janie/Hurston creates culture but does Meridian/Walker? Again,
here is that dynamic deconstructive duo, Barbara Johnson and H. L.
Gates, Jr., rightly praising Their Eyes Were Watching God for giving us (and
Walker) “A Black and Idiomatic Free Indirect Discourse”:
Janie, in effect, has rewritten Joe’s text of himself, and

liberated herself in the process. Janie “writes” herself into
being by naming, by speaking herself free. In The Color
Purple, Alice Walker takes this moment in Hurston’s text as
the moment of revision, and creates a character whom we
witness literally writing herself into being, but writing herself
into being in a language that imitates that idiom spoken by Janie
and Hurston’s black community generally. This scene and
this transformation or reversal of status is truly the first
feminist critique of the fiction of the authority of the male
voice, and its sexism, in the Afro-American tradition.
That is admirably precise and accurate; The Color Purple’s Celie

indeed writes “herself into being in a language that imitates that
idiom spoken by Janie and Hurston’s black community generally.” The
authority of the male voice, and its sexism, may well be subverted by
Hurston (she herself would have disowned any such intention or
accomplishment). But what has Walker subverted by imitating and so
repeating a revisionist moment that she has not originated? No feminist
critic will admit the legitimacy of that question, but it abides and will
require an answer
L O UIS H . P R A T T
Alice Walker’s Men: Profiles in the Quest for Love

and Personal Values
M any literary critics, perhaps understandably, have viewed Alice

Walker’s work with a skepticism typically accorded those whose
“places” in the literary mainstream have not been secured. However,
these reservations suddenly became muted in 1983 when Walker shed
her mantle of relative obscurity at 39 and became, in her own words, “a
name brand.” This was the year that The Color Purple held a place on the
New York Times Bestsellers’ list for over twenty-five weeks and
distinguished her as the first Black woman to win the prestigious Pulitzer
Prize for fiction. Nevertheless, several questions concerning Walker’s
art have continued to haunt her. One of the most significant (and
current) of these is why she has chosen to create a super- abundance
of kind, loving women who triumph in spite of the odds, played off
against weak, self-centered, violent men.
In a 1973 interview, Walker declared her interest in analyzing
social relationships and challenging the double standards so firmly
entrenched in the assumptions made by the status quo. Consequently, all
of her later works, most notably the short stories and the novels, reflect
this point of view:
. . . I wanted to explore the relationship between men and

women, and why women are always condemned for doing
what men do as an expression of their masculinity. Why are
women so easily
Studies in Popular Culture, 12 (1); 1989: pp. 42-57. © Estate of Louis H. Pratt.
5
6 Louis H. Pratt
“tramps” and “traitors” when men are heroes for engaging in

the same activity? Why do women stand for this? (O’Brien
197).
Walker’s sense of outrage at these injustices led her to formulate

an artistic stance which is sharply critical of the men in her novels.
One of her Washington Post interviews, published nearly ten years later,
provides an interesting and insightful footnote to her artistic philosophy:
“If I write books that men feel comfortable with, then I have sold out.”
(Washington Post E1)
Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that the question of
Walker’s negative male images continues to emerge. During the Fall
of 1985, she continued to find herself on the defensive. In a Publisher’s
Weekly interview on the impending release of The Color Purple, the movie
based on her Pulitzer- Prize winning novel, Walker side-stepped the
issue by arguing that she intended to write a woman’s story without
trying to “balance” it. Although she admitted to feeling more compassion
for her “miserable” men, she finally acknowledged, “it’s hard to be
sympathetic to someone who has a fist over your face” (Goldstein 48).
Thus, one of the major short-comings in Walker’s fiction is that her Black
male characters emerge either as tranquil men whose existence must
be validated and filtered through the consciousness of her women, or
they are presented as weak, self-centered, turbulent men whose
humanity is placed in jeopardy by their inability to develop loving
relationships with their wives and children.
The eminent critic Addison Gayle has argued that Walker’s
women also come across negatively because of the interrelationship
and the interdependency of Black men and women: “. . . you can’t
very well do a hatchet job on Black men without also doing a hatchet job
on Black women” (Bell 213). Although he makes a sweeping
indictment of modern Black women writers, Gale’s pointed analysis,
nevertheless, rings true as he argues that all of us, again, have been
victimized by racism:
Nothing that happens to Black men in this country does

not happen to Black women, only indirectly. There’s
another tremendous problem, too. Black men have grown
up in this country being very afraid of Black women, and a
hell of a lot of Black women have grown up in this country, in
too many cases, looking at Black men the way white folks
looked at Black men. At that point, there are tremendous
kinds of conflicts because we have not realized that the
enemy is not each other. The enemy is this country. The
enemy is not Black men, not Black women, it’s this country .
. . white folks have managed to have us believe that the enemy
is poor Black folks on welfare as opposed to middle- class
Black folks who want to be decent; light-skinned Black
Alice Walker’s Men: Profiles in the Quest For Love and Personal Values 7
folks as opposed to dark-skinned Black folks; and Black

men as opposed to Black women (Bell 214).
Essentially, then, the problem is one of images: how Black men

and women view themselves and each other in relation to their
universe. In an earlier article, Carolyn F. Gerald addresses this issue by
using the term “image” to mean “self-concept” and by focusing on “created,”
as opposed to “real” images. She further categorizes these created images as
personal and adopted, and she cautions us against adopting another person’s
view of reality because this places us within the realm of that person’s
influence and control. Since Blacks bear witness constantly to white racial
and cultural images which produce a “zero” image of themselves and
negate their “peoplehood,” she calls upon us to:
. . . reject white attempts at portraying black reality. They are

valid only in terms of the white man’s projection of himself.
They have no place in the definition of blackness, for they
reveal this white writer’s attempt to work through their own
cultural guilt, fascination with blackness, or sense of spiritual
emptiness. No
one can hand us a peoplehood, complete with prefabricated
images (Gerald 354).
Perhaps one of the striking features of Walker’s prose is that she

displays a penchant for portraying her men indirectly. Many never speak;
they are presented to the reader through the eyes of another person—usually
a woman. One such attempt in developing these tranquil men can be
found in the short story, “Roselily.” Here Walker uses the omniscient
narrator to describe a wedding scene in which the groom is characterized
as a Black Muslim whose severity is underscored by his gray car, his black
suit, and his handshake, which is “like the clasp of an iron gate” (Love and
Trouble 8). He is proud, black, and understanding of Roselily’s economic
condition: she has to provide for three children from a former marriage
by working in a garment factory. He has promised her freedom from
the pressures of a job, a freedom which she yearns to enjoy. What comes
home to the reader in this brief episode, however, is that her husband-
to-be has no understanding of her spiritual condition. He will expect her
to exchange her job of sewing straight seams in overalls, jeans, and dress
pants for one of making and caring for strong Black babies. He will bring
love into her loveless life, and he will expend great time in reshaping and
molding her into an appropriate wife. Roselily thinks of the smoke and
cinders in the Mississippi air and savors the prospect of relief, a chance in
Chicago to pursue the dream of a new neighborhood where she and her
children can find peace and happiness. Yet, Roselily feels “old” and “yoked.”
She senses that her expectations are like flawed visions exposed to the
harsh sunlight of reality:
8 Louis H. Pratt
Something strains upward behind her eyes. She thinks of

the something as a rat trapped, cornered, scurrying to and fro
in her head, peering through the windows of her eyes. She
wants to live for once. But doesn’t quite know what that means.
Wonders if she has ever done it. If she ever will (8).
“A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring” is a short story, narrated by

Sarah Davis, which focuses on the death of her father and the new,
brief insight which she gains into the significance of her nameless
grandfather’s life. Both men are filtered through Sarah’s consciousness,
which provides a simple but positive frame of reference for the two men.
Sarah remembers her father’s threats, spankings, and frequent relocations
in his effort to provide for his family, and she decides that all of these
grew out of love. However, it is her grandfather who receives most of
Sarah’s attention. She describes him as “simply and solemnly heroic; a man
who kept with pride his family’s trust and his own grief ” (Good Woman
135). What impressed Sarah most, however, was his determination to
allow his Blackness to be defined by his family, rather than by whites.
This produced in the old man a unique kind of toughness, a hardness
that defied Sarah’s efforts to capture him on canvas. Instead, Walker
allows the old man one solitary line which summarizes his durability: “if
you want to make me, make me up in stone” (135).
Several other female-filtered male characters also preset similar
images. “Elethia” is the name of the short story and the narrator in a
brief character sketch of Albert Porter, affectionately known as “Uncle
Albert.” Through Elethia’s eyes, Walker presents two contrasting images
of Uncle Albert, who was imbued with a special pride in his Blackness. Albert
Porter’s stuffed likeness stood in the window of Old Uncle Albert’s
segregated restaurant for whites and blacks alike to view. His neatly-
covered tray, white napkin, and smiling teeth satisfied the patrons of the
eating establishment. In fact, some of the older Blacks had come to
believe that the docile, faithful waiter image before them represented Old
Albert. Fortunately, however, there were those old-timers who remembered
the time he removed the genitals of a murdered young Black boy from
public display and defiantly buried them. They recalled that he was a
stubborn man who never forgot the horrible injustices heaped upon Blacks
by the system. This was the image Elethia admired and loved, and this
was what prompted her and her friends to steal Uncle Albert, burn his
stuffed likeness, and cherish the ashes of a one-man champion of Black
pride and dignity.
Mr. Sweet Little, another of Walker’s tranquil men, is the
charming subject of her frequently-anthologized short story, “To Hell
With Dying.” “Mr. Sweet,” as the children lovingly call him, is the
recreation of a twenty- four year old female narrator whose reminiscences
about one of her favorite people span an acquaintance of nearly two
decades. His story is one of
stunted ambition and thwarted romance, both of which cause Mr.

Sweet to retreat from the real world of accelerated stress, high tension,
and crass materialism and turn to his homemade alcohol and elaborate
playacting for relief and satisfaction. Although Mr. Sweet never speaks, the
narrator captures his “magic” through detailed and exquisite descriptions
which thoroughly convince us that Mr. Sweet Little is a genuine,
caring human. She recalls that he never attended his crops, but he was
always ready to frolic with the children and make them feel special
with his own unique magic. Having inherited the powers of revival
from her brother, the narrator delighted in the episodes when she
believed herself able to rescue Mr. Sweet from imminent death and coax
him back into their world of make-believe.
Finally, Walker presents the reader with Samuel, the peripheral male
character in The Color Purple, who is described entirely through the eyes
of Nettie in her letters to Celie. Although Samuel plays a central role in
Nettie’s life—first as her teacher and benefactor, and later as her
husband—he is never fully developed as a character. Early on in Nettie’s
story, we learn of his compassion and kindness when he adopts Olivia
and Adam and takes Nettie in on the mistaken assumption that she is the
mother of the children. Nettie describes him as a tall, big, black man with
white hair and “thoughtful and gentle brown eyes. When he says
something it settles you, because he never says anything off the top of his
head and he’s never out to dampen your spirit or to hurt” (Purple 128). In
his association with the Africans, he is reported to be sensitive, patient,
and kind, through whose eyes, “the vulnerability and beauty of his soul can
be plainly read” (211). We are told that, philosophically, his concept of
God has evolved into a kind of pantheism which is strikingly similar to
Celie’s, the sister-in-law he has never met; God is personal, a spirit which
cannot be confined to things and people, to be pursued directly by each
person by observing and appreciating the wonders of nature. Clearly,
Samuel was intended as a foil for the other men in the novel. Yet, we are
never permitted to grasp the full significance of his character. While we
can identify with him, we never fully understand the complexities of
his thoughts and actions.
These tranquil men, generally, have traditional values, and they
have been transformed by love into sensitive, compassionate individuals.
They have a profound concern for the preservation of the family unit and
an abiding love for their women and their children. They have a faith and
pride in Blackness, as well as a commitment to the progress and the
preservation of the race. These qualities contrast sharply with Walker’s
turbulent men, as we shall see. Why are Walker’s turbulent men so
“miserable,” as she herself calls them?
Why are these men unable to come to terms with their lives?
Consideration of the aspects of the lives of Albert Johnson, Grange and
Brownfield Copeland, and Truman Held reveal that each man is
actively involved in a frantic, unrelenting quest for love. Each character
wrestles with the trials and the
10 Louis H. Pratt
errors of life and reaches “experience,” which Albert tells us, “everybody
is bound to get . . . sooner or later. All they have to do is stay alive”
(237). The final stage for these men except for Brownfield, is the
distillation and the conversion of that experience into new lessons, new
ways of responding to people and to the forces in their environment.
The men in Walker’s fiction are so miserable because there is an
absence of love in their lives which leads them to abuse their wives and
children. Shug Avery remembers Albert Johnson as a handsome, loving,
kind human being who has a zest for life. He kept her dancing and
laughing in the course of their wild, youthful adventures. Thus, when
she returns to live in his house, she is unable to understand the change
that has come over him. She asks Celie, “How come he ain’t funny no
more? . . . How come he never hardly laugh? . . . How come he don’t
dance? . . . Good God, Celie What happen
to the man I love?” (116) Albert and Shug had “the kind of love
couldn’t be improve,” (116) but his father had denied him permission to
marry her because he disapproved of her lifestyle and the three children
she bore Albert, the paternity of whom the old man questioned. Albert
fought for the right to marry Shug, but finally he yielded and married
Annie Julia, his father’s choice, a wife he did not want to have. It was
then that he exchanged a world of love and laughter and hope for a mere
existence of spiritual poverty. He and Shug paraded their affection
openly for all the world to see while Annie Julia nursed her babies,
endured Albert’s beatings, and took her lover who, finally, shot her
down.
Then the cycle repeats itself. Needing someone to raise his
children, Albert offers to marry Nettie, to whom he has been
attracted. However, her stepfather chooses Celie for him, throws her
cow in the bargain, and Albert finds his romantic ambitions thwarted
once again. Still resentful and frustrated because he has never been
able to marry the woman he loves, Albert takes out his feelings on
Celie and unleashes his crude invectives in order to undermine her
confidence and self-respect as his has been destroyed:
. . . What you got? . . . You skinny. You shape funny. You too
scared to open your mouth to people.You black, you pore,
you
ugly, you a woman. Goddam,......you nothing at all (186, 187
passim).
And he beat her unmercifully because he believes that all women

are stubborn and that this is his conjugal privilege, necessary to keep his
wife in line (See Harris). During these eruptions of extreme violence,
Celie shields herself psychologically by entering a world of make believe:
“I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree” (30).
Albert’s abuse of his children might be described as benign

neglect. Although he rarely harms them physically, he virtually ignores
them, except for his son Harpo, who is forced to do the plowing and
work alongside of Celie in the field while the lovelorn Albert pines for
Shug and yearns for the life together that they never had.
In many ways, the life of Grange Copeland also parallels that of
Albert Johnson. Grange’s family disapproved of Josie and the notoriety
she had acquired through her house of pleasure, and so he had married
Margaret to please them. Before long, however, Grange had pondered his
lot and future as a sharecropper, settled into a kind of silent resignation,
and begun a routine of Sunday quarrels, weeks of depression, gloominess,
and despair, and Saturday nights at Josie’s, which always ended when he
returned home in a drunken stupor which belied his youthful vigor:
He was thirty-five but seemed much older. His face and eyes
had a dispassionate vacancy and sadness, as if a great fire
had been extinguished within him and was just recently
missed. He seemed devoid of any emotion . . . except that of
bewilderment (Grange Copeland 13).
On those nights he would threaten to kill Margaret and Brownfield,

and mother and son would run for the woods under the protective cover of
darkness. During the week, they quarreled and fought. For release from the
pain, Margaret had taken many lovers, but when she took Shipley, the
white overseer, the oppressor, Grange could endure no longer. So he
abandoned his wife and baby to the merciful death which brought a
peace they had never known before.
Grange Copeland was especially cruel to Brownfield, to whom he
rarely spoke. He seldom looked at his son or acknowledged his presence in
any way. On one occasion, Brownfield had watched his father as he drank
whiskey on the porch, and Grange had been particularly cruel when he
caught him staring:
Brownfield was afraid to move away and afraid to stay. When

he was drinking his father took every action as a personal
affront. He looked at Brownfield and started to speak. His eyes
had little yellow and red lines in them like the veins of a leaf.
Brownfield leaned nearer. But all his father said was “I
ought to throw you down the goddam well” (9, 10).
Because he had no money, Grange had rejected Margaret’s idea

of sending Brownfield to school. Brownfield also blamed him for his
mother’s gradual change from a sensitive, kind, warm human being to a
woman whose attention was captured by good times and the transient
pleasures of her lovers’
12 Louis H. Pratt
embraces. He insisted in believing that Grange had been an attentive,

loving father, but he could not remember when that time had been, so he
began to detest him for the love that Grange was unable to give:
. . . he hated him for everything and always would. And he

most hated him because even in private and in the dark and
with Brownfield presumably asleep, Grange could not bear to
touch his son with his hand (21).
Brownfield Copeland’s young life was devoid of love, and even when
he was grown, he felt “very often depressed by the thought that his
father had never really loved him” (164). Consequently, he emerges as
perhaps the most unredeemably degenerate of all of Walker’s men.
On the day of Brownfield’s birth, Grange and Margaret sit as
unanticipating parents to name their new son. As Grange looks
indifferently across the brown fields, they agree that no name can
change the fate of the baby and that “Brownfield” is as good as any
other. Yet, in spite of this ominous, inauspicious sign of foreboding,
Brownfield’s adult life does begin with a modicum of hope.
After Margaret dies, Brownfield realizes that he must avoid the
“beneficent generosity” of the Shipleys lest he find himself hopelessly
entangled in debt. So he vacates the property, hoping to make a new,
independent life for himself, one which his father had never known.
He survives simultaneous relationships with Josie and her daughter
Lorene to marry the educated, innocent Mem, who has yet to be
introduced to the real world. This was a significant step for Brownfield
because “he could still look back on their wedding day as the pinnacle of
his achievement in extricating himself from evil and the devil and
aligning himself with love,” (49) and as he loved Mem and “ . . . sucked
and nursed at her bosom . . . he . . . grew big and grew firm with love,
and grew strong” (49). Soon, however, this dream dies when Brownfield
realized that whites are in control of his welfare and his family’s welfare
as well:
He no longer had, as his father had maintained, even the desire

to run away from them. He had no faith that any other place
would be better. He fitted himself into the slot in which he
found himself; for fun he poured oil into streams to kill the
fish and tickled his vanity by drowning cats (59).
Realizing the hopelessness of his situation, he returns to Josie for

comfort and solace. Like Albert and Grange, he feels that his marriage
has been a mistake.
In order to force her to his level and to make her a scapegoat for
his failures, Brownfield forces Mem to give up her “proper” speech, her
teaching position, and her lofty aspirations. Simultaneously, he begins to
abuse her, the most brutal instance of which occurs when she refuses to
move back to Mr.
J. L.’s place from their house in the city. In the course of the
argument, Mem speaks up for herself, and Brownfield hits her
squarely in the mouth:
Don’t you interrupt me when I’m doing the talking, Bitch! he

said, shaking her until blood dribbled from her stinging lips
. . . You Goddam wrankly faced blacknigger slut! . . . You
say one more word, just one little goddam peep and I’ll cut
your goddam throat
. . . Mem closed her eyes as he dropped her abruptly against
the bedpost and gave her a resounding kick in the side of
the head. She saw a number of blurred pale stars, then nothing
else (90, 91).
Relentlessly, Brownfield pursued Mem to break her spirit, destroy

her will, her self-concept, her ability to triumph against the odds. Rather
than give up these things, Mem threatened to leave him, a move
Brownfield had difficulty in countering. So he waited for her one night
on the porch, pointed his shotgun at near point-black range into her
face, and fired.
Brownfield’s relationship with his children was equally as stormy. After
Grange has returned to Georgia, Brownfield confides that “My trouble is,
I always could do without childrens” (73). As a result, Ornette, Daphne,
and Ruth were paid only the slightest attention, and only when he was
nearly drunk. Brownfield could not view them in their naivete as human
beings. He scolded Ornette, the middle child, as if she were a whore,
but Daphne, the eldest, withstood most of the physical abuse. She alone
remembered his kindness, and like Brownfield himself had done as a
child, she fought hard to “remember when daddy was good.” Her nervous
condition made her jumpy, and Brownfield delighted in swearing at her,
calling her “stupid,” “crazy,” and “Daffy,” instead of Daphne:
. . . One time, when she was holding her stomach and crying,
with sweat popping out like grease bubbles on her face,
Brownfield had kicked her right where her hands were. He was
trying to sleep and couldn’t because of the noise, he said
(119).
Brownfield never touched the baby Ruth. Yet, at the age of four,
she observed him in his various acts of domestic violence and
perceptively summarized the opinion of the rest of the family. “You
know what,” she cried after he had sworn after her mother, “Hey, I
say, do you know what, . . . You nothing but a sonnabit” (108).
14 Louis H. Pratt
This unfulfilled quest for love leads Walker’s male characters to view
their women in purely sexual terms. In one of their rare father-to-son
conversations, Harpo asks Albert why he beats Celie, to which Albert
replies, “Cause she my wife. Plus she stubborn. All women good for—he
don’t finish. He just tuck his chin over the paper like he do,” Celie tells
us. “Remind me of Pa” (Purple 30). The same attitude is reflected in
Brownfield’s relationship with Mem. When his friends teased him and
inquired how he was able to marry a school-teacher, Brownfield rubs
his pants and brags, “Give this old black-snake to her . . . and then I
beats her ass. Only way to treat a nigger woman” (Grange Copeland 56).
Later one morning, in front of the children, he tries unsuccessfully to
entice Mem to delay her departure for work and come back to bed.
Frustrated and dejected, Brownfield exclaims, “Shit . . . One of these days
I’m going on over to Jay-pan, where the womens know what they real
job is!” (118).
Indeed, the men in Meridian are kindred souls to those in The
Color Purple and The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Here Walker
presents us with an intermittent panorama of lustful men who assume
that sexual conquest is their privilege and responsibility. Perhaps the
earliest influence on Meridian was her grandfather who slept with
nearly all the women in town while his wife, pregnant with their
twelfth child, was compelled to work to pay for their daughter’s
education by hiring herself out as a domestic after her work at home was
done. Then, as Meridian grows into her teenage years, she suffers the
same fate as Sofia in The Color Purple: she finds herself constantly
bombarded by the sexual advances of the men with whom she comes
into contact. Meridian submits to the frequent sexual encounters demanded
by her teenage lover Eddie, who later marries her, “shotgun” style, and
then deserts her and their daughter. There is George Daxter, the
undertaker, who enjoys fondling her, and there is his young assistant
who allows her to witness his seduction of another teenage girl in a
nearby shed. Later, Meridian encounters the doctor who performs her
abortion at Saxon College and offers to tie her tubes in exchange for
“some of all this extra-curricular activity” and the retired professor, Mr.
Raymonds, with whom she barters her sexual favors for a job as well as the
little extras: cokes, cookies, cans of deviled ham, and tennis rackets.
Finally, of course, there is Truman Held.
Truman and Meridian have been drawn together by their shared
experiences of beatings and jailings as a result of their civil rights
demonstrations and voter registration drives. They had arrived “at a time
and place in history that forced the trivial to fall away—and they were
absolutely together” (Meridian 84). She treasures him because he
punctuates his conversations with French phrases which she had
difficulty understanding, and he values her as “a woman to rest in, as a
ship must have a port. As a train must have a shed” (141). They
become sexually involved, and soon Truman discovers
that she has been both mother and wife. Thus, he turns to Lynn
Rabinowitz, another civil rights worker, after he has made it clear to
Meridian that dating white girls is “essentially, a matter of sex.”
It becomes obvious at this point that in spite of his veneer of
sophistication and charisma, Truman Held is a victim of racism and
sexism, and he is driven by the same animalism which motivates the
other characters of the novel. Scene by scene, Walker reveals him as an
ambivalent, fragmented personality who is symbolic of the classic
“double standard.” On the one hand, he desires virginity; on the other, he
is driven toward physical conquest. For him, the ideal woman must be
knowledgeable and experienced (she must read the New York Times). It is
not surprising, then, that he soon comes to view Meridian as sullied,
damaged goods because she has been intimate with another man.
However, this does not fully explain Truman’s rejection of Meridian.
Walker tells us that:
. . . Truman, also did not want a general beside him. He did

not want a woman who tried, however encumbered by guilts and
fears and remorse, to claim her own life. She knew Truman
would have liked her better as she had been as Eddie’s wife,
for all that he admired the flash of her face across a picket
line—an attractive woman, but, asleep (110).
Truman’s inhibitions and inadequacies prohibit him from accepting

and appreciating the intelligent black woman whose assertiveness
and independence he views as a direct threat to his masculinity.
Truman turns to Lynne because, on first inspection, she embodies
the qualities of a perfect wife. However, it is not long before he feels
intimidated by her intelligence, “her imagination, her wishes and dreams
. . . she annoyed him with her irrepressible questions that kept bursting
out and bubbling up into their lives, like spring water rising beside a
reservoir and undermining the concrete of the dam” (140, 141). Because of
Truman’s insecurities, their relationship begins to founder, but it is not
until Tommy Olds has been shot in Mississippi that he begins to examine
their circumstances. When Truman visits him in the hospital, Tommy
refers to Lynne as “that white bitch,” and he tells Truman that “All
white people are motherfuckers” (132). Truman accepts this
generalization, and he concludes that since Tommy’s assailant was white,
Lynne, by virtue of her whiteness, shared the guilt for the loss of Tommy’s
arm. But the most devastating blow to their relationship comes when
Tommy betrays their friendship and rapes Lynn. Truman cannot accept
the idea that she has, however unwillingly, “belonged” to another man.
Thus, the marriage deteriorates rapidly, and Lynne moves to New York
City where their daughter Camara is beaten, raped, and killed. In the
final scene of the
16 Louis H. Pratt
novel, Truman replaces Meridian as he begins the quest for “wholeness,”

for stability and permanence.
In spite of their relentless pursuit of love and personal values, the
men in Walker’s fiction present near-zero images which range from the
weak and ineffectual to the violent and the miserable. On the one
hand, we have the tranquil men who have no legitimacy except that
which is assigned to them through the consciousness of her women. They
do not act, they do not react, they do not interact. They function simply as
cardboard, underdeveloped, one-dimensional characters who lay no real
claim to viability, especially when they are compared with the finely-
drawn women in her fiction. And on the other, we have the turbulent
men, neither of whom is ever able to establish and maintain a warm,
kind, loving relationship. They are scheming, overbearing, and
vindictive. They come to us as oppressive, insensitive, and degenerate
individuals who are unable to celebrate their own humanity as well as
recognize that humanity in others.
Even when we consider the positive elements in these characters,
there is not a single man among them who exemplifies the most basic
attitudes of humaneness. Albert struggles with his hatred for Nettie, and
finally he reaches a near-human state when he abandons (though
involuntarily) his vendetta against her and restores communication
between the two sisters. He gains an appreciation f or them, but his
“experiences” never translate into a loving relationship with his son
Harpo. Similarly, Grange learns his lessons in the North. He comes home
full of love and compassion which he showers on his granddaughter
Ruth, but his relationship with Brownfield borders on hostility and
disdain. Truman Held may have profited from his experiences, but the
novel ends before he is able to demonstrate his new awarenesses.
And if these things stir within the readers a sense of compassion, we
are compelled to remember the deaths (and the lives) of Annie Julia,
Margaret, Mem, their babies, and Camara, and we realize the enormous
guilt for which their husbands and fathers must be held accountable.
It is unreasonable and patently unfair to examine a single work by
Walker (or any other writer) and expect to find a perfect balance of characters.
Similarly, it seems unusual when the gamut of her fiction is surveyed in a
futile search for a viable Black male character with a positive identity.
Still, we wonder if the Albert Porters, the Sweet Littles, the Samuels,
the Grange Copelands, the Brownfield Copelands, the Truman Helds,
the Albert Johnsons, are representative of Black men. Where are the
Frederick Douglasses, the W.
E. B. du Boises, the Gabriel Prossers, the Paul Robesons, the Martin
Kings, the Malcolm X‘s? Where is the unheralded, unsung, decent, hard-
working John Black who treasures his family and works his fingers to
the bone to insure their economic and spiritual survival? Herb Boyd
contends that these men have no place in Walker’s “insular world where
black male chauvinism is
the principal contradiction, black men the main enemy . . . The characters
in this universe are forced to feed on themselves, allowing the enemy to
escape indictment” (Boyd 62).
For the most part, the Black men in Walker’s world are in need of
redemption from the racism, oppression, and sexism still rampant in our
society. They are in need of liberation from the near-zero images of
themselves which has been propagated through the literature and the
culture. However, it is equally clear that Walker’s men have not been
victims of a society where injustices have been imposed individually.
Rather, they have functioned in a racial climate where oppression has
been administered systematically to Black people collectively. This
recognition reemphasizes the interrelatedness of Black men and Black
women and lends credence to the idea that there if no “Black woman’s
story,” for there is no “Black man’s story.” All of us, Black females and
Black males alike, are involved in the struggle, to achieve a state of
wholeness and reassert our humanity. Like Addison Gayle, Boyd reminds
us that, “at this juncture in our struggle, mired as we are in retrenchment,
we can ill afford to be further confused about the roots of our present
dilemma”(62). Therefore, we must identify and resist things which are
divisive; we must create and create those things which are harmonious,
those things which will lead us into the state of oneness which we
seek.
Wo R K s C I t E D
Bell, Roseanne P., “Judgement: Addison Gayle” in her Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of
Black Women in Literature. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979.
Boyd, Herb. “The Arts.” The Crisis 93. No. 2 (February 1986): 10ff.
Gerald, Carolyn F., “The Black Writer and His Role” in The Black Aesthetic. Ed. Addison
Gayle, Jr. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1972.
Goldstein, William. “Alice Walker on the Set of The Color Purple.” Publisher’s Weekly
(September 6, 1985): 46–48.
Harris, Trudier. “On The Color Purple, Stereotypes and Silence.” Black American
Literature Forum 18, No. 4 (Winter 1984): 155–161.
O’Brien, John, Ed. Interviews With Black Writers. New York: Liveright Publishers, 1973.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square Press, 1982. Cited as
Purple.
———. In Love and Trouble. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1973. Cited as
Love and Trouble.
———. Meridian. New York: Washington Square Press 1976.
———. The Third Life of Grange Copeland. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1970.
Cited as Grange Copeland.
———. You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch. Cited
as Good Woman.
Washington Post, October 15, 1982, E-1.
JOSE P H A . BR O WN
“All Saints Should Walk Away”: The Mystical

Pilgrimage of Meridian
T owards the end of From Behind the Veil, Robert B. Stepto expresses
a difficulty he has with the narrative strategy employed by Zora Neale
Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Having described both the
“narratives of ascent and immersion,” and speculating that Hurston’s
novel is “quite likely the only truly coherent narrative” before Invisible
Man that combines both ascent and immersion into a single text, Stepto
cites as the “one great f law” in Their Eyes the fact that the narrative is
told in the voice of the omniscient third person. Stepto refuses to call
Their Eyes a failed text; aware of its greatness, he suggests that the
novel might benefit from a new category:
one might say that the example of Their Eyes calls for a
narrative in which the primary figure (like Janie) achieves a space
beyond those defined by the tropes of ascent and immersion,
but (unlike Janie) also achieves authorial control over both the
frame and tale of his or her personal history.1
Ascent and immersion are terms with a rich religious significance. The
ritual space defined by these terms (in Stepto’s reading of Afro-American
narratives) has been associated by other perceptive and prophetic readers
of Afro-American culture, the composers and singers of the
Spirituals.
Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters, 12:2 (39); Spring
1989: pp. 310-20. © Charles H. Rowell.
19
20 Joseph A. Brown
Immersion demands attention to the deep river, to the Jordan (which,

chilly and cold, chills the body but not the soul), to the valley (where
countless old believers went to pray and where their souls got so happy
that they stayed all day). Ascent likewise has its equivalents in the
Spirituals: from the rock where Moses stood, to the mountain from
which Elijah caught the chariot ride, to the carnival of wheels-within-
wheels of Ezekiel’s vision way up in the middle of the air. Stepto suggests
that there is a “continuum of narrative strategies” that must be employed
in the study of Afro-American literature. In order to calibrate that
continuum more carefully—whether a name is ever found for each point
on the scale—it might be helpful to spend some time right smack in the
middle of the air, as the old folks suggested. By arriving at what will
be called, in this essay, “the mystic plain,” where Hurston seems to place
Janie Crawford in Their Eyes, other characters of Afro-American fiction
who would otherwise be place-less in the ascent/immersion scheme,
might be found to be quite at home.2
The main thrust of this essay will be tracing the inner growth of the
title character of Meridian, understanding that a mystical journey, in
the Afro- American religious tradition, brings heaven down to earth; and
by watching Meridian learn to hear the voice of God in the stillness
amidst the storm of her life, we might recover a sight of the middle
ground of the sacred spaces. After all, there was a den where Daniel faced
the lions; and a wilderness from which many a saint emerged; Jacob’s
ladder upon which the messengers of God traveled—to say nothing of the
familiar battlefield, where many a war was fought.
Zora Hurston has served as the tutelary ancestor for Alice
Walker so consistently that her value as a primary guide in this
endeavor needs no justification. While Alice Walker has written of her
indebtedness and bond to Hurston for Their Eyes Were Watching God, it
would be helpful to consider— in dealing with Meridian—some of the
occasional pieces Hurston wrote concerning various aspects of Afro-
American religious practices.3 Hurston, it might be argued, serves as a
model for Meridian Hill. The journey to seek the wisdom of the old is a
quest common to both. The deliberate odd behavior and quirkiness in
dress and utterance, the arresting presence and the delphic aura noticed
in the real Hurston are echoed more than coincidentally in the fictional
Meridian. In the portrait “Mother Catherine,” Hurston first describes her
meeting with the “spiritual dictator,” then quotes several aphorisms from the
prophetess:
She laid her hand upon my head.

‘Daughter why have you come here?’
‘Mother, I come seeking knowledge.’
‘Thank God. Do y’all hear her. She come here looking for
“All Saints Should Walk Away”: The Mystical Pilgrimage of Meridian 21
wisdom. Eat de salt, daughter, and get yo mind with God and
me. You shall know what you come to find out. I feel you. I
felt you while you was sitten in de chapel. Bring her a veil.’
(24)
‘There is no heaven beyond dat blue globe. There is a
between- world between this brown earth and the blue above.
So says the beautiful spirit.’ (26)
As could be expected, Meridian Hill’s beginning quest for

knowledge had none of the aggression often associated with Zora
Hurston. Meridian is introduced to the reader as a focused personality at
the end of her quest. The flashbacks that give the novel its particular
rhythm show Meridian beginning her journey on the periphery of the road,
attracted to the distractions, unaware of any pattern to her life. There are
no older women physically present to instruct her in the eating of salt
and the gaining of wisdom, especially not her mother:
Meridian was conscious of a feeling of guilt, even as a

child. Yet she did not know of what she might be guilty. When
she tried to express her feelings to her mother, her mother
would only ask: ‘Have you stolen anything?’
With her own daughter she certainly said things she herself
did not believe. She refused help and seemed, to Meridian,
never to understand. But all along she understood
perfectly.4
Hurston was able, as she demonstrates in book after book, to find wise
elders to further her journey to wisdom. For Meridian Hill, there is only
the wind buffeting her onto the road; it is her mind alone that will seek,
discover and re-create the world. Hurston, in her own authorial voice,
named her journey as “dust tracks on the road,” and wrote of the
journey in such a way as to keep herself veiled by her eloquence.
Meridian Hill is never known, but not because it is an authorial voice
other than her own that tells her story. Meridian remains a mystery
because she fashions herself not into an authentic witness, but into the
very presence of God, a presence that defies all telling. It is for others to
give witness to the deeds of Meridian. She weaves her own veil, and
Walker writes of Meridian’s life in such a way as to force the reader
(through Truman Held, Lynne, and the various townspeople who are
touched by her power) to seek the truth of Meridian in her silence.
Scholars have never been comfortable with mystics. (Nor for that
matter have the families, friends, and acquaintances of mystics had an
easy time with them.) Those whose business is the critical sifting of
words and other symbols are generally frustrated with any who use their
lives to discount the
22 Joseph A. Brown
ability to communicate in words. Even though the world of literary

criticism is periodically enthralled with theories that maintain that texts
are unreliable, in more mundane worlds the actions of people are held in
more suspicion if there are no words to provide a context of possible
interpretations. From the time of Jeremiah, wandering through Jerusalem
breaking pottery, to Teresa of Avila floating several feet above the chapel
floor, the very souls who most seek quiet have most seriously disturbed
the peace of mind of all who interact with them. Meridian Hill, fictional
though she may be, joins this company of unsettling saints:
Meridian did not look to the right or to the left. She

passed the people watching her as if she didn’t know it was
on her account they were there. As she approached the tank the
blast of its engine starting sent clouds of pigeons fluttering, with
the sound of rapid, distant shelling, through the air, and the
muzzle of the tank swung tantalizingly side to side—as if to
tease her—before it settled directly toward her chest. . . . And
then, when she reached the tank she stepped lightly,
deliberately, right in front of it, rapped smartly on its carapace—
as if knocking on a door— then raised her arm again. The
children pressed onward, through the remains of the arrayed
riflemen up to the circus car door. The silence as Meridian kicked
open the door, exploded in a mass exhalation of breaths, and the
men who were in the tank crawled sheepishly out again to
stare.
‘God!’ said Truman without thinking. ‘How can you not love
somebody like that!’
‘Because she thinks she’s God,’ said the old sweeper, ‘or else
she just ain’t all there. I think she ain’t all there, myself.’ (21–
22)
Without thinking (a state that is common to him), Truman Held sees

the reality that Meridian has become. This incident appears at the
beginning of the novel, in the episode entitled “The Last Return.” At
the end of the book, when this incident is once again the focus of the
narrative, Meridian writes one last poem:
there is water in the world for

us brought by our friends
though the rock of mother and god
vanishes into sand
and we, cast out alone
to heal
and re-create
ourselves. (213)
The mosaic of episodes that Walker fashions into Meridian are fused
in the central character as the reader finally realizes that Meridian has
become the rock of mother and god. The poem is the final blessing for
Truman Held, left to hang over his sleeping-place, a kiss of words left
upon his brow. Meridian is no longer cast out, alone; she has healed and
re-created herself. She has left the dark night of the soul, the purgative
journey. Because the novel is an assembly of incidents, fashioned in a
circle, the poem must be placed at the beginning of the story, no matter
where it is placed in the book. The congregation of witnesses see
Meridian after her journey through the wilderness and their/ our souls
“look back in wonder” at how she made it over. Her example is the
teaching message she aspired to: go ye and do likewise.
In many a kitchen in Afro-America, Meridian Hill would be
described as a “marked child.” Her fascination with mystic plains was
inherited through her father, because of her father’s grandmother, Feather
Mae. If Alice Walker intended Meridian to be anything else but her first
extended meditation on mysticism, the episode in which the story of
Feather Mae is recounted would be called something other than
“Indians and Ecstasy.” Meridian’s great-grandmother was a “woman it
was said of some slight and harmless madness.” When she first enters the
coils of the Sacred Serpent (the Indian burial mound handed on to
Meridian’s father), “she felt as if she had stepped into another world, into
a different kind of air.” Possessing only the story of Feather Mae,
Meridian goes to the Sacred Serpent and induces a vision:
It was as if the walls of the earth that enclosed her rushed

outward, leveling themselves at a dizzying rate, and then
spinning wildly, lifting her out of her body and giving her the
feeling of flying. And in this movement she saw the faces of her
family, the branches of trees, the wings of birds, the corners of
houses, blades of grass and petals of flowers rush toward a
central point high above her and she was drawn with them,
as whirling as bright, as free, as they. Then the pit where she
stood, and what had left her at its going was returned. When
she came back to her body—and she felt sure she had left it—
her eyes were stretched wide open, and they were dry, because
she found herself staring directly at the sun. (58)
She induces this vision because she sought to understand “her

great- grandmother’s ecstasy and her father’s compassion for people dead
centuries before he was born.” Meridian becomes her name (in all of its
variations as listed at the beginning of the book, but notably, “of or at
noon or, especially of the position of power of the sun at noon”) and,
unknowingly, is invested with the powers of the crossroads. The rest of
her life is an attempt to re-create this moment during which she stands
ecstatic, consonant with the Greek
24 Joseph A. Brown
understanding: withdrawal of the soul from the body; a mystic or

prophetic trance. A trance so powerful that she is “out of time,” able to
confront the sun without harm. Maybe “she ain’t all there,” but the part
that seems missing to the old sweeper, and to Anne-Marion, Truman,
Mrs. Held, and others is somewhere—flying between heaven and
earth.
Traditional understandings of mysticism would assert that the
individual mystics aim at direct union with their gods. In every tradition,
the attempt at mystical union is marked by an urgent disregard for the
body. Among the anchorites of the ancient African desert to the 14th-
century mystics of Europe; among the varieties of Buddhist, Hindu,
Taoist holy women and men; and among the initiates and devotees of
traditional Native American and African religions, there is a universal
struggle against the physical, a yearning to recapture the ecstatic for longer
and longer “periods” of time, until time can no longer chain them to the
earth and its hungers. What for these men and women is a blessed
state is often the manifestation of obsessive, delusional, or
pathological behavior to others.5
For those moments when mystics must return from the sacred
space and walk the streets of the world, there are tasks to be
performed by them, obligations to be met. In her essay,
“Conversions and Visions,” Zora Hurston succinctly outlines the
dynamics of acceptance of a call to preach. Alice Walker does not
follow this outline simply, but there is an appropriation of the insights
Hurston offers. Keeping in mind the fact that Meridian is re-creating a
tradition with no proximate mentor to guide her, it is possible to see the
essentials of conversion and the call to preach as applicable to much
of the purification process displayed in Meridian’s life. Hurston begins:
The vision is a very definite part of Negro religion. It

almost always accompanies conversion. It almost always
accompanies the call to preach.
In the conversion the vision is sought. The individual goes
forth into the waste places and by fasting and prayer induces
the vision. The place of retirement chosen is one most likely
to have some emotional effect upon the seeker. The cemetery,
to a people who fear the dead, is a most suggestive place to
gain visions. The dense swamps with the possibility of bodily
mishaps is another favorite. (85)
It is obvious that Meridian has sought a vision—for

understanding the dead of centuries before. Along with the more
orthodox forms of Afro- American religion, Meridian’s faith quest is an
attempt to restore the broken circle. She has only the stories of her
foremothers as sustenance; there is none
of their handed-over wisdom; none of the practical methods of

understanding special to wise old women are accessible to her. Taking the
outline Hurston provides, a coherent pattern emerges from the pages of
Meridian’s “book of life.”
While there is no cemetery, there is a preoccupation with the dead,
not the dead of centuries before, but the present newly-dead. Beginning
with the confrontation with the tank quoted above, Meridian can be
divided into stages of understanding how the dead compel the living to
pay reverence. Meridian confronts society so that the children may learn
to distinguish the varieties and economics of death:
‘You make yourself a catatonic behind a lot of

meaningless action that will never get anybody anywhere.
What good did it do those kids to see that freak’s freaky
wife?’
‘She was a fake. They discovered that. . . . They said she was
made of plastic and were glad they hadn’t waited until
Thursday when they would have to pay money to see her.’ (26)
Throughout the novel, the primary question Meridian negotiates is

“Can you kill for the revolution?” Her ambivalence, her habit of being “a
woman in the process of changing her mind,” causes feelings of
alienation within Meridian. Her overwhelming sense of being alienated
from those she respects and loves distracts her from the insight gained by
the reader—Meridian is not an outcast from the circle; she is its very
center. Anne-Marion rejects her and cannot break communications;
Lynne is jealous and angry with Meridian’s presence in her family’s life
and yet seeks out Meridian during every domestic crisis or tragedy.
Truman felt:
. . . it would have been joy to him to forget her, as it would

have been joy never to have been his former self. But running
away from Lynne, at every opportunity, and existing a few
days in Meridian’s presence, was the best that he could do.
(143)
The brief recounting of the tale of the Wild Child (pages 35–37) is
a distanced representation of Meridian’s status as she begins her
indenture at Saxon College. Rootless; instinctual; haphazardly pregnant;
subsisting on the castoff generosity of near-strangers, the girl and the
womanchild reflect each other. This establishes the motive for
Meridian’s response to the death of Wile Chile in the “Sojourner”
episode. At this point in her life, Meridian is described as existing in a
“fog of unconcern,” but the description is less than complete. She is
distracted from the external realities, focused on better shaping and
understanding the significance of the moment within
26 Joseph A. Brown
the coils of the Sacred Serpent. Meridian’s flight from the body has
stayed with her:
Meridian lived in a small corner room high under the eaves

of the honors house [of Saxon College] and had decorated
the ceiling, walls and backs of doors and the adjoining toilet
and large photographs of trees and rocks and tall hills and
floating clouds, which she claimed she knew. (38)
Her identification with the Sojourner Tree begins the spiritual

merging process that will develop, by the end of her story, into a
presence who is rock and god and mother, and the action that
signifies this beginning fusion is the funeral of Wile Chile beneath the
branches of the Sojourner. Whatever Meridian knows, she becomes.
Staring at the sun intensifies her name. Bringing the past and the
unwashed present into the womb of Saxon College—disrupting time and
the order that f lows from time—Meridian functions in a manner
similar to the slave, Lavinie. When the unthinking college students
attack the nurturing Sojourner, a part of Meridian remains silent for
most of the rest of the novel, and she must take on the name and the
responsibility of the tree itself. After all, she knew it. And she knows
the necessity of seeking out the children who would otherwise die
ungrieved and unavenged.
Meridian’s own child is the second death (in the structure of the
novel) that reduces her distracted state and allows her the freedom to
attain a higher level in the atmosphere. By renouncing the proof of her
flesh, she gives the child his life. When she is sought out to be the
refuge from grief by both Truman and Lynne at the death of their
daughter, Camara, Meridian acts with a calm, a self-possession, that
seems assumed and not demonstrated within the narrative. It would be
a flaw if the death of children (imagined, unattended, deliberate, and
perverted) were not major connectives throughout the novel.
Like rocks, rivers, hills, clouds and ancient trees, Meridian belongs,
as she is, to give direction, comfort. She has become another function
of her name: compass point.
It was Meridian who had led them to the mayor’s office,

bearing in her arms the bloated figure of a five-year-old boy
who had been stuck in the sewer for two days before he was
raked out with a grappling hook. The child’s body was so
ravaged, so grotesque, so disgusting to behold, his own mother
had taken one look and refused to touch him. To the people
who followed Meridian it was as if she carried a large bouquet
of long-stemmed roses. The body
might have smelled just that sweet, from the serene, set
expression on her face. They had followed her into a town
meeting over which the white-haired, bespectacled mayor
presided, and she had placed the child, whose body had begun
to decompose, beside his gavel. The people had turned with
her and followed her out. They had been behind her when, at
some distance from the center of the town, she had suddenly
buckled and fallen to the ground. (191)
If Meridian has learned to see death in life, life in death, the

ancestors in the fog, the great-grandmother in the serpent’s coils, why
would it not be possible at the end of her “recorded sayings and doings,”
for her to see not only the decomposing body of the child, but also the
cruelly cut flower that is every dead child? To have the mystic sight is
not to be blind to the world, but to see it as it really is, bounded and
encircled by the world of eternity. The mystic must make her return
among the people and show them a larger universe, give them a sense
of their being that is expanded in its horizon because of the sights the
mystic has seen and knows to be true.
One final death allows Meridian to break through the most
oppressive wall of her spiritual imprisonment. Throughout her life,
attending church had been a punishing frustration, because she could
respond only to the rhythms and melodies of the music, finding the
words of the sermons and the lyrics of the songs unintelligible. Given the
fact that she had learned from Miss Winter during the Black History
pageant that love meant forgiveness, Meridian did not hate the
churchgoers; she was (in her mind) simply not a part of the circle.
Feeling herself, once again, outside of the people, she is actually, to the
observing reader, thoroughly immersed in the essence of the religious
experience. The music induces a rapture inside her; yet one more form of
the ecstatic state for which she yearns. The clearest glimpse of the
simple grandeur of the true religious experience comes to Meridian as
she stands among the people during the funeral of Martin Luther King,
Jr. The vision is terminated when the marching mourners put off their
grief and renew their sociability:
‘It’s a black characteristic, man,’ a skinny black boy tapping

on an imaginary drum was saying. ‘We don’t go on over death
the way whiteys do.’ He was speaking to a white couple who
hung guiltily to every word.
Behind her a black woman was laughing, laughing, as if all
her cares, at last, had flown away. (186)
While the entire passage is shaped by Meridian’s shame and

revulsion for the lack of piety among people, does she not transform
every funeral into
28 Joseph A. Brown
a celebration, from calling down (with her untrained power) the petals of
the Sojourner upon Wile Chile, to the investing of flowers upon the
drowned boy? Part of her revulsion, it would seem, is aimed against the
uncluttered humanity of those who would renew themselves with
laughter in the midst of the profoundest grief.
Meridian, having for some time visited the neighborhood churches,
finally “for no reason she was sure of, found herself in front of a large
white church, Baptist (with blue and red in its stained windows, perhaps
that was what drew her). ” Within this church the last layer of her
often-tortured
journey around and around the wheel is met, managed, and connected.
This episode is entitled “Camara,” and the name of Truman’s child is the
binding force that allows Meridian to answer the question, “Can you
kill?” When the death of Camara is narrated earlier in the book,
Meridian’s focus is centered upon Lynne and Truman. The novel and the
person of Meridian are silent on the death of this child. It is up to the
reader to put the name of Camara into each sentence that mentions a
child who is murdered by the world. On the wheel of mystic time there
is only now, so that Meridian’s grief is not late, it simply is.
The service Meridian attends is a memorial in honor of a young
man slain while working in the Civil Rights Movement. His father,
terminally shattered, attends this memorial to speak a word to the
congregation. In one of the most beautiful passages in the book, the awe-
inspiring acceptance of the truth of his sorrow by a community “well-
acquainted by grief,” ends with the perennial words of the surviving
father:
The words came from a throat that seemed stoppered with

anxiety, memory, grief and dope. And the words, the beginning
of a speech he had laboriously learned years ago for just such
occasions as this when so much was asked of him, were the
same that he gave every year. The same, exact, three. ‘My son
died.’
Since Alice Walker is, by any account, “a strict constructionist” of

fiction, the utter simplicity of the words, “my son died,” must serve as
the still point around which the meaning of Meridian must swirl. So
small a sentence demands a halting and a reckoning, both for Meridian
and for her attending audience. Walker brings it all together as an
ENDING.
There was a reason for the ceremony she witnessed in

church......The people in the church were saying to the red-
eyed
man that his son had not died for nothing, and that if his son
should come again they would protect his life with her own. . . .
‘Understand this,’ they were saying, ‘the church (and Meridian
knew they did not mean simply ‘church,’ as in Baptist,

Methodist or whatnot, but rather communal spirit,
togetherness, righteous convergence), the music, the form of
worship that has always sustained us, the kind of ritual you
share with us, these are the ways to transformation that we
know. We want to take this as far as we can.’ (199)
This passage brings us back to the beginning of the essay, and

the difficulty Robert Stepto noted in the narrative voice of Their Eyes
Were Watching God. The title of that book could—and ought—very
well refer to Janie Crawford herself, since the people of her hometown
were looking at her, returning from the grave of the Florida muck. Janie
was transfigured by her journey; so, too, Meridian. When Meridian
speaks in her mind, in this passage, she has become possessed by the
voice of the holy assembly. She is the votary of the people. All of her
actions throughout the novel have been the signs of doing what the
people dreamed of doing, but were afraid to attempt. Now she has
become so emptied of particularized self, that when she thinks, she can
discern the nuances of unarticulated spiritual meaning. It is not a
question of “narrative strategies,” of determining who is speaking, and
when. The least complex answer is: everyone, and no one; then, now
and never.
Meridian leaves the church and makes her own vow to the man
whose son died. “Yes, indeed she would kill, before she allowed anyone to
murder his son again.” Digging deeply into that promise, Meridian
wavers with her authentic ambivalence; perhaps, perhaps not. Within
the promise were several other harmonious determinations. One
especially fulfills the dream- quest of the journey into the Serpent’s Coils,
fusing compassion and the dead of centuries before:
—and when they stop to wash off the blood and find their
throats too choked with the smell of murdered flesh to sing,
I will come forward and sing from memory songs they will
need once more to hear. For it is the song of the people,
transformed by the experiences of each generation, that holds
them together, and if any part of it is lost the people suffer
and are without soul.
In The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa,

Dominique Zahan offers this summary of his understanding of what
essentially unifies all traditional African religions:
. . . it is important to fully apprehend the unity of traditional

African religion, not so much through some of its elements
as
30 Joseph A. Brown
through man’s attitude towards the Invisible, through the

position which he feels he occupies in creation, and through
his feeling of belonging to the universe. In my view, in
short, the essence of African spirituality lies in the feeling
man has of being at once image, model and integral part of
the world in whose cyclical life he senses himself deeply and
necessarily engaged.
Moral life and mystical life, these two aspects of African

spirituality, give it its proper dimensions. They constitute, so to
speak, the supreme goal of the African soul, the objective
towards which the individual strives with all his energy
because he feels his perfection can only be completed and
consummated if he masters and surpasses himself through
divinity, indeed through the mastery of divinity itself.6
Meridian’s vow unites the moral and the mystical: yes, indeed she
would kill, before she allowed anyone to murder his son again. His son,
Wile Chile, Camara, the drowned boy, Martin Luther King, and the
litany of names punctuating the book will be protected because in the
time that matters, they cannot die; they are, even now, being born.
Within the traditional theologies of Africa, and within the
traditions of mysticism throughout the world, there is one final element
that must be addressed. It is final, in several senses, since Walker
introduces this theme at the ends of The Third Life of Grange Copeland,
and The Color Purple as well as Meridian. St. Paul says, in his Letter to
the Galatians: “and there are no more distinctions between Jew and
Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are the one in
Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27). Walker has not exactly covered all of those
categories, but she has made a point of recreating a world in which
men become complete only when they become female; not feminine, but
female. Grange Copeland becomes the daughter of Ruth. Mister Albert
allows his full person to unfold only when Miss Celie begins to clothe
him in her specially designed fashions, and teaches him to sew.
The constant illness besetting Meridian throughout the novel is
clearly named as the side effects of pregnancy.
‘Of course I’m sick,’ snapped Meridian. ‘Why else would

I spend all this time trying to get well!’
‘You have a strange way of trying to get well!’ (25)
His first thought was of Lazarus, but then he tried to

recall someone less passive, who had raised himself without
help.
Meridian would return to the world cleansed of sickness. That

was what he knew. (219)
Truman felt the room begin to turn and fell to the floor. A
moment later, dizzy, he climbed shakily into Meridian’s
sleeping bag. Underneath his cheek he felt the hard edge of her
cap’s visor, he pulled it out and put in on his head. (220)
. . . though the handwriting was grotesquely small. . . he

recognized it as Anne-Marion’s. It contained one line: ‘Who
would be happier than you that The Sojourner did not die?’ She
had written, also in minute script, ‘perhaps me,’ but then had
half- erased it. (217)
The photograph of a shoot emerging from the base of The Sojourner

is the sign from Meridian’s heaven (the between-world space where she is
most herself ) that announces her health. She has healed the Sojourner, by
attending to the dead and bearing them compassionately, ultimately
vowing to undo death when it next appears. It is the time of passing-
over. Truman begins the physical transformation of self, in the hermitage
of the healing woman. He will take Meridian’s place and assume her
role. She has been both mother and rock, channeling the power of God
—who is the community in concerted song and prayer—back into itself.
She will be less and less, diminishing and dissolving into the people. The
others marked by her passing will undergo the same rites and initiation.
Their hungers can be only half-erased. If the world is to be re-created,
they must first recognize that they have been cast out, alone; then come
close to the rock and cling. Meridian has been the rock, nurturing her
children until they are strong enough to crawl into her womb and give
birth to their own powerful spirits.
. . . The only new thing now,’ she had said to herself,

mumbling out aloud, so that people turned to stare at her,
‘would be the refusal of Christ to accept crucifixion. King,’ she
had said, turning down a muddy lane, ‘should have refused.
All those characters in all those novels that require death to end
the book should refuse. All saints should walk away. Do their
bit, then—just walk away. See Europe, visit Hawaii, become
agronomists, or raise Dalmatians.’ She didn’t care what they
did, but they should do it. (151)
And what should the people do; what is required of them? To choose
life. “Magnetic Meridian: a carefully located meridian from which
secondary or guide meridians may be constructed.”
32 Joseph A. Brown
No t E s
1. Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1979), 164–166.
2. Significant dwellers on this mystic plain would include John in
Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, Milkman in Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and
the most elu- sive of all the mythic characters of modern Afro-American fiction,
Bigger Thomas in Wright’s Native Son. The concept of a “mystic plain” has been
discussed earlier in Callaloo, in this author’s review, “With Eyes Like Flames
of Fire,” (Callaloo, No. 24, Spring–Summer, 1985).
3. These occasional pieces have been collected in The Sanctified Church
(Berkeley: Turtle Island Press, 1983). All the references to Hurston will be
taken from this edition.
4. Alice Walker, Meridian (New York: Washington Square Press, 1977),
49–51. All subsequent references will be taken from this paperback edition.
5. Richard Kieckhefer, in Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth Century Saints and
their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) presents a
most bal- anced view of the hunger of the mystics for the freedom to f ly to
the Divine, and of the methods they employed to induce and sustain the ecstatic
union. His discussion of the limits of a psychoanalytic critique of mystic
behavior is remarkable.
6. Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality and Thought of Traditional
Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pages 4–5. It is obvious, given
the subject of this essay, that the broom of “womanist prose” would have a
salutary effect upon the narrative style of Zahan or his translator.
AL ICE HAL L P E T R Y
Alice Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction
T here’s nothing quite like a Pulitzer Prize to draw attention to a

little known writer. And for Alice Walker, one of the few black
writers of the mid-’60s to remain steadily productive for the two
ensuing decades, the enormous success of 1982’s The Color Purple has
generated critical interest in a literary career that has been, even if not
widely noted, at the very least worthy of note. As a poet (Once, 1968;
Revolutionary Petunias, 1973) and a novelist (The Third Life of Grange
Copeland, 1970; Meridian, 1976), Walker has always had a small but
enthusiastic following, while her many essays, published in black- and
feminist-oriented magazines (e.g., Essence, Ms.), have likewise kept
her name current, albeit in rather limited circles. The Pulitzer Prize
has changed this situation, qualitatively and perhaps permanently.
Walker’s name is now a household word, and a reconsideration of her
literary canon, that all but inevitable Pulitzer perk, is well underway. An
integral part of this phenomenon would be the reappraisal of her short
fiction. Walker’s two collections of short stories— 1973’s In Love &
Trouble and 1981’s You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down—are now
available as attractive paperbacks and selling briskly, we are told. But a
serious critical examination of her short stories—whether of particular
tales, the individual volumes, or the entire canon—has yet to occur.
Hence this essay. As a general over-view, it seeks to evaluate Walker’s
achievement as a short story
Modern Language Studies, 19 (1); Winter 1989: pp. 12-27. © 1989 Modern Language
Studies.
33
34 Alice Hall Petry
writer while probing a fundamental question raised by so many

reviewers of the two volumes: why is You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
so consistently less satisfying than the earlier In Love & Trouble? How
has Alice Walker managed to undermine so completely that latest-and-
best formula so dear to book reviewers? The answer, as we shall see, is
partly a matter of conception and partly one of technique; and it suggests
further that Walker’s uneven- ness thus far as a writer of short fiction—
her capacity to produce stories that are sometimes extraordinarily good, at
other times startlingly weak—places her at a career watershed. At this
critical juncture, Alice Walker could so refine her art as to become
one of the finest writers of American short fiction in this century.
She could just as easily not.
•••
One key to understanding the disparate natures of In Love &

Trouble and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down is their epigraphs. In
Love & Trouble offers two.The first epigraph, a page-long extract from
The Concubine by Elechi Amadi, depicts a girl, Ahurole, who is prone to
fits of sobbing and “alarmingly irrational fits of argument”: “From all this
her parents easily guessed that she was being unduly influenced by
agwu, her personal spirit.” It is not until the end of the extract that Amadi
mentions casually that “Ahurole was engaged to Ekwueme when she
was eight days old.”1 In light of what follows in the collection, it is a
most suitable epigraph: the women in this early volume truly are “in love
and trouble” due in large measure to the roles, relationships, and self-
images imposed upon them by a society which knows little and cares less
about them as individuals. A marriage arranged in infancy perfectly
embodies this situation; and the shock engendered by Amadi’s final
sentence is only heightened as one reads In Love & Trouble and comes
to realize that the concubinage depicted in his novel, far from being a
bizarre, pagan, foreign phenomenon, is practiced in only slightly
modified form in contemporary— especially black—America. In the
opening story of In Love & Trouble, “Roselily,” the overworked title
character marries the unnamed Black Muslim from Chicago in part to give
her three illegitimate children a better chance in life, and in part to obtain
for herself some measure of social and economic security; but it is not
really a relationship she chooses to enter freely, as is conveyed by her
barely listening to her wedding ceremony—a service which triggers
images not of romance but of bondage. Even ten-year-old Myop, the sole
character of the vignette “The Flowers,” has her childhood—and,
ultimately, her attitudes towards her self and her world—shattered by the
blunt social reality of lynching: as much as she would love to spend her
life all alone collecting flowers, from the moment she accidentally gets
her heel
Alice Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction 35
caught in the skull of a decapitated lynching victim it is clear that, for

their own survival, black females like Myop must be part of a group that
includes males. Hence the plethora of bad marriages (whether legal
unions or informal liaisons) in Walker’s fiction; hence also the mental
anguish suffered by most of her women characters, who engage in such
unladylike acts as attacking their husbands with chain saws (“Really,
Doesn’t Crime Pay?,” IL&T) or setting fire to themselves (“Her Sweet
Jerome,” IL&T). Must be that pesky agwu again—a diagnosis which is
symptomatic of society’s refusal to face the fact that women become
homocidal/suicidal, or hire rootworkers to avenge social snubs (“The
Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,” IL&T), or lock themselves up in convents
(“The Diary of an African Nun,” IL&T) not because of agwus, or
because they are mentally or emotionally deficient, but because they are
responding to the stress of situations not of their own making.2
Certainly marriage offers these women nothing, and neither does
religion, be it Christianity, the Black Muslim faith, or voodoo. That these
traditional twin sources of comfort and stability cause nothing but
“trouble” for Walker’s characters might lead one to expect a decidedly
depressing volume of short stories; but in fact In Love & Trouble is very
upbeat. Walker manages to counterbalance the oppressive subject
matter of virtually all these 13 stories by maintaining the undercurrent of
hope first introduced in the volume’s second epigraph, a passage from
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:
. . . we must hold to what is difficult; everything in Nature grows and defends
itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself,
seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition” (ii). For Walker as
for Rilke, opposition is not necessarily insurmountable: struggles and
crises can lead to growth, to the nurturing of the self; and indeed most
of the women of In Love & Trouble, sensing this, do try desperately to
face their situations and deal with them—even if to do so may make
them seem insane, or ignorant, or anti-social.
The sole epigraph of You Can’t Keep lacks the relevance and subtlety
of those of In Love & Trouble: “It is harder to kill something that is
spiritually alive than it is to bring the dead back to life.”3 Fine words
from Herr Hesse, but unfortunately they don’t have much to do with
the fourteen stories in the collection. Few characters in You Can’t Keep
would qualify as “spiritually alive” according to most informed
standards. We are shown a lot of self- absorbed artistes (the jazz-poet of
“The Lover,” the authoress of “Fame,” the sculpture student of “A
Sudden Trip Home in the Spring”), plus rather too many equally self-
absorbed would-be radicals (“Advancing Luna—and Ida
B. Wells,” “Source,” “Laurel”), plus a series of women—usually referred
to generically as “she”—who engage in seemingly interminable monologues
on pornography, abortion, sadomasochism, and rape (“Coming Apart,”
“Porn,” “A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be
Saved?”). These
36 Alice Hall Petry
women are dull. And, unlike the situation in In Love & Trouble, the
blame can’t really be placed on males, those perennial targets of Alice
Walker’s acid wit. No, the problem with the women of You Can’t Keep
is that they are successful. Unlike the ladies of In Love & Trouble, who
seem always to be struggling, to be growing, those of You Can’t Keep
have all advanced to a higher plane, personally and socially: as Barbara
Christian observes, there truly is a clear progression between the two
volumes, from an emphasis on “trouble” to an emphasis on self-
assertiveness.4 The women of You Can’t Keep embody the product, not
the process: where a mother in In Love & Trouble (“Everyday Use”) can
only fantasize about appearing on The Tonight Show, a woman of You
Can’t Keep (“Nineteen Fifty-Five”) actually does it! Gracie Mae Still meets
Johnny! Similarly, a dying old lady in In Love & Trouble (“The
Welcome Table”) is literally thrown out of a segregated white church, but
in You Can’t Keep (“Source”) two black women get to sit in an integrated
Anchorage bar! With real Eskimos! Trudier Harris is quite correct
that, compared to those of In Love & Trouble, the women of You Can’t
Keep seem superficial, static: “Free to make choices, they find
themselves free to do nothing or to drift”5—and they do, with Walker
apparently not realizing that in fiction (as in life) the journey, not the
arrival, is what interests. Men and marriage, those two bugaboos of
In Love & Trouble responsible for thwarting women’s careers (“Really,
Doesn’t Crime Pay?”), mutilating hapless schoolgirls (“The Child Who
Favored Daughter”), and advocating anti-white violence (“Her Sweet
Jerome”), at least brought out the strength and imagination of the women
they victimized, and the women’s struggles engross the reader. In
contrast, the men of You Can’t Keep have declined, both as people and as
fictional characters, in an inverse relationship to the women’s success.
Most of the volume’s male characters barely materialize; the few who do
appear are milquetoast, from the pudgy, racist lawyer/rapist/lover Bubba
of “How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in
the State? It Was Easy”; to Ellis, the Jewish gigolo from Brooklyn who
inexplicably dazzles the supposedly cool jazz-poet heroine of “The
Lover”; to Laurel, he of the giant pink ears who (again inexplicably)
dazzles the black radical journalist in “Laurel.” And many of the male
characters in You Can’t Keep meet sorry ends—not unlike the women
of In Love & Trouble: Bubba is shot to death by his schoolgirl victim;
the shopworn Ellis gets dumped; poor Laurel winds up in a coma, only
to emerge brain-damaged. Curiously, we don’t miss them; instead, we
miss the kinds of conflicts and personal/social revelations which fully-
realized, reasonably healthy male characters can impart to fiction.
For men, either directly or through the children they father, are a vital
part of love; and it is love, as the soap operatic title of In Love &
Trouble
suggests,6 which is most operative in that early volume. It assumes various
forms. It may be the love between a parent and child, surely the most
consistently positive type of love in Walker’s fiction. It is her love for
her dying baby which impels Rannie Toomer to chase a urinating
mare in a rainstorm so as to collect “Strong Horse Tea,” a folk
medicine. It is her love for her daughter Dee that enables Mama to
call her “Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo” in acknowledgment of her
new Afro identity, but her equally strong love for her other child, the
passive Maggie, which enables her to resist Dee/Wangero’s demand for
old quilts (Maggie’s wedding present) to decorate her apartment
(“Everyday Use”). Then again, the love of In Love & Trouble may be
between a woman and God (“The Welcome Table”); and it may even
have an erotic dimension, as with the sexually-repressed black nun of
“The Diary of an African Nun” who yearns for her “pale lover,”
Christ (115). And granted, the love of In Love & Trouble is often
distorted, even perverse: a father lops off his daughter’s breasts in part
because he confuses her with his dead sister, whom he both loved and
loathed (“The Child Who Favored Daughter”); a young black girl and her
middle-aged French teacher, the guilt-ridden survivor of the holocaust,
fantasize about each other but never interact (“We Drink the Wine in
France”); a dumpy hairdresser stabs and burns her husband’s Black
Power pamphlets as if they were his mistress: “Trash!’ she cried over and
over . . . ‘I kill you! I kill you!” (“Her Sweet Jerome,” 34). But in one form
or another, love is the single most palpable force in In Love & Trouble.
This is not the case in You Can’t Keep, and the volume suffers
accordingly.
What happened to love in the later collection? Consider the case of
“Laurel.” What does that supposedly “together” black radical narrator
see in wimpy Laurel? Easy answer: his “frazzled but beautifully fitting
jeans”: “It occurred to me that I could not look at Laurel without
wanting to make love with him” (107). As the black radical and her
mousy lover engage in “acrobatics of a sexual sort” on Atlanta’s public
benches (108), it is clear that “love” is not an issue in this story: these
characters have simply fallen in lust. And as a result, the reader finds it
impossible to be concerned about the ostensible theme of the story: the
ways in which segregation thwarts human relationships. Who cares that
segregation “was keeping us from strolling off to a clean, cheap hotel”
(109) when all they wanted was a roll in the sack? Likewise, the
husband and wife of “Coming Apart,” who speak almost ad nauseum on
the subjects of pornography and sadomasochism, seem to feel nothing for
each other: they are simply spokespersons for particular attitudes
regarding contemporary sexual mores, and ample justification for
Mootry- Ikerionwu’s observation that characterization is definitely not Alice
Walker’s strong suit.7 Without love, without warmth, this ostensible
Everywife and Everyhusband connect literally only when they are
copulating; and as a result Walker’s statements regarding the sexual
exploitation of women, far
38 Alice Hall Petry
from being enriched by the personal touch of seeing how it affects

one typical marriage, collapses into a dry lecture punctuated by clumsy
plugs for consciousness-raising essays by Audre Lorde, Luisah Teish, and
Tracy A. Gardner. Similarly, its title notwithstanding, “The Lover” has
nothing to do with love. The story’s liberated heroine, having left her
husband and child for a summer at an artists’ colony in New England,
decides—just like that—to have an affair with the lupine Ellis: “when
she had first seen him she had thought . . . ‘my lover,’ and had liked,
deep down inside, the illicit sound of it. She had never had a lover; he
would be her first. Afterwards, she would be truly a woman of her time”
(34). Apparently this story was meant to be a study of how one woman—
educated, intelligent, creative—uses her newly- liberated sensuality to
explore her sense of womanhood, her marriage, her career as a jazz poet.
But the one-night-stand quality of her relationship with Ellis, not to
mention the inappropriateness of him as a “lover”—he likes to become
sexually involved each summer “with talkative women who wrote for
Esquire and the New York Times” because they “made it possible for
him to be included in the proper tennis sets and swimming parties at the
Colony” (36)—makes the story’s heroine seem like a fool. And that points
to a major problem with You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down: whereas
the stories of In Love & Trouble move the reader to tears, to shock, to
thought, those of the latter volume too often move him to guffaws. Too
bad they weren’t meant to be humorous.
One would think that a writer of Alice Walker’s stature and experience
would be aware that, since time began, the reduction of love to
fornication has been the basis of jokes, from the ridiculous to the sublime.
And whether they come across as comic caricatures (vide Laurel and
Ellis), examples of bathroom humor, or zany parodies, the characters,
subject matter, and writing style of most of the stories in You Can’t
Keep a Good Woman Down leave the reader with a she’s-gotta-be-
kidding attitude that effectively undercuts its very serious intentions.
Consider the subject matter. In stories like “Porn,” “A Letter of the
Times,” and “Coming Apart,” Walker attacks pornography,
sadomasochism, and violence against women by discussing them: it’s a
technique that many writers have used, but it can backfire by (1)
appealing to the prurient interests of some readers, (2) imparting
excitement to the forbidden topic, or (3) discussing the controversial
subject matter so much that it becomes noncontroversial, unshocking; and
without the “edge” of controversy, these serious topics often seem to
be treated satirically— even when that is not the case. This is what
happens in many stories in You Can’t Keep, and the problem is
compounded by the weak characters. The story “Coming Apart” is a
good example: the husband dashes home from his bourgeois desk job
to sit in the john and masturbate while drooling over the “Jivemates” in
Jiveboy magazine. None of this shocks: we see so
many references to genitalia and elimination in You Can’t Keep that

they seem as mundane as mailing a letter. Worse, the husband
himself (called “he” to emphasize his role as Typical Male) comes across
as a rather dense, naughty adolescent boy. He is so clearly suffering
from a terminal case of the Peter Pan syndrome that it’s impossible to
believe that he’d respond with “That girl’s onto something” when his
equally-vapid wife (called “she”) reads him yet another anti-pornography
essay from her library of black feminist sociological tracts (51). Walker’s-
gotta-be-kidding, but she isn’t. Likewise, the story “Fame” has a streak of
crudity that leaves the reader wondering how to respond. For the most
part, “Fame” consists of the ruminations of one Andrea Clement White
(Walker always uses all three names), a wildly successful and universally
admired writer who returns to her old college to receive her one-
hundred-and-eleventh major award (63). She doesn’t much like her
former (Caucasian) colleagues or the banquet they are giving her, as her
thoughts on the imminent award speech testifies:
“This little lady has done . . . ” Would he have said “This little man
. . .”? But of course not. No man wanted to be called little.
He thought it referred to his penis. But to say “little lady” made
men think of virgins. Tight, tiny pussies, and moments of
rape. (60, Walker’s ellipses)
As Andrea Clement White degenerates from Famous Author to a

character type from farce—the salty-tongued granny, the sweet old
lady with the dirty mind—everything Walker was trying to say about
identity, success, black pride has dissipated. We keep waiting for Walker
to wink, to say that “Fame” is a satire; but it isn’t.
The reader’s uncertainty about how to respond to You Can’t Keep a
Good Woman Down is not dispelled by the writing style of many of the
stories. Funny thing about lust: when you confuse it with love and try to
write about it passionately, the result sounds curiously like parody. The
following passage from “Porn” reads like a Harlequin romance:
She was aflame with desire for him.

On those evenings when all the children [from the
respective previous marriages] were with their other parents, he
would arrive at the apartment at seven. They would walk
hand in hand to a Chinese restaurant a mile away. They
would laugh and drink and eat and touch hands and knees over
and under the table. They would come home. Smoke a joint. He
would put music on. She would run water in the tub with lots
of bubbles. In the bath they would lick and suck each other,
in blissful delight. They would admire the rich
40 Alice Hall Petry
candle glow on their wet, delectably earth-toned skins. Sniff the

incense—the odor of sandal and redwood. He would carry her
in to bed.
Music. Emotion. Sensation. Presence.
Satisfaction like
rivers flowing and
silver.
(“Porn,” YCK, 78)
Except for the use of controlled substances and the licking and sucking,
this is pure Barbara Cartland. Likewise, the narrator’s passion for
Laurel (in the story of the same name) makes one blush—over the
writing: “I thought of his musical speech and his scent of apples and
May wine with varying degrees of regret and tenderness”; their “week of
passion” had been “magical, memorable, but far too brief” (“Laurel,”
YCK, 111).
One might be inclined to excuse these examples on the grounds
that love (or lust, or whatever) tends naturally towards purple prose.
Unfortunately, however, similar excesses undermine You Can’t Keep even
when the characters’ hormones are in check. Here is Andrea Clement
White once again, musing on her professional achievements while
awaiting the award at her banquet:
If she was famous, she wondered fretfully . . , why didn’t

she feel famous? She had made money . . . Lots of money.
Thousands upon thousands of dollars. She had seen her work
accepted around the world, welcomed even, which was more
than she’d ever dreamed possible for it. And yet—there
remained an emptiness, no, an ache, which told her she had
not achieved what she had set out to achieve.
(“Fame,” YCK, 55)
The theme is stale; worse, the writing itself is trite, clichéd; and frankly
one wonders how anyone with so unoriginal a mind could be receiving
her one hundred and eleventh major award. The same triteness mars “A
Sudden Trip Home in the Spring,” in which Sarah Davis, a black
scholarship student at northern Cresselton College, is “immersed in
Camusian philosophy, versed in many languages” (131) and the close
personal friend of the small-eyed, milky-legged, dirty-necked blonde
daughter of “one of the richest men in the world” (127). Sarah is BWOC
at Cresselton: “She was popular”; “Her friends beamed love and envy
upon her”; her white tennis partners think that she walks “Like a
gazelle” (124, 125). There is a momentary suggestion that Sarah takes her
situation and her classmates with a grain of salt (“She was interesting,
‘beautiful,’ only because they had no idea what made her, charming only
because they had no idea from where she came” [130]), but
this theme and tone are quickly abandoned as the tale lapses into a
curiously un-black reworking of the you-can’t-go-home-again
concept. If irony is what Walker has in mind, it certainly doesn’t come
through; and the over-all impression one gets from “A Sudden Trip” is
that, like her 1973 biography of Langston Hughes, this is an earnest story
intended for adolescent readers who appreciate simplistic themes,
characters, and writing styles.
The mature reader’s uncertainty over how to respond to “A Sudden
Trip” takes on a new wrinkle when one considers that Sarah Davis’s
prototype was another black scholarship student from rural Georgia
attending an exclusive northern college: Alice Walker.8 The least effective,
most seemingly comic heroines in Walker’s short fiction were inspired
by Walker herself. These predominate in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman
Down.
Walker has never denied that there are some autobiographical
dimensions to her stories. When “Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells”
was first published in Ms. magazine, Walker included a disclaimer that
“Luna and Freddie Pye are composite characters, and their names are
made up. This is a fictionalized account suggested by a number of real
events”; and John O’Brien’s 1973 interview with Walker offers further
details.9 Similarly, Walker in a 1981 interview with Kristin Brewer
discusses the autobiographical basis of her earliest story, 1967’s “To Hell
with Dying” (IL&T).10 Anyone familiar with Walker’s personal life will
see the significance of the references to Sarah Lawrence, the doorless first
apartment in New York, and the job at the Welfare Department in
“Advancing Luna” (YCK); or the stay at a New England artists’ colony in
“The Lover” (YCK); or the marriage to a New York Jew, the baby girl,
the novel, and the house in the segregated South in “Laurel” (YCK).
There is nothing inherently wrong with using oneself as the prototype for
a story’s character; the problem is that the writer tends, of course, to
present his fictionalized self in the most flattering—even fantastic—light
possible; and too readily that self assumes a larger role in the story than
may be warranted by the exigencies of plot and characterization. Consider
“Advancing Luna,” in which the speaker—who is “difficult to distinguish
from Walker herself ”11— takes over the story like kudzu. We really don’t
need to hear all about her ex- boyfriends, her getting “high on wine and
grass” with a Gene Autry lookalike who paints teeth on fruit, or her
adventures in glamorous Africa (“I was taken on rides down the Nile as a
matter of course”) (94, 96, 90). Her palpable self- absorption and self-
congratulation draw the story’s focus away from its titular heroine, poor
Luna—the selfless victim of interracial rape who ostensibly is an adoring
friend and confidante of the narrator. The reader’s immediate response
(after confusion) is that the story is really quite funny—and with that
response, all of Walker’s serious commentary on rape, miscegenation, and
segregation have dissipated. We see the same inadvertently comic,
Walker-inspired heroine in “Laurel” and “The Lover.” In the latter, the
jazz
42 Alice Hall Petry
poet “had reached the point of being generally pleased with herself,” and
no wonder. What with her “carefully selected tall sandals and her
naturally tall hair, which stood in an elegant black afro with exactly seven
strands of silver hair,” and her “creamy brown” thighs and “curvaceous and
strong legs,” she is able to stop meals the way other women stop
traffic: “If she came late to the dining room and stood in the doorway
a moment longer than necessary—looking about for a place to sit after
she had her tray—for that moment the noise from the cutlery already in
use was still” (34–35). (Really, who could blame Ellis for wanting her so?)
If only there were an element of self-mockery in “The Lover”; if only
Walker were being ironic in “A Sudden Trip”; if only she were
lampooning the shopworn notion of the successful but unsatisfied
celebrity in “Fame”; if only she were parodying romantic writing styles
(and thereby puncturing those “love affairs” undertaken purely to prove
one’s “sexual liberation”) in stories like “Porn,” “Laurel,” and “The Lover.”
But there is absolutely nothing in Alice Walker’s interviews, nothing in
her many personal essays, nothing in her friends’ and colleagues’ reviews
of her books, nothing anywhere to suggest that she is being anything but
dead serious in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down.
What is especially unfortunate about the unintentional humor of
You Can’t Keep is that Walker is quite capable of handling her material
very effectively; in several stories, for example, she excels at narrative
technique. Consider “How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the
Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy” (YCK). At first glance, the
narrative voice seems untenable: how is it that a poor little black girl
from Poultry Street writes such perfect English? (Placed entirely in
quotation marks, the story is “written” by her.) We learn the answer at
the end of the story: having murdered Bubba, the white lawyer who
became her lover after raping her, the narrator/confessor stole all the
money from his office safe and used it to finance her college education.
Hence her flawless English, and the irony of her “confession”: there is no
repentance here, and no reader can blame her. The point of view also is
consistent and effective. The same cannot be said of the long and
rambling “Source,” which unfortunately occupies the second most
prominent position in You Can’t Keep—the very end. It has no
identifiable point of view, and suffers accordingly. “Source” would have
been far more effective had Walker utilized what has been identified as
her “ruminative style”: “a meandering yet disciplined meditation.”12 It
is seen in those stories (first-person or otherwise) which essentially
record one character’s impressions or thoughts, such as “Fame” (YCK),
“Roselily” (IL&T), and “The Diary of an African Nun” (IL&T). The
sometimes staccato, sometimes discursive third-person narration of
“Roselily”—”She feels old. Yoked.” (6)—is reminiscent of E.
A. Robinson’s account of another dubious love affair, “Eros Turannos” (“She
fears him, and will always ask / What fated her to choose him”). Likewise,
the barely-restrained first-person narration of “The Diary of an African

Nun” is very evocative of Li Po’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A
Letter,” and it comes as no surprise that Walker attributes her fondness
for short literary forms to the Oriental poetry she has loved since
college.13 Also effective is the shifting point of view: the black father’s
and black daughter’s disparate attitudes towards her affair with a
married white man is conveyed by the alternating perspectives of “The
Child Who Favored Daughter” (IL&T). This rhythmic technique is
usually identified as cinematic, but it also owes much to the blues, as
Walker herself is well aware.14
This blues quality in the narrative points to the bases of several of her
best stories: the oral tradition. Whereas stories based on Walker’s own
experiences tend, as noted, to be over-written and hence inadvertently
comic, her most memorable tales are often inspired by incidents which
were told to her—be they actual accounts (e.g., “The Revenge of Hannah
Kemhuff ” [IL&T] depicts her mother’s rebuff by a white woman while
trying to obtain government food during the Depression) or black folk
tales (e.g., “Strong Horse Tea”).15 A particularly striking example is “The
Welcome Table” (IL&T): having been ejected bodily from an all-white
church, an old black lady meets Christ on a local road, walks and talks
with him, and then is found frozen to death, with eyewitnesses left
wondering why she had been walking down that cold road all alone,
talking to herself. It could be right out of Stith Thompson.The importance
of the oral tradition in Walker’s stories is further evident in direct addresses
to the reader (‘you know how sick [my husband] makes me now when he
grins’ [“Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?,” IL&T, 11]) and parenthetical asides (“I
scrooched down as small as I could at the corner of Tante Rosie’s table,
smiling at her so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed or afraid” [“The Revenge
of Hannah Kemhuff,” IL&T, 61]). The oral quality of Walker’s stories is
as old as folk tales, ballads, and slave narratives, and as new as Joan
Didion, who shares with Walker a flair for using insane or criminal
female narrators: compare Maria in Play It as It Lays with the would-be
chain saw murderess in “Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?” (IL&T) or the coolly-
detached killer of “How Did I Get Away with Killing.
. .” (YCK).16 Curiously, when the teller of the tale is an emotionally-stable
omniscient narrator, the oral tale techniques tends to backfire. For example,
the narrator’s remark at the opening of “Elethia” (YCK)—”A certain
perverse experience shaped Elethia’s life, and made it possible for it to be
true that she carried with her at all times a small apothecary jar of
ashes” (27)—sounds regrettably like a voice-over by John-Boy Walton.
Clearly the oral tradition is a mixed blessing for Walker’s fiction; but
it is a particular liability when, as in so many folk tales and ballads,
there is a paucity of exposition. Consider “Entertaining God” (IL&T), in
which a little boy worships a gorilla he has stolen from the Bronx Zoo.
The story would make no sense to a reader unfamiliar with Flannery
O’Connor’s Wise Blood,17
44 Alice Hall Petry
and where a lack of preliminary information tends to draw the reader

into O’Connor’s novel, it alienates him in “Entertaining God”: the story
comes across as a disjointed, fragmentary, aborted novella. Another Wise
Blood- inspired story, “Elethia” (in which a character with a habit of
lurking about museums steals a mummy which proves to be a stuffed
black man), does not fare much better. Similarly, as Chester J. Fontenot
points out, “The Diary of an African Nun” (IL&T), although “only six
pages in length, . . . contains material for a novella.”18 Expanded to that
length, “The Diary” could take an honorable place alongside another
first-person account by a disenchanted nun, The Nun’s Story—assuming,
of course, that Walker did not turn it into a series of socioeconomic lectures
disguised as chatty personal letters as she did with African missionary
Nettie’s letters in The Color Purple. Lack of exposition can be extreme in
Walker’s short stories. Consider this extract from “Porn” (YCK): “They
met. Liked each other. Wrote five or six letters over the next seven
years. Married other people. Had children. Lived in different cities.
Divorced. Met again to discover they now shared a city and lived barely
three miles apart” (77). How is the reader to respond to this? Is
Walker making a statement about the predictability, the lamentable
sameness of the lives lived in the ostensibly individuality-minded 1970s?
Or is she just disinclined to write out the details? The more one reads You
Can’t Keep, the more one tends (albeit reluctantly) towards the latter.
Walker’s disinclination for exposition, and the concomitant
impression that many of her stories are outlines or fragments of longer
works, is particularly evident in a technique which mars even her
strongest efforts: a marked preference for “telling” over “showing.” This
often takes the form of summaries littered with adjectives. In
“Advancing Luna” (YCK), for example, the narrator waxes nostalgic
over her life with Luna in New York: “our relationship, always marked by
mutual respect, evolved into a warm and comfortable friendship which
provided a stability and comfort we both needed at that time” (91). But
since, as noted earlier, the narrator comes across as vapid and self-
absorbed, and since the only impressions she provides of Luna are rife
with contempt for this greasy-haired, Clearasil-daubed, poor-little-rich-
white-girl from Cleveland, the narrator’s paean to their mutual warmth
and friendship sounds ridiculous. No wonder critic Katha Pollitt stated
outright that she “never believed for a minute” that the narrator and
Luna were close friends.19 Even more unfortunate is Walker’s habit of
telling the reader what the story is about, of making sure that he
doesn’t overlook a single theme. For example, in “The Abortion”
(YCK), the heroine Imani, who is just getting over a traumatic abortion,
attends the memorial service of a local girl, Holly Monroe, who had been
shot to death while returning home from her high school graduation.
Lest we miss the point, Walker spells it out for us: “every black girl of a
certain vulnerable age was Holly Monroe. And an even
deeper truth was that Holly Monroe was herself [i.e., Imani]. Herself shot
down, aborted on the eve of becoming herself ” (73). Similarly transparent,
here is one of the last remarks in the story “Source” (YCK). It is spoken by
Irene, the former teacher in a federally-funded adult education program, to
her ex-hippie friend, Anastasia/Tranquility: “I was looking toward
‘government’ for help; you were looking to Source [a California guru]. In
both cases, it was the wrong direction—any direction that is away from
ourselves is the wrong direction” (166). The irony of their parallel
situations is quite clear without having Irene articulate her epiphany in an
Anchorage bar. Even at the level of charactonyms, Walker “tells” things to
her reader. We’ve already noted the over-used “he”/ ”she” device for
underscoring sex roles, but even personal names are pressed into service.
For example, any reasonably perceptive reader of the vignette “The
Flowers” (IL&T) will quickly understand the story’s theme: that one first
experiences reality in all its harshness while far from home, physically
and/or experientially; one’s immediate surroundings are comparatively
“innocent.”The reader would pick up on the innocence of nearsightedness
even if the main character, ten-year-old Myop, hadn’t been named after
myopia. Likewise, “The Child Who Favored Daughter” is actually marred
by having the father kill his daughter because he confuses her with his
dead sister named “Daughter.” The hints of incest,20 the unclear cross-
generational identities, and the murky Freudian undercurrents are
sufficiently obvious without the daughter/Daughter element: it begins to
smack of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine after just a few
pages. Alice Walker’s preference for telling over showing suggests a
mistrust of her readers, or her texts, or both.
One might reasonably ask how a professional writer with twenty
years’
experience could seem so unsure about her materials and/or her
audience, could have such uneven judgment regarding fictional
technique, could seem so strained or defensive in her short stories. Part of
the answer may be that she is a cross-generic writer. Leslie Stephen felt
that newspaper writing was lethal for a fiction writer, and perhaps the
same may be said for journalistic writing—especially when the magazine’s
target readership is a special interest group. Whatever the case, as a short
story writer Alice Walker seems to alternate between (1) presenting
editorials as fiction, (2) experimenting with the short story as a
recognized literary form, and (3) rather self-consciously writing
“conventional” short stories. At best, the results are mixed.
The magazine editorials which masquerade as short stories are
among Walker’s least successful efforts. The classic example of this is
“Coming Apart” (YCK). It began as the introduction to a chapter on
violence against third world women in Take Back the Night; then, with
the title of “A Fable,” it ended up in Ms. magazine, for which Walker
happened to be a contributing editor; and now, unrevised, it is being
marketed as a short story in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down.21 The
volume contains several stories which occupy this
46 Alice Hall Petry
No Man’s Land between journalism and fiction: “Advancing Luna,”“Porn,”“A

Letter of the Times”—and, somewhat less transparently,
“Elethia,”“Petunias,” and “Source”—all exist so that Walker (or a
mouthpiece character) can make some statement about pornography,
racism, politics, sado-masochism, the Search for Self, whatever. Perhaps
these “stories” have some impact when read in isolation, months apart, in a
magazine such as Ms.; but when packaged as a collection of short stories
they are predictable and pedantic. The omniscient narrators and
mouthpiece characters rarely get off their soap-boxes; too often they
resort to lecturing other characters or the reader. Consider this appraisal
of the husband in “Coming Apart”: “What he has refused to see . . . is
that where white women are depicted in pornography as ‘objects,’ black
women are depicted as animals. Where white women are depicted at
least as human beings, black women are depicted as shit” (52). The
insistence upon the points Walker is trying to make would be appropriate
for editorials or magazine essays, but it doesn’t wash in a short story.
Those stories in which Walker attempts to experiment with what
is commonly held to be “the short story” are a bit stronger, although they
often have that fragmentary, unpolished quality alluded to earlier.
Frequently the experimental pieces are very short: “Petunias” (YCK) is a one-
page diary entry by a woman blown up by her Vietnam veteran son; it
is entirely in italics, as are “The Flowers” (IL&T) and “Elethia” (YCK).
As Mel Watkins notes in the New York Times Book Review, Alice
Walker’s shorter pieces tend to be “thin as fiction,” and he is probably
correct to classify them as that short story offshoot, “prose poems.”22 Longer
pieces also can be experimental. For example, “Roselily” (IL&T) utilizes a
point/counterpoint format, alternating fragments of the wedding ceremony
with the thoughts of the bride: the phrase “to join this man and this
woman” triggers “She thinks of ropes, chains, handcuffs, his religion” (4).
The irony is as heavy-handed as the imagery, but the device does work in
this story. Experimentation with structure just as often fails, however.
“Entertaining God” (IL&T) offers three discrete cinematic scenes—one of
the boy and the gorilla, another (evidently a flashback) of his father, and a
third of his mother, a librarian turned radical poet; but the scenes never
really connect. Perhaps it was meant to be what Walker has termed (in
reference to Meridian) a “crazy quilt story,”23 but if so the quilting pieces
never do form a pattern. The same quality of uncertainty and incompletion
is evident in “Advancing Luna,” which offers four—count ‘em, four—
separate endings with such pretentious titles as “Afterwords, Afterwards,
Second Thoughts,” “Discarded Notes,” and “Imaginary Knowledge.”
Apparently meant to be thought-provoking, instead they suggest that Walker
is indecisive about why she even wrote the story—or, what is worse, is
resorting to experimentation as an end in itself.
In light of all this, one might expect Walker’s more “conventional” stories
to be uniformly stronger than the essay/story hybrids or the experimental
efforts, but such is not always the case. All too often, conventionality
brings out the banal, the sentimental, and the contrived in Alice
Walker. Not surprisingly, two of her earliest stories—”To Hell with
Dying” (IL&T) and “A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring” (YCK)—are very
conventional in terms of structure, characterization, and action. In each, a
young woman returns to her rural Southern home from college up North
at the death of an elderly loved one. Old Mr. Sweet in “To Hell with
Dying” is a sort of dipsomaniac Uncle Remus, wrinkled and white-
haired, with the obligatory whiskers, a nightshirt redolent of liniment, and a
fondness for singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” to the narrator, who helps
to “revive” him during his periodic fake deathbed scenes. In short, he is
very much the sentimentalized “old darky” character that Walker
challenged so vigorously in “Elethia,” that O’Connoresque tale of the
grinning, stuffed Uncle Albert in the white man’s restaurant window.
Sarah Davis, the heroine of the equally sentimental “A Sudden Trip,”
summarizes what she learned by attending her estranged father’s funeral:
“sometimes you can want something a whole lot, only to find out later
that it wasn’t what you needed at all” (136). Is it any wonder that black
writer Ishmael Reed has called Walker “‘the colored Norman
Rockwell’”?24
Her sentimental streak has been noted by many of her commentators ( Jerry
H. Bryant admits to a lump in his throat), and Walker herself
acknowledges she is “nostalgic for the solidarity and sharing a modest
existence can sometimes bring.”25 Perhaps it does have a place in some
of the stories from early in her career. But it seems frankly
incongruous in the work of a woman who prides herself on being a
hard-hitting realist, and it poses particular problems in her handling of
the stories’ endings. The potentially incisive “Fame” is all but ruined
when the tough-as-nails Andrea Clement White melts at hearing a little
black girl sing a slave song. Likewise, “The Lover” (YCK) ends with the
jazz poet heroine in a reverie: she “lay in bed next day dreaming of all
the faraway countries, daring adventures, passionate lovers still to be
found” (39). Perhaps in part to avoid these final lapses into sentimentality,
Walker sometimes doesn’t “end” her stories: she leaves them “open.” It
can be a very effective technique in stories such as “Strong Horse Tea”
(IL&T) or “The Child Who Favored Daughter” (IL&T), where the pain
is underscored by the lack—indeed, the impossibility—of resolution in the
character’s situations. Probably Walker’s strongest non-sentimental endings
belong to three of the most conventional stories: “The Revenge of
Hannah Kemhuff ” (IL&T), “Nineteen Fifty-Five” (YCK), and “Source”
(YCK). In “The Revenge,” Mrs. Sarah Marie Sadler Holley, fearing that a
black rootworker will be able to use them in spells against her, stores her
feces “in barrels and plastic bags in the upstairs closets” rather than trust
“the earthen secrecy of the water mains” (80, 79). Her psychotic behavior
turns her husband against her, and she lets herself die in a chilling
dénouement that would do Miss Emily Grangerford proud.
48 Alice Hall Petry
Walker has used the psychology of guilt and fear in lieu of the Jesus-
fixed- her-but-good attitude held by Hannah’s prototype, Walker’s
mother, and the refusal to sentimentalize enhances the story. Likewise,
“Nineteen Fifty-Five,” a strong story with which to open You Can’t Keep
but atypical of the volume, is a sort of docudrama tracing the career of
Elvis Presley (Traynor) through the eyes of blues great Big Mama
Thornton (Gracie Mae Still). Still never does understand this sleepy-
eyed white man or his alien world, and her reaction to seeing his funeral
on television—”One day this is going to be a pitiful country, I thought”
(20)—is the perfect conclusion to the story. No sentiment, no
commentary. Finally, “Source” offers a surprisingly non-sentimental ending to
an insistently nostalgia-soaked story. Whether they are grooving in a
Mann County commune with Peace, Calm, and Bliss (didn’t nostalgia for
the ’60s end with Easy Rider?) or getting it together in the ’70s in an
Anchorage bar (sort of “The Big Chill Goes Alaskan”), the story of Irene
and Anastasia/ Tranquility has little for anyone. But the ending of the
story—that is, after the now-reconciled heroines have hugged “knee against
knee, thigh against thigh, breast against breast, neck nestled against neck”
(167)—is quite provocative: a group of tourists, peering through the
mists, believe they are seeing Mt. McKinley: “They were not. It was yet
another, nearer, mountain’s very large feet, its massive ankles wreathed in
clouds, that they took such pleasure in” (167). Suggestive without being
saccharine, and ironic without that “tinge of cynicism”26 which undercuts
so many of Walker’s endings, it is an ideal fade- out conclusion to a
collection that, with varying degrees of success, seeks to pose questions,
to raise issues, to offer no pat answers.
•••
The strengths and weaknesses of In Love & Trouble and You Can’t
Keep a Good Woman Down offer little clue as to the direction Alice
Walker will take as a writer of short fiction in years to come. Surely
she will continue to write short stories: Walker personally believes that
women are best suited to fiction of limited scope—David Bradley points
out that this is “the kind of sexist comment a male critic would be
pilloried for making”27—and she feels further that, as her career
progresses, her writing has been “always moving toward more and more
clarity and directness.”28 The often fragmentary and rambling tales of You
Can’t Keep, published eight years after the moving and tightly constructed
In Love & Trouble, would suggest that this is not the case. At this point in
her career as a short story writer, one wishes that Walker would
acknowledge the validity of Katha Pollitt’s appraisal of You Can’t Keep:
“Only the most coolly abstract and rigorously intellectual writer” can achieve
what Walker attempts in this recent volume, but unfortunately that is
not what she is like: “As a storyteller she is impassioned, sprawling,
emotional,
lushly evocative, steeped in place, in memory, in the compelling power of

narrative itself. A lavishly gifted writer, in other words—but not of this
sort of book.”29 What Alice Walker needs is to take a step backward: to
return to the folk tale formats, the painful exploration of interpersonal
relationships, the naturally graceful style that made her earlier collection
of short stories, the durable In Love & Trouble, so very fine. Touch base,
lady.
No t E s
1. Alice Walker, in Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women (New York:
Har- court Brace Jovanovich, n. d.), [i]. Henceforth, all page numbers will be
indicated parenthetically in the body of the paper.
2. Barbara Christian discusses the significance of the agwu and its
Western counterpart, “contrariness,” in “A Study of In Love and [sic] Trouble:
The Contrary Women of Alice Walker,” Black Scholar, 12 (March–April,
1981), 21–30, 70–71.
3. Alice Walker, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), [i]. Henceforth, all page numbers will be
indicated parenthetically in the body of the paper.
4. Barbara Christian, “Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as
Wayward,” in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical
Evaluation (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), p. 468.
5. Trudier Harris, “From Victimization to Free Enterprise: Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple,” Studies in American Fiction, 14 (Spring, 1986), 5.
6. In her review of In Love & Trouble, June Goodwin notes that “The
title may hover on ‘The Edge of Night,’ but none of the rest of ‘In Love and
Trouble’ has an inch of the soap opera about it” (Christian Science Monitor, 65
[September 19, 1973], 11).
7. Maria K. Mootry-Ikerionwu, [“Review of The Color Purple”], College
Lan- guage Association Journal, 27 (March, 1984), 348.
8. The connection between Sarah Davis and Alice Walker is made by Martha
J. McGowan, “Atonement and Release in Alice Walker’s Meridian,” Critique,
23 (1981), 36; and Jacqueline Trescott, “A Child of the South, a Writer of the
Heart,” The Washington Post (August 8, 1976), G3.
9. “Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells,” Ms., 6 (July, 1977), 75; John
O’Brien, “Alice Walker,” in Interviews With Black Writers (New York:
Liveright, 1973), p. 196.
10. Kristin Brewer, “Writing to Survive: An Interview with Alice Walker,”
Southern Exposure, 9 (Summer, 1981), 13.
11. McGowan [see note 8], 33.
12. Peter Erickson, “‘Cast Out Alone/To Heal/and Re-
Create/Ourselves’: Family-Based Identity in The Work of Alice Walker,” College
Language Association Journal, 23 (September, 1979), 91.
13. “I have been influenced—especially in the poems in Once—by Zen
epi- grams and by Japanese haiku. I think my respect for short forms comes from
this” (O’Brien [see note 9], pp. 193–94).
14. Barbara Christian points out the “almost cinematic rhythm” of the
alternating points of view in “The Contrary Women” [see note 2], 26. The
blues connection has been remarked by Mel Watkins in the New York Times
Book Review
50 Alice Hall Petry
(March 17, 1974), 41; John F. Callahan, “The Higher Ground of Alice
Walker,” New Republic, 171 (September 14, 1974), 22; and Walker herself: “‘I
am trying to arrive at that place where black music already is; to arrive at that
unselfconscious sense of collective oneness; that naturalness, that (even when
anguished) grace’” (O’Brien, p. 204).
15. Walker discusses the genesis of “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff” in
Mary Helen Washington, “An Essay on Alice Walker” in Roseann P. Bell,
Bet- tye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions
of Black Women in Literature (Garden City, New York: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1979), p. 136; and Claudia Tate, “Alice Walker,” in Black
Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1985), p. 186.
16. In the Winter, 1970–1971 issue of American Scholar, Mark Schorer
reviewed both Didion’s Play It As It Lays and Walker’s The Third Life of Grange
Cope- land. Schorer argued that “One page of Didion’s novel is enough to show
us that she is the complete master of precisely those technical qualities in which
Alice Walker is still deficient. One [may] read literally dozens of novels without
encountering the kind of novelistic authority that she wields so coolly” (172).
Perhaps Walker, taking her cue from Schorer, has been emulating Didion’s
example. Certainly this might help account for the Didionesque quality in so
much of Walker’s fiction.
17. Walker asserts that O’Connor “‘is the best of the white southern
writers, including Faulkner,’” and that she has been an important influence
on her work (O’Brien, p. 200). See also Alice Walker’s essay “Beyond the
Peacock: The Recon- struction of Flannery O’Connor,” Ms., 4 (December,
1975), 77–79, 102–106.
18. Chester J. Fontenot, “Alice Walker: ‘The Diary of an African Nun’
and DuBois’ Double Consciousness,” in Bell, et al., eds., Sturdy Black Bridges,
p. 151.
19. Katha Pollitt, “Stretching the Short Story,” New York Times Book Review,
(May 24, 1981), 9.
20. For a full discussion of the incest theme in this story, see Trudier
Harris, “Tiptoeing through Taboo: Incest in ‘The Child Who Favored Daughter,”
Modern Fiction Studies, 28 (Autumn, 1982), 495–505.
21. Walker explains the publishing history of “Coming Apart” in a
disclaimer at the beginning of the story (YCK, pp. 41–42).
22. Watkins [see note 14], 41.
23. “A crazy-quilt story is one that can jump back and forth in time,
work on many different levels, and one that can include myth. It is generally
much more evocative of metaphor and symbolism than a novel that is
chronological in structure, or one devoted, more or less, to rigorous realism . .
. (quoted in Tate [see note 15], p. 176).
24. Quoted in Trescott [see note 8], G3.
25. Jerry H. Bryant, [“Review of In Love & Trouble”], Nation, 217
(November 12, 1973), 502; Alice Walker, “The Black Writer and the Southern
Experience,” New South, 25 (Fall, 1970), 24.
26. Carolyn Fowler, “Solid at the Core,” Freedomways, 14 (First
Quarter, 1974), 59.
27. David Bradley, “Telling the Black Woman’s Story: Novelist Alice Walker,”
New York Times Magazine (January 8, 1984), 36.
28. Quoted in Brewer [see note 10], 15.
29. Pollitt, 15.
L YNN P I FE R
Coming to Voice in Alice Walker’s Meridian:

Speaking Out for the Revolution
I n Alice Walker’s second novel, Meridian, Meridian Hill has been

conditioned by her community’s patriarchal institutions to repress her
individuality and, above all, not to speak out inappropriately. But
when she finds that she cannot conform to authorized notions of
appropriate speech (public repentance, patriotic school speeches, and the
like), her only rebellious recourse is silence. Because of her refusal to
participate in authorized discourse, Meridian fails to fit in with a
succession of social groups—from her church congregation, to those at
the elite college she attends, to a cadre of would-be violent
revolutionaries. She begins a process of personal transformation when
she sets out alone to fight her own battles, through personal struggle and
Civil Rights work.
Walker posits Meridian’s struggle for personal transformation as an
alternative to the political movements of the 1960s, particularly those that
merely reproduced existing power structures. As Karen Stein writes,
. . . the novel points out that the Civil Rights Movement

often reflected the oppressiveness of patriarchal capitalism.
Activists merely turned political rhetoric to their own ends
while continuing to repress spontaneous individuality. To
overcome this destructiveness, Walker reaches for a new
definition of revolution.
African American Review, Volume 26, Number 1, (1992) pp. 77–88. © 1992 Lynn Pifer
51
52 Lynn Pifer
Her hope for a just society inheres not merely in political

change, but in personal transformation. (130)
Even the revolutionary cadre that Meridian tries to join insists that she
perform an authorized speech, declaring that she would both die
and kill for the revolution. When she silently considers whether she
could kill another human being, the group becomes hostile towards her
and finally excludes her. Walker realizes that would-be revolutionaries
must avoid reproducing the power structures that they combat. Killing,
for Meridian as well as for Walker, is an act of tyranny, even if one
kills in the fight against tyranny.
Meridian’s life is shaped by those moments when she remains silent
although those around her demand that she speak. She could not
publicly repent, despite her mother’s urgings; she could not utter the
patriotic speech she was assigned in high school; and she could not
proclaim that she would kill for the revolution when her comrades
expected her to. She is tormented by her peers’ hissing, “‘Why don’t you
say something?’” (28), and by the memory of her mother pleading, “‘Say it
now, Meridian . . . ’” (29). Meridian’s silence short-circuits the response
expected by patriarchal discourse. Her refusal to speak negates the
existing order’s ability to use her as a ventriloquist’s doll, a mindless
vehicle that would spout the ideological line. But Meridian’s strategy does
not prevent her from feeling guilt both for not conforming to the
standards of her family and friends, and for not being able to speak out
effectively against these standards.
Meridian lives on her own, separated from her family and the cadre
that has rejected her.Alone,she performs spontaneous and symbolic acts of
rebellion, such as carrying a drowned black child’s corpse to the mayor’s
office to protest the town officials’ neglect of drainage ditches in black
neighborhoods. She accomplishes more than the would-be
revolutionaries, who move on to live yuppie lifestyles. Stein writes,
“Walker’s novel affirms that it is not by taking life that true revolution
will come about, but through respect for life and authentic living of life
. . . gained only through each individual’s slow, painful confrontation of
self ” (140). Only Meridian, who struggles with questions that other
characters gloss over, completes this personal transformation. Her
confrontations with her personal history, family history, and racial history
shape the way she chooses to live.
Meridian’s struggle for personal transformation echoes June Jordan’s
definition of her duties as a feminist:
I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as

though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect
. . . and . . . I am entering my soul into a struggle that will most
certainly transform the experience of all the peoples of the
earth, as no other movement
Coming to Voice in Alice Walker’s Meridian 53
can,.....because the movement into self-love, self-respect, and self-

determination is . . . now galvanizing..the unarguable majority
of human beings everywhere. (qtd. in Hernton 58)
One of Meridian’s most difficult struggles is to forgive herself for her

perceived failings. If she can learn to love and respect herself, she can see
her moments of silence as legitimate acts of rebellion against a system
that would deny her individuality. Otherwise, she can only view her silences
as examples of the times she has failed her family and friends.
In the course of the novel, Meridian learns to turn to folk
traditions (stories, songs, May dances around The Sojourner) for
expression and inspiration. Reluctant to depend on her own words,
Meridian relies on stories of defiant actions by women who went before
her. The large magnolia tree known as The Sojourner, located in the
center of Meridian’s college campus, is also central to many subversive
tales. With The Sojourner’s story, we receive a more thorough description
of Saxon College and its goal of conferring “ladyhood” upon its
students. On the property that had been a slave plantation, young black
women learn “to make French food, English tea and German music”
(39), and “are blessed to perpetuate / the Saxon name!” (93). These new
Saxon women will spread the name, just as surely as the Saxon slave
women were forced to increase Master Saxon’s stock of slaves. But, irony
of ironies, the new women are endowed with the elements of traditional
white ladyhood, including its first requirement, virginity: “It was assumed
that Saxon young ladies were, by definition, virgins. They were treated
always as if they were thirteen years old” (94). And just as Saxon slaves
were kept on the plantation, Saxon students are trapped within the
campus’s ornate fence.
The Sojourner is the only complex and meaningful centering point
on this otherwise artificial campus. Generations of students have handed
down stories and folk practices concerning The Sojourner. The first is the
story of Louvinie, the slave woman who planted Sojourner. A skilled
storyteller, she unintentionally frightened her master’s young son to
death with a tale he and his sisters had requested. As punishment, Master
Saxon cut off her tongue at the root. Louvinie buried her tongue under
Sojourner, and, as the story goes, the tree grew miraculously. “Other
slaves believed it possessed magic. They claimed it could talk, make
music. Once in its branches, a hiding
slave could not be seen” (44). According to the slaves’ folk beliefs,
Louvinie transferred her capacity for powerful speech onto The Sojourner.
Susan Willis writes:
Named The Sojourner, the magnolia conjures up the presence

of another leader of black women, who, like Louvinie, used
language in the struggle for liberation. In this way, Walker
builds a network of
54 Lynn Pifer
women, some mythic like Louvinie, some real like Sojourner

Truth, as the context for Meridian’s affirmation and
radicalization. (114)
Louvinie and the conjured image of Sojourner Truth serve as positive

examples of women who use their tongues as weapons in the struggle
for liberation. Master Saxon’s punishment, however, is an equally
instructive example for Meridian. While it is possible to use your
tongue to combat a racist patriarchy, that system will endeavor to
silence such a tongue, even if it must cut it off at the root. At those
moments when Meridian is expected to reproduce patriarchal
discourse— in the form of public repentance during a church service,
for instance, or a patriotic speech at her high school—, Meridian
chooses to withhold her tongue as both a symbolic rupture of
patriarchal ideology and as a means of preserving her tongue,
preventing it from being cut out. Louvinie’s burial of her severed tongue,
and the subsequent creative transferral of her power, proves to be a more
practical alternative for Meridian to follow than images of black
women speaking out.
Early in Meridian, Walker links the contrasting strategies of
silence (withholding one’s tongue as opposed to having it forcibly
removed) to the politics of racism and patriarchy. In the opening chapter,
Walker crystallizes the oppression inherent in Southern segregation
practices, as grown white men rush to prevent a group of black children
from seeing what everyone acknowledges to be a worthless freak show, a
ludicrous carnival attraction. She also examines patriarchy’s ability to
“kill” women, using the Marilene O’Shay exhibit as a visual reminder, as
well as a parody of society’s idolization of dead women as the perfect
women (patriarchy’s version of “The only good indian’s a dead indian”).
Chicokema is a town so segregated that even events as trivial as a
carnival exhibit require separate days for white and black attendance.
Chicokemans avoid labeling their customs as racially biased by basing
their segregation on occupation: People who work in the guano plant
must be sectioned off from the rest of the town. But the distinction is
clearly racial, since the plant employs most of the black population and
the segregation extends to their families: “‘. . . the folks who don’t work in
the guano plant don’t draw the line at the mamas and papas,’” explains a
Chicokema resident, “‘they throw in the childrens too. Claim the smell
of guano don’t wash off ’” (20).
It is precisely this kind of unquestioned, all-pervasive
discrimination that psychologist Kenneth Clark claimed has a
detrimental effect on black children’s self-perception. In 1939, Clark
developed a doll test that was eventually used as evidence in Brown
vs. Board of Education. He showed a group of black children two dolls,
one black and one white, and asked them questions about the dolls. All
children correctly identified which doll was
white and which was black, but the majority of the children said they
liked the white doll better and claimed that the black doll looked
“bad.” Clark recalls in an interview:
The most disturbing question . . . was the final question:

“Now show me the doll that’s most like you.” Many of the
children became emotionally upset when they had to identify
with the doll they had rejected. These children saw themselves
as inferior, and they accepted the inferiority as part of reality.
(Williams 20)
The children of Chicokema have been negatively socialized to

believe that they are inferior to other children. And since the “smell of
guano,” or the color of their skin, does not “wash off,” they cannot
better their situation.
Meridian comes to Chicokema to help these children, not by
making speeches or typing up flyers, but by silently lining them up to
see the Marilene O’Shay exhibit on a “whites only” day. She places
herself at the front of the line and marches across the square. With a
style similar to Flannery O’Connor’s, Walker demonstrates the
ridiculousness of the white town’s reaction to Meridian: “‘This town’s got
a big old army tank,’” a young boy tells a Northern visitor, “‘and now
they going to have to aim it on the woman in the cap, ‘cause she act
like she don’t even know they got it’ ” (18). Walker presents the entire
situation in the absurd. The small town bought the tank to fight outside
agitators, painted and decorated it, then smashed the leg of their
Confederate Soldier Statue (an obligatory symbol of the Old South) in
an attempt to park their latest weapon in the town square. Now they
find themselves faced off against a hundred-pound woman leading an
army of school children.
Meridian waits for the police to arrange themselves— “. . . two men
were crawling into [the tank], and a phalanx of police, their rifles
pointing upward, rushed to defend the circus wagon,” (21)—before she
steps in front of the tank and leads the children to see Marilene O’Shay.
Not prepared to open fire on this woman and her band of children, the
defenders of the Old South simply stare at Meridian in disbelief. Without
speaking a word, Meridian succeeds in desegregating the O’Shay exhibit.
The act of facing up to the town’s white segregationalist army and
entering the forbidden circus wagon will become a more important
memory for the children than the exhibit itself—or its patriarchal
message.
Three of the titles painted on the Marilene O’Shay trailer sum up
the narrow possibilities for women in a patriarchal society: “Obedient
Daughter,” “Devoted Wife,” and “Adoring Mother” (19). The fourth,
“Gone Wrong,” indicates the perceived tragedy involved when a woman
rejects these roles: “Over the fourth a vertical line of progressively
flickering light bulbs moved
56 Lynn Pifer
continually downward like a perpetually cascading tear” (19). Walker

portrays, with maudlin kitsch, patriarchy’s imperative that a woman accept
her “place” (see Stein).
“The True Story of Marilene O’Shay” has been preserved for
future generations on cheap mimeographed fliers which tell us how
Henry O’Shay had lavishly provided for his lovely wife, Marilene, and how
she had rebuked the role of Perfect Wife by having an affair with another
man. An old black townsman’s interpretation of Marilene O’Shay’s
story provides us with patriarchal society’s view of the situation:
Just because he caught her giving some away, he shot the man,
strangled the wife. Throwed ’em both into Salt Lake...everybody
forgive him. Even her ma. ’Cause the bitch was doing him
wrong, and that ain’t right! years later she washed up on
shore, and he
claimed he recognized her by her long red hair Thought since
she was so generous herself she wouldn’t mind the notion of
him sharing her with the Amurican public. (22)
As Stein writes, “A living woman may resist her husband’s domination,

but the mummy, static and reified, may be completely possessed. O’Shay,
like the sinister Duke of Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess,’ has
reduced his wife to permanent, if frigid, fidelity” (132). But Stein here
reads only half the story: Not only has Henry O’Shay “mummified” his
wife into a “frigid fidelity,” he has also turned her body into a profitable
specular commodity. According to this community’s standards, her
transgression was not simply adultery, but thievery: She was caught
“giving some[one else’s property] away.” If Marilene O’Shay was
objectified and privatized while alive, she is commodified and
marketable once dead. A better analogy would be to the corpse of the
Grimms Brothers’ Snow White, displayed in her shining glass casket,
with Prince Charming telling the dwarves he must have “it,” no matter
what the cost.1
Although Henry O’Shay shoots the man who cuckolds him, he
does not turn the gun on his wife, choosing instead to strangle her
with his own hands. In so doing, he dislodges her tongue and prevents
her from speaking out while she dies. O’Shay’s method avenges his
pride and punishes his wife, literally choking off her voice.
Conveniently for Mr. O’Shay, choking leaves Marilene’s body intact and,
therefore, more easily preserved for later viewing.
If Marilene O’Shay is patriarchy’s perfect, petrified, and
commodified woman, The Wild Child is nature’s uncivilized answer.
Barbara Christian writes that the main struggle in Meridian is the fight
between a natural, life- driven spirit and society’s deadly strictures:
. . . though the concept of One Life motivates Meridian in

her quest toward physical and spiritual health, the societal
evils that subordinate one class to another, one race to
another, one sex to another, fragment and ultimately threaten
life. The novel Meridian
. . . is built on the tension between the African concept of
animism, “that spirit that inhabits all life,” and the societal
forces that inhibit the growth of the living toward their
natural state of freedom. (91)
The Wild Child, so removed from civilization that her language

consists of swear words she picked up in the alleys, fits most closely
the natural state of freedom Christian describes. Her pregnancy,
however, arouses the neighborhood’s concern, and demonstrates that she
has been excluded from not only the negative restrictions of society, but
the help and love of a community as well.
The first sight of this pregnant thirteen-year-old induces one of
Meridian’s corpse-like trances. Meridian feels compelled to try to help the
wild girl, and sets out to trap her and take her back to her room at
Saxon College. Unkempt, unpredictable, loud, and independent, The
Wild Child embodies the opposite of every Saxon ideal and demonstrates
the falseness of Saxon’s social codes to Meridian: “Wile Chile shouted
words that were never uttered in the honors house. Meridian, splattered
with soap and mud, broke down and laughed” (36). In the midst of
Saxon’s tradition of proper attire and social etiquette, this wild pregnant girl
protests in the only language she knows. And Meridian is delighted by the
girl’s free use of inappropriate language.
Unfortunately, no one else appreciates The Wild Child’s natural
state of freedom. A showdown between The Wild Child and the
house mother becomes a life-and-death confrontation that death wins.
The house mother, whose “marcel waves shone like real sea waves, and . .
. light brown skin was pearly under a mask of powder” (37), is the only
person in the honors house that Wile Chile trembles and cowers at.
Like the Dean of Women (aptly nicknamed “The Dead of Women”), the
house mother exemplifies proper behavior for a perfect lady: “‘She must
not stay here,’” the house mother tells Meridian. “‘This is a school for
young ladies’” (37). The Wild Child’s display of natural manners cannot
be tolerated at the honors house, no matter what moral responsibility
Meridian may feel towards the girl. Frightened by the house mother,
Wile Chile bolts from the unapproving house, only to be struck and
killed by a speeding car.
There is no survival for the unrestrained independent female. It
should come as no surprise, then, that the authorities of Saxon College
will not allow its students to have a funeral service for The Wild
Child. Saxon may treat
58 Lynn Pifer
its girls like thirteen-year-olds, but it has no use for real ones,
especially if they are homeless and pregnant. The Wild Child is so
dangerous to Saxon’s reputation that she cannot be allowed on campus,
even as a corpse. Saxon College’s official reaction to the students’
attempted funeral for The Wild Child confirms to Meridian and to the
other students that the goal of this institution is the proper socialization
of its young ladies, not the education of their minds. Although her fellow
students are overwhelmed with the urge to rebel, they are already so far
along the road to ladyhood that they do not know how to do it.
The fate of The Sojourner exemplifies the kind of destruction that
can take place when this revolutionary anger has no effective outlet.
The most beautiful and potentially subversive object on campus is
destroyed by frustrated student rioters who would avenge The Wild Child.
Their initial acts of rebellion seem childish and ineffectual: They throw
their jewelry (symbols of ladyhood) on the ground and stick out their
tongues (proof that they still have them). Their ultimate act of
revolutionary violence, however, is directed towards their most beloved
part of the campus: Despite Meridian’s protests, they chop down The
Sojourner.
Another piece of Sojourner folklore concerns the horrible effects
of Saxon’s demands on the outward appearance of its “girls.” This gory
tale tells of a Saxon student so ashamed by her unwanted pregnancy that
she tries to hide it, and who later resorts to chopping her newborn to
bits, which she flushes down the toilet. After being caught and severely
punished—locked in a room with no windows—, Fast Mary hangs
herself. She remains not just a grotesque warning to future Saxon
students, but also a symbol that brings them together:
There was only one Sojourner ceremony . . . that united all

the students at Saxon—the rich and the poor, the very black
skinned (few though they were) with the very fair, the
stupid and the bright—and that was the Commemoration of
Fast Mary of the Tower. . .
Any girl who had ever prayed for her period to come
was welcome to the commemoration, which was held in the
guise of a slow May Day dance around the foot of The
Sojourner It was
the only time in all the many social activities at Saxon that
every girl was considered equal. On that day, they held each
other’s hands tightly. (45)
The students’ folklore allows them to form a community as they band

together in a practice that subverts the conventional behavior at
Saxon College. They relish the story of a girl forced to go to terrible
lengths to
maintain the college’s demands regarding outward appearance, and it is

clear that the unsympathetic authorities, not Fast Mary, are the villains of
the story. Susan Willis writes: “Fast Mary’s inability to call on her
sister students and her final definitive isolation at the hands of her
parents raise questions Meridian will also confront: Is there a community
of support?” (113). Mary’s story reveals the injustices of this “civilized”
college, which seeks to separate its students from their folk community
by forcing them to follow a notion of proper behavior that is merely a
careful imitation of the white middle class.
Despite Saxon’s training, favorite stories among its students feature
heroines who dare to step out of line. Louvinie and Fast Mary
received horrendously painful punishments for their deeds, but such
penalties only reflect how intrepid they were; the more those in power
tried to suppress them, the more popular they became with their
peers. The folk tales and practices that surround The Sojourner work to
subvert the strictures of the social systems that surround it. According to
Willis, “As a natural metaphor, the tree is in opposition to the two social
institutions—the plantation and the university” (114). The folk practices
surrounding the tree allow the slaves, and later students, to oppose these
institutions as well.
While images of women like Louvinie and Sojourner Truth
provide Meridian with significant strategies for creative living, her own
mother does not. Instead, Mrs. Hill carefully exhibits the attributes of
the proper wife and mother in the eyes of her community. She has a
clean house and attends church, but we learn that she is actually
incapable of loving her children and will not forgive them for being
born:
It was for stealing her mother’s serenity, for shattering her

mother’s emerging self, that Meridian felt guilty from the very
first, though she was unable to understand how this could
possibly be her fault. When her mother asked, without glancing
at her, “Have you stolen anything?” a stillness fell over
Meridian and for seconds she could not move. The question
literally stopped her in her tracks. (51)
As far as we know, Meridian is the only child in the family who feels
this guilt. Later she will resent her own pregnancies, and like her
mother, she will also resent the fact that no one allows her to
acknowledge her negative feelings. In this patriarchal community, the
woman who would reject a pregnancy clearly does not know her place.
Although Mrs. Hill fulfills her duty as a religious woman and prays
for her children’s souls, she seems to have no understanding of her
children or their struggles. Like Saxon College, Mrs. Hill only considers
appearances. She devotes herself not just to the care of her children’s
bodies, but also to
60 Lynn Pifer
something even more superficial—the washing and ironing of their

clothes: “Her children were spotless wherever they went. In their stiff, almost
inflexible garments, they were enclosed in the starch of her anger, and had
to keep their distance to avoid providing the soggy wrinkles of contact
that would cause her distress” (79). Mrs. Hill’s children grow up feeling
“stiff, almost inflexible,” and they learn not only to keep their distance
from their distraught mother, but from other human contact as well.
Meridian, in fact, has been emotionally starched shut. Her mother
has refused to tell her anything about sex, and Meridian only learns
about it when she gets molested in a local funeral home. Meridian begins
her relationship with Eddie mainly because she wants a boyfriend to
protect her from all the other men around. And the demise of their
relationship comes about when Eddie finally notices that Meridian
does not enjoy having sex with him.
The chapter entitled “The Happy Mother” examines maternity’s
effects on Meridian. Now that she is a young wife and mother, everyone
thinks of her as a “perfect woman.” She is, in fact, nearly dead. Whereas
they assume she is concentrating on her child, she is actually considering
different ways to commit suicide. She spends her time at home, reading
women’s magazines: “According to these magazines, Woman was a
mindless body, a sex creature, something to hang false hair and nails on”
(71). Here Meridian’s awareness of patriarchy’s desire to “encase” her, to
“process” her according to the specular code of the media, becomes
most acute.
Walker’s poem “On Stripping Bark from Myself ” sums up
Meridian’s situation at this point in the novel: “I could not live / silent
in my own lies
/ hearing their ‘how nice she is!’ / whose adoration of the retouched image
/ I so despise” (Good Night 23). Meridian rejects the “nice” role of the
“happy” mother, recognizing that “happiness”is merely an empty sign that
accompanies the equally empty role of young, pregnant wife. Happiness
does not apply in any way to Meridian’s emotional state, but the
conventional (and therefore seemingly logical) association of “happiness”
with “motherhood” precludes her ability to state otherwise.
In her essay “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?,”
Walker writes, “If knowledge of my condition is all the freedom I get
from a ‘freedom movement,’ it is better than unawareness, forgottenness,
and hopelessness, the existence that is like the existence of a beast”
(Gardens 121). This, too, is the bottom line for Meridian. The
knowledge of her condition, and of the condition of women in
general, gives her hope. Perfect women in this community, as Meridian
well knows, are perfectly mindless, nicely dressed, walking corpses.
At age seventeen, Meridian is left on her own to consider what
to do with her life and her child’s. When Meridian says no to
motherhood, she offends and loses her own mother, her family, and her
community. She feels
guilty for leaving her baby, and cannot adequately explain why she must.
But by shedding her prescribed “happy mother” role and standing up for
her own needs, Meridian takes the first steps toward becoming a
“revolutionary petunia.”2 She stops living by others’ standards, learns to
bloom for herself, as she must in order to survive, since her rebellious
acts will alienate her from the rest of society.3
The battle fatigue Meridian encounters as a result of working in
the Civil Rights Movement turns into emotional fatigue brought on
by the endless guilt she feels for putting her child up for adoption. Even
though she knows her child is better off without his seventeen-year-old
mother, Meridian cannot forgive herself for giving him away. She feels
that she has abandoned both her son and her own heritage:
Meridian knew that enslaved women . . . had laid down their

lives, gladly, for their children, that the daughters of these
enslaved women had thought their greatest blessing from
“Freedom” was that it meant they could keep their own
children. And what had Meridian Hill done with her precious
child? She had given him away. She thought . . . of herself as
belonging to an unworthy minority, for which there was no
precedent and of which she was, as far as she knew, the only
member. (91)
Barbara Christian writes of the danger of the myth of Black

Motherhood, noting that, according to this tradition, only stories of
strong, successful mothers are passed on:
. . . that tradition that is based on the monumental myth of

black motherhood, a myth based on the true stories of
sacrifice black mothers performed for their children . . . is . .
. restrictive, for it imposes a stereotype of Black women, a
stereotype of strength that denies them choice and hardly
admits of the many who were destroyed. (89)
Meridian is full of victims of this tradition of Black Motherhood.

Meridian’s own mother, for instance, is an unhappy mother who manages
to conform to the tradition only by suppressing her own emotions. She
feels that she has been betrayed by other mothers because they never
“warn[ed] her against children” (50); i.e., that there is no secret inner
life or euphoria in motherhood, but a loss of one’s independence.
Meridian’s girlhood friend Nelda is another victim: Nelda wanted to go
to college, but since she became a mother at age fourteen, she never
finished high school. Fast Mary’s pregnancy leads to her suicide, and the
heavy belly of the pregnant Wild Child limits
62 Lynn Pifer
her ability to move out of the path of the car that kills her. Meridian
herself belongs to the “worthless minority” of mothers excluded by the
tradition. Her own sacrifice—of giving up her child—is as painful and
trying as any of the legendary sacrifices, but according to the code of the
tradition, Meridian’s is not a sacrifice but a case of willful neglect.
Meridian’s attempts at personal growth through a love relationship
also fail. Truman Held appears as Meridian’s lover in a chapter that
Walker aptly titles “The Conquering Prince.” This clichéd role would be
more appropriate in a fairy tale, but it is the role Truman would most
like to play. True/man, called “True” by Lynne, is in fact, quite false: a
black would-be revolutionary who loves to dress well and speak French.
He paints strong black women, earth mothers, yet he finds himself
attracted to white virgins. Meridian notes that, despite his revolutionary
slogans and liberal education, Truman really wants a quiet little helper
that would look good while hanging on his arm. Truman “did not want a
woman who tried . . . to claim her own life. She knew Truman would
have liked her better as she had been as Eddie’s wife . . . an attractive
woman, but asleep” (110). Meridian is too independent to be the clinging
vine Truman desires.
With the failure of her romance, Meridian finds that she is haunted
by a recurring dream: that “. . . she was a character in a novel and that
her existence presented an insoluble problem, one that would be solved only
by her death in the end” (117). Meridian’s reflective moment creates, for
the reader, a reflexive moment in the text. While Meridian’s dream
suggests a
truth that she can never “know” — that she actually is a
character in a novel—, the significance of the dream lies in another,
fictional direction. For Meridian, the problem of being a character in a
novel is a problem of limitation and constraint, of definition and
expectation bound to a clichéd way of reading and writing, one that
privileges the death of a character as the most climactic (and therefore
desired and inevitable) moment in a narrative. Death, however, solves
nothing but the problem of how to end a plotline. Meridian’s dream
also reminds us that this “insoluble problem” is one that Walker herself
must face in the creation of her narrative; having offered us a
“revolutionary” character whose struggles have transgressed the boundaries
of racism and sexism, Walker must find a way to end Meridian
successfully without the expected end of its protagonist. If, as Walker
states in an interview with Claudia Tate, Meridian is a novel “about
living” (185), the conventional melodramatic death scene is out of the
question. 4
To her credit, Meridian has managed to escape the symbolic
death of being killed by patriarchy’s standards and petrified into a perfect
woman— she leaves behind “Obedient Daughter,” “Devoted Wife,” and
“Adoring Mother.” She even goes a step further and escapes becoming
“Enchanted Lover” to Truman’s “Conquering Prince.” But Meridian
cannot be sure that she is not
destined to die at the end of a novel, as someone’s “Tragic Heroine.” In

order to avoid this unwanted role, she must accept the sacredness of her
own life. Barbara Christian writes that Walker works with traditional and
feminist perspectives on motherhood, attempting a compromise that would
allow her protagonist to live:
As many radical feminists blamed motherhood for the

waste in women’s lives and saw it as a dead end for a
woman, Walker insisted on a deeper analysis: She did not
present motherhood itself as restrictive. It is so because of the
little value society places on children, especially black children,
on mothers, especially black mothers, on life itself. In the
novel, Walker acknowledged that a mother in this society is
often “buried alive, walled away from her own life, brick by
brick.” Yet the novel is based on Meridian’s insistence on the
sacredness of life. (90)
Meridian does not object to children, or mothers bearing children, but

to the role a woman is expected to play once she becomes a mother.
According to this role, a mother, particularly The Mythical Black
Mother, should sacrifice her individual personality and concerns in
order to live for her children. Unfortunately, the only way Meridian can
escape this unwanted role is to leave her child and family, accepting her
own mother’s disapprobation. And to do so she must first learn to
shed the guilt this action produces.
Meridian’s cumulative guilt becomes so great it prevents her
from seeing or moving freely. She slips into a petrified trance, and it
takes an act of sisterhood by Miss Winter to bring her out of it. Miss
Winter had tried to help Meridian once before when Meridian found she
could not utter the mindlessly patriotic speech at her high school
graduation. (The capitalist/ patriarchal hegemony perpetuates itself when
each year a high school girl recites this speech, providing ritual evidence of
woman’s position as subject to society’s ideology, and all the other women
participate by listening attentively and applauding the performance.)
Miss Winter is the only member of the audience who truly understands
Meridian’s struggle against the hegemonic discourse of the speech:
She told her not to worry about the speech. “It’s the same one
they made me learn when I was here,” she told her, “and it’s
no more true now than it was then.” She had never said
anything of the sort to anyone before and was surprised at
how good it felt. A blade of green grass blew briefly across
her vision and a fresh breeze followed it. She realized the
weather was too warm for mink and took off her coat. (122)
64 Lynn Pifer
Miss Winter breaks the custom of accepting this speech by admitting

to Meridian that, although she had once recited the words, she had
not believed they were true. This is the first time that an older woman
has given an honest, useful piece of advice to Meridian, and Miss Winter
is rewarded immediately for her good act with a pleasing feeling that
allows her, for a time, to shed a layer of woman’s prescribed
respectability, the heavy mink coat.
Miss Winter’s first words of kindness, however, go unnoticed by
Meridian, who at the time is obsessed with her mother’s disappointment
with her performance. Meridian feels completely weighed down by guilt
for not living up to her mother’s standards: “It seemed to Meridian that
her legacy from her mother’s endurance, her unerring knowledge of
rightness and her pursuit of it through all distractions, was one she
would never be able to match” (124). Miss Winter’s second message
comes through because she poses as that perfect (and perfectly dead)
woman, and pulls Meridian out of her near-coma by saying” ‘I forgive
you” (125) at the right moment. Relieved of her guilt, Meridian
recovers.
Gloria Steinem writes of the progress Walker has made for her
heroines since she wrote her first story:
Her first short story, unpublished, “The Suicide of an American

Girl,” describes a friendship between a young black American
and an African student. Attracted and angered by her
independence, he rapes her; as a kind of chosen sacrifice, she
doesn’t resist. But after he is gone, she quietly turns on the
gas and waits for death. It’s a conflict that Alice would no
longer resolve by giving up. (93)
Meridian will not give up and resolve her problems by dying. As she
tells Lynne, martyrs should walk away alive instead of acting out the
melodramatic last scene: “‘King should have refused. Malcolm, too,
should have refused. All those characters in all those novels that require
death to end the book should refuse. All saints should walk away. Do
their bit, then— just walk away’” (151).
Earlier in the novel, Walker lists people assassinated for taking
part in a “revolution”: “MEDGAR EVERS/JOHN F. KENNEDY/
MALCOLM X/MARTIN LUTHER KING/ROBERT KENNEDY/
CHE GUEVARA/PATRICE LAMUMBA/GEORGE JACKSON/
CYNTHIA WESLEY/ADDIE MAY COLLINS/DENISE MCNAIR/
CAROLE ROBERTSON/ VIOLA LIUZZO”(33).To the names of
famous political and spiritual leaders, Walker adds the names of lesser
known Civil Rights workers such as Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife
from Detroit killed by Klan members after participating in the Selma
March, and Cynthia Wesley,
one of four girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.
The placement of slashes and spaces makes the names slide into one
another. “EVERS/ JOHN” seems more of a unit than “JOHN F.
KENNEDY,” and the entire list appears to meld together, blurring the
identities of this group of martyrs who have become names mentioned
on the nightly news. But the significance of the list, as Walker implies,
involves the loss of modern people’s ability to grieve collectively, as a
community. And the agent of that loss is television, now “the
repository of memory” (33).
In order to survive, Meridian must see through the mystique of
martyrdom, learn to value her own life, and find a community to live
with, rather than a company of names to be listed among. Meridian
finally finds a living community in an unconventional church. Although
Walker does not mention Truman and Lynne’s daughter Camara in the
section bearing her name, the image of this young victim of racial
violence informs the chapter. In the middle of a church service,
Meridian realizes she could kill to prevent a crime such as the brutal
attack on Camara. This church, unlike the conventional Baptist church
Meridian attended as a girl, has a stained-glass representation of B. B.
King, a preacher who urges the congregation to stand up for their rights,
and hymns with new lyrics that speak out to her: “‘. . . the music, the
form of worship that has always sustained us, the kind of ritual you share
with us, these are the ways to transformation that we know’” (200).
Listening to the congregation’s hymn, Meridian finally achieves a
spiritual release and transformation:
In comprehending this, there was in Meridian’s chest a

breaking as if a tight string binding her lungs had given way,
allowing her to breathe freely. For she understood, finally, that
the respect she owed her life was to continue, against whatever
obstacles, to live it, and not to give up any particle of it
without a fight to the death, preferably not her own. indeed
she would kill, before she allowed
anyone to murder [the guest speaker’s] son again. (200)
Instead of adopting the murderous philosophy of the would-be

revolutionary cadre, Meridian has transcended it. She will not kill, or die,
“for the revolution” or any other abstract ideology. If forced to, she
would kill to preserve life. And when unable to prevent a murder, she
can gather together with other mourners to grieve that death
publicly.
Thadious M. Davis writes that Meridian “divests herself of
immediate blood relations—her child and her parents—in order to
align herself completely with the larger racial and social generations of
blacks” (49), and she seems to have achieved this alignment as she unites
with the congregation. By the end of the novel her personal identity
becomes part of their collective
66 Lynn Pifer
identity: “Meridian is born anew into a pluralistic cultural self, a ‘we’ that
is and must be selfless and without ordinary prerequisites for personal
identity” (Davis 49). As a collective group, this congregation can mourn
and remember together. The repository of memory has returned to the
community.
When Meridian opens her mouth to sing with the congregation, she
at last finds her voice and moves beyond her method of strategic
silences:
. . . perhaps it will be my part to walk behind the real

revolutionaries— those who know they must spill blood in
order to help the poor and the black . . .—and when they stop
to wash off the blood and find their throats too choked with
the smell of murdered flesh to sing, I will come forward and
sing from memory songs they will need once more to hear.
(201)
By turning to the songs and stories of her cultural heritage, she finds a
way to serve her people. And, finally, she can speak out against racist
patriarchal hegemony, rather than standing silent and alone in the
margins.
No t E s
1. “Let me have the coffin, and I will give you whatever you like to ask for
it” (Grimm 220).
2. I take this term from Walker’s poem “The Nature of This Flower Is
to Bloom”: Rebellious. Living. / Against the Elemental Crush. / A Song of
Color / Blooming / For Deserving Eyes. / Blooming Gloriously / For its Self. /
Revolution- ary Petunia” (Petunias 70).
3. In Walker’s character Meridian, we are able to see her admiration
for women such as Rebecca Jackson, of whose “remarkable general power”
Walker writes: “a woman whose inner spirit directed her to live her own life,
creating it from scratch, leaving husband, home, family, and friends, to do
so” (Gardens 79).
4. “What happens when I write is that I try to make models for myself.
I project other ways of seeing. Writing to me is not about audience actually. It’s
about
living” (Tate 185).
Wo R K s C I t E D
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York:
Pergamon, 1985.
Davis, Thadious M. “Alice Walker’s Celebration of Self in Southern Generations.” Southern
Quarterly 21.4 (1983): 39–53.
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm. Trans.
Lucy Crane. New York: Dover, 1963.
Hernton, Calvin C., The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex,
Literature, and Real Life. New York: Anchor, 1987.
Stein, Karen F., “Meridian: Alice Walker’s Critique of Revolution.” Black American Literature
Forum 20 (1986); 129–41.
Steinem, Gloria. “Do You Know This Woman? She Knows You.” Ms., June1982: 36+.
Tate, Claudia. “Alice Walker.” Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.
175–87.
Walker, Alice. Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ ll See You in the Morning. New York: Harcourt, 1979.
———. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt 1983.
———. Meridian. 1976. New York: Pocket, 1977.
———. Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1971.
Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. New York: Penguin,
1988.
Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
FE L I P E S M ITH
Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art
T he “saving” of lives is central to Alice Walker’s art. This “redemptive”

quality in her work goes beyond the thematic to the very heart of Walker’s
aesthetics, as she makes clear in her essay “Saving the Life That Is Your
Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life”: “It is, in the end,
the saving of lives that we writers are about. . . . We do it because we
care. . . .
We care because we know this: the life we save is our own” (Gardens 14). The
urgency to “save lives” thus stems from Walker’s acknowledgment of a
spiritual bond connecting the writer to the lives she depicts: Artistic
redemption “saves” the artist as well.
The most dramatic illustrations Walker provides of the saving
power of art emphasize this mutual benefit to “saver” and “saved.” In
her essay “The Old Artist: Notes on Mr. Sweet,” Walker tells how her
career as a writer— her very life in fact— was “saved” by her art. She
wrote her first published story “To Hell with Dying” instead of
committing suicide. In the process, she saved for future generations
the story of how the old guitar player Mr. Sweet “continued to share his
troubles and insights [and] ... continued to sing.” Simultaneously,
through writing she gave herself the courage to “turn [her] back on the
razor blade” (Word 39).
Mutual redemption is also the focus of Walker’s discussion of her
artistic debt to Zora Neale Hurston. In “Saving the Life That Is Your
Own,” she
African American Review, Volume 26, Number 3; Fall 1992: pp. 437–451. ©1992
Felipe Smith
69
70 Felipe Smith
describes how crucial Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935) was to her
completion of a fictional version of her mother’s remembrance from the
Depression in a story called “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff.” In this
early Walker story, the narrator quotes a conjurer’s curse directly from
Hurston’s book as part of her plan to secure justice for the wronged
Hannah Kemhuff. Walker explains the effect of her “collaboration” with
her esteemed literary ancestor this way:
In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological

threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it
I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that
wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of
being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy
to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let
me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am
not alone. (Gardens 13)
The highly spiritualistic terms of this revelation are characteristic of

Walker’s discussions of the saving power of art. Walker secularizes such
terms as redemption and salvation to encompass solutions to social
problems such as racial and gender oppression. She models her
redemptive strategy on writers such as Chopin, the Brontës, de Beauvoir,
and Lessing, whom she describes as “well aware of their own oppression
and search[ing] incessantly for a kind of salvation” (Gardens 251). One
result of this is an implicit connection for Walker between “savers” and
“saviors.” She describes Anaïs Nin as “a recorder of everything, no matter
how minute,” a writer who “saves” in the sense of collecting and
preserving. Tillie Olsen, though, “literally saves lives,” in the sense of
preventing danger or harm from befalling others. And by serving as a
model for women, Virginia Woolf “has saved so many” from the terrible
waste of unfulfilled lives (14).
Yet the key feature of Walker’s redemptive art, in spite of the
secular redemption that she envisions, is the feeling Walker gets from
participating in the spiritual continuity of her people. At the heart of
Walker’s definition of the writer’s social role is a cultivated awareness of
the reciprocal saving potential of art, based on her sense of art as a
means of keeping alive the connection between ancestral spirits and
their living descendants. This multiple preservation of artist, subject,
and communal spirit describes, I believe, the very core of Walker’s
artistic strategy.
In Walker’s philosophy of redemptive art, to save means, first, to
collect and thereby preserve the subject from loss by immortalizing it
in art; by reclaiming the past the artist insures its availability to the
future. The second meaning of to save involves providing the wisdom of
the past both to ensure the continuity of the folk ethos and to serve as a
blueprint for personal and
communal survival for those who require artistic models. To save

someone, in Walker’s eyes, includes the obligation to liberate her/him
from an oppressive cycle of violence. To be saved means to have achieved
an “unself-conscious sense of collective oneness; that naturalness, that
(even when anguished) grace” (Gardens 264).
In certain ways, Walker’s belief in the redemptive power of

writing recalls Mark C. Taylor’s description of textual interpretation
as a form of “radical Christology.” Taylor poses a theory of the text
that views the act of interpretation as a reenactment of ritual sacrifice.
For Taylor, the critic produces a text by victimizing the “host” text,
dismembering and incorporating it in the process (63–69). The
antecedent text, a victim of sacrifice, is for Taylor a “victimizer” as
well because it cannot fulfill itself without the critic’s participation.
Like Christ, the text requires victimization in order to fulfill its destiny of
becoming dismembered and disseminated to the multitudes.
Identifying the central paradox that links textual and Christological
functions, Taylor quotes Jeffrey Mehlman’s assertion that “in order to be
preserved the text must be interpreted, opened up, violated.” Thus
Taylor finds that textual interpretation is a process not unlike the
commemoration of the crucifixion of Christ by the consumption of the
Holy Eucharist in the Catholic mass: “Dismembering is, paradoxically, a
condition of remembering, death the genesis of life.” Taylor stresses that
“incorporation is not mere destruction but is also reembodiment,
reincarnation” (67).
Alice Walker has similarly iterated a theory of textual production
that follows the process of incorporation, reembodiment, and
reincarnation of anterior texts in the newly (re)created text. The
spiritualistic terms in which Walker discusses her intertextual strategy
show that she considers her approach not simply a form of rhetorical
play, indirect critique, or homage to her literary ancestors (what Henry
Louis Gates has termed “motivated and unmotivated Signification” [94,
121, 124, 255]). Walker, in summoning ancestral voices, seems to have bi-
directional “salvation” in mind—redemptive “reincarnation.” The process
involves much more than acknowledging Zora Neale Hurston, to cite one
example, as a literary “foremother”; it suggests instead a determined
effort “literally” to reincarnate and redeem her as text- within-text.
Rather than focus on the “parasitic” relationship between host
text and interpretive text that grounds Taylor’s analysis, Walker sees her
texts as eucharistic hosts in their ternary conjunction of spirit, word, and
flesh. Simply put, Walker envisions her texts as redemptive sites which
host the spiritual infusion of words, reincarnating actual flesh-and-blood
martyrs,
72 Felipe Smith
saints, and sinners. Embodied in words, spirits “take flesh” in her texts.
Her redemptive art, broadly imagined, is akin to the “radical
Christology” which Taylor envisions the interpretive act to be. In Taylor’s
figuration, textuality is the state common to both the material and the
immaterial. Everything nameable is a text: author and subject, body
and spirit, the living and the dead. If living flesh can be converted
into Word (text), then so can the dead. If existence within a text
provides a kind of “life,” then, by analogy, the generation of a text is a
form of “transubstantiation,” giving life to that which may in fact have
no material existence. Textual inscription re-calls, reincarnates, and
reembodies ancestral spirits.
Here we can compare Taylor’s “Embodied Word” to Alice Walker’s
description of the process by which the novel The Color Purple came
into being. Walker explicitly addresses that novel’s “invocation” “To the
Spirit:
/ Without whose assistance / Neither this book / Nor I / Would have been
/ Written.” Assuming the “I” here is Walker herself, how do we
account for her description of both the novel and herself as written
texts? As Taylor points out, “When Incarnation is understood as
Inscription, we discover Word. Embodied Word is Script(ure), the
writing in which we are inscribed and which we inscribe” (71; emphasis
added).1
Similarly, the novel’s envoi (“I thank everybody in this book
for coming. / A. W., author and medium”) conceives the novel’s
characters as autonomous entities inhabiting Walker’s newly created
text, participating in the moral drama there enacted.2 But as they are,
like her, “written” by the “Spirit,” their claim to autonomy rests
upon their priority as “texts.” Walker acknowledges the anteriority
and autonomy of these in- dwelling “texts” by describing her role as
that of “author and medium.” As “author,” she participates in the
inscription of ancestral voices into written text. As “medium,” she
invokes and “channels” the wisdom of ancestral “texts.” Walker’s own
description of textual production relegates to herself a priestly role in
the continuity of the textual chain, the site of gathering among
ancestral presences, the living, and the unborn. Her strategy makes a
place for the reader, too, conceiving the reader as a past, present, future
potentiality whose presence and participation fulfill the text (and
therefore part of the “everybody” thanked “for coming”). Despite the
many interesting lines of inquiry that such a formulation raises, the
importance of this collectivity of presences within the text to
Walker’s quest for a redemptive art has not been examined
heretofore. 3
Beyond thematic and structural considerations, Walker’s
“Signifyin’” gestures (in Gates’s usage) signal her concern with
rhetorical aspects of textual “salvation.” To see clearly how the writer’s
power to “save lives” resides in rhetorical practices, we can look to
Walker’s description of the character Grange Copeland in her 1973 self-
interview. Walker explains that Grange’s
reason for killing his son Brownfield in The Third Life of Grange
Copeland (1970) and his subsequent death at the hands of the police
are based on his desire to preserve what he valued in life: “To [Grange],
the greatest value a person can attain is full humanity, which is a state of
oneness with all things, and a willingness to die (or to live) so that the
best that has been produced can continue to live in someone else.”
Grange does not acknowledge a spiritual authority, making his self-
sacrifice an even greater gesture. For him, material continuity replaces
spiritual value, giving urgency to his desire that “the best” continue in
his absence. His act is a gesture of revolutionary theological revision, a
skepticism comparable to Walker’s added claim that she doesn’t believe
in “a God beyond nature. The world is God. Man is God. So is a leaf or a
snake” (Gardens 265).
Walker’s interest in communal continuity as an alternative to
spiritual transcendence continues in Meridian (1976). Meridian Hill
decides that, in the absence of spiritual value, existence itself should be
revered above all: “‘All those characters in all those novels that
require death to end the book should refuse. All saints should walk
away. Do their bit, then—just walk away’” (151). To her the only
reason for self-sacrifice should be, as in the case of Grange, the
preserving of another life: “. . . she understood, finally, that the
respect she owed her life was to continue, against whatever obstacles,
to live it, and not to give up any particle of it without a fight to the
death, preferably not her own.” This heightened sense of existence
extends “beyond herself to those around her because, in fact, the
years in America had created them One Life” (204). Thus, the
murder of the Civil Rights worker whose memorial she attends is
essentially a killing of herself, and Meridian finds herself
“approach[ing] the concept of retaliatory murder” (205) as a
recognition of the need to preserve “the best that has been
produced.”4
But it is during the memorial ceremony that Meridian discovers
the notion of preserving ancestral “spirits” as an extension of her
obligation to One Life. The commemorative statement of the surviving
parent of the slain worker provides a moment of existential clarity and
economy: “‘My son died’” (202). The response of the community is
qualitatively different, however. In their ritual remembrance of the
youth, they attempt to keep him “alive” by preserving in their memories
the text of his liberation and reform philosophy. Meridian “hears” their
covenant with the martyr as an unspoken communal “voice” addressing
the aggrieved parent:
“. . . we are gathering ourselves to fight for and protect what

your son fought for on behalf of us. If you will let us weave
your story and your son’s life and death into what we already
know—into the songs, the sermons, the ‘brother and
sister’—we will soon
74 Felipe Smith
be so angry we cannot help but move. . . . the church . . . ,

the music, the form of worship that has always sustained us,
the kind of ritual you share with us, these are the ways to
transformation that we know. We want to take this with us
as far as we can.” (Meridian 204)
Not only is the youth’s idealism textualized for communal

preservation, but his “life and death” are also “woven” into that text
—it is he who is repeatedly revived and sacrificed for the community.
In order to see this “radical Christology” in its full rhetorical
dimensions, we should recall Barthes’s reminder that a text (from the
Latin textus) is always “woven” from pre-existing materials (76). The
unspoken “voice” of the communal One Life practices a distinct form
of intertextuality (“‘let us weave your story and your son’s life and
death into what we already know’”) as a method of spiritual
continuity and as a “way to transformation.” That the text of the dead
man does transform the community can be seen in the distinct
departures in tone, content, and iconography of the church: The
songs have a “martial” cadence and different, less conciliatory words;
the church mission has been redefined as social activism; in the liturgy,
God has been reduced to a “reference”; and the Lamb of God depiction
of Christ has been replaced with a painting of a surrealistic, sword-
wielding avenger (Meridian 199–203).
To the extent that she is certainly registering a critique through
repetition and revision, Walker’s “reformed” black church “Signifies” on
traditional Christian ritual and doctrine. Further, Walker specifies
through the unvoiced “voice” that the community is aware of “Signifyin’
” as one of the primary “ways to transformation that [they] know” by
highlighting the rhetorical nature of their attempt to keep the text of the
worker “alive.” His “life and death,” as texts, are “woven” into the “songs,”
“sermons,” and forms of address (“‘brother and sister’”) by which they
identify themselves as a community. Walker underscores the significance of
the process by describing another, more famous martyr being kept
“alive” by the congregation:
The minister—in his thirties, dressed in a neat black suit

and striped tie of an earlier fashion— spoke in a voice so
dramatically like that of Martin Luther King’s that at first
Meridian thought his intention was to dupe or to mock. She
glanced about to see if anyone else showed signs of
astonishment or derision. (199)
Since signifying typically connotes disapproval, Meridian is immediately

suspicious about the minister’s intention and looks for clues in the
reactions of the others to see if mockery is really the “message.” The
minister’s youth
and dress likewise semiotically “Signify” on Martin Luther King; the

“text” of King—youth, voice, dress, sermon—has been “woven” into the
ritual as one of the church’s “ways of transformation,” to enable the
church to keep the past alive and to prepare for the future:
It struck Meridian that he was deliberately imitating King, that

he and all of his congregation knew he was consciously keeping
that voice alive. It was like a play. This startled Meridian; and
the preacher’s voice—not his own voice at all, but rather the
voice of millions who could no longer speak—wound on
and on. . . .
(200)
The preacher’s voice is “not his own voice at all” because it is a

“text” woven of many other texts, the ancestral “millions who could
no longer speak.” Mark Taylor notes the difficulty of ascribing
authorship to any text: “Rather than an author, we discover a seemingly
endless chain, an infinite proliferation of authors. Authors within
authors, or as [Kierkegaard] puts it, ‘one author seems to be enclosed in
another, like the parts in a Chinese puzzle box’” (61). Meridian’s
discovery that the preacher’s voice is a compendium of ancestral voices
makes clear to her that the perpetuation of the “Signifyin’ chain” of
ancestral voices is the chief responsibility she owes to One Life: The
“circle is unbroken” as long as someone remains alive to “speak” the
texts. Her decision to kill before letting that “voice” become silent would
not be possible except for her awareness that, beyond its implementation
as a form of critique, “Signifyin’ ” is a culturally recognized vehicle
of reincarnation and redemption—a “way of transformation.”
Significantly, Walker wrote “Saving the Life That Is Your Own” the
same year that she wrote Meridian.
Thus the invocation to the “Spirit” writer with which Walker
foregrounds The Color Purple (combined with Stevie Wonder’s “Show
me how to do like you / Show me how to do it,” as an epigraph) follows
the question of authority to one of its several conclusions. While
there is no one “author” of the text of ancestral voices, the
collectivity of authority may itself be named “the Spirit.” Walker
acknowledges that this authority “writes” her since its texts shape her
(“show [her] how to do it”) and, through her, shape her texts. In The
Temple of My Familiar (1989) Walker’s idea of the corporeal text
(“Embodied Word”) is best exemplified in the character Lissie, “ ‘ “the
one who remembers everything” ’ ” (Temple 52). Lissie, whose spiritual
reincarnations allow her to thumb through the texts of her lives back to
the dawn of human history, achieves godhead through the saving of all
of her “selves,” even those which have been inimical to One Life. As
Embodied Word she becomes a paradigm of redemptive intertextuality:
76 Felipe Smith
She is Walker’s spirit made text, many times over, each successive
text a “repetition and revision” of past selves. Her authority derives
from the unbroken chain of revisionary texts like Chinese puzzle boxes
within her, herself the compendium of black female, of world
experience.
II
We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And

if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as
witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our
children, and, if necessary, bone by bone. (Gardens 92)
I will focus now on Walker’s critique of the Christological model as a

specific aspect of her redemptive art. Shug Avery’s assertion in The Color
Purple that “you have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see
anything a’tall” (168) is an initial step in her ultimately successful
campaign to teach Celie (and the reader) that religious observance is
a matter of social convention. Since the characterization of Christ as
male agent of salvation without whom the passive and powerless female
cannot be saved serves, in Shug’s estimation, to reinforce patriarchal and
hierarchical social formations which perpetuate female oppression, that
characterization is an obstacle to spiritual growth. 5 The notion of self-
sacrifice and martyrdom runs counter to Walker’s reformist impulses,
since it valorizes victimhood as an index of spiritual progress. Walker’s
alternative to the Christ model, the result of many years of struggle
with the implications of the entirely submissive role of the female and
the otherwise oppressed, is a collective female agency (so-called
“woman-bonding”) that stresses self-help and group support.6
The supplanting of the Christ model by the collective redemption
model in Walker’s work, I will argue, is part of a complex intertextual
strategy of redemptive art that involves Walker’s two most cherished
literary ancestors— Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston. “Cane and
Their Eyes Were Watching God are probably my favorite books by black
American writers,” Walker said in her 1973 self-interview, referring to
the best known works by Toomer and Hurston, respectively. “I love
[Cane] passionately; could not possibly exist without it” (Gardens 259).
Her reverence for Hurston has also been well established. Through
essays like “Looking for Zora,” which recounts how Walker literally
claimed kinship with Hurston in order to locate the writer’s burial
place, Walker herself became very instrumental in the “rescue” of Hurston
from neglect by readers and scholars. Yet Walker’s expressed
reservations about each of these authors indicates that she would change
things about their lives and about their writing, too, if it were in her
power.
As the epigraph to this section clearly demonstrates, Walker feels it is

not only within her power, but it is her duty as a writer, to reclaim
and restore ancestral geniuses.
Because Walker sees her texts as redemptive sites, the rehabilitation
and preservation of her adopted ancestors, Toomer and Hurston, have
been part of her creative practice almost from the start. Yet there is a clear
distinction in the manner of Walker’s textual reincarnations of the pair.
Interestingly, while she strongly associates the Christological model
with Toomer-like figures in her texts, Walker inscribes Hurston-like
characters in her texts as innovators of the collective uplift model. Insofar
as Walker characteristically associates Toomer with the discredited ideal
of masculine agency, she must not simply reclaim him; she must
(ironically) “redeem” him from his role as failed Christ. Walker must
reclaim Hurston, on the other hand, in a fashion that compensates for the
destitution and desperation that marked the writer’s last years. In the
process, Walker has become the catalyst for the current Hurston
revival, “an act of literary bonding quite unlike anything that has ever
happened within the Afro-American tradition” (Gates 244).
Walker’s fascination with Toomer may be attributed in part to
the fact that the site of his famous trip to the South immortalized in
Cane is approximately an hour’s drive from Walker’s own hometown of
Eatonton, Georgia. The women whose lives he sketched were women of
Walker’s own mother’s time and circumstances. In “In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens,” Walker describes Toomer’s women as “our mothers and
grandmothers, some of them: moving to music not yet written”
(Gardens 232). Yet in explaining her attachment to Toomer, Walker
acknowledges that her feelings for Cane come from a “perilous direction”
(86). Despite her claim that she “could not possibly exist without” Cane,
Walker says that she could indeed learn to do without Toomer himself: “I
think Jean Toomer would want us to keep [the] beauty [of Cane], but let
him go” (65; emphasis added). Apparently she allows Toomer to “go”
based upon his choice “to live his own life as a white man,” a “choice
[which] undermined Toomer’s moral judgment: there were things in
American life [racism] and in his own [racial opportunism] that he simply
refused to see” (62).
Examining Walker’s valediction carefully shows it to be a more
profound critique of Toomer than it might appear at first glance, for she
lifts the phrasing of her dismissal of Toomer from Toomer himself. In
“Theater,” a sketch in the middle section of Cane, the story’s central
character, John, becomes transfixed by the earthy beauty and physical
immediacy of the dancer Dorris as she performs on the stage before him.
John, however, decides against emotional or even physical involvement
with the purple-stockinged chorine. He “desires her,” but “holds off.”
This is but one instance in a pattern of ironized, self-conscious desire
and denial that typifies Toomer’s
78 Felipe Smith
educated males (as well as some of his middle-class women), throwing

into relief Toomer’s own speculative relationship with black culture.
Ultimately John’s ambivalence about a black beauty whose vitality frightens
him evolves into a passive aesthetic appropriation that provides him with
the emotional distance he requires (and, in the process, produces the
line that echoes in Walker’s emotional separation from Toomer: “Keep
her loveliness,” he tells himself, but “let her go” [Cane 51]).
John, as the author’s stand-in, embodies Toomer’s tenuous
relationship to his subject, “the rich dusk beauty” of black folk culture
(Cane xvi). The aesthetic resolution to John’s emotional dilemma is
emphasized with a chiasmatic refrain, recalling the versification of
Toomer’s “Song of the Son”: “Let her go,” he repeats. “And keep her
loveliness” (52). Walker’s appropriation of Toomer’s language is a
classic example of “Signifyin’,” identifying implicitly the aspects of
Toomer’s biography which most trouble her: his rejection of black
women, compounded by his objectification and scopic appropriation of
their pain and their beauty. In many of the sketches in Cane, the various
Toomer surrogates, faced with the possibility of union with black women
of the South, almost always choose to take the women’s loveliness with
them, but let their bodies go (or, rather, stay).
In “Fern,” for example, the would-be savior who narrates the
story is overcome by Fern’s physical proximity, and, moving to
exploit her vulnerability, he precipitates in her a fit of madness.
Guiltily, he plans to do “some fine unnamed thing for her” (17)—
something short, that is, of taking her with him as he leaves on the
train. The narrator of “Avey” tries to interest Avey in an art that
would articulate the black female soul, but as narrator and interpreter
of the woman’s life, it is his art, not hers, that he recites to her, putting
her to sleep in the process. His art—in effect, the text of Cane writ
small—repeats the pattern of the male observer who objectifies female
existence, extracts its beauty, but leaves the woman herself behind.
Ironically, the narrator’s final comment on Avey—“Orphan-woman” (47)
— certifies this emotional abandonment.
In fact, Toomer’s men are themselves the orphans—cultural
orphans dislodged from the saving womb of their maternal culture by
the stronger pull of a supersessive patriarchal embrace. Like Kabnis, they
are figuratively Antaean, “suspended a few feet above the [culture]
whose touch would resurrect [them]” (96). Like Dan Moore in “Box
Seat” and Paul in “Bona and Paul,” they are haunted by visions of earth
mothers who would nurture them toward fulfillment of their potential
destinies as “new-world Christs.” Strikingly, Toomer’s textual
surrogates conjure a “new-world Christ” who is not a savior, but
simply a martyr or, as Dan Moore puts it, “a slave of a woman who
is a slave” (63). Committing themselves to black women signifies
commitment to a black identity, a closing off of options that
neither Toomer nor his surrogates seem willing to abide: “‘God

Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with beauty,’” cries
Kabnis. “‘Take it away. . . . Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself . . .’”
(83). Despite his prayer for deliverance, Kabnis becomes, however, a
martyr—a Christ figuratively chained to the slow, tortuous wheel of
racial antagonism in the South. When we read this event in light of
Toomer’s later disaffiliation with black culture and identity, it leaves
the impression that Kabnis, who alone among Toomer’s surrogates
achieves physical union with the women and the soil of the South,
exemplifies Toomer’s horror at the prospect of “saving” the South’s
suffering black women at the expense of his own freedom.
The failure of the “new-world Christ” figures in Toomer’s work
is significant, given Toomer’s professed desire to “save” the “plum” of
black culture which had been “saved” for him in the folksongs he
heard.7 Unable to move beyond a model of redemption that requires
their cultural “deaths” to “end the book,” Toomer and his surrogates
flee the South in tacit admission that those who stand apart from both
the community and its culture cannot “redeem” either. What Toomer
actually preserves is not the Southern black folk culture he set out to
document, but the fact of his ambivalence toward it.
For her part, Walker not only critiques the proclivity of Christ
figures to victimize those they have come to save, but she typically
characterizes them as cultural voyeurs in the Toomer mold. Walker
effectively encodes the “text” of Toomer as would-be savior into her
fiction, and there forces him to atone for the crimes of theft and
abandonment. Toomer’s appropriation of the stories of the women of
the South, the real substance of Cane, followed by his abandonment of
the race (and its women), is the “crime” which Walker redresses by
her reappropriation of their lives and texts. She “redeems” the women
of Cane in her own works—takes back their beauty, and lets the
Toomer/Christ figure go. But she doesn’t let him “off.”
Among the earliest of the “Toomer archetypes” incarnated in Walker’s
fiction is Mordecai Rich, in the short story “Really, Doesn’t Crime
Pay?” The “crime” of the title is that of creative theft, a crime which
Rich commits against a woman, Myrna, whose “madness” links her
clearly to the women of Toomer’s Cane. A Northern black man who
goes to the South in search of literary material upon which to launch
his career, Rich describes himself as an aesthete and a Romantic in
the Toomer mold: “‘A cold eye. An eye looking for Beauty. An eye
looking for Truth.’” Myrna’s suspicion of him stems from her belief
that “nobody ought to look on other people’s confusion with that cold
an eye” (In Love 14), yet in the end, he seduces her and steals her stories
—tales, fittingly, of women victimized
80 Felipe Smith
by men. His praise of her creative power masks his parasitical

intent: “‘You could be another Zora Hurston,’” he says archly (18). Sure
—and he could be another Jean Toomer, for he appropriates Myrna’s life
and works and uses them to become a celebrated writer. To
compound his crime, he replaces the black matriarch of Myrna’s story
“with a white cracker, with little slit-blue eyes” (21)—a commentary,
perhaps on Toomer’s aesthetic/ romantic preferences—and announces
his intention to write a book called “‘The Black Woman’s Resistance to
Creativity in the Arts.’” Like the teller of “Avey,” Rich becomes an
“authority” on the inability of black women to appreciate “an art
that would open the way for women the likes of her” (Cane 46), a
trickster masked as savior.
Another such trickster/savior of Walker’s is Truman Held in
Meridian. Held, too, is a Northern black man who goes to the South
during the Civil Rights Movement; leaves a local Southern girl
(Meridian) behind physically, psychically, and emotionally violated;
returns to the North to embark upon an artistic career built upon the
representation of the black women of the South; and there marries, as
Toomer did, a white woman. Similarly, Held’s pretense of
internationalism in clothing (African) and speech (French) “Signifies”
upon Toomer’s retreat into pan-culturalism to escape the onus of his
black American identity. In naming Held, Walker also “Signifies” on
Toomer’s narrator in “Fern,” who is “held” by Fern’s eyes: “Her eyes,
unusually weird and open, held me. Held God” (Cane 17).8 Beyond
these details, the interesting coincidence of Walker’s heroine’s having the
same name as a favorite retreat of the young Toomer in Washington,
D.C.— Meridian Hill—points to Walker’s strategy of intertextual
reference. It is on Meridian Hill that the Toomer surrogate in “Avey”
tries to teach Avey the meaning of her life with a high-blown poetry
also intended to seduce. If Truman Held stands in for Toomer in
Meridian, Meridian certainly fills the role of the Aveys that have become
“trapped in an evil honey” of Toomer’s art (Gardens 232).9
In the end it is the very image which he exploits for profit, that of
the Southern black earth mother, which “holds” Truman: “It was as if
the voluptuous black bodies, with breasts like melons and hair like a
crown of thorns, reached out—creatures of his own creation—and
silenced his tongue. They began to claim him” (Meridian 170). Just as
Fern haunts the would-be seducer who abandons her, Meridian (“‘The
woman I should have married and didn’t’”) becomes “a constant reproach,
in [Truman’s] thoughts” (138, 141). Since Truman surrounds himself with
pictures of Meridian and with paintings and sculptures of the black
women of the South, his torment poetically stems from the nature and
source of his crime—the sin of reducing people to Art (128).
Significantly, Truman, haunted by the image of the mother culture
against which he has transgressed, must expiate his crimes by
working as the “servant” to women who are “servants” in the South.

Under Meridian’s direction, he works out his “salvation” as a freelance
Civil Rights activist, assuming Meridian’s role as communal sufferer after
she decides to “ just walk away.”10
Male characters such as these and the white rock star Traynor in
Walker’s short story “Nineteen Fifty-five” share attributes which separate
them from other victimizers of women in her works. Unlike the more
typical male antagonist, they do not commit their crimes as a result
of ignorance or simply as rough embodiments of a brutal patriarchy, but
see themselves as saviors and liberators of women from emotional and
physical violence, as men more sensitive to the plight of women due to
their artistic temperaments. This Toomer-inspired figure of the “new-
world Christ” who participates in the oppression of those he comes to
liberate, and for whom “martyrdom” constitutes lifelong union with the
culture and women of the black South, forms the core of Walker’s
“text” of the Christ model. The racial and cultural ambiguity of the
figure, his outsider status to the culture, his “racial opportunism,” and
his career-defining cultural voyeurism and aesthetic banditry round out
the cluster of discrete signifiers which typify this enduring Walker
paradigm.
The fact that this violator suffers psychically from his crime
echoes Toomer’s summation of Fern’s history of victimization: “When
she was young, a few men took her, but got no joy from it. And then,
once done, they felt bound to her” (Cane 14). Not only do these
transgressors typically get no joy from their crimes in Walker’s stories,
but the very image of the violated “black madonna” (the nurturer in
Toomer’s work of the “new-world Christ”) becomes the avenging ghost
who drives the transgressor on a path toward purgation. Walker’s
textual appropriation of Toomer serves a purgatorial function then,
becoming the theater for the passion, fall, and redemption of a
particular, gender-focused Christology.
While Walker’s redemptive efforts at textually reincarnating
Toomer center on rehabilitating his history of racial and female
exploitation, her effort at textual resuscitation of Zora Neale Hurston
is redemptive in the sense that Walker attempts to reverse the
catastrophic effects of poverty, isolation, and critical neglect. Noting
Langston Hughes’s description of Hurston as “a perfect book of
entertainment in herself,” Henry Louis Gates has also discovered the
“presence” of Hurston in Walker’s The Color Purple, but he attributes it
to Walker’s revisionary reconsideration of Hurston’s heroine, Janie
Woods, in Their Eyes Were Watching God (245). Gates compares
Walker’s description of a picture of Hurston which she owns to the
picture of Shug Avery standing beside a motor car that Celie
describes (Gates 254). He interprets this “Signifyin’ ” gesture as
evidence that Shug is a revision of Janie, a “letter of love to [Walker’s]
authority
82 Felipe Smith
figure” (244). I think, however, that Walker’s depiction of Shug

Avery is meant to “Signify” on Hurston herself, especially since the
picture of Hurston metamorphoses into the picture of Shug. Just as
Walker “saves” the text of Mules and Men by transcribing it into “The
Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,” Walker “saves” Hurston herself in The
Color Purple. Shug Avery is Zora Neale Hurston reincarnated as “a
perfect book of entertainment in herself.”
Further, this inscription of Hurston serves the strategic purpose
of “redeeming” the Christological model previously associated with
Toomer. Toomer’s outsider view of black women in the South falls just
short, in Walker’s estimation, of Hurston’s insider view: “There is no book
more important to me than this one,” says Walker of Their Eyes Were Watching
God, “(including Toomer’s Cane, which comes close, but from what I
recognize is a more perilous direction)” (Gardens 86). The “ghost” of
Hurston which dwells in Walker’s works takes precedence over the “ghost”
of Toomer, just as Hurston’s text of black womanhood in the South
authoritatively and chronologically supersedes Toomer’s. Gates is
correct, I think, to see The Color Purple as revisionary of both Cane and
Their Eyes (194, 249). But Walker’s novel seems, more appropriately, an
attempt to “redeem” both parent texts by ensuring that “the best that
has been produced” in both “can continue to live” in The Color Purple.
Not only does The Color Purple revise key tropes in Toomer’s
Cane, it owes its very title to the urgent chromatic display of Toomer’s
work, where we find the “purple haze” of dusk, the “purple” skin of the
“Face” at sundown, lavender-tinted houses, and “pale purple shadows”
contrasting with the “deep purple” of a woman’s hair. Dusk tinges men
with “purple pallor.” The purple glow of the “Crimson Garden” signifies
its transition from Eden to Gethsemane in “Bona and Paul,” while
women dress in “silk stockings and purple dresses” in the South and
“silk purple stockings” in the East. Nettie’s discovery of the near-purple
(i.e., “blue-black”) skin of the Africans in The Color Purple tips off a
further meaning of “the color purple” for Walker as well as Toomer:
“the colored people.” Toomer’s memorable poem in Cane, “Song of the
Son,” shows his most striking use of the color in a figuration that
captures the essence of Cane:
O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,

Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree
bare One plum was saved for me, one seed
becomes
An everlasting song, a singing

tree, Caroling softly souls of
slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,

Caroling softly souls of slavery (12)
For Toomer, the “saved” plum is the essence of the slavery

experience captured in the folksongs of the South which he believed were
doomed to extinction. His text, then, has the redemptive purpose of
preserving the souls of black folk, immortalizing them in “everlasting
song”—but as written, not spoken, texts. As such, Toomer’s saving
gesture, a figurative “singing tree,” represents the prototype of
Walker’s redemptive art.
“When reading Toomer’s ‘Song of the Sun’ [sic] it is not unusual
to comprehend—in a flash—what a dozen books on black people’s
history fail to illuminate,” Walker has said. “I have embarrassed my
classes occasionally by standing in front of them in tears as Toomer’s
poem about ‘some genius from the South’ [i.e., ‘Georgia Dusk’] flew
through my body like a swarm of golden butterflies on their way
toward a destructive sun. Like Du Bois, Toomer was capable of
comprehending the black soul” (Gardens 258). Walker’s particularly
emotional response to this poem indicates her awareness of Toomer’s
characterization of “the colored people” as “the color purple” (“O
Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums”), and her depiction of
Shug Avery in The Color Purple involves a redemptive gesture built on
that figuration. Shug’s nickname is an abbreviation for “Sugar,”
significantly, the chief product of the cane crop. On first seeing
Shug, Celie notes, “Under all that powder her face black. . . . She got
a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum”
(42). Later, Celie views Shug’s disease-racked body in the tub: “. . .
Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like
her mouth . . .” (45). In an interesting “Signifyin’ ” gesture, Walker
transforms Toomer’s “saved” plum into a real “singer” (and worshipper
of trees). And, more importantly for Walker’s redemptive strategy, by
“saving” Shug, Celie performs the enabling action toward her own
redemption, for the kiss of those very black plum lips opens up to
Celie her own sexuality, spirituality, and ultimately (through Shug’s
“saving” of Nettie’s letters) her very identity.
In her most recent collection of essays, Living By the Word (1988),
Walker claims that “there is no story more moving to me personally
than one in which one woman saves the life of another, and saves
herself . . .,” a feat that “black women wish they were able to do all the
time” (19). In effect, what we see in The Color Purple is Walker’s
inscription of that very mutual saving gesture between herself and her
literary ancestor, Hurston. Walker appropriates Toomer’s figure of the
“saved plum,” which becomes the seed of the “singing tree” of his art.
But significantly, the “voice” which comes through clearest is
Hurston’s, not Toomer’s, and the song she sings is not of ineffectual male
saviors who end up exploiting those they would redeem, but
84 Felipe Smith
of women individually and collectively working toward their own and

each other’s salvation.
Moving Toomer “off her eyeball” allows Walker to see beyond
the hierarchical Christological path, just as Shug opens up for Celie
the route of mutual salvation. Toomer’s singing tree is figuratively
incorporated into Hurston’s chorus of Nature. When, in Their Eyes,
Janie’s grandmother saves “de text” of her slave experience for Janie, the
moment strikingly parallels Toomer’s “saved plum” of the black slave
experience. But Janie learns, as Walker does too, that saved “texts”
are meant to be rewritten through the vantage of new experience.
Janie revises, and therefore redeems, her grandmother’s “text” of male-
agent salvation (i.e., respectable marriage), passing on to Pheoby her own
text of transformation from unvoiced cultural orphan to voiced and
participating (yet determinedly autonomous) member of the folk
community, a paradigm of redemptive agency which Walker
appropriates and expands upon. Toomer’s text of male-agent redemption
— cognate with Nanny’s, and therefore implicitly critiqued by Janie’s
experience in Their Eyes—becomes entirely obsolete in light of the
manifold saving gestures of the women of The Color Purple.
At the heart of The Color Purple lies a complex redemptive
artistry that encompasses saving gestures of various types. For example,
Walker has acknowledged her grandmother as her source for Celie
(“Characters” 67). Walker has also made much of the tale of the
shared underwear as an influence (Gardens 355–56). But the un-text of
the redemptive fantasy at the heart of the novel appears in Walker’s
1979 essay “Zora Neale Hurston,” which concludes with the definitive
statement of Walker’s redemptive art that serves as the epigraph to this
section of my essay: “We are a people. A people do not throw their
geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists
and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our
children, and, if necessary, bone by bone” (Gardens 92). In this
concluding statement to an article on the cautionary aspects of Hurston’s
life and career, Walker signals her intent to reassemble the “text” of
Hurston, “if necessary, bone by bone,” and to reincarnate her as
“Embodied Word.” Equally revealing is what immediately precedes this
declaration in the essay, a fantasy of mutually assisted salvation which
includes not only Hurston but, significantly, the singers Billie Holiday
and Bessie Smith too:
In my mind, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie

Smith form a sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in the
tradition of black women singers, rather than among “the
literati,” at least to me Like Billie and Bessie she followed
her own road, believed
in her own gods, pursued her own dreams, and refused to
separate herself from the “common” people. It would have
been nice if the
three of them had had one another to turn to, in times of need. I
close my eyes and imagine them [my emphasis]: Bessie would be
in charge of all the money; Zora would keep Billie’s
masochistic tendencies in check and prevent her from singing
embarrassing anything-for-a- man songs, thereby preventing
Billie’s heroin addiction. In return, Billie could be, along with
Bessie, the family that Zora felt she never had. (Gardens 91–
92)
Does this fantasy not represent the core of The Color Purple? Walker’s
assertion that Hurston “ belongs” more among the singers than the
writers grounds Shug Avery’s incarnation as blues singer. Further, in
Mary Agnes (Squeak), we can hear not only the words but also the
“sort of meowing” voice of Billie Holiday. Both her drug use and tragic
history with men relate her to Holiday, and the fact that she, like Celie
(Hurston), benefits from an extended network of female strivers fulfills
the fantasy’s intent of rewriting and redeeming the lives of the
ancestral voices Walker acknowledges. Physically and
temperamentally, Sophia suggests Bessie Smith, the one who would keep
the money. Walker’s redemptive strategy works to empower each historical
figure in a way that fictionally reverses the putative cause of her life’s
suffering. As Walker explains of her step grandmother’s reincarnation in
the novel as Celie: “I liberated her from her own history I wanted her
to be happy” (“Characters” 67).
Walker’s various statements indicate her belief in the actual, not
figurative, saving power of art—the ability of the artist to liberate
people from their tragic histories—if necessary, to make them happy.
In her poem “Each One, Pull One,” Walker elevates this ability to an
obligation. Addressing all who “write, paint, sculpt, dance / or sing” as
sharers in the “fate / of all our peoples” (i.e., One Life), she exhorts
those standing with her on “the rim / of the grave” of the ancestors
(including King, Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, Hurston, Nella Larsen,
and Toomer) to stop helping their enemies to “bury us”:
Look, I, temporarily on the rim of the grave

have grasped my mother’s hand my father’s leg.
There is the hand of Robeson Langston’s thigh
Zora’s arm and hair . . .
Each one, pull one back into the
sun We who have stood over
so many graves
know that
all of us must live
or none. (Horses 50–53)
86 Felipe Smith
III
The story of Walker’s redemptive effort on behalf of Toomer and Hurston

has one additional chapter. In Walker’s recent novel The Temple of My
Familiar, he Toomer archetype reappears as the folk/pop singer Arveyda,
a man of multiracial background like Toomer. Arveyda’s fame as a
musician derives from his ability to “sing” the souls of his largely female
audience, and as in Toomer’s case, this talent feeds off his exploitative
relationship with the women in his life. At the novel’s end, Arveyda
meets Fanny, the genetic descendant of Celie (through Olivia) and the
spiritual descendent of Shug, having been raised in the household of
the two women. The sexual union of these two, then, marks the
“textual” bonding of the Toomer and Hurston archetypes in Walker’s
work. Their orgasm (in Shug’s theology, the ecstatic achievement of god’s
presence) returns us to the key tropological refiguration in The Color
Purple: Arveyda feels as if he has rushed to meet all the ancestors and
they have welcomed him with joy” (407). During this ancestral
communion, they also share a vision which hints at their textual origins:
She is fearful of asking him what she must. Timidly she says:
“And did you also see the yellow plum tree and all the little
creatures, even the fish, in its branches? . . .”
But Arveyda says simply, “Yes. . . . But best of all . . .
was the plum tree and everything and everybody in it, and the
warmth of your breath and the taste in my mouth of the sweet
yellow plums.” (407–408)
This scene represents, I believe, Walker’s reconciliation with the

Toomer archetype—her attempt to lay to rest this ghost that has roamed
her works in search of atonement. The yellow plums perhaps result
from the cross- pollination of the two trees of Walker’s ancestral Gardens
—Janie’s pear and Toomer’s plum. The sexual positioning of Fanny above
Arveyda reflects the Toomer surrogate’s abandonment of hierarchical
sexual politics, while his achieved physical union with Fanny (a “space
Cadet” in the mold of Toomer’s Fern) indicates a fulfillment of both
Toomer’s quest for physical union with the spirit-maddened women of the
race and the women’s parallel discovery of a spiritual anchor. Thus their
final salutes to each other attest to their success in mutually-assisted
salvation:
“My . . . spirit,” says Fanny . . . .

“My . . . flesh,” says Arveyda (408)
No t E s
1. Wendy Wall (85) suggests that Walker ascribes a similar power to
Celie, since Celie too is the author of a self which has only a textual
existence.
2. See Walker’s essay “Writing The Color Purple” (Gardens 355–60), in which
she describes the “visitations” by the book’s characters as crucial to the
production of her text.
3. Henry Louis Gates (239–58) and Michael Awkward (135–64) have
pursued other possibilities in interpreting Walker’s spiritualistic stance, also with
reference to Hurston and Toomer as literary ancestors.
4. In my forthcoming essay “Survival Whole: Redemptive Vengeance and
Forbearance in Alice Walker’s Novels,” I consider Walker’s continued interest in
retaliatory violence as an alternative method of redemption.
5. Mary Daly points out that the Christological model leads inevitably
toward sexism: “The underlying—and often explicit—assumption in the minds
of theologians down through the centuries has been that divinity could not have
deigned to ‘become incarnate’ in the ‘inferior’ sex, and the ‘fact’ that ‘he’ did
not do so of course confirms male superiority” (70). Daly goes on to insist
that even the reform theologians who interpret Christ as a symbol miss the
point that the historical use of the “symbol” to oppress indicates “some inherent
deficiency in the symbol itself ” (72).
6. Mary Daly’s chapter The Bonds of Freedom: Sisterhood as Antichurch”
explains the rationale for such a reformist gesture: The development of
sisterhood is a unique threat, for it is directed against the basic social and
psychic model of hierarchy and dominion upon which authoritarian religion as
authoritarian depends for survival” (133).
7. See Darwin T. Turner’s “Introduction” to Cane xxii–xxiii. For other
aspects of Toomer’s messianic self-image, see page xi of the “Introduction.”
8. The eyes of Truman Held’s own “ judge,” Meridian Hill, have a
similar effect upon Truman: “There was something dark, Truman thought, a
shadow that seemed to swing, like the pendulum of a dock, or like a blade,
behind her open, candid eyes, that made one feel condemned. That made one
think of the guillotine” (Meridian 139).
9. See Kerman and Eldridge (74) on Meridian Hill. When we consider
the implications of the name Meridian, we should also note the central
importance of the poem “Blue Meridian” as Toomer’s attempt at racial and
cultural self-definition. See Kerman and Eldridge (80–81) for a discussion of
“Blue Meridian” (originally titled “The First American”).
10. Martha J. McGowan points out that the working title for Meridian was
Atonement and Release (29).
Wo R K s C I t E D
Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s

Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-
Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Joshué V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1979: 73–81.
“Characters in Search of a Book.” Newsweek 21 June 1982: 67.
Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston:
Beacon, 1973.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Kerman, Cynthia Earl, and Richard Eldridge. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for
Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
McGowan, Martha J. “Atonement and Release in Alice Walker’s Meridian.” Critique: Studies
in Modern Fiction 23.1 (1981): 25–36.
Taylor, Mark C. “Text as Victim.” Deconstruction and Theology. Ed. Thomas J. J. Altizer.
New York: Crossroad, 1982: 58–78.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. New York: Liveright, 1975.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt,
1982.
———. Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986.
———. In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women. New York: Harcourt, 1973.
———. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.
———. Living By the Word: Selected Writings, 1973–1987. San Diego: Harcourt, 1988.
———. Meridian. 1976. New York: Harcourt, 1976.
———. The Temple of My Familiar. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989.
Wall, Wendy. “Lettered Bodies and Corporeal Texts in The Color Purple.” Studies in American
Fiction 16 (1988): 83–97.
R O B E R T J A M E S BU T L E R
Alice Walker’s Vision of the South in

The Third Life of Grange Copeland
Two-heading was dying out, he lamented. “Folks what can look at

things in more than one way is done got rare.”
(Third Life 129)
I n “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience,” Alice Walker

defines her response to the South in a richly ambivalent way.l Although
she stresses that she does not intend to “romanticize Southern black
country life” and is quick to point out that she “hated” the South,
“generally,” when growing up in rural Georgia, she nevertheless
emphasizes that Southern black writers have “enormous richness and
beauty to draw from” (In Search 21). This “double vision” (19) of the
South is at the center of most of her fiction and is given extremely
complex treatment in her best work. While Walker can remember with
considerable resentment the larger white world composed of “evil greedy
men” who paid her sharecropper father three hundred dollars for twelve
months of labor while working him “to death” (21), she can also call
vividly to mind the “sense of community” (17) which gave blacks a way of
coping with and sometimes transcending the hardships of such a racist
society. Although she emphatically states that she is not “nostalgic. . .
for lost poverty” (17), she can also lyrically recall the beauties of the
Southern land, “loving the earth so much that one longs to taste it
and sometimes does” (21). Even the Southern black religious
traditions, which she con-
African American Review, Volume 27 (2), Summer 1993: pp. 195–204. © 1993 Robert
James Butler
89
90 Robert James Butler
sciously rejected as a college student because she saw them with one part
of her mind as “a white man’s palliative,” she values in another way
because her people “had made [religion] into something at once simple
and noble” (18), an “antidote against bitterness” (16).
Walker’s ambivalence, therefore, is a rich and complex mode of
vision, a way of seeing her Southern background which prevents her
from either naïvely romanticizing the South or inducing it to an
oversimplified vision of despair and resentment. Ambivalence, or what
Grange Copeland might call “two-heading” (Third Life 129), allows
Walker to tell the full truth about her experience in the South. Avoiding
the “blindness” created by her awareness of the injustices done to blacks
in the South, she is able to draw “a great deal of positive material” from
her outwardly “‘underprivileged’“ (In Search 20) background. Indeed, she
stresses that her status as a black Southern writer endows her with
special advantages:
No one could wish for a more advantageous heritage than

that bequeathed to the black writer in the South: a compassion
for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of
evil, and an abiding sense of justice. We inherit a great
responsibility as well, for we must give voice to centuries not
only of silent bitterness and hate but also of neighborly
kindness and sustaining love. (In Search 21)
Walker’s sense of herself as both a black and a Southern writer,

then, enables her to participate in a literary tradition containing a
richness of vision which she finds missing in the mainstream of American
literature. In “Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of
Models in the Artist’s Life,” she expresses a distaste for the overall
pessimism of modern American literature. She claims that “the gloom of
defeat is thick” in twentieth-century American literature because
“American writers tended to end their books and their characters’ lives
as if there were no better existence for which to struggle.” But because
Southern black experience is rooted in both “struggle” and “some kind of
larger freedom” resulting from such struggle, the black writer is able to
overcome the despair which enervates so much modern literature (In
Search 5). African American writers, therefore, participate in a literary
tradition which is distinctive for both its lucid criticism of modern life
and its special ability to recover human value and thus make important
affirmations which give black American literature a unique vitality
and resonance.
The single work which best expresses Walker’s powerful
ambivalence toward Southern life is her first novel, The Third Life of
Grange Copeland, a book notable for its vitality and its resonance.
Walker’s complex vision of the South can be seen in her development of
the novel’s three main characters—
Alice Walker’s Vision of the South in The Third Life of Grange Copeland 91
Brownfield, Ruth, and Grange Copeland. While Brownfield is a terrifying

example of how the South can physically enslave and spiritually cripple black
people, Ruth’s story offers considerable hope because she is able to leave
the South, rejecting the racist world which destroys Brownfield and, in so
doing, move toward a larger, freer world which offers her fresh
possibilities. Grange Copeland’s narrative points out some of the positive
features of Southern black life. He returns to Georgia after an
unsuccessful journey north to find the things he needs for his identity—a
sense of place and a feeling of family and community, what Michael
Cooke has called “intimacy” (x). Although the narratives, taken in
isolation, do not express the author’s whole vision of Southern life,
together they offer a series of interrelated perspectives which capture
Walker’s richly ambivalent vision of the South. While Grange’s story
in isolation might suggest a glib romanticizing of the black South and
while the stories of Ruth and Brownfield might suggest an equally
simplistic debunking of black Southern life, all three narratives constitute
what Walker has called “the richness of the black writer’s experience
in the South” (In Search 18).
Brownfield’s narrative concentrates all that is negative about
Southern culture: He is cruelly victimized by the extreme racism and
poverty of the Georgia backwoods world in which he is born and
raised. As his name clearly suggests, his is a case of blighted growth;
he is a person who has been physically and emotionally withered by
the nearly pathological environment which surrounds him. By the
end of the novel, he is portrayed as “a human being . . . completely
destroyed” (225) by the worst features of rural Southern life—ignorance,
poverty, racism, and violence. Appropriately, one of the earliest images
of him in the novel describes him as undernourished and diseased, his
head covered with tatter sores, his legs afflicted with tomato sores, and
his armpits filled with boils running with pus. As his narrative
develops, these images of disease coalesce into a frightening metaphor
which dramatizes how Brownfield is infected and eventually destroyed
by a racist world which systematically deprives him of human
nourishment.
This is particularly true of the way in which the system of
Southern sharecropping destroys his family by enslaving them to the
land which would otherwise nourish them. Because Brownfield’s father
Grange cannot make an adequate living for his family, his ego is
gradually eroded, until he comes to see himself as a “stone,” a “robot,”
and a “cipher” (8). He therefore fails as a husband and a father, driving
his wife to suicide and withdrawing emotionally from his son. The net
effect on Brownfield is to engrave deep emotional scars into his
character which ultimately stunt his growth. After being abandoned by
Grange and losing his mother shortly afterwards, Brownfield is
frozen into a condition of Southern servitude. His efforts
to establish a new life fail to materialize because his loss of family

and the destruction of self-esteem caused by a racist environment trap
him in a kind of moral vacuum:
He was expected to raise himself up on air, which was all that

was left after his work for others. Others who were always
within their rights to pay practically nothing for his labor. He
was never able to do more than exist on air; he was never able
to build on it, and was never able to have any land of his own;
and was never able to set his woman up in style, which more
than anything else was what he wanted to do. (54–55)
Literally cheated out of land and morally dispossessed of a human

foundation for his life, Brownfield is ironically condemned to repeat
his father’s failures. As he realizes not long after being abandoned by
Grange, “. . . his own life was becoming a repetition of his father’s”
(54). His efforts to go north result in “weeks of indecisive wandering”
(31), eventually bringing him to a small Georgia town where he forms a
debilitating relationship with Josie, one of his father’s discarded lovers.
When he does discover a fruitful relationship with Mem, their marriage
is ruined by the same factors which destroyed his parents’ marriage. The
“warm, life-giving circle” of their life together is gradually dissolved by
“the shadow of eternal bondage” (49) which eroded his father’s self-
esteem. Bound like his father by “the chain that held him to the land”
(50), Brownfield too becomes neurotically jealous of his wife and
degrades her to the point where he can recover part of his ego by feeling
superior to her. Like his father, who pushed his wife into suicide because
he could not bear loving her and could not adequately support her,
Brownfield murders Mem because a social environment that strips him of
manhood cancels out his love for her. Forced by an oppressively racist
society to “plow a furrow his father had laid” (45), Brownfield is indeed a
“brown field,” a crop that has failed to mature and bear fruit because
his life has been deprived of necessary nutrients.
Like his five-year-old daughter, who is slowly poisoned by the
arsenic she uses to dust the cotton crop in order to protect it from boll
weevils, he is gradually victimized by a uniquely Southern system of
segregation and sharecropping which infects his life. He eventually
becomes exactly what his social environment wants him to be—an
extension of its most pathological impulses. Indeed, Brownfield not
only comes to accept the South but develops a perverse love of the
world which dehumanizes him. Thus, he blankly accepts the
impoverished roles extended to him by his Southern environment and
makes no attempt either to rebel against these roles or to seek a better
world:
He had no faith that any other place would be better. He

fitted himself into the slot in which he found himself; for fun
he poured oil into the streams to kill the fish and tickled his
own vanity by drowning cats. (59)
A normal boy early in the novel, Brownfield becomes the book’s most
degraded character, for in accepting his “place” in Southern society,
he degenerates into a killer of families and a poisoner of innocent life.
If Brownfield’s narrative dramatizes Walker’s most severe criticisms of

the South, the story of his daughter Ruth qualifies this pessimistic
vision by providing an alternative to the meaninglessness of
Brownfield’s life. Even though Ruth spends her formative years in the
same environment which poisoned her father, she is able to protect
herself with a number of antidotes because she develops a consciousness of
Southern life which makes her aware of both its strengths and dangers. She
is thus able to empower herself with some of the strengths of black folk
culture in the Deep South and is also able to imagine her life in terms
which transcend the South, ultimately leaving it for a larger world which
offers her new possibilities. Whereas Brownfield’s life travels a
deterministic circle of futility (all his efforts to gain physical and
emotional distance from the racist South fail), Ruth’s story is existential in
outlook. It involves a process of awakening and liberation. Like the slave
narratives, which Walker has described as a part of a literary tradition
where “escape for the body and freedom for the soul went together” (In
Search 5), Ruth’s story is a f light from twentieth-century forms of
Southern bondage. Her consciousness distills all that is good in her
Southern black traditions and allows her to imagine a broader world
beyond the South. As a result, she is able to create “a way out of no
way” (iii). Like the Biblical Ruth, she finds herself an alien in a
strange land, but, unlike Ruth, she can find her way to a kind of
promised land, a new space offering fresh possibilities.
A crucial part of her liberation is contained in the fact that she
does not grow up in the kind of spiritual and emotional vacuum which
blighted Brownfield’s life. Although she has had to face the physical
poverty and racism which characterize her father’s existence, she gains
the benefit of the family life he was deprived of, and this puts her in
contact with nourishing cultural and personal values. In contrast to
Brownfield, who spins in futile circles because he “was expected to raise
himself up on air” (54), Ruth is raised by a mother whom she comes to
regard as “a saint” (126), someone who makes heroic efforts to meet her
human needs. Although Mem literally gives up her life opposing
Brownfield’s acceptance of his “place” in Southern society, she succeeds
in moving the family to a town where Ruth, for a time at least, has
the benefit of a real house and formal schooling. More importantly,

Mem provides Ruth with a powerful role model, for she is a woman who
maintains her human dignity in a dehumanizing environment. Like the
women whom Walker describes in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens who
provided her with role models, Mem is an “exquisite butterfly trapped in
an evil honey” (232). By “inheriting” her mother’s “vibrant, creative
spirit” (In Search 239), Ruth comes to transcend the limitations which
white society seeks to impose on black women.
After Mem is murdered—literally by Brownfield and symbolically
by the Southern society he comes to love and represent—Ruth is
taken in by Grange, who becomes her surrogate father. From the moment
of her birth, Grange sees Ruth as unique and beautiful, someone who
almost magically appears in the midst of an environment which is harsh
and ugly. Marveling at Ruth as a newborn child, he exclaims, “‘Out of
all kinds of shit comes something soft, clean, and sweet smellin’ ’” (71).
From this point on, Grange dedicates himself to protecting Ruth from
the foulness of the Southern environment into which she was born, and
he commits himself to nurturing that which is “sweet” and “clean” in her.
He provides her with a “snug house”
(69) in which to live and also gives her for the first time in her life an
adequate supply of nourishing food.
More importantly, he nourishes her mind and soul. He forbids her
to work in the cotton fields which have helped to destroy
Brownfield’s life, telling her, “‘You not some kind of field hand!’”
(125), and he arranges for her to attend school. But in an important
way he also becomes her teacher, instructing her in “the realities of life”
(139), drawing material from his own wide experience and his extensive
knowledge of black folklore. His retelling of folktales from the black
South provides her with a vivid sense of a mythic hero—the trickster
“who could talk himself out of any situation” (128). She thus learns from
an early age a lesson which her father never acquired— that words
and intelligence, not raw violence, have the power to transform
experience by creating understanding and control over life. When
listening to Grange sing blues music, she likewise feels “kin to something
very old” (133), a musical tradition arising out of the black South which
transforms suffering into a kind of human triumph rooted in what Ralph
Ellison has called a “near tragic, near comic lyricism” (90).
By connecting Ruth to the life-giving tradition of the black folk
art of the South, Grange provides her with the time-tested values
which will help her to survive and even triumph over the racist world
which destroys so many other people in the novel. His recounting
episodes from black history reinforces in her mind the crucial idea that
black people established a strong and viable culture in the South, despite
the efforts of the dominant society to destroy that culture. His accounts of
his personal past, especially
from his boyhood, also bring to life in Ruth’s consciousness “all sorts
of encounters with dead folks and spirits and occasionally the Holy
Ghost” (129). In other words, his stories give her vital access to an
imaginatively rich, emotionally potent world—precisely the kind of
world which the psychologically underdeveloped Brownfield never
becomes aware of. As Ruth grows older, Grange also teaches her about
the world beyond the South. He steals books from the white library
which open her mind and stimulate her imagination—books about
mythology, geography, Africa, and romantic rebellion. He also reads her
episodes from the Bible, especially the story of Exodus, again
empowering her with the compelling myth of an oppressed people who
triumph over circumstance through the strength of their will and spirit.
Although he twice offers her his farm, which would root her deeply
to the South he has come to accept as his home, Grange loves Ruth
enough to prepare her for the most dramatic action of her life, her
flight from the South. Late in the novel, when Ruth asks him about
her future, he tells her, “‘We got this farm. We can stay here till
kingdom come.’” But by this point in her life she feels stifled by the
segregated South and tells him, “‘I’m not going to be a hermit. I want
to get away from here someday’” (193). The same fences which
provide Grange with a sense of security Ruth perceives as
encroachments.
The final third of the novel, therefore, deals with Ruth’s
increasing dissatisfaction with the rural South and her desire to move
toward a larger, broader world which her protean identity needs. This
struggle finally takes the form of her gaining independence from
Brownfield and everything he represents about the South. A man who
“had enslaved his own family” (227), as well as himself, he is intent on
taking Ruth back after he has been released from prison. When he
encounters Ruth late in the novel as she walks to school, he shouts at
her, “‘You belongs to me, just like my chickens or my hogs.’” “‘You
need shooting,’” she defiantly replies (220). Rejecting the crippling roles
imposed on her mother and grandmother by Southern society, she observes
that “‘I’m not yours’” (219).
As the novel draws to its close, Ruth, with Grange’s help,
achieves her independence from her father and Southern life in general.
It becomes increasingly clear to Grange that the only way to protect Ruth
from Brownfield is to encourage her to leave the South, for the full
weight of Southern law is in favor of returning her to Brownfield,
whom Judge Harry regards as her “‘real daddy’” (244). Grange, therefore,
centers his life on helping “to prepare Ruth for some great and
herculean task” (198)—her emancipation from Southern slavery and
her pursuit of a new life. He buys her an automobile on her sixteenth
birthday and begins saving money which she will use for college. He
ultimately sacrifices his own life to save her from Brownfield, for
he is killed by the police after shooting Brownfield when the court takes
Ruth away from him.
The novel ends on a painful note of ambivalence. Southern
injustice erupts in violence which takes Grange’s life, yet his death frees
Ruth for a new life of expanded possibilities. By the conclusion of the
book, Ruth is poised for flight into a fast-changing world which will
transform her. Observing the nightly television news, she becomes
fascinated by “pictures of students marching” (232) as they work toward
a more open and fluid society. Even the Georgia backwater in which she
has been raised shows dramatic evidence of real change—voter
registration campaigns, interracial marriage, and the beginnings of
integration.
But the novel strongly implies that Ruth will not stay long in the
South because her own protean self requires more space and possibility
than the South at this point in its history can provide. Eager to “‘rise up’”
(196) in life, she dreams of going north. As she tells Grange, “‘I want
to get away from here someday. . . . I think maybe I’ll go North, like
you did . . .’” (193). Later she thinks vaguely of journeying to Africa.
The exact physical direction of her life is not made clear, nor could it be.
Like many African American heroic figures such as Frederick Douglass
and the persona of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, she has a lucid notion of
the Southern places she must leave but keeps an indeterminate vision of
the open space to which she will move. Like the Jews in Exodus, whose
story Grange has told her “for perhaps the hundredth time” (209), she
must leave an all-too-real Egypt in order to quest for a mythic
“Promised Land.”
The third major narrative in the novel incorporates the visions of the
South implicit in the other two narratives and offers one more critically
important perspective on the South. Whereas Grange Copeland’s “first”
life powerfully reinforces the bleakly pessimistic view of the South
implicit in Brownfield’s narrative, and his “second” life is very similar in
certain ways to Ruth’s story, because it is a flight from the slavery of the
segregated South, Grange’s “third” life contains an important element
missing in the other two narratives—his remarkable return to the South,
which regenerates him as a human being. It is this return, like Celie’s
return to Georgia at the end of The Color Purple, which underscores
Walker’s most affirmative vision of the South. In returning to Baker
County, Grange achieves “his total triumph over life’s failures” (136),
creating a new place for himself by transforming the racist society which
has withered Brownfield into a genuine “home” (141) which nurtures
Ruth and also causes him to be “a reborn man” (157). Like the hero
described in Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Grange
attains truly heroic status by a three-part journey involving the leaving
of a settled, known world; the experiencing of tests in an unknown world;
and the returning home with a new mode of consciousness which
transforms his life and the lives of others (246).
Walker, who knew the most brutal features of the rural South
firsthand, is careful not to romanticize the South to which Grange
returns. She emphasizes that Grange goes back to Georgia not
because of a sudden nostalgia for magnolias and wisteria but simply
because the circumstances of his life have made him a Southerner, for
better or for worse: “. . . though he hated it as much as any place else,
where he was born would always be home for him. Georgia would be
home for him, and every other place foreign” (141). Crucial to Grange’s
creation of a new home for himself in the South is his securing of land.
Using the money he obtained in various devious ways in the North and
the money he gets from Josie’s sale of the Dew Drop Inn, he builds a
farm which constitutes “a sanctuary” (155) from the white world which
has victimized him economically and poisoned him with hatred. As his
name suggests, he is able to “cope” with his “land” so that he can build a
“grange” or farm which will nourish himself and others. This “refuge”
(156) not only provides him with food from his garden and a livelihood
from his sale of crops but, more importantly, gives him the independence
and freedom he needs to assume meaningful roles which his earlier life
lacked: “. . . he had come back to Baker County, because it was home, and
to Josie, because she was the only person in the world who loved him.
. . “ (155–56).
Accepting the love from Josie which he had earlier rejected because
he found it “possessive” (144), he marries her shortly after returning
from the North, thus embracing the role of husband. In this way he
transforms her Dew Drop Inn from the whorehouse which was a
grotesque parody of a human community into a real place of love
between a man and a woman. Not long after this he begins to assume the
role of father when he assists Mem in the delivery of Ruth on Christmas
Day, a time when Brownfield is too drunk to be of much use to his family.
After Brownfield murders Mem, Grange fully undertakes the role of
father, providing Ruth with the love and care which he was unable to
extend to Brownfield in his “first” life. In all these ways Grange is able to
create a small but vital black community separated from the larger white
world intent on destroying the black family.
Grange’s journey north failed him because it poisoned him with
the same kind of hatred which damaged his previous life in the
South. His Northern experiences are revealed in the terrifying
epiphany when he gloats over stealing a white woman’s money while
watching her drown in Central Park Lake. The whole experience becomes
a grotesque inversion of a religious conversion, very much like Bigger
Thomas’s killing of Mary Dalton in Native Son. Like Bigger, who feels a
grisly sort of “new life”
(101) when he savors the death of Mary Dalton, Grange feels “alive
and liberated for the first time in his life” (153) as he contemplates the
image of withdrawing his hand from the drowning woman. He thus
commits in a different form the same sin which brought his “first”
life in the
South to such a disturbing close. Just as Grange is partly responsible

for the deaths of his wife and stepchild, whom he abandons when he is
no longer able to cope with the societally induced hatred which
poisons all of his human relationships, so too does he abandon the
pregnant white woman when societally induced hatred causes her to call
him a “nigger” (152). Withdrawing his hand from her also echoes an
earlier gesture of withdrawing his hand from his son shortly before he
abandons him. Just as his hand “nearly touche[s]” (152) the woman’s in
Central Park, his hand has earlier “stopped just before it reached
[Brownfield’s] cheek” (21). In both cases his withdrawal of human
sympathy from people is a clear index of how Grange has been
emotionally damaged by the racist society in which he lives.
The South and North, therefore, are portrayed in Grange’s first
two lives as dehumanized and dehumanizing environments. But
whereas the South has turned him into a “stone” and a “robot” (8), the
North converts him into the kind of invisible man classically described
in African American literature by Du Bois and Ellison:
He was, perhaps, no longer regarded merely as a “thing”; what

was even more cruel to him was that to the people he met
and passed daily he was not even in existence! The South had
made him miserable, with nerve endings raw from continual
surveillance from contemptuous eyes, but they knew he was
there. Their very disdain proved it. The North put him into
solitary confinement where he had to manufacture his own
hostile stares in order to see himself Each day he had to say
his name to himself over and
over again to shut out the silence. (144–45)
Although both environments pose severe threats to his humanity, Grange

finally chooses the South over the North because he is humanly
visible to Southerners, whereas Northern society is completely blind to
him. Although Southern whites regard blacks with “contemptuous eyes”
(145) which dis- tort their vision, they at least focus upon blacks as human
beings; the white Northerners Grange meets would reduce blacks to
complete anonymity. Thus, Grange experiences a condition of
“solitary confinement” in the North but in the South is given the
opportunity to feel the “sense of community” (In Search 17) which
Walker has extolled in her essays as a particularly important feature of
Southern black life.
It is Grange’s achievement of a “home” in Georgia which
provides him with a genuine human conversion. He returns to Baker
County with disturbing vestiges of his first two lives, fits of depression
which lead him to contemplate suicide and express an “impersonal
cruelty” (137) which frightens Ruth. But his recovery of the meaningful
roles of husband, father,
and farmer lead to his regeneration, providing him with a “third” life.
Josie’s love, though flawed, is deeply experienced for a while, and Ruth is
able, with “the magic of her hugs and kisses” (124), to bring him out
of his bouts of suicidal depression. As the novel develops, he admits to
Ruth that she has “‘thaw[ed]’” the “‘numbness’” (233) in him. Whereas early
in the book Grange seems “devoid of any emotion . . . except that of
bewilderment” (13) and whereas in the middle of the book he is blinded
by a nearly demonic hatred of whites, he finally becomes a fully developed,
even heroic, person because of his recovery of a “home” in the black
South.
Walker, however, consciously avoids idealizing Grange’s Southern
home. As the novel’s ending makes clear, it is a small oasis of human
love surrounded by the same kind of Southern racism which has
blighted the lives of scores of black people in the novel. Southern
courts continue to mete out injustice, and Southern violence
continues to take the lives of innocent people, most notably Fred Hill,
who is murdered when his son attempts to integrate a previously all-
white school. And as Ruth’s narrative demonstrates, even Grange’s home
has its restrictive features. Although such a pastoral “refuge” satisfies
Grange with a sense of place and continuity with the past, Walker clearly
endorses Ruth’s desire to leave it for the open space which her young
spirit desires. Grange’s story may contradict Thomas Wolfe’s notion that
you can’t go home again, but Ruth’s story emphasizes the fact that
staying home or returning home for good can stifle certain kinds of
people. Although Grange’s Southern home provides Ruth with an
essential foundation for human growth, ultimately she must leave that
home if she is to continue to grow.
As Alice Walker has observed in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, her

sense of reality is inherently dialectical:
“I believe that the truth of any subject comes out when all sides
of the story are put together, and all their different meanings
make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts of
the other writer’s story. And the whole story is what I’m
after.” (49)
The Third Life of Grange Copeland succeeds as a novel because it

consciously avoids an oversimplified vision which expresses only one
“side” of Southern life. Artfully mixing its three main narratives in order
to include the “missing parts” absent from any single narrative, the
novel suggests a “whole truth” about the South which is complex
and many-sided. The book thus remains true to its author’s deepest
promptings and her most profound sense of her Southern black
heritage.
No t E
1. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens contains other essays about Walker’s
view of the South, and each of them expresses a similarly ambivalent vision. For
example, in “Choosing to Stay Home: Ten Years after the March on
Washington,” Walker observes that she felt like “an exile in [her] own town,
and grew to despise its white citizens almost as much as I loved the Georgia
countryside where I fished and swam and walked through fields of black-
eyed Susans . . . (162). In the same essay she remarks that she is attracted to
the “continuity of place” (163–64) the South offers but also is intent on leaving
Mississippi for the North because she feels bored by its “pervasive football
culture” and is appalled by its “proliferation of Kentucky Fried Chicken stands”
(170). In “Coretta King Revisited,” she praises Martin Luther King for exposing
“the hidden beauty of black people in the South” and for showing blacks that
“the North is not for us” (156). But in subsequent essays she speaks of
greatly enjoying her life in Northern cities such as New York and Boston. Her
observations on Zora Neale Hurston also ref lect a powerfully split view of the
South. Although she claims that “. . . Zora grew up in a community of black
people who had enormous respect for themselves . . .” (85), she also is painfully
aware that Hurston had to leave the rural South to become a writer and that
she was shunned by the community when she returned to Florida in her later
years, eventually dying a pauper and suffering the indignity of being buried
in an unmarked grave.
Wo R K s C I t E D
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968.
Cooke, Michael. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of
Intimacy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. 1964. New York: NAL, 1966.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt,
1983.
———. The Third Life of Grange Copeland. New York: Harcourt,
1970. Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper, 1966.
G A I L K E A T I NG
Alice Walker: In Praise of Maternal Heritage
I n her autobiographical essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”,

Alice Walker looks at the tremendous burden black women have had
to carry from a historical perspective and analyzes the overwhelming
odds they have had to overcome to express their creativity. All too often
women’s accom- plishments have been viewed as inferior since,
traditionally, they have been judged according to male standards.
Walker, however, acknowledges the great contributions women have
made to our culture and traces the power of women through her own
matrilineage.
In looking at the folklore, which Walker notes very often reveals
a person’s status in society, she found that very often black women are
referred to as “the mule of the world” (“In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens” 2378) since they have, traditionally, been forced to do what no
one else wanted to. She acknowledges how difficult it is to be both a black
woman and an artist but urges women today to find strength in their
heritage and “to look at and identify with our lives the living creativity
some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know” (“In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” 2378).
Nina Auerbach has written a very interesting book focusing on
female bonding entitled Communities of Women in which she compares
male and female communities, discovering a basic and very significant
difference between them. Auerbach discovered that male
communities possess a
The Literary Griot: International Journal of Black Expressive Cultural Studies, 6 (1);
Spring 1994: pp. 26–37. ©1994 Gail Keating.
101
102 Gail Keating
grandeur and a magnitude that female communities do not. The typical

quest novel is a fine example. Males are out to conquer the world and
leave their imprint on it in a significant way. They are interested in
obtaining power and symbols are an important and integral part of their
lives. They refer to one another as “King,” “Captain” and “Master” (7).
Communities of women, however, have no such lofty aspirations:
“In almost all instances, the male quest is exchanged for rootedness—a
school, a village, a city of their own” (Auerbach 8). Very often a woman’s
activities center around the home. But, because of the awesome
number of daily responsibilities a woman must deal with, her creative
spirit rarely has time to develop in traditional ways. A woman, in order to
be successful, must remove herself from the distractions that prohibit her
having the time to create. Ellen Moers agrees that a woman’s life is far
from easy: “A woman’s life is hard in its own way, as women have always
known and men have rarely understood” (3). These same feelings are
expressed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf points out
that the reason why so many women writers are not successful is
because they allow unimportant, unnecessary, irrelevant distractions to
take precedence over their work. According to Woolf, having money and
the privacy to write makes it easier for a woman to be successful: “Genius
needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or
dependency, and without money freedom is impossible” (viii). Thus, for
Woolf, freedom and success are functions of class. Is it any wonder so
few women have become successful artists? How many have actually
had the freedom, the time, the money to pursue their interests? In Woolf
’s analysis of the difficulties women face in their attempts at writing,
she notes the enormous obstacles they must overcome. In the
Introduction to A Room of One’s Own, Gordon summarizes Woolf ’s
belief that women
. . . were uneducated; they had no privacy; even Jane Austen

had to write in the common sitting room and hide her work
under blotting paper so as not to be discovered. Yet even when
they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon
their sex, they could not write, because they had no tradition to
follow. No sentence had been shaped, by long labor, to express
the experience of women. “It is useless to go to the great men
writers for help, however much one may go to them for
pleasure . . . [they] never helped a women yet, though she
may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to
her use.” (x)
What Walker suggests, however, is that we must broaden our

perspective on what constitutes art, thereby allowing us to see creativity
expressed in areas available and readily used by women. If we continue to
insist on defining
creativity and success in grand male terms, for instance, if one need be a
poet, a novelist, an essayist, a short story writer to be considered an
artist, then these women are not. But there are other ways.
Using her own mother as an example, Walker shares with us the
very difficult life her mother led, raising eight children, working beside her
husband all day—and she emphasizes beside, not behind—doing her
chores at home all night, and never having a minute to think of her own
needs, never having time to even think about creativity. Walker muses:
“But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to
know or care about feeding the creative spirit?” (“In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens” 2379). Walker’s answer is that women, and black
women in particular, needed to find an outlet for their creative spirit in
order to survive and find it they did in ways that have for too long been
overlooked by society.
In “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” Walker gives several
examples of the types of creativity these women used to express their
innerselves. One is a quilt that hangs in the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, D.C. According to Walker:
In fanciful, inspired and yet simple and identifiable figures,

it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is considered rare,
beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quilt-
making, and though it is made of bits and pieces of
worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of
powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling. Below this
quilt I saw a note that says it was made by “an anonymous
Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago.”
If we could locate this “anonymous” black woman from

Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers–
an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could
afford, and in the only medium her position in society
allowed her to use. (2379)
This same idea is conveyed by Walker in “Everyday Use,” a short

story about a mother and two daughters, Maggie & Dee. Maggie is
the poor, self-conscious backward daughter who has remained on the
farm with her mother, a large, masculine, hard-working woman. Dee,
however, who is quite self-assured and worldly and has left her rural
surroundings, returns home for a visit with the rather pretentious-
sounding name of Wangero. In a very condescending way, Dee
(Wangero), now that she has made her way in the world, appreciates
the beauty of the “art” of her maternal heritage. And once again
Walker uses quilt-making as an example of the creativity these
women expressed:
104 Gail Keating
After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of

my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in
the kitchen over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two
quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big
Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the
front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star
pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both
of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn
fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa
Farrell’s Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece,
about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great
Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War.
(2372)
Realizing the value of these quilts, Dee (Wangero) asks her mother if
she can have them. When her mother tells her they have been
promised to Maggie, Wangero is astonished: “‘Maggie can’t appreciate
these quilts!’ she said. ‘She’d probably be backward enough to put them
to everyday use’” (2372). The mother admits she hopes Maggie will do
just that and recalls how, when she offered them to Dee (Wangero)
when she went away to college, Dee refused finding them “old-
fashioned, out of style” (2373). But her understanding and appreciation of
what constitutes art has changed; it has been broadened to include
common everyday things women put their hearts and souls into.
Desperate to have the quilts, Dee (Wangero) cries out, “But they’re
‘priceless!’ Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years
they’d be in rags. Less than that!” (2373). But the mother understands
what Dee (Wangero), even though she feels superior to Maggie, will
never be able to understand: Maggie, backward as she is, has found a
way to express her creative spirit in the same way generations of women
before her have done. Very simply, the mother says, “She can always
make some more . . . Maggie knows how to quilt” (2373). As Dee
(Wangero) prepares to leave–without the quilts–she reveals what little
understanding she has of her mother and sister:
“You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came

out to the car.
“What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know.
“Your heritage,” she said. And then she turned to Maggie,

kissed her, and said, “You ought to try to make something of
yourself, too, Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from the
way you and Mama live you’d never know it.” (2373)
What Dee (Wangero) doesn’t realize is that her mother and sister
are doing just fine. They are not dissatisfied with their lifestyle; rather
they are quite happy and content. They have their very simple, plain little
home on their tiny piece of land. They have each other. And, perhaps
unknown to them, they have found a very natural outlet for their
creativity which society has just begun to appreciate, but is not a part
of. It is Maggie, not Dee (Wangero), who has bonded with generations
of women past, who is in touch with her matrilineage.
The message Walker wishes to convey to us is that women have
always expressed themselves, whether it be through quilting, sewing,
cooking, canning or gardening. According to Nagel:
Gardens play an important role throughout the development of

American literature. From the Puritans, who saw their mission
as the establishment of a new Eden or New Earth in the
American wilderness, to those who came later and saw the
potential for an American New World, North America
represented a distillation of the Biblical and classical pastoral
ideals. (43)
And gardens have traditionally been a woman’s domain. Granted,

male strength may have been needed to dig the beds and till the soil
but the garden itself has always been feminine territory. Nagel goes on
to note the close association between gardening and one’s maternal
heritage:
Instead of destroying gardens, girls must become “worthy

successors” to their grandmothers, preservers of nature and,
specifically, their gardens. Since women had authority in their
gardens and had been entrusted with their guardianship, they
must bear the responsibility for their neglect or disappearance and
the way of life associated with them. Modern women who
neglect the garden and its concomitant values axe, by
extension, just as guilty as the destructive child in her
grandmother’s Edenic garden. (48)
These same ideas can be seen in the fiction of Willa Cather.

Transplanted so to speak from conservative, settled, orderly, safe Virginia
to the rough, unsettled prairielands of Nebraska, Cather desperately needed
to discover her roots, to find some link with the past that would sustain
her and give her the strength and courage she would need to survive in
this frontier land. Most young girls, of course, would have looked to their
mothers for this support. Cather’s mother, however, unable to adapt to
the new environment herself, was not the female figure a young girl
could rely on for strength. Looking back to the previous century, Annette
Kolodney’s interesting study of women’s
106 Gail Keating
imaginative responses to the frontier reveals that the kinds of

apprehensions Cather’s mother experienced were, in fact, quite common.
However, there were many women, transplanted from the East, who
adapted, if not easily, at least quite well. Kolodney discovered that one
means these women found of accommodating themselves to the new
landscape was by creating “a garden that reflected back images of their
own deepest dreams and aspirations” (8). And, as Sharon O’Brien
acknowledges:
[Cather] chose to see herself as the adopted daughter of

these pioneer mothers–professionally as well as personally.
Recognizing the creativity rural women channeled
unobtrusively into the garden, the quilt, and the meal, she
reestablished continuity . . . with Nebraska’s farm women
(73)
Cather’s link with this female tradition provided her with an

important emotional support system and a sense of cultural continuity.
She used her own experiences in the kitchens and gardens of her
immigrant neighbors as a foundation upon which to build her image
of herself as a person, as a woman:
Cather had personal grounds for praising woman’s role in

preserving life from one home to another. The rituals of
domesticity— preserving, cooking, gardening, housekeeping
—are the bearers of culture in her fiction, where establishing a
home signifies the human ability to transform an empty world
into an inhabited one. (O’Brien 74)
Alice Walker has these same personal grounds to call upon. In “In Search
of Mothers’ Gardens” Walker recalls her own mother’s green thumb:
. . . my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house

we were forced to live in. And not just your typical straggly
country strand of zinnias, either. She planted ambitious
gardens–and still does–with over fifty different varieties of
plants that bloom profusely from early March until late
November. (2380)
Morning and night, no matter how exhausted she was, she labored–a
labor of love–in her garden. And it gave comfort and great pleasure to
her family: “Because of her creativity with her f lowers, even my
memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms–sunf lowers,
petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena and
on and on” (2381). What
greater praise could be given any work of art?
And her mother’s gift was not lost on the community at large
either. People came to her for cuttings, praising her ability to turn even
the poorest, rockiest soil into a garden and enjoying a “garden so brilliant
with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and
creativity” (2381). But most of all, Walker emphasizes the creativity
expressed by her mother when she says:
I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers

that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible–except
as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must
have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal
conception of Beauty.
Her face, as she prepared the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of
respect she leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes
life. She has handed down respect for the possibilities—and
the will to grasp them.
For her, so hindered and intruded upon in so many ways, being

an artist has still been a daily part of her life. This ability to hold
on, even in very simple ways, is work black women have done
for a very long time. (2381)
More than that we do not ask from those artists, primarily males,
who have been the novelists, the essayists, the short story writers and the
poets. Walker makes us realize that the time has come to acknowledge
the tremendous burden so many women have been forced to carry,
especially those born black; time to pay tribute to what they have
managed to accomplish given so little to work with and so much
opposition; time to expand our vision of what constitutes art; time to
become aware of our maternal heritage, to be proud of it and do our
best to carry on the tradition.
We can also see women’s creativity expressed through quilt-making
and sewing in Walker’s widely-acclaimed novel, The Color Purple. Celie,
the narrator, leads a wretched life. Sexually abused as a child by a
man she believes to be her father, she is forced to marry a man she
doesn’t love who doesn’t love her. He not only makes her work like a
dog, which she does without daring to say a word, but he also abuses
her sexually and beats her whenever he feels like it. Celle is thin and
dark and ugly. She has so little going for her in life except for her
natural ability and creativity displayed in her quilt-making and
sewing. In the beginning expressing her talent in this way serves
almost as an escape from her downtrodden, painful, dull, daily existence
but, in the end, it becomes her salvation, giving meaning to her life and
enabling her to become a fulfilled, independent women. Not
108 Gail Keating
only does her self-image change drastically but it becomes possible for
her to interact with others as a mature adult woman because of her
creative ability.
In the beginning of the story we see Celle’s ability to endure her
suffering with a sense of humor. When her stepson’s wife, Sofia, is
angry with Celie and returns the curtains Celie had made for the
newlywed’s house, the two women fight and then talk. Reconciled, Sofia
says, “Let’s make quilt pieces out of these messed up curtains” (44).
Delighted, Celie runs off to get her “pattern book” and later reveals that
in contrast to the many sleepless nights she has experienced, “I sleeps like
a baby now” (44). The women have argued, made up and finally sat
together as friends, doing what they do best, sewing a quilt which will be
both beautiful and useful and, even more importantly, an expression of
themselves.
Another instance of the bonding quilt-making makes possible for
women occurs when Celie’s brother-in-law, Tobias, comes to visit. Once
again Sofia and Celie use their time both productively and creatively:
“Me and Sofia piecing another quilt together. I got about five squares
pieced, spread out on the table by my knee. My basket full of scrapes
on the floor” (58). Tobias appreciates Celie’s industriousness, wishing his
own lazy wife could be more like her. “Always busy, always busy, he say. I
wish Margaret was more like you. Save me a bundle of money” (58). Even
though Celie’s husband is so abusive to her and rarely, if ever, does any
work either around the house or on the land, she never gives up. She is
strong and courageous, a much more capable person than he could ever
hope to be.
And she is understanding and patient, almost saint-like in her
acceptance of the woman her husband has always loved and hoped to
marry, the woman of very questionable reputation, Shug Avery.
Aware of the attraction between the two of them–they’ve had three
children together–she nonetheless welcomes Shug into their home when
Shug becomes deathly ill. In fact, Celie is so awed by this glamorous,
irreverent singer who is such a contrast to her own ugly, pitiful self
that she, too, falls in love with Shug. But even these two women, who
have so little in common, find a bond in quilt-making:
Me and Mr — both look up at her. Both move to help her sit

down. She don’t look at him. She pull up a chair next to me.
She pick up a random piece of cloth out of the basket. Hold it

up to the light. Frown. How you sew this damn thing? She
say.
I hand her the square I’m working on, start another one. She
sew long crooked stitches, remind me of that little crooked
tune she sing.
That real good, for first try, I say. That just fine and dandy. She
look at me and snort. Everything I do is fine and dandy to you,
Miss Celie, she say. But you ain’t got good sense. (59)
But Celie does have good sense; in fact, more than the rest of them
put together. Once again, Tobias recognizes her worth, saying: “She got a
heap more than Margaret . . . Margaret take that needle and sew your
nostrils together” (59). And, in addition to her good sense, Celie has a
worthwhile skill, a skill that will enable her to rise above her deplorable
condition, a skill that must be passed on to others. Possessing this talent
that others admire will, in time, raise Celic in the others’ eyes and, at
the same time, raise her own self-esteem. Celie’s skill now brings not
only she and Sofia together, but Shug as well. We now see three
women bonding:
Me and Sofia work on the quilt. Got it frame up on the

porch. Shug Avery donate her old yellow dress for scrap, and I
work in a piece every chance I get. It a nice pattern called
Sister’s Choice. If the quilt turn out perfect, maybe I give it to
her, if it not perfect, maybe I keep. I want it for myself, just for
the little yellow pieces, look like stars, but not. (61)
Celie wants her “art” to be perfect just as any artist would. But she
also wants to share it with others, for it to be put to good use as we
saw in “Everyday Use.” Art for a woman like Celie is not a luxury to be
admired and enjoyed. Art is an integral part of daily life. And, being
the kind, generous, self-sacrificing woman she is, she gives the quilt she
would love to keep for herself, since a part of Shug is in it, to Sofia
who needs it more than she does: “At the last minute I decide to give
Sofia the quilt. I don’t know what her sister place be like, but we
been having right smart cold weather long in now. For all I know,
she and the children have to sleep on the f loor” (71).
Years later, in a letter Celie finally receives from her sister,
Nettie, who she has been separated from since the early days of her
marriage, we again see how quilts represent the daily lives of women.
Nettie has been living in Africa with a wonderful missionary couple,
Corrine and Samuel, and Celie’s two children who were taken from
her at birth. When Corrine is dying, she reveals that she believes the
children, who look so much like their aunt, are Nettie and Samuel’s.
Nettie tries desperately to convince her that she is wrong and tells her
the true story. Corrine had once met Celie at a dry goods store in
town and Nettie is determined to help her recall their meeting. The
only way she is able to do this is by showing her the quilts Corrine
had made many years ago:
110 Gail Keating
Then I remember her quilts. The Olinka men make beautiful

quilts which are full of animals and birds and people. And as
soon as Corrine saw them, she began to make a quilt that
alternated one square of appliqued figures with one nine-
patch block, using the clothes the children had outgrown,
and some of her old dresses.
I went to her trunk and started hauling out quilts . . . .
I held up first one and then another to the light, trying to

find the first one I remembered her making. And trying to
remember, at the same time, the dresses she and Olivia were
wearing the first months I lived with them.
Aha, I said, when I found what I was looking for, and laid
the quilt across the bed.
Do you remember buying this cloth? I asked pointing to a

flowered square. And what about this checkered bird?
She traced the patterns with her finger, and slowly her eyes
filled with tears. (192–193)
She remembers, not just the day but, more importantly, how much
the little girl, Olivia, looked like Celie and how afraid Corrine was that
Celie would want Olivia back. And, because of this, she admits, “I
forgot her as soon as I could” (193). But now that she remembers, she
forgives both Nettie and Samuel and dies in peace. Quilts have
enabled three more women to bond, to understand what each
woman has been forced to endure. Dying, Corrine turns to her
husband Samuel and says, “I believe” (194).
When Celie finally decides to leave Mr. — after learning that he
has hidden Nettie’s letters from her for years, she goes to Memphis with
Shug to begin a new life. And, because she has a talent, a skill, and a
sincere desire to understand what each person wants, she finally makes a
life for herself: “I am so happy, I got love, I got work, I got money,
friends and time” (222). What else could any person want? All this is
made possible through Celie’s ability to sew:
I sit in the dining room making pants after pants. I got pants
now in every color and size under the sun. Since us started
making pants down home, I ain’t been able to stop. I change
the cloth, I change
Alice Walker: In Praise of Maternal Heritage t
h
e print, I change the waist, I change the pocket. I change the 111
hem, I change the fullness of the leg. I make so many pants
Shug tease me. (218)
Celie, like any artist, seeks perfection. She is not satisfied with
anything less, so she experiments until she can say: “Then finally one day
I made the perfect pair of pants”(219). Her greatest desire is to make
others happy so, in making each pair of pants, she carefully considers
each individual’s specific needs. She understands who and what Shug is
when she creates pants for her:
They soft dark blue jersey with teeny patches of red. But what
make them so good is, they totally comfortable. Cause Shug eat
a lot of junk on the road, and drink, her stomach bloat. So the
pants can be let out without messing up the shape. Because she
have to pack her stuff and fight wrinkles, these pants are soft,
hardly wrinkle at all, and the little figures in the cloth always
look perky and bright. And they full round the ankle so if she
want to sing in ’em and wear ’em sort of like a long dress, she
can. Plus, once Shug put them on, she knock your eyes out.
(219)
This admiration is mutual. Not only is Celie awed by Shug’s

appearance, but Shug is awed by Celie’s talent, “Miss Celie, she say,
you is a wonder to behold” (219). How good it feels to be appreciated
for one’s worth, to have one’s creativity acknowledged and respected.
Just as we saw people coming to Walker’s mother for advice on
gardening in, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” word now spreads
about Celie’s ability to make “the perfect pants” and people begin
coming to her. Shug brags to Grady and Squeak about her pants and
“By now Squeak see a pair ‘she’ like. Oh, Miss Celie, she say. Can I try
on those?” (219). And she looks so good in them that “Grady look at
her like he could eat her up” (219). Is it any wonder Celie’s creations
are in demand? “Next thing I hear Odessa want a pair. Then Shug want
two more like the first. Then everybody in the band want some. Then
orders start to come in from everywhere Shug sing. Pretty soon I’m
swamp” (220).
But Celie’s art has matured. Her pants weren’t always the
beautiful, comfortable creations they have become. Through trial and
error she has reached perfection: “Shug finger the pieces of cloth I got
hanging on everything. It all soft, flowing, rich and catch the light.
This is a far cry from that stiff army shit us started with, she say” (219).
Shug says “us started with” because it is her money that has made Celie’s
endeavor possible. Without Shug’s financial support, Celie would not
have had the money to buy the
112 Gail Keating
material. There is a mutuality here: Celie taught Shug how to sew and
Shug enables Celie to start a business.
Up to this point Celie’s art has been given to others as a gift, as
when Shug suggests she make a special pair for Jack, Sofia’s brother-in-
law, who helped raise Sofia’s children. And, as Celie did when she made
Shug’s pants, she thoughtfully considers how to best fashion the pants
to meet Jack’s needs:
I sit looking out cross the yard trying to see in my mind what a
pair of pants for Jack would look like. . . . Love children. . . .
I start to make pants for Jack. They have to be camel. And soft
and strong. And they have to have big pockets so he can
keep a lot of children’s things. Marbles and string and pennies
and rocks. And they have to be washable and they have to fit
closer round the leg than Shug’s so he can run if he need to
snatch a child out the way of something. And they have to
be something he can lay back in when he hold Odessa in
front of the fire. And . . . .
I dream and dream and dream over Jack’s pants. And cut and
sew. And finish them. And send them off. (220)
Celie’s creations are a labor of love. She designs these pants with the
same precision and diligence and inspiration an architect would use in
designing a building, a painter in painting a landscape, a composer in
writing an opera, a writer in writing a novel. Her means of expression is
no less significant than theirs. It is a woman’s way of expressing her
creativity, using the talent, skill and material she has at hand.
By now, however, Celie realizes that she must begin earning her
own living. What she doesn’t understand is that she has the means at her
fingertips: “One day, when Shug come home, I say, you know I love
doing this, but I got to git out and make a living pretty soon. Look like
this just holding me back” (220). Shug just laughs for she knows that
Celie is already on her way:
Let’s us put a few advertisements in the paper, she say. And let’s
raise your prices a hefty notch. And let’s us just go ahead and
give you this dining room for your factory and get you some
more women in here to cut and sew, while you sit back and
design. You making your living, Celie, she say. Girl, you on
your way. (220–221)
The love she expresses in every pair of pants she makes, she
sends to Nettie in Africa. They have been separated for years, but
Celie has never
forgotten her and understands her needs even though they are continents
apart. She writes to her sister:
Nettie, I am making some pants for you to beat the heat in

Africa. Soft, white, thin. Drawstring waist. You won’t ever have
to feel too hot and overdress again. I plan to make them by
hand. Every stitch I sew will be a kiss. (221)
Years later, as Mr. — and Celie, “two old fools left over from love”
(278), console each other over Shug’s running off with a nineteen-year-
old named Germaine, he asks her why her pants are so special. She
understands what his masculinity and macho perspective have prevented
him from seeing: “Anybody can wear them, I said. Men and women not
suppose to wear the same thing, he said. Men spose to wear the pants”
(278). But she explains to him that in places like Africa people dress for
comfort, regardless of their sex, and it is not uncommon for men to
sew. He makes a confession to her: “When I was growing up, he said, I
use to try to sew along with mama cause that’s what she was always doing.
But everybody laughed at me. But you know I liked It” (279). So Celie
decides to teach him. She becomes his mentor:
Well, nobody gon laugh at you now, I said. Here, help me stitch
in these pockets.
But, I don’t know how, he say.
I’ll show you, I said. And I did. (279)
She teaches him so well that they spend hours together sewing. Mr.
— enjoys designing shirts to go with Celie’s pants:
Mr. — is busy patterning a shirt for folks to wear with my

pants. Got to have pockets, he say. Got to have loose sleeves.
And definitely you not spose to wear it with no tie. Folks
wearing ties look like they being lynch. (290)
After all the years of hurt, abuse and misunderstanding between these
two human beings, they finally sit together, united through a lifetime of
shared experience, “Now we sit sewing and talking and smoking our
pipes” (279). He will never again be able to take advantage of her.
Carrying on a tradition of generations of women before her sewing, Celie
has turned her art into a business which has enabled her to rise above her
deplorable situation. She is a free, independent and happy woman. When
Shug returns, as Mr. — and Celie know she will, she asks what they
have been up to. Celie replies, “Nothing much” (291) but Shug knows
better. Pressed for more informa-
114 Gail Keating
tion, Celie expresses the contentment she has found in life at last, “Us
sew, I say. Make idle conversation” (291). And just like the black women
Walker refers to in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Celie has
managed “to hold on” (2381), carrying forth the legacy of so many
generations of black women before her, and setting an example for
those to follow.
Wo R K s C I t E D
Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1978.
Kolodney, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy, and Experience of the American Frontiers,
1630–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1977.
Nagel, Gwen. “This Prim Corner of Land Where She Was Queen: Sarah Orne Jewett’s
New England Gardens.” Colby Library Quarterly 22.1 (1986): 43–62.
O’Brien, Sharen. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Fawcett,
1987. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1982.
Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use”. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. S.
Gilbert & S. Gubar. New York: Norton & Company, 1985.
Walker, Alice, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”. The Norton Anthology of Literature
by Women. Ed. S. Gilbert & S. Gubar. New York: Norton & Company, 1985.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1929.
BO N N I E B R A E N D L I N
“Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar

as Pastiche”
[Claudia Dreifus]: Your new novel . . . has been published to

mixed reviews. You spent eight years writing it. Surely, this must
hurt.
Alice Walker: Yes, you would like to be understood by people.

But I do understand that my worldview is different from that of
most of the critics [T]hey are defending a way of life, a patriarchal
system, which
I do not worship.
— Interview, The Progressive, 1989
R eviewers generally applauded Alice Walker’s 1989 novel, The Temple

of My Familiar, for its development of ideas and themes introduced in her
earlier fiction and essays—its castigation of white and male oppression,
its valorization of African American and female identity, and its
emphasis on the importance of community and female friendship. At the
same time, however, they were perplexed by the novel’s
conglomeration of narrative techniques and styles. Joyce Maynard, for
example, labeled The Temple “a radical feminist Harlequin romance
written under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. There’s a
little black history here, a little crystal healing
there, with a hot tub and some acupressure thrown in for good
measure”;1 James Wolcott, complaining that the text “doesn’t gel at any
junction,” abandoned critical analysis in alliterative mock despair:
“Pantheistic plea, lesbian
American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, Volume 68,
Number 1, March 1996: pp. 47–67. Copyright © 1996 by Duke University Press.
115
116 Bonnie Braendlin
propaganda, past-lives chronicle, black-pride panorama, The Temple of

My Familiar [is] the nuttiest novel I’ve ever read.”2 Even a sympathetic
reader like J. M. Coetzee, who praised Temple as “a fable of recovered
origins . . . long on inspirational message,” complained about Walker’s
“cliché-ridden prose” and the novel’s lack of “narrative tension.” 3 Doris
Davenport affirmed Walker’s womanist world view but found the novel f
lawed by “awkward, corny and embarrassing” language in “nauseating and
contrived” sex scenes.4 Clearly, Temple disconcerted reviewers who
expected Walker to be in control of language and narrative form, their
responses perhaps implying that in this novel she had failed as an
artist. Scholarly articles have focused upon Walker’s idealism,
maternalism, and spirituality, following the lines established by Coetzee
and Davenport but largely ignoring—or sometimes excusing—her
problematic style and narrative strategy.5
All of Alice Walker’s novels are polemical in their opposition to
“racism, sexism, classism, and colorism” and their plea for universal
equality. Even The Color Purple, which was critically acclaimed and
established Walker as a major American novelist, occasioned accusations
of divisiveness, reverse racism, and male-bashing. As a self-proclaimed
“revolutionary” author, Alice Walker has never been intimidated by the
negative criticism her polemical fiction invites. Throughout her essay
collections, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and Living by the Word, and
in numerous interviews, she articulates her political and aesthetic vision
as a “womanist” committed “to survival and wholeness of entire
people, male and female,” beginning with “my people” and “black
women,” extending to “the multiplicity of oppression— and of
struggle,”6 and ultimately to “human life” and the polluted earth. 7 Her
authorial mission of salvation depends upon consciousness raising: “We
must begin to develop the consciousness that everything has equal
rights because existence itself is equal” (LBW, 148). From the
beginning of her writing career in the early 1970s, Walker defied
public criticism with a radical stance: “The writer—like the musician or
painter—must be free to explore, otherwise she or he will never discover
what is needed (by everyone) to be known. This means, very often,
finding oneself considered ‘unacceptable’ by masses of people who think
that the writer’s obligation is not to explore or to challenge, but to second
the masses’ motions, whatever they are. Yet the gift of loneliness is
sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not
previously been taken into account.”8 Undaunted by adverse criticism,
perhaps even encouraged by it to persist in pursuing her messianic goal,
Walker continues to defend her vision. In an interview with Paula
Giddings about her controversial and overtly political Possessing the
Secret of Joy (1992), Walker connects the African practice of clitoridectomy
with broader issues that have figured prominently in her life and
writings, including AIDS, “a healthy continent,” slavery, “our mothers’
collaboration,”
Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar as Pastiche 117
“organized religion,” “heterosexist culture,” “a male-dominant

tradition,” connectedness, “community,” and “multiracial, multiethnic,
multisexual, multieverything.” Again, she articulates her revolutionary
goal: “What I’m hoping is that this book will invite whatever movement
there is to converge with all of the people who may now be aware of it,
and together we may be able to do something.”9
Walker’s artistic and political vision also informs The Temple of
My Familiar, novel wider in scope and more experimentally
audacious than her other works that may signal a more extreme
position in her oeuvre. I wish to offer here some ways of reading the
novel as a polyvocal text in a postmodern context, an approach usually
reserved for white male authors. I propose that although the opposition
of womanism to patriarchy may be thematically central to the text,
Walker’s stylistic strategies decenter any propagandistic focus, creating
what Catherine Belsey calls an “interrogative text,” that is, one in which
style functions as an alienating device to urge readers toward
disengaged reflection upon self and society and to “invite [them] to
produce answers to the questions [the text] implicitly or explicitly
raises.”10 Experimental novels, as Raymond Federman laments, are often
misunderstood and unappreciated because they lack a reassuring
“readability,” that is, continuity and clarity that reinforce “our own
knowledge . . . our own culture”; they destabilize the security of our
ideological positions, prompting us to ask, “how total, how coherent,
continuous, rational, how whole, how secure we are in our culture.”11
Experimental fiction disconcerts readers with the unexpected, the
incoherent, the irrational, with repressed and suppressed ideologies that
often run counter to those of the dominant culture and canon.
Walker’s interrogatory text works to alienate us from our cultural and
ideological complacencies; through a clash of ideologies and literary
styles that risks scorn and rejection, Temple urges us to reflect upon our
cherished beliefs and to consider other, countercultural responses to
contemporary personal, communal, and global issues.
As long as we expect a nectarine to taste like either a peach

or a plum we are bound to be disappointed. But once we
assimilate this new category—nectarine—we begin to know
what we are dealing with and how to react to it. We can judge
and appreciate.—Robert Scholes
The title of The Temple of My Familiar directs our attention to Walker’s

description of an ancient priestess’s familiar: “a small, incredibly
beautiful creature that was part bird, for it was feathered, part fish, for it
could swim and had a somewhat fish/bird shape, and part reptile, for it
scooted about like geckoes do, and it was all over the place Its
movements were grace-
ful and clever, its expression mischievous and full of humor. It was alive!
It slithered and skidded here and there.” 12 This hybrid creature offers a
clue to Walker’s narrative strategy in Temple, which mixes tones and
styles with abandon; at times Walker’s language is serious and
beautifully lyrical, at other times comic and clichéd. An unconventional,
non-narrative text, the novel may be read as pastiche—a juxtaposing of
the profound and the mundane not intended to “gel at any junction.”
In our postmodern era pastiche belongs to what Ihab Hassan
calls “the mutation of genres . . . promiscuous or equivocal forms:
paracriticism, paraliterature, happening, mixed media, the nonfiction
novel, the new journalism. Cliché, pop, and kitsch mingle to blur
boundaries Throughout
culture, a jumbling or syncretism of styles.”13 A traditional handbook
to literature defines pastiche texts as “literary patchworks,”14 calling
attention both to their mixing of styles and their imitation of previous
works, authors, or genres in their attempts to ridicule or to flatter. As a
form of parody not necessarily satirical, contemporary literary pastiche
reinvents genres, perpetuating established conventions and initiating
changes, thus insuring generic continuity with variation. 15 By expressing
alternate visions of the world and the self, contemporary writers
transform, transgress, and perhaps subvert established genres. More
specifically, pastiche may provide women and ethnic authors with a means
of appropriating genres to represent individual and group beliefs,
values, and versions of reality in conflict with those of the dominant
culture and the traditional canon, both of which marginalize Otherness.16
In pastiche, where, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains, “[w]riters Signify
upon each other’s texts by rewriting the received textual tradition,”17
African American writers emulate and revise both the white and the
black literary canons. In general, Paul Gilroy contends, “[t]he clutch of
recent African-American novels which deal explicitly with history,
historiography, slavery, and remembrance all exhibit an intense and
ambivalent negotiation of the novel form that is associated with their
various critiques of modernity and enlightenment.”18 In The Temple of
My Familiar, read as pastiche, the clash of traditional and contemporary
ideas and ideologies revises a particular genre, namely, the
bildungsroman.
I believe in change: change personal, and change in society.

—Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Many twentieth-century novels, including The Temple of My Familiar,

perpetuate with variation the bildungsroman, a novel of the formation of
personality or identity, of an individual (often adolescent) coming to con-
sciousness, shaping and being shaped by social and cultural ideologies as
expressed in such discourses as those of education, religion, the law,
and
the media. Bildung constructs a subject as the end product of a

process of choosing among various roles defined by these discourses and
thus privileges ideologies of individualism and autonomy. The term
Bildung traditionally denotes both the self-development journey, a
formation of individual personality or coming-to-consciousness, and the
goal of that journey, variously seen as harmonious, well-rounded
development of talents and abilities, self-knowledge, communal/social
responsibility, or a combination thereof. Franco Moretti argues that the
goal of Bildung in its bourgeois capitalist historical context is, for
Anglo-European society, the integration of its sons and daughters into
their designated societal spheres, the workplace and the home
respectively, and, for the developing individual, a happy state of har-
mony dominated by “the feeling that the world is his [or her] world.”19
But Bildung is not necessarily a mindless adherence to social dictates;
David H. Miles defines it as a more positive developmental process
characterized by three stages—observing without action or thought,
“seeing and feeling,” and “thinking and reflecting”—a process that
integrates emotions with reason, although privileging the latter.20 Alice
Walker’s earlier novels contribute to the appropriation and adaptation of
the bildungsroman by authors outside the American mainstream, a
strategy that enables them to inscribe the values of the margins in texts
that challenge constructions of identity as exclusively white male. The
Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), and The Color
Purple (1982) construct an individual identity directed and supported
by African American communal values and expounded by the female
voice. On one level Temple narrativizes Bildung as a midlife awakening by
both men and women to the stultifying life occasioned by erroneous
choices made in adolescence, as a movement from inactive,
unenlightened paralysis of will to an educated, perceptive determination
to change, a progression roughly approximating Miles’s three stages.
Walker’s interest in an ideal of mutual and reciprocal nurturance and
support between the individual and the community is derived from her
African heritage but resembles a goal of the classical European
bildungsroman obscured or lost over the years of postromanticism in the
white male canon, namely, the Humanitätsideal, the cultivation of
individual talents and abilities in service of the communal good.
Walker’s re-emphasis on community, in addition to being a way of
improving bourgeois society (as it was in the German ideal of
Humanität) is also a means of positioning her protagonists in
protective and creative environments in order to nourish individual
growth, a strategy which indicts contemporary racism and sexism and
ultimately suggests social and ecological cooperation.
Temple reshapes the bildungsroman midlife coming-to-consciousness
narrative by positioning the identity stories of five young intellectuals in
several contexts—race, sex, and class prejudice; the 1980s preoccupation
with sex, rock music, and New Age beliefs; African myth and
diaspora history; and the African American woman’s faith in
matriarchal power and wisdom. Walker’s novel opens by introducing,
in omniscient narration, four main characters in midlife crises. The co-
opted, antifeminist Suwelo, enamored of the dominant-culture history he
teaches, is discouraged by his failures as a husband and lover. His wife
Fanny, disillusioned by marriage, mainstream vocation, and academic
feminism, has left the college where she taught women’s studies to work
in a massage parlor. The Latina Carlotta feels betrayed by her husband’s
infidelity and by her academic colleagues’ racial and sexual biases. Her
husband Arveyda, an African/Native American rock star, has both
caused and suffered from dissension and separation between women by
having an affair with Carlotta’s mother Zedé. Fanny, Carlotta, Arveyda
and Suwelo are self-absorbed and frustrated by the animosity they
harbor toward others. Fanny’s anger is directed against white racism but
displaced onto Suwelo; Suweb’s is displaced from his parents onto Fanny
and her attempts to raise his consciousness through feminist and black
texts; Arveyda’s anger is disguised as sexual desire for Zedé but finally
explained as desire for unity with his own mother, who neglected him in
childhood; and Carlotta’s ire is aroused by and aimed at her husband’s
and mother’s sexual betrayal. Driven apart by bitterness, these four
characters engage in affairs, leave their jobs, and languish in
debilitating unhappiness. Claiming the reader’s attention through
several chapters of part 1 (of six divisions), their stories constitute the
primary plot line of Temple. A fifth story, that of Mary Jane Haverstock,
the radical Caucasian commando-turned-humanitarian, is told later and
piecemeal by Mary herself and by various characters who knew her; it is
removed from the narrative of the other journeys but linked to them
thematically. Only Miss Lissie, the reincarnated storyteller, does not
develop, for she is already self-aware and socially conscious, burning
with a righteous anger that is more social than personal.
Theprotagonists’ preoccupationwiththepresentreflectspostmodernism’s
“one major theme,” defined by Fredric Jameson as “the disappearance of
a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social
system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past,
has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that
obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have
had in one way or another to preserve.”21 More specifically, Temple
represents this problem as a separation of African Americans from their
heritage, a state that replicates the plight of earlier slaves but one for
which African Americans now share responsibility: “Our new masters
[Miss Lissie notes] had a genius for turning us viciously— in ways that
shamed and degraded even themselves, if only they’d had sense enough
to know it—against anything that once we loved” (T, 64). In The
Temple of My Familiar Walker voices her concern that in the eighties
the
ideals valorized in her earlier fiction are endangered as contemporary

women and people of color who have earned a prominent place in the
mainstream forget their history and its lesson of concerned community, a
lesson more crucial than ever in the face of threats of human and
global extinction.
The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture:

that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and
made “absent.”
—Rosemary Jackson
The bildungsroman plot of Temple is interrupted almost immediately

by accounts of nearly forgotten South American and African slavery
in the recent past and by stories of female power from the lost “dream
memory” of “the very ancient past” (T, 83, 53). Walker’s montage of
historical and mythic images from various speakers interspersed with
narrative action creates plot discontinuity, but the tales of ancient
matriarchies in the jungles of Africa and South America—both usurped
by patriarchal religions and the violent wrenching of natives from their
homelands— offer a thematic continuity. Her retelling of the past
exposes the dark underbelly of white colonial history—the privileged
and privileging narrative that scapegoats Others. Through horrific
recollections of slavery in Zedé’s tales of her youth in South America
and through Miss Lissie’s stories of the African slave trade and the
diaspora, Temple offers eyewitness accounts of the deliberate and
relentless enslavement and extermination of peoples of color. It also
reintroduces myths and legends antedating the Greco-Roman and Judeo-
Christian traditions, which have through force and exclusion exerted
their claim to power in Western culture. In counterpoint to the
protagonists’ modern lives of dissension and divorce, Walker constructs
fantastic tales of a utopian prehistory when men and women lived apart
in respect for one another’s privacy and uniqueness but cooperatively
and in harmony with one another, as well as with their cousins, the
jungle beasts. Her motive is to reconnect past to present in order to
renew eclipsed values; as she says in an earlier essay, “[if] we kill off
the sound of our ancestors, the major portion of us, all that is past,
that is history, that is human being is lost, and we become historically
and spiritually thin, a mere shadow of who we were, on the earth”
(LBW, 62). She has said of Temple, “[w]hat I’m doing is literarily
trying to reconnect us to our ancestors. All of us. I’m really trying to
do that because I see that ancient past as the future, that the
connection that was original is a connection; if we can affirm it in the
present, it will make a different future.”22
The loss of familial and communal values is depicted in Temple as
affecting—even effecting—the plight of contemporary sons and daughters
whose maturation processes have been crippled by their relationships

with parents, especially by a mother’s rejection. The task of re-educating
them belongs to African American women who recover not only the
immediate past but also a prehistorical, largely matriarchal heritage.
Unlike Walker’s earlier novels, in which motherhood is rejected
(Meridian) or thwarted by oppression (The Color Purple), Temple valorizes
motherhood; Miss Lissie and Zedé, who remember and teach lost ideals
of harmony and nurturing, are biological mothers, and Celie and Shug
nurture Fanny as surrogate mothers. Mothers thus are given voice and
allowed to speak the discourses that have been suppressed through
male-authored history.23
Together with the Afracentric wisdom of both Zedé and Miss
Lissie, The Gospel According to Shug—carried over from The Color
Purple and interpolated into Temple as a series of beatitudes—may be
seen as constructing the concept of Bildung as process and goal: people
must strive to admire and love “the entire cosmos” and “the Earth,
their mother,” to live in harmony with “Creation” and all “the
citizens of the world,” to “receive only to give” in the spirit of
“generosity,” to pray “for harmony in the Universe,” to “give up their
anger,” and to “forgive . . . every evil done to them” (T, 287–89). The
last two injunctions articulate Walker’s most pressing concerns, the
ones that prepare people to achieve the other, more remote goals.
Personal and social anger is understandable, especially when motivated
by abusive parents, unfaithful spouses, or racists and sexists, but Shug’s
gospel calls for the rejection of personal anger because it causes the
separation and dissension that thwart global communal harmony. In
Temple the journey toward harmony involves consciousness raising
rather than just individual coming-to-consciousness.
Exoneration of the mother, frequently blamed by adult children for
their faults and failures, becomes a key to self-knowledge and cultural
awareness in Temple, as Walker’s characters, guided by matriarchal
wisdom, exorcise their personal anger through painful reassessments of
their relationships with their mothers and grandmothers. This process
occurs consciously, combining the seeing, feeling stage of Bildung
with that of thinking and reflecting, but it is realized in epiphanies.
Release of anger occurs in moments when the conscious mind relaxes its
defensive censoring of memory: “Suwelo is suddenly too tired to keep
watch over the door of his heart. It swings open on its own” (T, 403).
The men forgive the mothers who neglected them after recognizing the
reasons for their neglect: Suwelo blames his father and then forgives his
abusiveness, while Arveyda comes to respect his mother’s spirituality,
which absorbed the attention he craved as a child. Recalling their
mothers, the women rediscover and reclaim lost ties with their female
heritage: As a “bell chimist” (T, 372), Carlotta replicates her
grandmother’s “magical” artistic talent; when Fanny recalls her early
upbringing in the
warm communality of Celie and Shug’s house, she allows herself to bond
with the others in friendships and a marriage that respect individuality in
community. The dissipation of anger releases the mothers from personal
blame and responsibility for adult children’s problems and affirms
female love and nurturance—the lessons of matriarchal prehistory.
The goal of Bildung in the mainstream novel is a maturity rewarded
by a profitable vocation and a loving spouse, indeed a valorization of
bourgeois marriage. Communal Bildung in Walker’s fiction is a function
of “maternal eros,” which Jean Wyatt sees in women’s fiction as replacing
“the patriarchal family system, where one mother is burdened with meeting
everyone’s needs while neglecting her own,” with “a circle of
mothering persons . . . each nurturing the others.”24 Walker thus
substitutes for the nuclear family—in which a mother is forced to
sacrifice her sexuality and pleasure to maternal love and devotion—a
community that fosters and satisfies the desires of all, including the
mothers. The novel of awakening, a subgenre of the female
bildungsroman to which Temple also belongs, depicts a nostalgic inward
journey toward “self-discovery,” defined by Rita Felski as “an abrupt and
visionary apprehension of underlying unity which leads to an
overcoming of ironic and alienated self-consciousness” and a
“conceptualization of female identity as an essence to be recovered
rather than a goal to be worked toward.”25 In place of a lost personal self,
Walker envisions a suppressed and silenced prelapsarian unity and a
respect for life that, once recovered by self- absorbed people, may stem
the tide of racial and sexual disharmony and of ecological destruction.
By recreating “the speaking black voice in writing”26 in homage
to Zora Neale Hurston, Walker continues to signify on the black
literary tradition; by revising the process of Bildung from self-
individuation to social consciousness raising and by replacing the
phallocratic narratives of individualism and autonomy that underwrite
the traditional bildungsroman with philosophies of maternality and
community, she signifies upon the dominant-culture canon. Temple
responds not only to the conventional but also to the parodic
bildungsroman, in which, according to Miles, protagonists are
“guilt-laden pilgrims who can make no progress” because they are
incapable of “recogniz[ing} or confess [ing] their pasts.” The challenging
by authors like Franz Kafka and Günter Grass of the Judeo-Christian
belief that “knowledge. . . leads to virtue” results in what Miles terms
“merely new anti-values, new anti-novels, new revolts against the
literary past.” A dialectical return to the past is necessary if the
bildungsroman is to survive; yet the past must be “transform[ed] and
transcend[ed].”27 By moving beyond parody, by imitating but
transvaluing self-development in the contexts of female spirituality,
alternate versions of history, and countercultural stances, The Temple
of My Familiar may be
hailed as an anti-anti-bildungsroman, though perhaps not of the sort that

Miles predicted would “transform” the genre.
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her.

And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.
—Hélène Cixous
When Temple collapses the distinctions between realism and romance,

between past and present, it confirms Walker’s womanist “world view,”
which, she maintains, opposes phallogocentrism. Davenport speculates
that while Walker’s previous novels may be described as “realistic-
natural- istic fiction,” Temple “certainly could be seen as ‘mystical,’ or
even as a new form of Fantasy/Science Fiction.”28 Cast as “a romance
of the past 500,000 years” (T, dust jacket), Walker’s novel participates in
Feminist Romanticism, described by Felski as positing “mythic and
nonrational consciousness” as an “appropriate modality for a ‘feminine’
identity [offered by Walker also to men] which has been excluded from
public history.”29 In our culture, the postmodern breakdown of the
great narratives of Western culture (Les Grands Récits), those totalizing
discourses that, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, underwrite and thus
privilege certain cultural and political practices to the exclusion or
marginalization of others, has generally occasioned widespread
nostalgia for certainty, which Dana Polan sees expressed in “the
Reagan moment” (the era in which Temple appeared) as a “reinvest-
ment in great myths.” In contrast to establishment nostalgia,
however, which “lead[s] to certain attempts to make the large
corporation mythic and inspiring,”30 Walker’s Afracentric nostalgia for a
lost harmony in The Temple of My Familiar positions matriarchal
communal spiritualism against Western white-male corporate
mythologizing. In this respect the novel may be defined as a
transgressive modernist text.
As a multilevel, polyvocal text, however, Temple opens itself to a
number of readings, offering a postmodern multivalency of meaning,
even to the extent of risking alienating readers by problematizing the
nature of meaning itself. How we as readers respond to pastiche may
depend upon our political and artistic orientations, which condition us to
denounce or defend postmodernism and its art forms as either “retrograde
or progressive, regressive or transgressive.”31 I want at this point to
open my own text to various ways of reading Walker’s pastiche,
acknowledging multiple and even contradictory interpretations,
suggesting, I hope, that the novel is more interrogatory than
propagandistic.
Reading an experimental, interrogatory text, as Belsey notes, can
be both “frustrating and exhilarating.”32 Politically committed readers of
Temple may agree that group collaboration is better for social reform
than
self-individuation, yet they may question the pacifism inherent in the

advice offered to Fanny by her African father Ola: “Make peace with
those you love and that love you or with those you wish to love. These
are your companeros, as the Latin Americans say” (T, 317). One problem
with this advice, especially coupled with Shug’s gospel, is that it rejects
resistance to racism through overt political action. While Ola admits,
“I have been responsible for the deaths of whites” in retaliation for
racist brutality, he maintains, “It did not ‘liberate’ me psychologically, as
Fanon suggested it might. It did not oppress me either. I was simply
freeing myself from the jail that they had become for me, and making
a space in the world, also, for my children” (T, 316). Walker’s novel
suggests that political violence was a necessary but regrettable stage of
liberation for African Americans, one that Meridian passed through
during the Civil Rights Movement; now, however, a new stage of
resistance and transformation is in the offing, one in which
forgiveness and love replace anger as weapons against racism.
Whereas in The Color Purple the characters “learn to channel anger into
creativity,”33 here anger gives way to sensuality and eroticism: both the
artistic and the sexual counter phallocratic oppression and control
exercised upon Americans through the Puritan ethic. Love becomes
problematic, though, when it is equated in the novel with
nontraditional expressions of sexuality by a community depicted as a
“new age clan,” oiling one another’s bodies as they “walk slowly, their
arms loosely around each other, back and forth, up and down the . . .
beach . .
. always talking and listening to each other intensely, as if whole worlds
hang on their words . . . all . . . perfectly beautiful” (T, 405), their
sexual couplings occurring in and around a hot tub, a sauna, and a
massage mat, standard trappings of California hedonism. Read
satirically, this clan may be seen as ironic exemplars of contemporary
Bildung, although they may also be seen as nostalgic reminders of the
1960s, when “Eros appeared capable of undermining the civilization of
oppression,”34 and many believed that “everything was possible . . . [in]
a moment of universal liberation, a global unbinding of energies.”35 The
clan’s erotic play expresses a longing for prelapsarian innocence that
characterizes contemporary romanticism and permeates Walker’s
mythologizing in Temple. “Free love” in this novel is not just nostalgia
for the 1960s (although it might be partly that) but also an expression
of the desire to return to the freedom and unity of the ancient “dream
memory” time when, as Miss Lissie remembers it, “[l]ovemaking was
considered one of the very best things in life, by women and men; of
course it would have to be free” (T, 358). That is why “Arveyda feels [in
orgasm] as if he has rushed to meet all the ancestors and they have
welcomed him with joy” (T, 407). While Jameson views nostalgic pastiche
as an “indictment of consumer capitalism” because it is “an alarming and
pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing
with time and history,”36
Walker’s pastiche reclaims a repressed history, an alternative tradition of

matrilineal ancestral wisdom that embodies the values of caring, love,
and harmony our society needs to remember to overcome the narcissism,
waste, and pollution of contemporary consumerism. The reunited
protagonists may be read as her own “indictment of consumer
capitalism,” their preference for the simple life, attuned to nature and to
one another’s needs, countering and condemning yuppie consumerism
and the desire for upward mobility.
Readers will undoubtedly also note resemblances between the
female wisdom embodied in Shug’s gospel and New Age beliefs. Shug’s
key words and phrases—“circular energy,” “a new age on Earth,”
“love the entire cosmos,” “love the Earth, their mother,” “harmony in
the Universe,” “love all the colors of all the human beings,” “lose their
fear of death,” “love and actively support the diversity of life”—are also
those of New Agers, who, according to a 1987 Time magazine article,
exhibit “a lack of faith in the orthodoxies of rationalism, high
technology, routine living, spiritual law-and-order.” Time characterized
the era’s New Age philosophy as “a combination of spirituality and
superstition, fad and farce, about which the only thing certain is that it
is not new [M]any elements of the New Age,
like faith healing, fortune-telling and transmigration of souls, go back for
centuries.”37 In this respect Walker’s counterculturalism, while
problematic for some readers, may be seen by others as a recovery of lost
or repressed arts, sciences, and religions formerly practiced and believed by
women and others outside the mainstream. Her characters’ countercultural
activities, presented as vestiges of ancient medicine concentrated in the
hands of women before the domination of science and technology, attest
to their connections to the ancestors: Fanny’s massage, for instance, is not
only sexual foreplay but also a healing art, as she seeks out and
relieves bodily pain and its underlying mental and psychological stress.
Although Arveyda has been commercialized as a rock musician, he is also a
healer: “Arveyda and his music were medicine, and, seeing or hearing
him, people knew it. They flocked to him as once they might have to
priests. He did not disappoint them” (T, 24). A soulmate to Carlotta,
Arveyda is a reincarnation of the Indians and priests of her mother’s
South American background and embodies the spirituality of the dream
memory time: “It was his Indianness that she saw, not his blackness. She
saw it in the way he really looked at her, really saw her. With the
calm, detached concentration of a shaman” (T, 7).
Walker’s interest in the New Age culture may also be seen more
positively in light of its resemblances to goddess theology, expressed in
Shug’s gospel as a desire for universal harmony. The “concept of a
Black/Brown African Goddess,” as Davenport points out, reinforces
Walker’s belief in a “connection between spiritual and physical
empowerment.”38 It also reflects a movement among feminists to celebrate
female spirituality as a counterforce
to the restrictive and debasing position accorded women in male

religions. Carol Christ notes that images of the goddess in female-
authored literature oppose and seek to undermine “the power of the
symbolism of God the Father,” which has excluded women from
affirming their identity “in the image and likeness of God.” Christ
suggests that various meanings attach to the goddess symbol, including
“the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of female power as a beneficent
and independent power” rather than an “inferior and dangerous” one, the
reclamation of the female body and its life cycles, and new connections
between women and nature.39 Walker’s protagonists resemble characters
in current feminist science fiction, who, according to Phyllis J. Day, “are
integral to and often protectresses of Earth and ecology. [These
characters] are part of an organic whole, a return to our premechanistic
past, and they represent a force against man in his assumption of the
right to dominate either women or Earth/Nature.”40 Following Christ’s
contentions that “[t]he Goddess as symbol of the revaluation of the body
and nature thus also undergirds the human potential and ecology
movements,” and that both movements reflect an “affirmation, awe, and
respect for the body and nature .
. . the teachings of the body and the rights of all living things,”41
ecofeminists may read Walker’s goddess as an affirmation of the
potential for both human and environmental improvement.
The preoccupation with matriarchal wisdom in Temple foregrounds
the maternal not in the restrictive sense of individual mothering but in
the wider contexts of social nurturing and pre-oedipal development. The
new community established at the end of this novel is comprised of
individuals whose enlightened awareness appears to be both unconscious
and conscious and to express itself both in their unabashed sensuality and
in their concerned caring for one another’s needs and desires. Their
uninhibited sexuality may represent an eroticism that, like the “maternal
erotics” Wyatt sees replacing “a masculine erotics of dominance” in The Color
Purple, “fosters personal growth” because sex “involve[s] liberating each
other’s powers of self-expression rather than trying to suppress them.”42 A
celebration of jouissance is inherent in this replication of pre-oedipal,
undifferentiated energy and relational, nonsexist identity, where legally
married couples—Arveyda and Carlotta, Suwelo and Fanny—remain in their
now transformed marriages while flaunting infidelity, paradoxically
participating in and defying patriarchal law and custom. At the same time,
Walker’s reinscription of sixties’ counterculturalism in an eighties’ milieu
historicizes her promulgation of matriarchal myth and legend.
The somber tone of Walker’s earlier fiction has perhaps conditioned
readers to expect in The Temple of My Familiar tragic realism rather
than comic pastiche. In this novel, however, laughter seems essential to
Bildung; its absence marks the self-absorption of contemporary life, as
Suwelo realizes when he reminisces about his Uncle Rafe’s ability to
amuse everyone: “And
the depth of the laughter! The way it seemed to go so far down inside
it scraped the inside bottoms of the feet. No one laughed like that any
more” (T, 36). And surely lines like those describing Fanny’s sexual
freedom—“She was soon meditating and masturbating and finding
herself dissolved into the cosmic All” (T, 385)—or Arveyda’s
embarrassed reaction to Fanny’s lovemaking—“‘I’m afraid,’ he groans,
‘you have lit a little candle’” (T, 407)— are funny even to readers who are
surprised to find Walker writing comedy. One of Shug’s beatitudes reads
“HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the
company of the jolly righteous” (T, 289). By the end of the novel, self-
deprecating and playful laughter becomes one way of mitigating the
sarcasm that has divided people throughout history. Walker is often
tongue-in-cheek, and her readers are invited to laugh also.
Walker’s preoccupation with language, analyzed in a recent article
as a recognition by African American authors of the power of the
word “to prevent or foster the development of authentic selves,”43
extends to Temple, which mixes “high” and “low” language, perhaps to
disconcert readers and suggest revolutionary possibilities for dismantling
hegemonic discourses at the level of the individual narrative text.
Walker’s clichés, trite expressions, profanity, and jokes—“A woman
without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” (T, 383), the linking of
“motherworshipers” and “motherfucker” (T, 64), and Suwelo’s pun,
“Talking . . . is the very afro-disiac of love” (T, 322) are salient examples—
offend linguistic proprieties, calling attention to a potentially subversive
discourse. This language, by calling attention to itself, contributes to
Walker’s experimental alienation effect, resembling the pastiche strategy,
described by E. Ann Kaplan, of employing a “semi-comic, self-conscious
stance” toward content, a ploy which keeps audiences off balance,
doubting, and never sure of any fixed ideological stance.44
Like the priestess’s familiar, Walker’s techniques in The Temple of My
Familiar slither and skid between modernist epistemological concerns
with the kinds and limits of knowledge and postmodernist ontological
concerns with being and becoming. The most obvious and most
important instances of this shifting occur when Walker blurs the lines
between past and present, life and death—particularly when Miss Lissie
moves via reincarnation in and out of various historical periods and
between history and the “dream memory” of myth and legend—or the
lines between fiction and fact—as when Fanny meets the real-life
novelist Bessie Head. The conflation of historical time and prehistorical
memory, coupled with the juxtaposing of official and alternative histories
and of fiction and history creates what Brian McHale terms “an
ontological flicker” through which distinctions between truth and
falsehood, bible and apocrypha, insider and outsider are called into
question. By crossing ontological boundaries, postmodem pastiche
simulates death in ways that demystify it and, McHale argues,
“models
not only the ontological limit of death, but also the dream of a
return.”45 Walker’s pastiche, especially in its depiction of reincarnation,
implies that fear of death may be mitigated by viewing it as a “part of
life” (LBW, 74.) She unites the living with the dead in order to employ
the dead’s wisdom in creating a better future for the living.
While reconstructing neglected matriarchal values, Walker’s pastiche
also recognizes the ambiguity of contemporary vestiges and
manifestations of sexual spirituality, of female power, and of vital
but obscured links between humans and animals and the rest of nature.
Rather than privileging her philosophy through one spokeswoman,
Walker problematizes it by distributing wisdom among several male
and female storytellers, some of whom are still searching for self and
knowledge. Furthermore, while Miss Lissie appears close to being a
goddess, having survived eons of oppression, she is not presented as
a transcendent, unified self. She displays herself in numerous
photographs that not only document and present various nameless
and forgotten African identities but also fragment her character,
dispersing it across time and space. The fragility and possibly
ephemeral nature of goddess identity is suggested also by her life story,
written in invisible ink, a text that Suwelo discovers can be read
only once before it disappears forever. At the end of the novel even Miss
Lissie has departed this life and text, leaving readers to interpret her
portrait, with its lion and a “very gay, elegant, and shiny red high-
heeled slipper” (T, 416). These images remind readers that in the
postmodern moment meaning is decentered, multivalent,
problematic, and accessible only through parable and pastiche.
Recognizing this, we are at liberty to enjoy this experimental novel as a
text that, like the temple familiar, is mercurial and chameleonic,
“graceful and clever, its expression mischievous and full of humor . . .
and alive!” even as we are cajoled into speculation: Is Miss Lissie
transformed into a bestial familiar, waiting to assume her human shape
at a later stage, or has she disappeared forever, leaving the slipper as a
souvenir? Are there other possible interpretations of the portrait? Or of
The Temple of My Familiar?
No t E s
1. Joyce Maynard, “The Almost All-American Girls,” review of The Temple

of My Familiar, Mademoiselle, July 1989, 72.
2. James Wolcott, “Party of Animals,” review of The Temple of My
Familiar, New Republic, 29 May 1989, 29–30.
3. J. M. Coetzee, “The Beginnings of (Wo)man in Africa,” review of
The Temple of My Familiar, New York Times Book Review, 30 April 1989, 7.
4. Doris Davenport, “Afracentric Visions,” review of The Temple of My
Famil- iar, Women’s Review of Books, September 1989, 13–14.
5. See, for example, Madelyn Jablon, “Rememory, Dream History, and

Revi- sion in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s The Temple of My
Familiar,” CLA Journal 37 (1993): 136–44; Felipe Smith, “Alice Walker’s
Redemptive Art,” African American Review 26 (1992): 437–51; Ikenna Dieke,
“Toward a Monastic Idealism: The Thematics of Alice Walker’s The Temple of
My Familiar,” African American Review 26 (1992): 507–14; and Maureen T.
Reddy, “Maternal Reading: Lazarre and Walker,” in Narrating Mothers:
Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, ed. Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 222–38.
6. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi, 250, 311.
7. Alice Walker, Living By the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987 (San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 147; hereafter this work is cited
parenthetically as LBW.
8. Alice Walker, interview with John O’Brien, in Alice Walker: Critical
Per- spectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah
(New York: Amistad, 1993), 340.
9. Alice Walker, interview with Paula Giddings, Essence, July 1992, 60, 61,
102. A recent critique of Possessing the Secret of Joy by Margaret Kent Bass,
(CLA Journal 38 [1994]: 1–10) accuses Walker of “cultural condescension,”
“smugness,” and Western imperialism in her attempt to rescue African women
from their “ignorance and misery” (4, 9), as exemplified by the continuance of
female circumcision today. Bass, however, recognizes Walker’s invitation to
polyvocality in Possessing, where “she includes all arguments against her
position and attitude in the narrative”
(4) and again fragments, hence decenters, the authorial and authoritative female
subject (2). Bass’s admission “that I have no quarrel with what Walker attempts
to do, but rather with the way she does it” (3) typifies many reactions to
Walker’s oeuvre.
10. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), 91.
11. Raymond Federman, “What Are Experimental Novels and Why
Are There So Many Left Unread?” Genre 14 (1981): 27.
12. Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1989), 118–19; hereafter this work is cited parenthetically as T.
13. Ihab Hassan, “Making Sense: The Trials of Postmodern Discourse,”
New Literary History 18 (1987): 446.
14. C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 4th ed. (Indianapolis:
Odys- sey, 1972), 381.
15. See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-
Cen- tury Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985).
16. Pastiche finds a special place in the liberated and liberating spaces
created by the postmodern moment, a time, as Edward Said reminds us, of
“opening the culture to experiences of the Other which have remained ‘outside’
(and have been repressed or framed in a context of confrontational hostility) the
norms manufac- tured by ‘insiders’ (“Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and
Community,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster
[Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983], 158).
17. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-
Ameri- can Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 124.
18. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 218.
19. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European
Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 68.
20. David H. Miles, “The Picaro’s Journey to the Confessional: The
Chang- ing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman,” PMLA 89
(1974): 984.
21. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-
Aesthetic, 125.
22. Alice Walker, interview with Claudia Dreifus, The Progressive, August
1989, 31.
23. See Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psycho-
analysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), for discussions
of silenced mothers.
24. Jean Wyatt, Reconstructing Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1990), 19. In Walker’s earlier novels, as Patricia Waugh has
demonstrated, the “women characters discover a personal strength through the
revalidation of family connection,” and homely, communal activities like
quilting, gardening and cooking create a “ functional art” that “implies that
culture must not be elevated above the community, that artistic expression
should be a voicing of the establishment of human identity in relationships and
connections between equals” (Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern
[London: Routledge, 1989], 213–14). In Temple, activities such as bread baking,
massage, and music help to unite people in a similar communal relationship,
emphasizing their similarities while respecting their differences, a utopian
vision akin to that of The Color Purple, a novel in which, as Susan Willis
observes, “extended family” members “are bound up in a network of care that is
. . . sustaining and open” (Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience
[Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987], 160).
25. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social
Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 142.
26. Gates, xxv.
27. David H. Miles, “Kafka’s Hapless Pilgrims and Grass’s Scurrilous
Dwarf: Notes on Representative Figures in the Anti-Bildungsroman,”
Monatshefte 65 (1973): 344, 348.
28. Davenport, 14.
29. Felski, 147.
30. Dana Polan, “Postmodernism and Cultural Analysis Today,” in
Postmod- ernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices, ed. E. Ann Kaplan
(London: Verso, 1988), 55.
31. E. A. Grosz, “Introduction,” Futur*Fall: Excursions into Post-
Modernity, ed. Grosz, et al. (Sydney, Australia: Power Institute of Fine Arts,
University of Sydney, and Futur*Fall, 1986), 10.
32. Belsey, 106.
33. King-Kok Cheung, “‘Don’t Tell’: Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and
The Woman Warrior,” PMLA 103 (1988): 169.
34. Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Cathy Urwin, Couze Venn, Valerie
Walkerdine, Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and
Subjectivity (London: Methuen, 1984), 4.
35. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s” (1984), in The Syntax of
History, vol. 2 of The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, 2 vols.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 207.
36. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 117.
37. “New Age Harmonies,” Time, 7 Dec. 1987, 64, 62.

38. Davenport, 13.
39. Carol P. Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess:
Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections,” in Womenspirit
Rising: A Feminist Reader on Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow
(New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 274–75; 271–81.
40. Phyllis J. Day, “Earthmother/Witchmother: Feminism and Ecology
Renewed,” Extrapolation 23 (1982): 14.
41. Christ, 282.
42. Wyatt, 164, 167.
43. Keith Gilyard, “Genopsycholinguisticide and the Language Theme in
African-American Fiction,” College English 52 (1990): 776.
44. E. Ann Kaplan. “Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodernism: The Case of
MTV,” in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, 37.
45. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 90,
235.
DE B O R AH E . B A R K E R
Visual Markers: Art and Mass Media

in Alice Walker’s Meridian
T he most powerful form of media representation is that which

creates not just an obtainable demand for a particular product or
style, but one that creates an unobtainable desire in the audience, a
sense that there is something missing in one’s life that can only be
found in the represented image. Alice Walker describes just this
phenomenon in “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” an
essay which is directly relevant to the intersection between the media
and the Civil Rights Movement. There Walker explains her mother’s
fascination with the soap operas that she watched as a maid:
She placed herself in every scene she saw, with her braided hair
turned blond, her two hundred pounds compressed into a sleek
size-seven dress, her rough dark skin smooth and white. Her
husband became “dark and handsome,” talented, witty, urbane,
charming. And when she turned to look at my father sitting
near her in his sweat shirt with his smelly feet raised on the bed
to “air,” there was always a tragic look of surprise on her
face. Then she would sigh and go out to the kitchen looking
lost and unsure of herself. (123)
African American Review, 31 (3) Fall 1997: pp. 463–79. © 1997 Deborah E. Barker
133
134 Deborah E. Barker
The soap operas are a form of escape, but they also help to perpetuate
the image of a glamorous white world. As Walker explains her mother’s
situation, “Nothing could satisfy her on days when she did not work
but a contin- uation of her ‘stories,’” and she “subordinated her soul to
theirs and became a faithful and timid supporter of the ‘Beautiful
White People’” (122-23).
To say that we are all profoundly marked by the media in our
most immediate understanding of racial and sexual identity is by now
almost a commonplace, but the exact nature of this marking is much
more difficult to assess. In Meridian Alice Walker enacts a literary
analysis of the interaction between the media and the public as
dramatized through the character of Meridian Hill, who, as a young
black woman participating in the Civil Rights Movement, represents an
intersection between race and gender as it was being culturally redefined
during the political upheaval of the sixties and seventies.1 Meridian not
only confronts the image of “Beautiful White People” promoted by an
objectifying white-dominated mass media, but, more importantly, she sorts
through the often uncomfortable interaction between mass media images
and self-generated representations of racial and gender identity in
African-American art and culture, including the legacy of black
motherhood.2 Through this confrontation, Meridian learns how to “see”
herself.
While much critical attention has been focused on the interaction
between music and language in African-American culture, the visual arts,
as Michelle Wallace asserts, have been under-represented and under-
analyzed. This is an especially egregious oversight, because the visual
element of race is inexorably linked to racial identity: “How one is seen (as
black), and, therefore, what one sees (in a white world), is always already
crucial to one’s existence as an Afro-American. The very markers that
reveal you to the rest of the world, your dark skin and your kinky /
curly hair, are visual” (Wallace 207). This corporeal recognition of race,
Wallace maintains, allows white Americans to “overlook” African
Americans, while assuming that blacks cannot “see” that they are being
treated as invisible. The result produces a mutually dependent cultural
invisibility and blindness based on the visual markers of race. In
Meridian, movies, magazines, television, and the visual arts play a vital
role in this process because they reinforce and reproduce on a mass scale
certain cultural images of ourselves that are virtually impossible to
ignore.
As Walker shrewdly demonstrates, the force of any given
cultural representation is, in part, related to the power of the medium
in which it is displayed, and therefore it is also subject to the economic
and ideological underpinning of that medium. Noam Chomsky
explains that
the major media—particularly, the elite media that set the

agenda that others generally follow—are corporations “selling”
Visual Markers: Art and Mass Media in Alice Walker’s 135
Meridian
privileged audiences to other businesses. It would hardly come as

a surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect
the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the
product. Concentration of ownership of the media is high and
increasing. (8)
Walker, however, does not depict the media as a monolithic structure

that simply shapes a passive audience. She brings to the novel what an
analysis of the media alone cannot: Individual reactions to the media
images in turn become events which shape the images of the media, and
this is most powerfully demonstrated in a fictional format, especially one
set during the Civil Rights Movement, a time when images of African
Americans were undergoing incredible change.
To illustrate the rich and complex history of representations of
African- American women, I will highlight various forms of this
representation that help to contextualize Walker’s analysis of the
impact of the media on our perceptions of race and gender. These
examples will cover a wide terrain both historically and generically, but I
have chosen them because they reveal the pervasive logic behind the
cultural construction of racial and gender identity in America. It is
important to keep in mind, however, in examining Meridian’s opposition
to the cultural depictions of African-American women that, although
black women have been historically marginalized or “erased” in the
mass media, they do not stand outside the culture; they do play and
always have played an integral role in shaping culture. Regardless of the
prevalent segregation of our society, ultimately it is impossible to
segregate mass culture; its influence is too pervasive and, at the same
time, too subtle. In the novel there is no single effect of the media just
as there is no single reaction to the media.3 The characters—male and
female, black and white, old and young—use media images as a
touchstone for their understanding and analysis of the world around them.
They variously reject, emulate, parody, valorize, destroy, interpret,
romanticize, and/or revolutionize the images they encounter. The mass
media, therefore, provide an intersection between the cultural
representations of the past and the present, between black and white
culture, and between high art and popular culture.
Movies: A White Dream World
In Meridian it is the Hollywood movies that serve as the site of

unobtainable desire. The movies are not only white-dominated, but are
largely controlled by a few major studios that have the financial backing
to produce and distrib- ute large-budget, major-release films. Hollywood
represents a white dream world which is based on the viewers’
identification with the valorization
of white culture over that of people of color: “Movies: Rory Calhoun,

Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, Slim Pickens. Blondes against brunettes and
cowboys against Indians, good men against bad, darker men” (Meridian
75). Not only do the movies transmit an implicit racist message, but
they also create a seductive and unattainable dream of glamour, a
glamour that is particularly attractive to young schoolgirls. For Meridian
the movies provide the dream world she moves through as a girl to
alleviate the boredom and limitations of her own life. Her identification
with the movie images is so powerful that in her memory they actually
replace the events of her own life:
. . . she could herself recall nothing of those years, beyond

the Saturday afternoons and evenings in the picture show.
For it was the picture show that more than anything else
filled those bantering, galloping years. This fantasy world
made the other
world of school—with its monotony and tedium—bearable. (75)
The movies are satisfying only if the viewer can completely identify
with that world, but any actual comparison between the images of
everyday life and the movie images creates the “tragic look of
surprise” and a sense of discontentment. As Meridian sits alone all day
looking out the window after the break-up of her marriage, she
understands the young girls that go by on their way home from school
and their lack of awareness of the world around them:
They simply did not know they were living their own lives
— between twelve and fifteen—but assumed they lived
someone else’s. They tried to live the lives of their movie idols;
and those lives were fantasy. Not even the white people they
watched and tried to become—the actors—lived them. So they
moved, did the young girls outside her window, in the dream of
happy endings: of women who had everything, of men who ran
the world. So had she. (75)
For Meridian, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout, divorcee,

and unenthusiastic mother, the discrepancies between her own life and
that of the movie idols, or even the other young girls, are too extreme; the
realities of her life are unavoidable.
Magazines: The Ideology of Enforced Motherhood
As a young wife and mother Meridian turns away from the movies
and turns to magazines that target young black women. She reads
Sepia, Tan, True Confessions, Real Romance, and Jet, but these do not
provide an attrac-
Visual Markers: Art and Mass Media in Alice Walker’s Meridian 137
tive alternative to the dream world of the movies. Meridian’s assessment

is that, “according to these magazines, Woman was a mindless body,
a sex creature, something to hang false hair and nails on. Still, they
helped her know for sure her marriage was breaking up” (71) and that
she is not ready for motherhood. Instead of instilling an ideology of
femininity based on marriage and motherhood, the magazines serve
as a yardstick by which Meridian measures her own alienation. The
magazines cannot provide an escape for Meridian because it is her own
story that is repeatedly presented in the articles, yet she resists their
version of the “happy ending.” The articles illustrate the reification of
the “legacy of black motherhood” from which Meridian feels excluded
because of her decision to give up her child. Motherhood is defined in
such strict parameters in the magazines that they espouse an ideology of
enforced motherhood, an ideology that stresses lady- like behavior and
depicts a sacrificial motherhood which is incongruous with individual
ambition or political participation.
To understand Meridian’s reaction to images of motherhood it is
necessary to bring to light those forms of the media (black teen
magazines) which have not been given the same critical attention as
more widely circulating magazines such as Look or Life, but which have
had, perhaps, an even greater influence on their target audience, young
African-American women. A content analysis of the stories and
advertisements from Tan (December 1959 and January to April 1960,
roughly the time period when Meridian is reading the magazine) can
help to elucidate both the connection and conflict between Meridian’s own
stories and the narratives she reads in the magazines. Tan in particular is
appropriate because, as a confessional romance magazine directed at a
young black female audience, it shares the qualities of all the
abovementioned magazines, and it provides the greatest concentration of
representations of young black women aimed precisely at this group.
On one level these magazines are an antidote to the glamorous myth
of Hollywood romance because they explore the everyday details of
married life.4 The romantic allure of sex is undercut in articles such as
“What Makes a Girl Bad,” “Married at Seventeen,” and “I Can’t Have
Your Baby,” which depict women, like Meridian, who find themselves
pregnant before they are ready to assume that responsibility. Meridian’s
decision to give her child up for adoption violates the norms of the black
community as they are presented in Tan. “I Was a Victim of the Beat
Generation” and “No Fathers for Their Babies,” which combine
personal confessions with a kind of sociological analysis, warn of the
double or triple standard applied to black women regarding
premarital sex and illegitimate children. As the article describe it, in the
white community a pregnancy is generally kept quiet; the young
woman goes away for a time and gives her baby up for adoption, resuming
her former life as if nothing had happened. In the black community
adoption is
not so acceptable an option, and a pregnant teen is more likely to assume

the responsibilities of motherhood.
Although the magazines warn against being “fast,” the
unmarried mothers in the stories are not condemned; they generally
return to their families and, by the end of the story, marriage is
suggested as a future reward. The real condemnation and most severe
consequences are accorded not to women with illegitimate children but
to women like Meridian who reject their own mothers and/or reject
becoming mothers themselves. In “Married at Seventeen” and “I Can’t
Have Your Baby,” the two articles most directly applicable to Meridian’s
story, both women are married to respectable black men with good jobs;
the problem is that these women, like Meridian, have rejected their
mothers’ advice and in doing so have cut themselves off from the “legacy
of black motherhood.” Their desire for individual autonomy is presented
as the source of their problems, problems that ultimately endanger their
unborn children.
Any discussion of the legacy of black motherhood must, of
course, include the problematic position of the slave mother and the
complex representations associated with black motherhood. As
Meridian is well aware, a slave mother would not have had the choice to
keep her own child, while Meridian is choosing to give hers away (91).
According to Claudia Tate, nineteenth-century African-American
women writers reconstructed the norms of true womanhood “to inscribe
moral indignation at the sexual and maternal abuses associated with
slavery” and “to designate black female subjectivity as a most potent
force in the advancement of the race” (107). In other words, a
narrative of a former slave who marries and raises her own children
constituted a sign of personal and social liberation, of civic
enfranchisement and social responsibility. Tate persuasively argues that it
is inappropriate to read nineteenth-century African-American women’s
fiction against “modernist allegories of desire” which “characterize marriage
and freedom as antithetical.” However, in following this reconstruction of
womanhood and refuting the antebellum representation of black women
as sexualized breeders, the twentieth-century romance magazines that
Meridian reads (while still retaining some aspects of the “discourse of
racial liberation” by encouraging fidelity and respect for the family and
community) have taken on a more conservative and limiting view of
female subjectivity. While Tate can argue that in the postbellum period
black female subjectivity as depicted in women’s sentimental novels was
a “most potent force in the advancement of the race” (107), in 1960 the
magazine narratives encouraged a maternal devotion that precluded
political involvement.
In “Married at Seventeen,” Shirley’s decision to quit school and to get
married against her mother’s wishes leads not only to her estrangement
from her parents but ultimately to her attempted suicide, which results in
the loss
of her unborn baby. The story’s “happy ending” is Shirley’s reunion with
her parents in her hospital room and the doctor’s assurance that she will
have other children. The story ends with Shirley’s confession and her
prayer that she will be worthy of her “wonderful children” and her
“husband’s love.” Her confession, however, is not just an acknowledgment
of wrongdoing, or bad judgment, but a confirmation that there is only
one set of standards and one role that is acceptable:
My parents had been right. Marriage was a mistake for me.

A mistake because I was not an adult, not a mature enough
person to face the problems of life. I had wrapped my future in
rosy dreams of romance and the first time the bubble broke,
I did not know where to turn. Or when I did know—that my
parents would have helped—I made a martyr of myself by
refusing their aid. It takes a real person to stoop with dignity.
My heart was heavy with the bitter price I had to pay, the loss
of my baby. It wasn’t just the attempted suicide and lack of
oxygen but the run down condition I had let myself get into
from improper diet and lack of exercise.
“I guess I’m not fit to be a mother.” (53)
Ironically, although Shirley’s confession is that she is not ready for

marriage or motherhood, the solution to her problem is to have more
children. As long as she can be recuperated into the ideology of enforced
motherhood, she can be forgiven for the attempted suicide that caused
the death of her baby, but it is seemingly unthinkable that she might
have had the child and given it away. Meridian has clearly internalized
this message. As the novel indicates, Meridian “might not have given
[her son] away to the people who wanted him. She might have
murdered him instead. Then killed herself. They would all have
understood this in time” (90). Unlike adoption or abortion, suicide,
while considered tragic, can be forgiven because, rather than violating
enforced motherhood, it reinforces the concept by making death a
woman’s only alternative to motherhood, and it has the added
consequence of getting rid of women who are “monsters,” the way in
which Meridian’s mother characterizes any woman who would give
away her child.
Meridian feels that she has lost her mother’s love and that she is
cut off from the legacy of black motherhood. As in Walker’s “In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Meridian too has a legacy of
artistic/creative ancestors who created out of the materials and
circumstances available to them. Most prominent is her great-
grandmother, who decorated barns and who earned the money to buy
her own freedom and that of her children and her husband. Meridian’s
great-grandmother represents the positive image of the strong African-
American mother / artist (pro)creator who through her own work
and sweat was able to free and protect her children from slavery, but
who was also a creative artist whose work survived after her.
Mrs. Hill, however, no longer embodies the positive elements
of motherhood or the artist; she is another example of the negative
ramifications of enforced motherhood. While Meridian sees her mother
as “Black Motherhood personified” and as “worthy of [her] maternal
history,” the narrator states that Mrs. Hill “was not a woman who
should have had children. She was capable of thought and growth
and action only if unfettered by the needs of dependents, or the
demands, requirements, of a husband” (49). She raised her children
though she never wanted them, and she refused her own creativity as a
form of protest for the role she had to adopt as a mother. Mrs. Hill’s
garden is not a living garden but a cluster of “fake” flowers made of
paper and wire, and her walls are covered with photographs of other
people’s children—not her own. For Mrs. Hill to accept Meridian
would challenge her own definitions of the proper role of women and
would challenge the necessity of her own sacrifice of motherhood and
question even the desirability of having raised six children “though I
never wanted any.” Rather than bringing mothers and daughters together,
the legacy, when viewed as a requirement rather than a right, keeps them
apart and condemns any woman who cannot live up to its standards
while also limiting all women to only one role in life.
Becoming a real woman, according to the magazines, seems to
involve a masochistic selflessness which cannot brook anger or
resentment. “I Can’t Have Your Baby” presents the most direct attack on
the duties of a daughter and the value of motherhood. Lora, who as a
girl was responsible for her brothers and sisters, admits that she
resented and at times even hated her mother, whose “only purpose in
life was to bear babies with disgusting regularity” (27). Like Meridian,
Lora’s desire for independence leads to a rift between her and her
mother. She leaves home, gets a job, and eventually marries her boss.
When she finds out that she is pregnant, her first thought is to have an
abortion. Although ultimately she decides to have the baby, she
pretends that it isn’t really happening to her. Like Shirley, she does not
take proper care of herself and ends up in the hospital needing a
transfusion from her youngest brother, the very brother whose birth she
had resented because she had to stay home to help raise him. For Lora
the happy ending comes with the birth of her daughter. The “awful pain
of birth seemed to have purged my heart of the hatred and resentment I
felt toward my family,” and she was at last “well on the way to becoming
a real woman, just as Mom said” (62). Pain therefore has a cathartic
effect which rids women of individual desires and turns them into
“real” women.
The twentieth-century magazines do, of course, offer some very
sound advice: It is helpful to have familial support during pregnancy,
and it is
important to take care of yourself mentally and physically. But the proper
role of the mother as portrayed in the articles goes beyond such good
advice. The article “Devil Child” best exemplifies the stringent
requirements of the “good-enough” mother. Elfreda, who tells her own
story, commits none of the transgressions of the other women (she is
not pregnant before she marries, nor does she take improper care of
herself during pregnancy), yet her transgression produces the most tragic
outcome: She murders her son to prevent him from raping her.
Elfreda, who marries a hard-working,honest young black man, still
enjoys going out with her friends after the birth of her first child, Leonard.
Elfreda has an understanding and sympathetic mother and a loving
grandmother (named Grandma Hill) who agree to look after her son on
the evenings she goes out with her friends. Five years later, when her
second child is born, Elfreda is older and ready to settle down. The extra
attention her daughter receives makes her son jealous, and, despite his
parents’ increased attention over the years, the damage cannot be
repaired. Leonard goes from bad to worse, hurting his sister and
attacking her friend. It is this assault, which his mother breaks up, that
causes Leonard to turn on her and leads to his death. The lesson here as
explained directly in the narrative is that Leonard’s death is ultimately
attributable to his mother’s desire to have fun when she was young. Despite
the fact that “he got lots of attention from his relatives,” he did not get
enough from his parents. The implied lesson is that any deviation from
total devotion to one’s children can lead to the most dire consequences,
and ultimately it is the mother’s fault.
The Art of Advertising
Ironically (and despite the fact that their titles invoke the visual
recognition of color—Tan, Sepia, Jet), these magazines downplay the
Hollywood version of romantic love by dramatizing the realities of
“giving in” to passion, even as they depict acceptable forms of sexuality
(those associated with marriage) by invoking the visual tropes of
whiteness: long hair and light skin. The article “How to Keep Your
Husband Happy,” for example, advises women to “look feminine” and
concludes that “most men associate femininity with longish softly waved
hair” (66). The ads in particular associate romance and marriageability
with light skin and long hair. An ad for Nadinola Bleaching Cream
shows a woman smiling brightly while the man behind her holds up her
left hand to reveal her engagement ring; the copy reads “Give romance a
chance! Don’t let a dull, dark complexion deprive you of popularity.” An
ad for Raveen shows only the heads of a woman and a man, who is
smiling intently at her. The woman’s head is turned so that her face is
seen only in a limited profile while her long hair dominates the picture
and is three times
the size of her face. The caption reads, “Men love women with lovely,
lus- trous, thrilling hair appearance!” For Meridian this association of
marriage and acceptable sexuality with the visual symbols of whiteness is
particularly unappealing. As a girl she had accepted her mother’s view
that white women were “frivolous, helpless creatures, lazy and without
ingenuity” (108) whose only notable asset might be “a length of hair, if
it swung long and particularly fine. But that was all. And hair was
dead matter that continued—only if oiled—to shine” (109).
Walker parodies the “dead matter” of long hair as a trope of white
female sexuality in her depiction of Marilene O’Shay, the “mummy
woman” whose husband drags her “preserved” body across the country in a
circus wagon that is inscribed in red letters: “Obedient Daughter, Devoted
Wife, Adoring Mother, Gone Wrong.” In the opening chapter of the novel
Meridian challenges the power of the myth of the white woman as a
means of marginalizing blacks by exposing the mummy woman as fake.
The artificially created/preserved corpse of Mrs. O’Shay brilliantly
embodies the contradictory representations of race and gender in
American culture by alluding to the historical representations of these
categories and how they have been used to shape and define each other.5
In the pamphlet which he distributes to those who pay to see his
wife, Mr. O’Shay assures his audience that his wife is indeed white
and that the darkening of her skin (which his attempts to whitewash
have not concealed) has been caused by exposure to salt and “only
reflects her sinfulness” and not her race. The mummy woman
exemplifies Hazel Carby’s assertion that the nineteenth-century ideology
of the cult of true womanhood with its attendant features of purity,
delicacy, and sexlessness not only excluded black female sexuality but
was dependent on it to define acceptable white female behavior. “Black
womanhood was polarized against white womanhood in the structure of the
metaphoric system of female sexuality, particularly through the
association of black women with overt sexuality and taboo sexual
practices” (32). White women, however, retained the status of “true
womanhood” only so long as they conformed to the sexual limits
associated with that status. White women, like Marilene O’Shay, who
are sexually transgressive are represented as being visually recognizable
because they take on the attributes of racial difference. As Mary Ann
Doane describes the relationship between nineteenth-century
representations of race and sexuality, “The hyperbolic sexualization of
blackness is presented within a visual framework; it is a function of
‘seeing’ as an epistemological guarantee” (214). Marilene’s
representation as the dark-skinned mummy woman therefore reinforces
the “epistemological guarantee” of purity or the lack of it; the salt has
preserved her both as a sign of past sinfulness and as a reminder that
death is the ultimate form of control over female sexuality.6
Carby’s and Doane’s analyses of nineteenth-century sexual and

racial politics are particularly appropriate for understanding the
significance of the mummy woman because of its own nineteenth-century
antecedents. Mr. O’Shay’s touring side show and his promotion of the
mummy woman embody the sensationalistic use of sexuality and race that
marks the concurrent development of art and advertising in an emerging
mass culture, particularly as manifest in the nineteenth-century freak show
and the traveling art show. In the early 1840s (before the completion of
the transcontinental railway or the mass availability of photography,
television, or the movies), one of the most effective ways to reach the
masses was literally to take your show on the road. Two such touring
shows, which on the face of it seem to have nothing in common, have
particular relevance to the presentation of the mummy woman:
P. T. Barnum’s notorious “Fejee Mermaid” (1843) and Hiram Powers’
The Greek Slave (1844). Powers’ Slave is an example of ideal sculpture, the
epitome of American high culture, while Barnum’s freak show is
associated with the worst aspects of popular culture—fraud and
sensationalism. However, like the mummy woman, both The Greek
Slave and the “Fejee Mermaid” were carefully promoted through the use
of visual images interpreted by supporting texts that were predicated upon
the polarization of black and white female sexuality.
In 1843 Barnum sent his uncle, Alanson Taylor, on a Southern
tour to exhibit the “Fejee Mermaid,” one of Barnum’s most notorious
frauds. Although the “mermaid” ultimately was declared to be simply
the body of a fish sewn onto the head of a monkey, Barnum used a
publicity strategy of combining drawings of an exotic mermaid
accompanied by pamphlets which supported the mermaid’s authenticity. 7
The image of the mermaid has long been associated with irresistible
female sexuality. Barnum was able to heighten the erotic association of
the mermaid by coupling it with the Fiji Islands, a location which was
often the site of the exotic adventures chronicled in the popular sea
narratives of the nineteenth century, but the “Fejee Mermaid” also
played on the image of the sensual black woman. Although the Fijian
mermaid is, of course, not African, many white Americans’ propensity
to associate all dark-skinned people is evidenced by the fact that
Barnum was able, in his later exhibition of Fijian cannibals, to include
an African-American woman from Virginia. In Charleston the
controversy over the mermaid’s authenticity as a new species was set
amid the backdrop of the growing scientific debate over
“polygenesis,” a theory promoted by Dr. Josiah C. Nott, who used his
hypothesis that African Americans were a separate and inferior
species to support his proslavery position (Fredrickson 78–80).
Reverend John Bachman, a critic of Nott, declared the mermaid a hoax
and began the scientific debate that was played out in the
newspapers. Despite the free publicity, the public
controversy ultimately backfired and the mermaid, like the mummy

woman, was declared a hoax, and the tour was canceled (Harris 62–
67).
Despite the mermaid’s ultimate demise in the South, Barnum
made record profits in New York, and he certainly proved the power of
manipulating racial and sexual representations for promotional purposes.
The lesson was not lost on the art world. Four years after the
American tour of the “Fejee Mermaid,” Hiram Powers, an American
sculptor, began a traveling exhibition of his most famous work, The Greek
Slave. In promoting his tour of The Greek Slave Powers’ problem was the
opposite of Barnum’s.8 Powers needed to downplay the erotic
connotation of his nude statue and disassociate it from the American
slave trade. The touring show of The Greek Slave, like that of the
mummy woman, was accompanied by a pamphlet. However, in the case
of The Greek Slave the pamphlet stressed her modesty and purity and
included testimony from ministers who attested to the morality of the
work. The Greek Slave employs the visual markers of whiteness and
Christianity to present a woman under attack by the barbarian Turks,
thus reversing the racial politics of slavery and presenting a victimized
white (marble) woman:
Visual details carefully informed the audience that the subject

was a pious, faithful woman: a locket and a cross hanging on
her abandoned clothing suggest a lost love and a sustaining
Christian faith. Stripped naked, displayed for sale in the
marketplace, her hands chained, the Greek slave, unlike Eve,
was absolved from responsibility for her own downfall.
(Kasson 49)
Supporters of The Greek Slave claimed that she was “clothed all over
with sentiment; sheltered, protected by it from every profane eye”
(Kasson 58). The accompanying narrative was apparently quite effective;
viewers wept and wrote poetic tributes to the victimized Greek slave,
and the tour was also a financial success.
The rationale behind the purity of The Greek Slave is that she
“civilizes” the baser instincts of her viewers, thereby controlling how they
“see” her. The black woman is also assumed to be in control of how she is
seen. The corollary to white female purity, as Carby explains, was the
belief that black women by definition were not pure and therefore could
not possibly be victims of male desire, but were instead the instigators
(27). The black slave woman is therefore “seen” as responsible for inciting
male desire, on the one hand, and for not eliciting pity, on the other. The
difference between the mummy woman and The Greek Slave revolves
around the issue of sexual desire and sexual autonomy. The Greek Slave
retains her “epistemological guarantee” of purity by demonstrating her
lack of desire in the face of sexual transgression. Marilene O’Shay, who
goes “outside the home to seek her pleasuring,” revokes
her status as a white woman, as a symbol of restrained and contained

sexuality, and takes on the visual markers of racial difference.
In the context of the mummy woman and its nineteenth-century
antecedents, the artistic productions of Truman Held, Meridian’s former
lover and fellow Civil Rights Worker, are equally suspect. Truman has
turned the stereotype of the strong, fecund black woman into a
marketable aesthetic object, and potentially the money he makes
through the sale of his work will provide him with the means for not
dealing with black women in his future—by marrying another white
woman. As Truman works “night and day on the century’s definitive
African-American masterpieces,” he still has not come to terms with his
own ambivalent feelings about black women. “‘Black women let
themselves go,’ he said, even as he painted them as magnificent giants,
breeding forth the warriors of the new universe. ‘They are so fat,’ he
would say, even as he sculpted a ‘Big Bessie Smith’ in solid marble,
caressing her monstrous and lovely flanks with an admiring hand” (168).
Truman can appreciate black women only as art. Lynne, Truman’s white
ex-wife (who has her own problems with viewing black women as art9),
assumes that Truman’s art will have an impact on his own life, that
having fought through his art to the reality of his own mother, aunts,
sister, lovers, to their beauty, their greatness, [he] would naturally seek
them again in the flesh” (169) and that she is magnanimously giving
him back to Meridian. Yet when she comes to his apartment she meets
his new “tiny blonde” girlfriend who explains, “‘We’ve been livin’
together for two months. Truman says soon as he sells some more of
his paintings we’re goin’ to be married’” (171).
Truman’s art becomes his substitute for dealing with the black women in
his past. He can paint and sculpt Meridian over and over, but he cannot
fully accept her as a lover and a friend. Truman’s art does not
challenge his own stereotypes about black women, nor does it prompt
him to “seek them again in the flesh.” It is precisely their flesh that
Truman finds threatening. His objection to large women is clearly not
on aesthetic grounds because in his art he can admiringly caress the large
flanks of Bessie Smith. It is the flesh itself, the reality of actual black
women, that he cannot come to terms with. Seeking black women “in the
flesh” also carries a sexual connotation and is directly connected to
Truman’s avoidance. While he can control the flesh/sexual
representation of black women in his art, he fears that real black women
do not control their flesh; they “let themselves go.” Truman has
incorporated the cultural representation of black women as sexually
wanton to such a degree that he now fears them in the flesh. Ultimately
Truman’s definitive American masterpiece is, like Mr. O’Shay’s mummy
woman, the only way he can control and limit female sexuality. When
Truman sees the circus wagon of Marilene O’Shay with its description of
her preservation and her dutiful nature as daughter, wife, and mother, he
immediately declares, “‘That’s got to
be a rip-off ’” (19). Yet these are the same attributes that he has required
of his own wife and which prevent him from accepting Meridian as
she is (110). Rather than challenging media images of African-American
women, Truman is depicted as someone who too quickly embraces and
imitates media images, incorporating them into his own artistic
creations of black women.
A sign of Truman’s complicity with the media is that, while
Meridian uses women’s magazines as a measure of her alienation and her
unwillingness to comply with the gender codes, Truman uses popular
magazines as a blueprint for his ever-changing persona. When Truman
ponders the issues of his own life he repeatedly turns to the mass media
for his cue. Ironically, Truman explains to Meridian that he dates
Lynne and the other white exchange students because they read the
New York Times. The exchange students, therefore, symbolically link
Truman to the white, Eastern media. And it is again the mass media that
influences Truman’s decision whether or not to stay married to Lynne,
since it is no longer fashionable to have a white wife:
He had read in a magazine just the day before that

Lamumba Katurim had gotten rid of his. She was his wife,
true, but apparently she was even in that disguise perceived as
evil, a castoff. And people admired Lamumba for his perception.
It proved his love of his own people, they said. But he was not
sure. Perhaps it proved only that Lamumba was fickle. That
he’d married this bitch in the first place for shallow reasons.
(135)
Although Truman is able to question the motives and sincerity of the

celeb- rities he reads about, he still does not fully question his own
motives and his need to be politically and publicly correct.
As the new revolutionary artist of the ’70s, Truman explains that
the revolution of the ’60s was just a fad. “‘The leaders were killed, the
restless young were bought off with anti-poverty jobs, and the clothing
styles of the poor were copied by Seventh Avenue. And you know how
many middle- class white girls from Brooklyn started wearing kinky
hair’” (189). Truman’s critique is, of course, equally applicable to his own
dress and lifestyle. Like a cultural chameleon, each time Truman is
described he has adopted a new, updated image.10
Television: Black Exposure
That Meridian would turn to the Civil Rights Movement after

rejecting the magazine version of black womanhood is not surprising.
It is a lesson that she would have learned from the magazines
themselves. Although
Tan and True Confessions dealt very little with politics, Jet, which
aimed at a wider audience, dealt more extensively with current affairs
and with the Civil Rights Movement in particular. And it was only in
connection with the Movement that women were accorded status
independent of their role as “sex creatures.” Jet, which was blatant in its
depiction of black women as sexual objects, regularly featured
photographs of women in bathing suits in 1960. Even when women were
being lauded for intellectual or social distinctions in the magazine, the
text was accompanied by a “cheesecake” photo. For example a Chicago
housewife who is promoting National Library Week is pictured in heels
and a swimsuit reading a book; the caption accompanying the picture
reads “Stacked High.” A University of Chicago coed who is majoring in
international relations is also depicted in a bathing suit, and the caption
includes her measurements as well as her major. A “pinup” calendar,
again depicting women in bathing suits, was another regular feature
of the magazine. In fact, there are very few pictures of women which
do not emphasize their bust line or show them wearing bathing suits.
The one very noticeable exception to the rule is the cover of the April
21, 1960, issue, which shows an unsmiling young woman who does not
even look into the camera and whose bust-line is not visible in the
photograph. She is standing behind bars and the caption reads, “Sit-in
Student Freedom Fighters.” The Movement, therefore, afforded
contemporary African-American women an alternative form of
representation in the mass media as serious participants in a political
cause. At the same time that Meridian’s involvement in the Civil
Rights Movement has cut her off from her mother and the version of
sacrificial motherhood put forth by the black women’s magazine, it also
marks her self-conscious participation in history.
Walker demonstrates that the same media which propagate oppressive
fantasies can also be a source of opposition. In Walker’s own life it
was the presence of a black face on television which provided her with
an alternative and ruptured the influence of the television images and
white “stories”:
The influence that my mother’s soap operas might have had on

me became impossible. The life of Dr. King, seeming bigger and
more miraculous than the man himself, because of all he had
done and suffered, offered a pattern of strength and sincerity
I felt I could trust. I saw in him the hero for whom I had
waited so long.
(“Civil Rights” 124)
Meridian’s listless television watching is interrupted when she sees her

own neighborhood on the TV news. Through this event she is thrust into
history and becomes “aware of the past and present of the larger
world” (73). It is only through a televised press conference that she
learns that a house nearby
is a headquarters for a voter registration drive, and again it is

through the TV news that she learns that the house has been bombed.
Meridian is stunned, not only that such things could happen in
her own neighborhood, but that the Civil Rights workers were already
aware of the danger and had hired a guard. Meridian’s reaction to this
scene points to her own lack of knowledge of the larger world, but it also
emphasizes the lack of representation of blacks on television. As
Meridian indicates, blacks are not usually on the news “unless of
course they had shot their mothers or raped their bosses’ grandparent
—and a black person or persons giving a news conference was unheard
of ” (72). By calling a press conference, the Civil Rights workers use the
media as a form of resistance to represent their own goals, rather than
being depicted as reflections of the white community’s fears. (Access is
still limited, however; it is the white newscaster who controls the
handkerchief-covered microphone as if to filter the words of blacks or to
protect himself from contamination.) Still, the power of television works
two ways: The black youths have made themselves heard, but they have also
made themselves and their whereabouts public knowledge, and have
subsequently been the victims of a bombing. Like Louvinie, the slave
who was silenced because of the terrifying power of her stories, which
literally scared her young, white master to death, the black youths have
also been silenced by death for challenging racial segregation.
Meridian also scrutinizes the less dramatic effects of black access to
the media. Again, there is no single reaction to resistance. As Foucault
explains, “Focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying
densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive
way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain
types of behavior” (96). Walker demonstrates the ripple effect of the
media coverage. The TV depiction of the brutality used against
marching Civil Rights workers indirectly influences Meridian’s ability to
go to college. As her high school principal states, “. . . a generous (and
wealthy) white family in Connecticut— who wished to help some of the
poor, courageous blacks they saw marching and getting their heads
whipped nightly on TV—had decided, as a gesture of their liberality and
concern, to send a smart black girl to Saxon College in Atlanta, a
school this family had endowed for three generations” (86). Although
at face value this would seem to be a positive effect of TV coverage, the
narrator’s ironic tone serves as an implicit critique. The word wealthy, in
parentheses, mediates the generosity of the white family by indicating
that this was no financial sacrifice for them. And the sincerity of their
action is undermined by its being described as “a gesture of their liberality
and concern”; its real import is to enhance their own “positive” image as
liberals. Television brings the violence of the marches into their
Connecticut home, but the family’s reaction of sending a smart black
girl to a school that is segregated by
race and sex does very little to combat racism and sexism, as is indicted
by the fact that the family for three generations has been giving money to
Saxon, a school which enforces middle-class standards of lady-like
decorum and does not condone involvement in the Civil Rights
Movement.
Photography: Through a Different Lens
If, as suggested earlier, movies provide some of the most limiting and
limited forms of media representations, photography is one of the most
widely accessible and varied forms, and it serves as an important
symbol of self- representation in Meridian. The family photo album
became an important means of documenting the major events and
activities of the family, and with the advent of affordable cameras
photography became a popularly accessible art form. (For Lynne and
Meridian one of the signs of their alienation from their families is the
fact that Lynne has no photos of her parents and Meridian’s mother
has photos of other people’s children, not her own.) The history of
photography is one associated not only with recording the lives of the
wealthy and famous but also one of capturing everyday people and
places. Photography, more than any other visual medium, has been used
to record the lives of the poor and the disenfranchised.11
Walker, of course, does not condone all aspects of photography.
She is well aware of its objectifying potential and the history of the
visual depiction of black women as the exotic Other. As Mary Ann Doane
explains, “Within a photographic discourse which brought the dark
continent home to Europeans, the exotic and the erotic were welded
together, situating the African woman as the signifier of an excessive,
incommensurable sexuality” (213). Walker demonstrates this with the
example of the white exchange student at Saxon who takes
“photographs of the girls straightening their hair and also of them
coming out of the shower” as if they were natives in the National
Geographic. The exchange student is informed by the Saxon students that
“‘this here ain’t New Guinea’” (103). The camera, however, in its most
positive aspect facilitates a link between the object and the subject.
Truman, through his art, is able to create Meridian as a profitable and
silent object that cannot question or challenge his motives or his art.
However, when he uses the camera to take a picture of Lynne surrounded
by black children, who take turns combing her hair, he finds he cannot
take the picture. The camera forces him to see (though not fully
acknowledge) the contradictions in his life. He cannot aestheticize his
ambivalent relationship with Lynne. “What stops him he will not, for
the moment, have to acknowledge: It is a sinking, hopeless feeling
about opposites, and what they do to each other” (129).
For Meridian the camera serves as a symbol of her ability to see her
world through a different lens. While at college Meridian begins to
develop her own
representation of the world through her photographs (she “decorate[s]

the ceiling, walls, backs of doors and the adjoining toilet with large
photographs of trees and rocks and tall hills and floating clouds, which
she claim[s] she knew” [38]). Her photographs of nature, while soothing,
cannot insulate her from the harsh external realities that she encounters
in her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, nor from the
repressive rules of Saxon’s code of lady-like behavior. At the end of the
novel, however, the metaphor of the camera and two key photographs (a
picture of a slain Civil Rights worker and the rejuvenated Sojourner tree)
help her to recontextualize the stifling aspects of religion, as represented
by her mother, and the unrelenting aspects of revolutionary politics, as
represented by her friend Anne-Marion. Meridian’s insight occurs during a
visit to a reformed church:
She was aware of the intense heat that closed around the
church and the people moving slowly, almost grandly up the
steps, as if into an ageless photograph. And she, standing
across the street, was not part of it. Rather, she sensed herself
an outsider, as a single eye behind a camera that was aimed
from a corner of her youth, attached now only because she
watched. If she were not there watching, the scene would be
exactly the same, the “picture” itself never noticing that the
camera was missing. (193-94)
In using the metaphor of the camera, Meridian does not disturb or

appropriate the past (the ageless photograph); it is independent of her
gaze and has its own importance and autonomy, but simultaneously the
camera gives her a perspective from which to view the scene. This is
an important passage because it holds the key to Meridian’s
struggle to define herself as a woman and an activist within the black
community. In the past she has resisted both the conservative
elements of the church and the radical and potentially violent aspects
of the black power movement. Meridian’s return to the reformed church
allows her to embrace those things in her past that have separated her
from her friends and family, but she does it on her own terms and not
on theirs.
The church which Meridian attends is changed from the inside out.
The building itself is different; the preacher is not only understandable
but he is blatantly political, attacking Nixon, forbidding young men to
participate in the Vietnam War, and mentioning God only “as a
reference.” The music and the icons of the church have been
transformed from passive signs of conformity to signs of active
resistance (198). But the most radicalizing element of this new-old
church is the inclusion of a photograph of a young man killed for his
revolutionary beliefs. The impact of hearing his father’s story and the
congregation’s reaction brings Meridian to the realization that
“she would kill, before she allowed anyone to murder his son again”
(200). It was her refusal to kill in the name of the revolution which
marked her break with the radical movement and her friend Anne-
Marion. The photograph allows Meridian to reconcile her ambivalent
feelings both toward the church and to the revolutionary groups of her
past. By combining the radical and the righteous Meridian can accept
what formerly was unacceptable: “Only in a church surrounded by the
righteous guardians of the people’s memories could she even approach the
concept of retaliatory murder. Only among the pious could this idea
both comfort and uplift” (200).
The final photograph of the novel, that of the new branch on the
Sojourner tree (which Meridian hangs next to her own poems and
Anne-Marion’s letters), serves as a visual sign of the reintegration of
Meridian’s cultural, political, and artistic interests. The fact that Anne-
Marion has sent her the picture confirms Meridian’s reconciliation with the
ideas of the revolutionary groups of her past. And the new sprout signals
her return to health and her return to writing poetry. (Walker has
described her own early poems as “new leaves sprouting from an old
tree” [Gardens 249].) The Sojourner, which was destroyed in the Saxon
student riot, links Meridian to her African heritage, to music, sexuality,
and resistance. The Saxon slaves believed the tree had magical powers,
could talk and make music, and “possessed the power to obscure vision.
Once in its branches, a hiding slave could not be seen” (44). The Saxon
students, including Meridian, believing the tale, used the tree to shelter
their lovemaking.
The “obscured vision” fostered by the Sojourner’s leaves seems
benevolent in comparison to Wallace’s concept of cultural invisibility, yet it is
necessitated by the oppression of slavery in the past and the repression of
female sexuality in the present. Such invisibility can be enabling, but it is
not a solution. The solution for Meridian is not simply to reject the
cultural images of African- American women, nor to sacrifice herself to
them as a revolutionary martyr. She finds a way to see them in a new
critical context which no longer obscures her vision. In the final chapter
of the book, Truman has taken Meridian’s place, implying that he is
now going to see the world from her perspective and to see her within a
new critical context which no longer obscures his vision.
No t E s
1. Barbara Christian, in her thorough reading of Meridian, discusses
the importance of the circular structure of the novel in connecting Meridian’s
personal history with her cultural milieu and with the development of the Civil
Rights Move- ment (Women 204-34).
2. As Barbara Christian observes of Walker’s writing in general, “Walker’s
peculiar sound, the specific mode through which her deepening of self-
knowledge
and self-love comes, seems to have much to do with her contrariness, her
willingness at all turns to challenge the fashionable belief of the day, to
reexamine it in the light of her own experiences and of dearly won principles that
she has previously challenged and absorbed” (Feminist 82-83).
3. As Foucault explains, “Resistance is never in a position of exteriority
in relation to power These points of resistance are present everywhere in the
power
network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt,
source of all rebellions, or pure law of revolution. Instead there is a plurality of
resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary,
improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant,
or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by
definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations” (96).
4. The article “Is Love Really Necessary,” for example, undercuts the
glamour of romance by stressing the difference between the romance of dating
and the reality of marriage. The author agrees that love in marriage is preferable,
but lists six areas of compatibility that are equally important: sexual relations,
money matters, social and entertainment activities, relations with in-laws,
religion, and mutual friends.
5. Critics have expressed various, but interrelated, interpretations of
the importance of the mummy woman. According to Barbara Christian the
opening scene “satirizes the lavish trademarks of the South—the white woman
protected, indeed mummified, by the sanctimonious rhetoric of her society, but
losing even these questionable privileges when she exercises any sexual
freedom” (Women 207- 08). For Deborah McDowell “the mummy woman is a
metaphor for the preservation of dead, no longer viable traditions and
institutions” (264). Picking up on McDowell’s statement, Alan Nadel asserts
that the scene “makes clear the connection between Meridian’s body and the
body politic.” Her paralysis links her to the mummy woman at the same time
that her activism “suggests an alternative to the untenable roles of womanhood
produced by white and male culture and replicated in the mummy-woman’s
alleged history” (60). Karen Stein, Martha McGowan (31), and Peter Erickson
(89), view Meridian’s encounter with the mummy woman as an ironic depiction
of the decline of the Civil Rights Movement. According to Stein, “Walker
suggests that a primary reason for the Movement’s failure was its lack of a
sustained sociopolitical critique” (131).
6. The pattern of death and violence (intentional, accidental, or even
self- induced) as a means to silence and/or punish women who have
abrogated their traditional duties as daughters, wives, or mothers (especially
mothers) is repeated throughout the novel in the stories of Wild Child (who
observes no social conventions and whose only language is obscenities and
farts), Louvinie (who was silenced because of the force and power of her speech),
Fast Mary (who killed her illegitimate child and then herself), and Lynne (who is
dead in the eyes of her family because of her interracial marriage). The silencing
of these women is also directly connected to the death of a child, often their
own. Each of these women represents the devastating consequences of going
outside prescribed limits and serves as a warning to Meridian, whose own
struggles correspond to those of the silenced women: Wild Child, the violation of
lady-like behavior imposed at Saxon; Louvinie, the ability to speak out in the
Civil Rights Movement; Fast Mary, the decision to have an abortion; and
Lynne, estrangement from the family, especially from the mother. Hence,
Meridian, as a twentieth-century black woman, is not excluded from the cult
of true womanhood, but instead suffers from the severity of its behavioral codes.
The
artificial preservation of the mummy woman and the fundamental question of

her authenticity characterize the basic inadequacy of the cult of true womanhood
as a realistic or desirable model of conduct for a twentieth-century woman.
7. However, even Barnum had his limits. He was persuaded to cancel
the eighteen-foot-long banner of a mermaid which he planned to f ly outside his
New York museum (Werner 56-63).
8. Powers’ earlier nude, Eve Tempted, was considered too indiscreet by
an American buyer who canceled his order. Other art tours that featured nudes
had also received unfavorable press in America (Kasson 48-49).
9. Lynne reifies the life of poor, Southern blacks through a romantic,
artistic perspective that undermines the principles of her participation in the
Civil Rights Movement and her attempt to change the South: “To Lynne, the
black people of the South were Art. This she begged forgiveness for and
tried to hide, but it was no use . . . ‘I will pay for this,’ she often warned
herself. And yet, she would stand perfectly still and the sight of a fat black
woman singing to herself in a tattered yellow dress, her voice rich and full of
yearning, was always—God forgive her, black folks forgive her—the same
weepy miracle that Art always had for her” (130). Lynne “pays for” her
objectified view of blacks by living out the negative ramifications of the
stereotype that she has romanticized. Living in poverty on the Lower East Side,
Lynne dramatically represents that there is nothing romantic or artistic about
her plight. The real dangers of poverty, inadequate housing, and poor living
conditions are graphically brought home to Lynne by the brutal death of her
daughter Camara (174). Lynne exemplifies Walker’s criticism that white women
have not included black women under the heading of “women” because that
would mean having to deal with the implication of poverty for black women as
mothers (Gardens 373).
10. Truman is first the “preppie,” French-speaking, jeans-and-polo-shirt-clad,
clean-cut young man of the early Civil Rights Movement. His affinities are
with Western culture (especially anything French) and the middle class.
Meridian notes that he has the face of an Ethiopian warrior that you see in
magazines, and when we next see him he has picked up on the increased
emphasis on African culture: He wears a “flowing Ethiopian robe of extravagantly
embroidered white, his brown eyes aglow with excitement” (100). As the New
York artist, Truman smokes little cigars and has his hair in two dozen small
braids. When he returns to the South to find Meridian, he has adopted yet
another persona—the “revolutionary artist.” Meridian notes ironically that he
looks like Che Guevara, “not by accident I’m sure,” in his “tan cotton jacket
of the type worn by Chairman Mao” (24).
11. While Hollywood responded to the Depression with big-budget
musicals, documentary photographers traveled the South and Southwest
recording the devastating effects of the drought and Depression. Richard
Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices, which recorded the movement of blacks
from the rural South to the urban North, relied on the Farm Service
Administration’s archives for its photos.
Wo R K s C I t E D
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman

Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Chomsky, Noam. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Boston: South
End Press, 1989.
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York:
Pergamon Press, 1985.
———. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport:
Greenwood, 1980.
“Devil Child.” Tan 10 (Apr. 1960): 32+.
Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Erickson, Peter. “‘Cast Out Alone / To Heal / And Re-create / Ourselves’: Family-Based
Identity in the Work of Alice Walker.” CLA Journal 23 (1979): 71–94.
Foucault, Michel. The Histoiy of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New
York: Vintage, 1980.
Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American
Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1971.
Harris, Neil. Humbug. Boston: Little, 1973.
“I Can’t Have Your Baby.” Tan 10 (May 1960): 26+.
“I Was a Victim of the Beat Generation.” Tan 10 (Feb. 1960): 10–
12. “Is Love Really Necessary?” Tan 10 (Jan. 1960): 16+.
Kasson, Joy. Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture.
New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990. “Married at Seventeen.” Tan 10 (Apr.
1960): 15+.
McDowell, Deborah. “The Self in Bloom.” CLA Journal 24 (1981): 262–75.
McGowan, Martha J. “Atonement and Release in Alice Walker’s Meridian.” Critique: Studies
in Modern Fiction 23.1 (1981): 25–36.
Nadel, Alan. “Reading the Body: Alice Walker’s Meridian and the Archeology of Self.”
Modern Fiction Studies 34 (1988): 55–68.
“No Father For Their Babies.” Tan 10 (Dec. 1959): 10+.
Perkins, Ann. “What Makes a Girl Bad?” Tan 10 (Mar. 1960): 38+.
Stein, Karen. “Alice Walker’s Critique of Revolution.” Black American Literature Forum
20 (1986): 129–142.
Tate, Claudia. “Allegories of Black Female Desire; or, Reading Nineteenth-Century
Sentimental Narrative of Black Female Authority.” Changing Our Own Words: Essays
on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. 98–126.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.
———. Meridian. New York: Simon, 1976.
Wallace, Michele. “Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Visual in
Afro- American Culture.” Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective. Ed. Hilde Hein and
Carolyn Korsmeyer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 205–17.
Werner, M. R. Barnum. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1923.
Wright, Richard. Twelve Million Black Voices. New York: Viking, 1941.
MAR CIA NOE AND MICHAE L J AYNE S
Teaching Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”

Employing Race, Class, and Gender,
with an Annotated Bibliography
“Because I’m black and I’m a woman and because I was brought up
poor and because I’m a Southerner . . . the way I see the world is quite
different from the way many people see it” —Alice Walker
“The whole point of reading literature, it seems to me, is to learn to

have sympathies, imaginative relationships with people who are different
from one’s self.” —Irving Howe
W e write as a teacher and a student who have found that race, class,
and gender can function heuristically to complicate and enrich students’
readings of Alice Walker’s, “Everyday Use” and to encourage students to
take a more reflective approach to this story. We have found that reading
and discussing the story from these perspectives can help students
question the easy conclusions they might be tempted to draw from the
story and understand the complexities that lie beneath its surface. This
approach can also help students transcend their personal circumstances
and gain a better understanding of people who are culturally
different from themselves.
For Marcia “Everyday Use” is a story, popular with students, that
can appear deceptively simple and one-dimensional to the casual reader,
perhaps because it is focalized through the first-person narrator, Mama.
As Susan Farrell suggests, this narrative strategy can have the effect of
persuading
Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction, 5:1; Fall 2004: pp. 126–136. ©2004 Marcia
Noe.
155
156 Marcia Noe and Michael Jaynes
students that Mama’s statements are completely accurate and her values
are co-extensive with those of the implied author; this dependence on
an unreliable narrator can lead to an oversimplified and distorted
reading of the story. Students who engage with the story only
superficially tend to identify Maggie, the stay-at-home country daughter,
as the “good daughter” and Dee, her sophisticated city sister, as the “bad
daughter,” taking their cues from Mama’s descriptions of them. When
students are asked to discuss the story first from the perspective of
gender, then race, and finally class, they are able to move away from
identifying with Mama to engage critically with the story and interrogate
the narrator and her values. A related problem concerns the story’s
denouement, in which Mama gives her heirloom quilts to Maggie, even
though Dee has asked for them. Students tend to draw a simplistic
moral lesson from the fact that humble, self-effacing Maggie wins out
over her better educated elder sister rather than to examine the story’s
movement and components carefully and critically to arrive at a more
nuanced reading, which can be facilitated if the story is approached from
the perspectives of race, class, and gender and the ways in which they
are imbricated.
For Michael, looking at the story through the lenses of gender, race
and class helped him transcend the self-involved sphere of his personal
existence to experience the reality of the Other. Discussing the ways
that race, class, and gender are important in “Everyday Use” helped
Michael to see himself in a way that he had never before: as an educated,
middle-class, Christian, heterosexual white male who is privileged in
many ways. In his opinion, this story is most valuable to a reader such as
himself, who had never fully examined his place and role in a patriarchal
society until he read the story from these perspectives. Doing so helped
him to move closer to the possibility of seeing the story from the point of
view of a poor black southern woman. By seeing how Maggie, Dee, and
Mama deal with issues of their past, their femininity, their class, and
what it means or doesn’t mean to be black, he gained a small amount of
understanding of his race, class, and gender’s role in the oppression of
people like these characters.
Focusing on gender can help students see how different the story is
from the typical story or play by a male author. “Everyday Use” is
gynocentric; it is not a story about fathers and sons, as is often the case in
Western literature, but about mothers and daughters. Stories about
fathers and sons usually involve rivalries, competitions and the passing
down of goods. Often the object of contention is an inheritance of land
or money. In canonical plays, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Desire
Under the Elms, there is typically much lying, cheating, and bickering
to get the inheritance; often it is the oldest son who comes out on top.
There are similar elements in “Everyday Use,” but instead of the usual
father-to-son inheritance plot as seen in the plays of Miller, Williams,
and O’Neill, it is cultural heritage, rather than land or
Teaching Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” 157
money, that is at stake in the story, represented by the quilts and butter
churn that Dee wants to appropriate. And while the eldest son often
inherits wealth in patriarchal works, in “Everyday Use” Mama gives her
legacy of quilts to Maggie, the uglier, scarred, less flamboyant, less
confident, more traditional, less-educated younger sister rather than to
her elder sister, Dee. The story thus is an inversion of the canonical story
of masculine inheritance and thereby offers an alternate value system as
well as an alternate plot.
Patricia Kane, in “The Prodigal Daughter in Alice Walker’s
‘Everyday Use,’” emphasizes that Dee—the prodigal, wandering daughter
of the story— does not receive the inheritance, unlike the prodigal son of
the Biblical version of the tale: “The reversals and variations from the
Biblical prodigal son story suggest that when women make the
choices, the tale expresses different values” (7). “Everyday Use”
establishes a more community-focused value system, as seen in Mama’s
giving the quilts to Maggie, that is thus placed in sharp opposition to the
more patriarchal values of a play like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Desire
Under the Elms. While land is worked, cared for, and overseen by
individuals and handed down from one individual to another, usually from a
father to an eldest son, quilts are communal, woven into existence with
the hands and skill of women, testaments to the importance of women’s
space and values. In “Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker’s
‘Everyday Use,’” Houston Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker point out
that while Dee is the one who is most intent on possessing the quilts, it is
Maggie who actually is skilled in quilting, capable of making her own
quilts, and thus, in Mama’s eyes, the daughter who is best able to
understand, care for, and cherish the quilts, and by extension, the
family’s history and culture.
While employing gender as an analytical category to discuss “Everyday
Use,” Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” can
further elucidate this story. In this essay Walker asks what it must
have meant for “[a] black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’
time? In our great- grandmother’s time? It is a question with an
answer cruel enough to stop the blood” (233). Walker writes of
nameless great-grandmothers who lived lives of oppression while
longing to model “heroic figures of rebellion, in stone or clay”(233). This
statement led Michael to consider the popular image of artists. Picasso,
Michelangelo, Pollack came immediately to mind: all males. He then
realized that he had no conception of what it must mean for a woman,
whether black or a member of any other race, to be an artist today. He
realized that while it is difficult enough for a contemporary woman
artist to be taken seriously in a male-dominated culture, it would have
been nearly unimaginable for women of our great-grandmothers’ time to
be considered serious artists. In this context, “In Search of Our Mother’s
Gardens” illuminates the first paragraph of “Everyday Use,” in which
Mama and Maggie have readied the front yard in anticipation of Dee’s visit,
sweeping
“the hard clay . . . clean as a floor” and lining “the fine sand around the
edges
. . . with tiny, irregular grooves . . .” (2012). We can thus see Mama
not only as poor, unsophisticated, and uneducated, but also as a
twentieth-century incarnation of those would-be artist grandmothers and
great-grandmothers that Walker writes about in her essay. Lacking the
education and background to create through elite media such as
sculpture or painting, Mama expresses her heritage and creativity through
ordering her front yard and furnishing her home with artifacts crafted by
her ancestors.
Another way in which the lens of gender can help students see
more complexity in the characters is the way that this perspective
foregrounds their androgynous dimensions. Mama is female, yet quite
masculine in appearance and in her self-proclaimed ability to “kill and
clean a hog as mercilessly as a man . . . eat pork liver cooked over the
open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog . . . and
[knock] a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge
hammer and [have] the meat hung up to chill before nightfall” (2013).
Dee is more feminine in dress and appearance, yet she is very assertive.
She seems to command Hakim-A-Barber, the story’s only male character,
according to her will. It could even be argued that the homely Maggie,
lacking the traditional feminine attributes of beauty, grace, and style, is
somewhat androgynous as well. None of the female characters is
completely, traditionally “feminine.” They all contain worlds of female
experience. By reading the story from the perspective of gender, we are
better able to understand and appreciate the complexity of the female
personality and the female values and world view that the story
endorses. Conversely, the story can help male students understand
what it means to be a man in a patriarchal society, enabling them, the
traditional holders of power and privilege, to be able to step back and
examine their own status as well as to see how minorities view them. As
a result of reading “Everyday Use” with an emphasis on gender, male
students can begin to become more understanding, tolerant, and better
men.
Race is a second lens through which a productive reading of “Everyday
Use” can proceed. Toward this end, Barbara Smith’s seminal essay,
“Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” can be usefully placed in
dialogue with the story. Smith says that “[w]hen white women look at
Black women’s works they are of course ill-equipped to deal with the
subtleties of racial politics” (170). If this is the case, then white males are
doubly removed from Walker’s racial politics; therefore, it is doubly
important that they read and attempt to understand “Everyday Use.” For
example, Michael was surprised by the question that Mama—a confident,
intelligent woman—asks: “Who can even imagine me looking a strange
white man in the eye?” (2013). It would never have occurred to Michael
that a black woman could feel this way; to him, white men are simply
men like any others. However, the story has shown
him that his assumption may not be true, and this revelation makes the
story important to study—especially for white men.
Race plays a critical role ‘in the forming of Mama’s character; she
received a meager education because the colored school she went to
closed down while she was in the second grade. Mama’s sense of herself
as black is also reflected in her statement, regarding the Johnny Carson
daydream, that she couldn’t imagine looking a white man in the eye
or talking back to one. But while it may appear that Mama is self-
conscious about being black while Dee is proud of her black heritage,
looking at the story through the lens of race promotes a more nuanced
reading; it is Dee’s African heritage but not her African American
heritage that she wants to claim. She adopts an African name and
African dress but is plainly not thrilled about the simple cabin in
which Maggie and Mama live. She admires the churn top and dasher,
the benches, the quilts of her ancestors; they are in the distant past,
not in the present, like Mama and Maggie, who threaten to embarrass
Dee with their simple country ways. The objects of contention in the
story, the Lone Star and Walk Around the Mountain quilts, are
significant not only because they are family heirlooms but because of
their role in African American history, a history of which Dee
demonstrates no awareness: since the time of slavery, African American
women have used quilts to tell stories and send messages; moreover,
quilts are widely believed to have been used as signals in the
Underground Railroad (Tobin and Dobard 26–33, 80–81, 118–119;
Baker and Pierce-Baker 309; Perry).
At the beginning of the story, Mama imagines that she is too
black for Dee, saying, in her self-description at the end of the Johnny
Carson daydream, “But of course all this does not show on television. I
am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds
lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake” (2013). Dee brings race
directly to the forefront of the story when she explains why she changed
her name: “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people
who oppress me” (2015). Mama points out that Dee is named after her
aunt, and the name has a long history in their family. Ironically, Dee takes
on an African name, Wangeroo Leewanika Kemanjo, and in doing so, she
elides her African American heritage at the same time that she embraces
her African heritage. And, as Helga Hoel points out, the “African” name
she adopts is of questionable authenticity (37-38). Further, we can see this
pattern continuing with her request for the quilts. Dee wants the quilts,
not for “everyday use,” as their African American makers intended, but for
objects of art to link her back to her African roots. Dee is more attractive,
more curvaceous, and more stylish than her sister Maggie. She has the
benefit of the trendy African mystique while Maggie is scarred from
the fire that consumed the family’s first house, a loss that Dee did not
mourn. Maggie’s scars suggest the scars of three hundred years of
African American slavery.
Dee has the university education while Maggie and Mama have the much
different education of the fields, the crafts, the country folkways of
their African American heritage. Even the two-dimensional Hakim
emphasizes how far removed is Dee from her African American heritage;
Hakim and his hair, his long goatee, his unpronounceable name, and
philosophical doctrines are an index of how African Dee has become.
Since Maggie, in the end, gets the quilts that Dee has asked for, the
value system of the story is seen to be quite different from that of
Dee, whose objections to Maggie’s using the quilts are tantamount to a
rejection of her African American heritage of manual labor and simple
lifestyle.
Reading the story from the perspective of class can help the student
to focus on and better understand the turning point of the story and
denouement: when Dee asks for the family heirloom quilts and is refused
them by Mama. Although Mama and Dee are alike in personality,
confidence, assertiveness, and intelligence, Mama and Maggie have
something more important in common; they are both working-class
characters, while Dee has moved into the middle class. She carries
herself, dresses, speaks, and conducts herself according to middle-class
norms. Before she became educated and realized that her humble roots
could be used to enhance her status, she was ashamed of her working-
class origins. Mama tells us, “She wrote me once that no matter where
we ‘choose’ to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will never
bring her friends” (2014). We also learn that the “priceless” quilts that
Dee now wants were the same ones that Mama tried to give her when
she went away to college; at that time Dee didn’t want them: “[She told
me they were old-fashioned, out of style” (2017). Dee’s new interest in her
roots stems from her new awareness that aspects of her history can be
used as accessories of style and as elements of interior decoration to
elevate her in other people’s eyes and to solidify her middle-class status;
she can appear more intelligent, more compassionate, more thoughtful,
more in touch with her heritage. She has brought Hakim to visit her
family in order to use Mama and Maggie and the house she hates and
the quilts she didn’t want earlier to show him her humble roots. For
her the dasher, the churn top, the quilts, and Hakim himself are
fashion accessories, status symbols that Dee uses to show Mama and
Maggie that she has a greater understanding and appreciation of her
heritage than they do. She even tells Mama,“You just don’t understand . .
. your heritage” (2018). The irony is that the African American past Dee is
denying links Mama and Maggie to the African heritage she desires
so intently in a way that she could never experience, at least without a
considerable change in mindset. Maggie will marry John Thomas, the
local boy, and carry on the African American traditions and lifestyle
that Mama taught her. Maggie will continue to quilt and churn butter
and raise children and live proudly and simply; Dee, in objecting to
Maggie’s getting the quilts because “[s]he’d
probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use” (2017) is

rejecting her working-class black roots and substituting, in her plan to
hang the quilts rather than use them, a more middle-class ethos,
ironically getting further and further from the roots she thinks she is
attempting to reclaim.
The irony of Dee’s plan can be further emphasized by honing in on
the quilts themselves and the way that their intended uses differentiates
between classes. Mama and Maggie see them as items of everyday use. They
both know how to make them and know that they are made to keep people
warm. However, Dee sees them as works of art to hang on walls. Poor
people make quilts; rich people buy them. To the poor, quilts are made to
keep people warm and dashers are made to churn butter; to the rich these
items become fashionable art objects with which to decorate dwellings.
Dee says that she wants the quilts, but not the ones that have been
stitched by a machine around the edges. Mama says, “That’ll make them
last better.” Again, the emphasis is on use. Dee says, “That’s not the point.
These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did
all this stitching by hand. Imagine!” (2017). This statement is also ironic.
Mama doesn’t have to imagine; she knows. She quilts by hand also. Again
we see the irony in Dee’s words: she is out of line by proclaiming these
facts as if Mama didn’t know them first hand. Dee didn’t want these
quilts until they became fashionable, a fact that Walker emphasizes.
When students are divided into small groups and asked to use first
gender, then race, and finally class as analytical categories in their
consideration of “Everyday Use,” with each group sharing their insights with
the class as a whole on the first topic before moving on to discuss the
next, they experience both enlightenment and frustration. While the close
focus on each discrete topic can generate many insights, such as those
discussed by Michael above, this method also demonstrates to students
how difficult it is to discuss how race functions in the story, for example,
without also discussing class or gender. For example, is Mama consigned
to a life of poverty because she is black, because she is a female, or because
she is working class? All three factors would seem to be causative here
and not easily separated. At this point the formula race + gender = class
can be brought up for discussion. It is equally difficult to separate gender
and race in considering how the central symbol of the story, the quilts,
functions in “Everyday Use.” This exercise is valuable because it demonstrates
how powerful the categories of gender, race, and class can be when used as
heuristics; it is also useful in showing students how these terms are
imbricated.
A review of the scholarship on “Everyday Use” reveals that
almost no one has discussed how the story should be taught. As a
starting point, we recommend, for an undergraduate class, the third
chapter of Robert MacMahon’s Thinking About Literature, “Alice Walker’s
‘Everyday Use’: A Summary and Analysis of Characters and Motives.”
There are a number of other secondary sources that we have found most
useful when examining the
story from the perspectives of race, class, and gender; they are listed in
the annotated bibliography that appears at the end of this essay. Also
available is a two-part series of films from Films for the Humanities &
Sciences (www. films.com; 800-257-5126): Alice Walker: “Everyday Use”
and Alice Walker: A Stitch in Time. The former is a 26-minute
dramatization of the story and the latter is a 22-minute interview with
Alice Walker that focuses on specific issues of gender, race, and class
that the story raises.
We believe that“Everyday Use”is an ideal story with which to
demonstrate both the power and the pitfalls of using gender, race, and
class as analytical categories with which to approach a work of fiction in
the undergraduate literature classroom. In reading “Everyday Use,”
Michael experienced a story about black, working-class women and
thereby became more open to the history, values, and concerns of people
who are completely different from him in terms of gender, race, and class.
Thus, the story is valuable not only as a well- crafted work of fiction but
as a means of eroding the cultural egocentrism that many students bring
to college. If these students are exposed to “Everyday Use” and its
complexities, a shift in cultural consciousness may occur. As Gary Saul
Morson says,
To engage with a work, one projects oneself into the alien

world of another culture and another time, into the mind of
any author who judged and saw things differently from the way
we usually do, and into the thoughts and feelings of characters
quite unlike ourselves.
Walker’s story can stand on its own as a work of art, but it can also
function as a catalyst to put us on the road to a multicultural,
enlightened society. This change can begin with a close examination of
Walker’s “heroic figures of rebellion” in “Everyday Use.”
Wo R K s C I t E D
Baker, Houston, and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. “Patches, Quilts and

Community in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use.’” Alice Walker: Critical
Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K A.
Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, Inc. 1993. 309–316.
Farrell, Susan. “Fight vs. Flight: A Re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker’s
‘Everyday Use.’” Electronic Collection A83585372: RN A83585372. 1998
Newberry College.
Hoel, Helga. “Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use,’”
American Studies in Scandinavia 31.1 (1999): 34–42.
Kane, Patricia. “The Prodigal Daughter in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use.’” Notes
on Contemporary Literature 15.2 (1985): 7.
MacMahon, Robert. “Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’: A Summary and Analysis

of Characters and Motives.” Thinking About Literature. Portsmouth,
New Hampshire: Heinemann, 2002.
Morson, Gary Saul. “Teaching as Impersonation.” Literary Imagination 4.2 (Spring
2002). 145–151.
Perry, Regenia. Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilts. Rizzoli Art Series. Series Editor
Norma Broude, n.p.; n.d.
Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” The New Feminist Criticism:
Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 168–85.
Tobin, Jacqueline L., and Raymond G. Dobard. Hidden in Plain View: The
Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. New York:
Doubleday, 1999.
Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2,
Eighth Edition. Ed. George McMicahel and others. Upper Saddle River,
New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. 2002–2018.
———. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. 1974. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1983. 231–243.
Below appear some secondary sources that will be helpful to the

instructor who wishes to use race, gender, and class as analytical
categories in teaching “Everyday Use”:
Baker, Houston, A. Jr., and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. “Patches: Quilts and

Community in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’.” A1ice Walker: Critical
Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A.
Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, Inc. 1993. 309–316.
Quilting patches could be defined as the faded glory of the already
gone, and they are compared to women as they are a liminal element
between wholes. Weaving, shaping, sculpting and quilting provide responses
to chaos; they are survival strategies in the face of dispersal. Traditional
African cultures were scattered by the Europeans, and the female
European tradition of quilting became a black women’s folk art. Those
outside the sorority of quilting often fail to understand the dignity and
grace of quilt makers taking haphazardly scattered patches and
combining them into articles of everyday use. A discussion of the short
story “Everyday Use” with particular emphasis on the black woman’s art
of quilting and what the quilts represent follows. Maggie is described as
the “arisen goddess” of the story. She goes from inglorious to goddess
due to her long ancestral memory and knowledge of quilt-making. Links
between “Everyday Use” and The Color Purple are discussed.
Bauer, Margaret D., “Alice Walker: Another Southern Writer Criticizing

Codes Not Put to ‘Everyday Use’.” Studies in Short Fiction 29 (1992):
143–151.
Parallels are drawn between the stories in Alice Walker’s In Love
and Trouble and works by authors such as Katherine Anne Porter,
Flannery
O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. Walker writes about

the South as a place and a group of people she loves but is troubled
by also.
Christian, Barbara, T., “Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as

Wayward.” “‘Everyday Use’ Alice Walker.” Ed. Barbara T. Christian.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994: 123–148.
Walker’s large body of writing contains recurrent motifs, including
the black woman as creator and the black woman’s level of wholeness
reflecting the health of the community. Walker’s works tend to be
centered on black women, especially In Love and Trouble, Can’t Keep a
Good Woman Down, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Meridian,
and The Color Purple, This tendency is also reflected in her personal effort
to rescue the works of Zora Neale Hurston from oblivion. Rather than
being elaborate in her writing, she is organically spare, and she uses a
concentrated distillation of language. Several works are discussed in the
context of black protagonists, other black authors, cultural nationalism,
and the psychological impact of oppression.
Walker is drawn to the process of gat-making as a model for her
own craft. Out of everyday, random, unconnected pieces come clarity,
imagination and beauty. Walker not only embraces quilts as “high” art;
she also admires their functional beauty as well. “In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens” and “Everyday Use” are discussed in relation to
women’s art and quilt-making. Meridian and other stories are discussed
along with a more lengthy treatment of Celie and other characters in
The Color Purple.
Farrell, Susan. “Fight vs. Flight: A Re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker’s

‘Everyday Use’.” Electronic Collection: A83585372 RN: A83585372. 1998
Newberry College.
Most people agree that Walker’s story is about a mother’s awakening
to one daughter’s superficiality and to the other’s deep-seated understanding
of heritage. A reading such as this condemns the older, more “worldly”
sister. This popular view is far too simple, and Dee should be
commended for several things. Because the story is told through the first-
person narration of Mama, and all first-person narrators tend to be
unreliable, the reader needs to reflect critically upon Mama’s narration.
For example, Mama may be projecting her fears onto Maggie about Dee’s
arrival. We are told through Mama, and since we never get inside
Maggie’s head, it is impossible to know what Maggie is thinking. We
find out, during the Johnny Carson fantasy, that Mama is ashamed of
her appearance and will be nervous until Dee leaves. Mama says Dee
would wish her to be more slender and lighter in color, but we cannot
know if this is truly Dee’s wish or not.
Mama remembers Dee as being self-centered and demanding,
but she also remembers her as determined fighter who has style.
Mama can’t imagine looking a white man in the eye, and Dee acts as
if she has never
heard the world tell her “no.” Dee is educated, and perhaps the
“simple pleasures” Mama and Maggie enjoy are not enough for complex,
modern African-Americans. Dee will move on, and Maggie will
remain. She will remain the same as she and many of her ancestors have
been for centuries. She will remain unchallenging, uneducated, and
unconvinced that the world owes her more. Dee’s power and fire and
active seeking of a better lot in life should be admired, not deplored.
Dee’s new name is not a throwing off of her heritage but a
reclaiming of her past. It is an active step to rising above what has been
allowed her by the dominant class and ideology. Walker’s novel Meridian
is also mentioned in the same light in a short discussion.
Kane, Patricia. “The Prodigal Daughter in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’” Notes
on Contemporary Literature. 15.2 (1985): 7.
Walker’s story is a variation on the prodigal son story with which we
are all familiar. It is humorous and it pleases us by having the fatted calf
received by the stay-at-home, not the wanderer. The difference in the
ending suggests that when the story is told by and about women, the
tale takes on different values. This is a useful look at a variation of the
archetypal prodigal child vs. the familiar daughter and the inversion of
values it suggests.
Keating, Gail. “Alice Walker: In Praise of Maternal Heritage.” The Literary Griot.
6.1 (1994): 26–37.
This is a look at maternal heritage that utilizes Alice Walker’s essay,
“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” as a framework from within
which to discuss The Color Purple and “Everyday Use.” Walker
acknowledges the huge contributions of women and traces the influence
of women through her own matrilineage. Nina Auerbach’s book
Communities of Women is also cited as demonstrating how males are out to
conquer the world while women have no such aspirations. Virginia Woolf
’s A Room of One’s Own is also examined. Walker says we must broaden
our conception of Art. Women use all sorts of creative media in
artistic expression, even though they are often not recognized as such.
The same idea is ingrained in Walker’s “Everyday Use.” Both Mama and
Dee recognize the value of the quilts in question because they both
realize, in different fashions, that they are art. They are made with pieces
of their history and heritage and they have been assembled with love.
Dee doesn’t understand that Mama and Maggie have found a natural
outlet for their creativity.
Willa Cather’s fiction examines some of the same values. Cather was
much concerned with the female tradition and its roots. Walker’s
hugely successful novel The Color Purple is also examined in the same
light as the other works. Quilt-Making (and therefore matrilineal heritage)
is found in The
Color Purple as well. Celie, the main character in this novel, also
understands and values the simplicity in her life, and this makes her
wise. Celie’s freedom is provided through her ability to sew. Maternal
heritage is examined in each of the works with special attention to the
two by Walker.
McMahon, Robert. Thinking About Literature. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002.

This book provides practical advice about how to teach a variety of
topics and stories. Chapter three, “Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’: A
Summary and Analysis of Characters and Motives,” is of special interest.
A summary of the story is given which ties the story to the prodigal
son story, and then some pedagogical advice is given. The chapter
provides some “getting acquainted” reading exercises and some thought-
prompting questions to get students’ minds on the subject and theme of
the story. Then, different situations are outlined, including “Dee vs.
Maggie,” “Mama’s Moral Character,” “Why Does Mama Take the Quilts
from Dee and Give Them to Maggie?” More class-related exercises are
given with suggested readings of the story designed to motivate students
to think about the story in less obvious ways.
Tuten, Nancy. “Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’.” Explicator. 51.2 (1993):25–28.

Tuten focuses on the way in which both Dee and Mama use
language to their advantage. Dee uses language to condescend to and
subjugate her sister and mother. The first-person narrator/mother seems
helpless, at the beginning of the story, but this changes as the story
progresses. Mama gains control through her language. Mama and
Maggie are definitely joined as a team when Dee shuns her family
identity. Taking a new name is an exercise in language. Dee trades the
language of her oppressors for the language of her past. Mama gains
power when she does this. This shift in power is subtly illustrated in a
late-story shift in tense from present and future to past. In the end, Mama
shows power by not mentioning Dee at all in the final paragraph of the
story while she mentions Maggie twice by name. The characters’ power
is achieved by language, and it is Mama who retains the most power by
the end of the story.
Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” 1974. In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1983: 231–243.
Walker asks from where does she, the writer, come and what is
her tradition? She explores these questions by relating a female heritage
that makes her different from other writers. She traces the images of black
women in literature and discusses in depth the creative legacy of
ordinary, unknown black women in the South. She uses her own
matrilineage as an example. Black women of yesteryear had no
traditional creative outlet for their genius,
so they made their own in everyday activities such as quilting because

these were the only outlets the dominant society left them. Gardening,
quilting and cooking are similar such arts, so subtle, natural, and
culturally ingrained that the artist may have been unaware of her
creation. Time has transformed such creation—considered mundane in
the past—into high art, as the anonymous quilt in the Smithsonian
testifies. A discussion of that quilt’s impact on the author ties in her
more recent work, with its themes of black women’s creativity, and
her own transformation.
L A UR I E MCMI L L AN
Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker’s

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
S ince the 1970s, the personal voice has been brought to bear more
and more often on literary criticism, leading Nancy Miller to describe the
1990s as a time of “confessional culture” that manifested itself in
academia with “personal criticism and other autobiographical acts” (But
Enough xiv, 1–2).1 Though we have now entered a new century, the trend
does not appear to be waning, yet autobiographical criticism is still often
greeted with hesita- tion. While many scholars using personal writing
in their criticism claim with Ruth Behar that such work is well-suited to
addressing “serious social issues” (B2), critics point out that the personal
voice does not actually effect change. Daphne Patai, for example,
announces that “personal disclosures” and “self-reflexivity [do] not
change reality. [Such approaches do] not redis- tribute income, gain
political rights for the powerless, create housing for the homeless, or
improve health” (A52). Despite the clear lack of direct political
intervention wrought by personal criticism, however, I am not willing to
dismiss it as completely irrelevant to questions of social justice. Alice
Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) is one text that shows
how self-conscious autobiography can be a useful tool to wield in a
politically- motivated critical practice. Three of Walker’s essays in
particular—“Beyond the Peacock,” “Looking for Zora,” and “In Search
of Our Mothers’ Gardens”—demonstrate how personal criticism can use
performative ele-
Journal of Modern Literature 29:1 (2004): pp. 107–123. © 2004 Indiana University
Press.
169
170 Laurie McMillan
ments to increase its effectiveness. Walker’s particular style of performance

involves the use of story narratives that emphasize the highly
constructed and textually mediated qualities of her self-
representation. Readers are thus encouraged to interpret Walker’s
writing on multiple levels—not only as personal testimony but also as
literary criticism and allegory—effectively bringing the personal
voice into criticism without falling into traps of essentialism. As it
renegotiates readings of the past, then, In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens demonstrates the way literary criticism can use performative
autobiography to influence cultural practices and potentially change
material lives.
The Debate Over Personal Criticism
i. The pros
Although the reasons why critics choose to write autobiographically
vary enormously, three factors are central to the use of personal
criticism in Alice Walker and other writers who are committed to
literary criticism as a vehicle for social change. First, autobiography
allows scholars writing from traditionally marginalized positions to
simultaneously assert the legitimacy of their viewpoints and challenge
perspectives that have been presented as disinterested and universal.
Pamela Klass Mittlefehldt thus claims the personal voice as a way “to
assume the validity and authority of one’s voice, the significance of
one’s experience, and the implicit value of one’s insight and
perspective” (197). Such a gesture is political in itself on occasions
when it challenges ideas about who is allowed to speak. At the same
time, autobiographical criticism has the power to change dominant
discourses by raising awareness of views outside of the mainstream.
Many black feminist critics especially prize the disruptive power of
scholarship: Barbara Smith proposes a “highly innovative” literary
criticism that the black feminist critic “would think and write out of
her own identity” (137), while scholars such as Deborah McDowell and
Valerie Smith believe that attention to the experiences of black women
may potentially radicalize discourses of race and gender. When
followed to its logical outcome, the wariness of false universals and
the valuing of multiple viewpoints lead to a vision of literary criticism
that perpetually attends to issues of difference. Mae Henderson thus
calls for “a multiplicity of ‘interested readings’ which resists the total-
izing character of much theory and criticism” (162). Such a vision
may be at least partially realized through autobiographical criticism as it
focuses on the local and the particular.
Autobiographical criticism may do political work not only by acting as
an antidote to universalizing tendencies but also by affirming the value
of personal writing, a genre long devalued in its associations with both
women
Telling a Critical Story 171
and African Americans. The slogan connecting the personal and the
political in the Women’s Liberation Movement implicitly points to a long
tradition of women’s writing that includes diaries, memoirs, and letters.
Autobiography has also figured strongly in African American traditions,
often in variations of the slave narrative.2 However, such personal writing
has begun to receive widespread critical attention only in the last twenty-
five years, and it still is often read as a sign of the times instead of
being considered on the basis of its own literary merit.3 Embracing
autobiography in literary criticism, then, is one way of claiming personal
writing as a valuable genre. Jane Tompkins further suggests that
traditional scholarly writing tends to maintain “the public-private
dichotomy, which is to say, the public-private hierarchy” that “is a
founding condition of female oppression” (1104). She calls for more
personal modes of writing because “to adhere to the conventions is to
uphold a male standard of rationality that militates against women’s being
recognized as culturally legitimate sources of knowledge” (1105). Other
scholars have similarly turned to autobiographical criticism as part of an
effort to reclaim and revalue a heritage of life-writing while introducing
alternative methods into a critical realm long dominated by white
males.
The use of autobiography in criticism may finally be important
as it inspires change not only in the academy but also outside it, as
readers are drawn into a culture of activism. Personal criticism has the
potential to inspire political action in its readers in two ways: through the
author’s engagement in the subject matter and through connections
forged between literary criticism and material conditions. Many
scholars who have experimented with autobiographical criticism have
brought new enthusiasm to their work, leading Marianne Torgovnick to
suggest that a personal investment is important because it can infuse
writing with an “eloquence” that engages both the author and the reader
(qtd. in Williams 421). Frances Murphy Zauhar concurs, observing that
when “the model of the detached analytical” critic has been replaced with
the critic “engaged in and even transformed by [. . .] literature” (107), the
reader is more likely to become personally invested in the project as well
(115). As personal criticism appeals to both the “heart and intellect,”
readers are more likely to continue the political work initiated by the text
(Behar B2). Furthermore, the personal voice often renders criticism more
widely accessible than would traditional academic prose. As Ruth Behar
argues, one of the most compelling reasons to use a personal voice is
the “desire to abandon the alienating ‘metalanguage’ that closes, rather than
opens, the doors of academe to all those who wish to enter” (B2).
Autobiographical criticism, then, often sparks enthusiastic responses in a
wide range of readers who are drawn into the text by the scholar’s
visible personal investment.
Personal criticism may also move readers towards activism by bringing
literary criticism out of a purely textual realm and into contact with
the
172 Laurie McMillan
socio-material. Jane Tompkins thus turns to personal writing because

academic language is too far “from the issues that make feminism matter.
That make her matter” (1104); she hopes that using an openly
subjective discourse will allow her to better connect scholarship to her
lived experiences. The autobiographical anecdote (a distinct kind of
personal writing) enacts a similar gesture toward material conditions.4
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt suggest that the anecdote
acts as “an interruption that lets one sense that there is something—the
‘real’—outside of the historical narrative” (50), while Joel Fineman
explains that the anecdote is always literary but “is nevertheless
directly pointed towards or rooted in the real” (qtd. in Gallop 3).5 Of
course, literary criticism tends to be connected in many ways to the
cultural milieu whether or not it includes personal anecdotes, but
autobiographical writing makes such connections explicit. Readers are
then more likely to recognize what is at stake in the particular critical
project, and they may feel compelled to join the dramatized struggle in
which the author is engaged. Bringing autobiography to criticism can
potentially inspire social change, then, as it challenges dominant
views, values personal writing, and inspires activism through its
investment in the criticism as a response to lived conditions.
ii. The cons

While many scholars have used the personal voice to invigorate their
critical work and address injustices, the reactions of other scholars have
not been wholly positive. Although some resistance to personal criticism
may stem from defensiveness or unwillingness to reconsider received
paradigms, four potential problems may keep personal criticism from
being politically effective. First, because personal writing by nature
has an inward focus, it can end up being self-absorbed and limited in
scope rather than ultimately moving towards social change. If a
narrative is meaningful only to the person who wrote it or to a select
group of listeners, its political power becomes moot. Linda Kauffman
thus wonders, “Are ‘we’ feminist scholars solipsisti- cally talking only to
ourselves?” (1156), and Nancy Miller explains, “At its worst, the
autobiographical act in criticism can seem to belong to a scene of
rhizomatic, networked, privileged selves” (Getting Personal 25). Daphne
Patai puts it even more forcefully: “I doubt that I am the only one
who is weary of the nouveau solipsism [in academic writing]—all this
individual and collective breast-beating, grandstanding, and plain old
egocentricity” (A52). Any personal writing that does not consider who
the audience is and what it hopes to accomplish is likely to fall into
such a pattern.
Second, because the personal is often considered less valid than
traditional styles of academic writing, those who use such an approach risk
being silenced and/or reinforcing gendered dichotomies. Many academics
will immediately
take scholarship less seriously when it incorporates a personal voice,

leading Nancy Miller to comment, “[W]e’re not sure we want ourselves
going to the bathroom in public—especially as women and feminists—
our credibility is low enough as it is” (Getting Personal 8). Using the
personal voice may also be problematic in feminist work since the
implied values of “sincerity and authenticity [. . .] inevitably lock us
back into the very dichotomies (male intellect versus female intuition;
head versus body, etc.) that so many feminists have spent so much time
trying to dismantle” (Kauffman 1162). Such risks are serious matters
because criticism intended to effect social change may end up
contributing to the binary thinking that is one of the major roots of unjust
practices.
Third, autobiographical criticism can inhibit dialogue by relying on
the authority of experience. Here, an “authentic” voice uses subjectivity as a
way of silencing alternate opinions, perpetuating rather than disrupting
the claim to authority traditionally associated with the objective voice. David
Simpson calls this maneuver “invok[ing] ‘liberal authenticity’” and says it
“can be reduced to a statement like ‘I felt it, therefore it is true’” (qtd.
in Heller A9). Linda Kauffman further explains, “By insisting on the
authority of my personal experience, I effectively muzzle dissent and muffle
your investigation into my motives” (1156). In some cases, the association
between personal experience and scholarship can dictate, either implicitly
or explicitly, who is “allowed” to discuss women’s literature or minority
literature.6 If literary criticism hopes to address injustices, a personal
voice that silences other voices is ineffective because it reinforces a
model of relation based on domination.
Finally, personal criticism often rests in an identity politics as one
member of a group speaks representatively, ignoring differences within
that group. That is, many times when scholars write from a personal
perspective, they point to their position based on gender, race, or another
cultural marker, and they seem to be “speaking as” a member of a particular
group or “speaking for” a particular group (Miller, Getting Personal 20).
David Simpson labels this a “native identity politics,” and he translates it
as, “‘I felt it. I am white. Therefore, this is what white people feel’” (qtd.
in Heller A9). Such positioning becomes ineffective on the one hand
because it can reduce cultural groups to biological functions, as if all
women are the same or all African American women are the same. In
addition, however, even when cultural influences are acknowledged, an
identity politics can develop in which differences among people within a
single group are ignored. Furthermore, when people speak
representatively of an entire group, they also tend to assert that group’s
difference from (an)other group(s), reinforcing problematic oppositions and
stabilizing categories that tend to be fluid and hybrid in actuality.
Each of these four drawbacks to personal criticism could lead to a critical
practice that inadvertently perpetuates rather than changes oppressive
practices.
174 Laurie McMillan
iii. Self-conscious negotiations and Alice Walker

Using the personal voice in literary criticism may potentially be either
revolutionary or conservative. As scholars have used autobiography and
encountered both its inspirations and its frustrations, however, they have
worked through my list of “pros” and “cons” in a number of fruitful
ways. The most successful negotiations tend to bring poststructural
theory into autobiographical practice, so that the critics simultaneously
construct and deconstruct a personal story as they write with highly self-
conscious and self-reflexive styles.7 Such literary criticism is
performative rather than naturalized. “Naturalized” personal criticism
would use an autobiographical voice that presents itself as transparent, as
if reading about a person is to fully know and understand that person and
his or her experiences. “Performative” personal criticism, on the other
hand, highlights the way an identity is taken up and used in a certain
way, drawing attention to autobiography’s media- tion through language
and cultural context. As a performative approach keeps people from
being reduced to their representations, notions of identity remain f luid
and changeable; an essentialist identity politics can then be resisted
rather than enacted through the autobiographical criticism.
Although Walker’s In Search essays were written before the heyday
of poststructural theory, they anticipate the theoretical turn to
performative writing to a great degree. Walker uses the story narrative
to combine her highly particularized experience with literary allusion
and symbolism, helping her to bring “real life” onto the page while
paradoxically highlighting the fictionalized presentation of that “life.”
Walker is thus able to achieve the positive effects of personal criticism
while largely avoiding its pitfalls. Like much personal criticism aiming to
effect socio-political change, Walker’s volume challenges dominant
ideas of the time by asserting the value of marginalized voices (those
of African American women in particular in this case); it explicitly
values autobiographical writing; and it calls readers “beyond
contemplation to action” through Walker’s own investment in the text
and through attention to unjust social conditions (Mittlefehldt 206).8 If
Walker presented herself in naturalized terms, however, much of her
political work would be sabotaged with the implication that race and
gender are stable categories that define the individual. Instead,
Walker presents herself as a somewhat fictionalized character, inhabiting
certain roles in each narrative. This turn to performance not only moves
beyond self-absorption as it attends to audience reception, but it also
implies a fluid and changing notion of subjectivity that avoids gendered
dichotomies, resists claims to authenticity, and problematizes an identity
politics. In other words, while Walker’s autobiography accomplishes
political goals, its performative story elements keep it from operating
within foundationalist assumptions that could ultimately reinforce the
status quo.
Alice Walker tells a critical story

Although Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens works as
an integrated whole in many ways, three essays in particular—“Beyond
the Peacock ” (1975), “Looking for Zora” (1975), and “In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens” (1974)—exemplify a personal criticism performed
through story narratives.9 The three essays share a sense of quest and
tend to comment upon one another as themes and symbols are woven
together among and between them, yet each moves in a distinct
direction. The importance of personal story narratives is suggested not
only through the quest themes but also as Walker “signifies” on the
writers Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf.
“Signifying,” as Henry Louis Gates explains it, is a critical approach with
African American roots that enacts repetition with difference. The
repetition pays tribute to the precursor writer, while the difference is a
way of revising the precursor’s story or practice, often exposing its
limitations.10 Walker’s particular choices of precursor writers highlight
the importance of story that guides her personal critical voice. The
fictional elements of Walker’s personal stories are finally suggested in
the use of three motifs in the essays—houses, mother(s), and gardens—
that bring the literal and symbolic together. As the motifs are
introduced in detailed and concrete ways, they perform several
functions: they particular- ize Walker’s background; they bring Walker’s
critical work in touch with material existence; and they operate as
symbols with significance beyond Walker’s personal experience. The
work that the essays aim to do, the writers that they draw upon, and
the symbols that they use come together to create a model of a radical
and performative personal criticism.
Although “Beyond the Peacock,” “Looking for Zora,” and “In Search of
Our Mothers’ Gardens” are guided by different purposes, they share a
sense of quest that is suggested in their titles. The phrases “beyond,”
“looking,” and “in search” all point to dissatisfaction with what is
currently visible and a commitment to bring into sight that which has
remained hidden. This sense of quest manifests itself in the essays with
an emphasis on process— Walker writes about journeys, both literal and
figurative, which the essays simultaneously recount and enact. That is,
the essays present an ongoing process of discovery and recovery rather than
a final destination of completed work. The focus on quest positions the
essays within a long story tradition, and it also adds a mythic dimension
to Walker’s writing. Quests, after all, are grand and important rather than
ordinary or everyday. In Walker, however, the ordinary and grand are
brought together: she tells simple stories of ordinary lives, but these
stories are written as a matter of communal survival. Walker is very
aware of the history of oppression of African Americans, and she
recognizes the importance of building a heritage to help African
Americans thrive. Ruth Behar might have been characterizing Walker’s
essays when
176 Laurie McMillan
writing that “the best autobiographical scholarly writing sets off on a

personal quest and ultimately produces a redrawn map of social terrain”
(Behar B2). Walker’s quest to help claim, recover, and build upon stories
is a means to her own survival as a writer, but it is also a way to support
the African American community.
Despite the common quest theme, the essays move in quite
distinct directions. “Beyond the Peacock” both problematizes and
affirms an integrationist approach to literature through the specific example
of Flannery O’Connor. Here, Walker recounts a visit she and her mother
made to one of their former homes and the former home of O’Connor,
just down the road. In the course of the visit, Walker muses on
O’Connor’s significance and on her own troubled response to a
privileged white Southern writer. “Looking for Zora” turns to the
building of a black women’s literary heritage as it enacts and encourages
recovery work that can provide markers of the past for future
generations. Walker tells of her journey to Florida, where she tracked
down Hurston’s burial spot so as to mark the site with a headstone.
“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” continues to affirm an African
American women’s literary heritage. In order to explore the roots of black
women’s literature, Walker considers the plight of black women and the
creative work of both Phillis Wheatley and her own mother under
incredibly adverse conditions. While Wheatley may be the more
conventional literary foremother, Walker values her own mother’s use of
gardening as an alternative expression of black women’s creative ability.
Together, the essays turn again and again to the invisibility of a black
women’s literary heritage and begin to build—or rebuild—a tradition of
storytelling and creative expression that can help support the African
American community.
Walker’s commitment to story as a way of moving her personal
voice into a cultural conversation becomes apparent as she signifies upon
Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf. In
“Beyond the Peacock,” Walker adopts O’Connor’s mission in writing but
modifies her use of fiction. As Walker understands it, O’Connor writes
about characters “in times of extreme crisis and loss” in order to help
readers recognize their “responsibility for other human beings” (56).11
Walker similarly seems intent on inspiring “both personal and cultural
levels [of transformation]” (Mittlefehldt 206). However, O’Connor
tends to offer negative examples while Walker portrays positive, even
utopic, models. This difference becomes apparent as Walker retells
O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” to her own
mother. While O’Connor’s story focuses on a mother and son who have
trouble getting along because of their different perspectives, Walker and
her mother tend to respect one another’s viewpoints. For example, Walker
changes her description of O’Connor’s character from “old” to “middle-
aged” due to her mother’s objections (49). Walker’s narrative
also varies from O’Connor’s because it uses a first person

autobiographical voice rather than a third person fictional perspective,
allowing Walker to highlight the way her background affects her
reading of O’Connor. Still, Walker comments on O’Connor’s
Catholicism in order to bring fiction and biography together, and she
embeds the retelling of O’Connor’s stories in her own narrative. Despite
the differences, then, the connections between the two writers throughout
this essay draw attention to the stylized aspects of Walker’s personal
narrative.
Zora Neale Hurston stands in contrast to O’Connor, for Walker
fully embraces Hurston as a role model in “Looking for Zora” and,
in the process, makes storytelling more central.12 Dianne Sadoff argues
that the “structure and material [of “Looking for Zora”] imitates and
so recalls [Hurston’s] Mules and Men” (12), in part because both Hurston
and Walker return to the South with an “ideal” vision that is revealed as
false through their use of “self-irony” (14). More importantly, both
Hurston and Walker are interested in claiming and preserving their
African American heritage. Their journeys and interviews allow them to
come to story in community with others, while their publications are
a means of both saving and sharing what they have found.
Additionally, although both Hurston and Walker present their quests
autobiographically, they both use the term “lies,” which subtly
recasts expectations of autobiography. In Mules and Men, the people
Hurston interviews commonly call their folktales and legends “lies.”
When Walker references these “black folk tales that were ‘made and
used on the spot,’ to take a line from Zora” (98), she echoes her own
lines from a few pages earlier, where she had described her claim to
be Hurston’s niece as a “profoundly useful lie” (95, Walker’s emphasis).
In each case, stories (“lies”) are treasured for their usefulness rather
than their factual veracity. Walker thus demonstrates her willingness to
take on a role (such as that of Hurston’s niece) in order to accomplish a
mission, and she also suggests that even “lies” can contain some
measure of truth: Hurston “is [her] aunt,” even though the familial
bond is a figurative rather than a literal one (102). As she uses the
term “lies” and Hurston’s approaches, then, Walker implies that her
personal writing may be partly folktale—a narrative to be shared on a
storefront where its significance is based on what it might symbolize
—what it might accomplish—rather than on how closely it follows
actual events.
Walker finally signifies on Virginia Woolf, particularly her A Room of
One’s Own, in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” Both writers
combine attention to socio-material conditions with performance and
symbolism. However, the African American oppression Walker writes
of tends to be more horrific than the injustices suffered by the middle-
class white women of Woolf ’s text, and Walker becomes more personally
involved in her text than
178 Laurie McMillan
does Woolf. In her well-known volume, Woolf argues that women have
been categorically denied the conditions necessary to produce literature
—a fixed income and a private space in which to work. Walker similarly
considers the material circumstances that have affected the literary
production of African American women, but to do so, she inserts
relevant details into passages quoted from Woolf ’s work:
“For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a

highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry
would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary
instincts [add ‘chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one’s
body by someone else, submission to an alien religion’], that she
must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”
(Woolf qtd. in Walker 235; bracketed phrases are Walker’s)
Walker thus uses Woolf’s ideas but re-contextualizes them so that

they speak to the experiences of Phillis Wheatley, as well as to the
situation of the many black women who were unable to produce
creative writing despite a potential talent. At the same time, the change
Walker is working towards becomes more pressing because the oppression
she catalogues makes Woolf’s concerns pale in comparison.
Walker also signifies on Woolf ’s use of a persona in A Room of One’s
Own. Although Woolf uses “I” throughout her text, she separates herself
from this “I” near the start of the volume: “‘I’ is only a convenient term
for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but
there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them” (Woolf 4).13 The
use of a persona allows Woolf to use symbolism throughout her text to
make points on multiple levels. For example, she writes that “a man’s
figure rose to intercept” her just as her thoughts were running wild, and
he compelled her to walk on the path (6), an image related to the
discussions of boundaries, transgressions, and gendered positions that
Woolf continues throughout her text. Such an approach calls for readers
to actively interpret rather than passively receive ideas, so that “it is for
[the reader] to seek out [. . .] truth and to decide whether any part of
it is worth keeping” (Woolf 4-5). Alice Walker does not adopt a
persona as Woolf does, but neither does she “reject her predecessor’s
self-neutralizing aesthetic and voice-dropping narrative practice” (Allan
132). Instead, Walker combines the performance of Woolf with an
insistence on her own material and interested existence in relation to her
text. Walker emphasizes the text as performance by introducing the
importance of story and using metaphorical language. “In Search” thus
begins with a metaphorical poem, and Walker insists on her own identity
as a storyteller: “[T]hrough years of listening to my mother’s stories of
her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves,
but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the

urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be
recorded” (240). Here, “stories” and “lives” become intermingled, and stories
themselves become ubiquitous—they are unconsciously “absorbed.” Walker’s
extensive use of literary symbolism continues to foreground performative
aspects of her narrative. Still, Walker clings to her own material situation
in a way that Woolf does not, explaining that she looks in her own
backyard—her personal past—in order to answer larger questions
about black women’s literary heritage. Walker’s combination of allegory
and direct involvement in her text encourages readers to engage in textual
interpretation in order to understand and act on issues that affect actual
human beings.
While Walker’s playful recuperations of O’Connor, Hurston, and
Woolf constantly highlight the importance of storytelling in her personal
criticism, the use of figurative language reinforces the performative
elements of her autobiographical writing. Nancy Miller suggests that
symbolic language is particularly suited to writing that calls for social
change:
[M]etaphors are to be taken very seriously [. . .] as an

economical way both to theorize outside of systems dependent
on a unitary signature [. . .] and to imagine in the material
of language what hasn’t yet come [. . .] into social being. [. .
.] Perhaps what seems most “feminist” to me about the uses
of both metaphor and narrative criticism is the self-
consciousness these modes of analysis tend to display about
their own processes of theorization.
(Miller Getting Personal xii)
Walker’s essays use three important motifs to render their work both
con- cretely specific and symbolically representative: houses, mothers,
and f lowers or gardens. As the personal becomes presented as story
complete with metaphorical language, readers are encouraged to
interpret the narrative both literally and figuratively rather than reduce it
to either one person’s experience (and thus not terribly important in a
wide-ranging sense) or to a “mere” story (and thus not terribly pressing
because it is not “real” or “true”). Each of the three motifs functions
among the essays in particular ways to forward Walker’s project and
her call for others to engage in issues of social justice and literary
heritage. While each is always literal on one level, houses also symbolize
literary roots and traditions that take various forms, the mother points to
literary precursors, and f lowers or gardens represent an idealized field of
African American women’s literary heritage. The images together work
within a single though diverse project of literary recuperation and
growth.
180 Laurie McMillan
The houses, as concrete manifestations of injustices, graphically

communicate the disparity between the preservation of white and black
cultural heritages.14 In “Beyond the Peacock,” Walker’s former house is
in the middle of a muddy pasture, surrounded by fences and “no
trespassing” signs (43–44). When Walker and her mother eventually
reach it, they see that two of the four rooms have rotted away; the
two that remain are used to store hay. The whole scene represents
the roots and the history of African Americans and their literatures—
difficult to access and left to disintegrate, with some irrevocable losses
already apparent. Such a theme is reinforced in “Looking for Zora,” for
Walker has a difficult time finding Hurston’s grave because the area is
covered with waist-high weeds and a map to mark the location has to
be hand-drawn from memories and oral communication. As a final
“home” for Hurston, such a grave graphically indicates the neglect
that black writers have suffered, which Walker explicitly notes by
including a quote from Robert Hemenway describing Hurston’s
“resting place” as “generally symbolic of the black writer’s fate in
America” (93). Walker also visits the last neighborhood in which
Hurston had resided which, like Walker’s former home, is difficult to
access: Walker and her companion need to ask several people for
directions, and the street is unpaved and “full of mud puddles” (113).
This dire physical setting seems appropriate when the young people
who live there “had no idea Zora ever lived, let alone that she lived
across the street” from them (115). While all of these experiences can
be (and should be) read symbolically as signs of an undervalued
black heritage, Walker introduces affect into her narrative in order to
bring the symbolic in touch with the material actuality of what she
describes. She thus explains in restrained tones that “normal
responses of grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they
bear no relation to the depth of emotion one feels” (115). As such
passages combine attention to the specific scene of devastation with
a sense of its overwhelming communal implications, readers are called
to join Walker in responding to the problem.
O’Connor’s house in “Looking Beyond” stands in startling contrast to
Walker’s former home and Hurston’s former neighborhood and gravesite.
O’Connor’s last residence is close to the road and is attended to by a
caretaker, with a small, shabby house set behind it where slaves had
probably once lived. Walker writes, “Her house becomes—in an instant
—the symbol of my own disinheritance, and for that instant I hate her
guts” (57). In such a way, Walker again simultaneously invokes raw
emotion and explicitly draws attention to the way material signs of
disparity operate as symbols, representing oppressions that might be less
tangible. Symbols, then, are not illusive or without effect. On the
contrary, Walker relates the psychic burden of acknowledging injustices:
“For a long time I will feel Faulkner’s house,
O’Connor’s house, crushing me” (58). In other words, Walker feels

oppressed by the white literary heritage that has been preserved and
honored at the expense of her own black roots, and the concrete
structures provide a visual manifestation of a weighty cultural
problem.
The house symbolism is rather discouraging, but it is answered with a
more positive focus on mothers and the maternal.15 It is Walker’s mother
who ignores the “no trespassing” signs when they revisit their former
home, and the presence of Walker’s blood mother keeps O’Connor from
intruding into the maternal position that threatens Walker with the
dispossession of her specifically black roots. Walker’s “mother” is thus a
literal woman at the same time that she serves as a figurative path to the
preservation of a black woman’s heritage. In “Looking for Zora,”Walker
claims that Hurston is her aunt in order to access information about her,
but Hurston becomes Walker’s “metaphorical mother as well” (Sadoff 8).
“In Search” most significantly places importance on the mother as a source
of inheritance, support, inspiration, life, nourishment, and instruction—in
short, the mother empowers the daughter, whether she takes the form of a
literary precursor, a peer, or a literal maternal figure.
The mother is always intertwined with the final motif of importance
in the three essays: flowers or gardens. “In Search” begins with an
epigraph that pictures the relationship between the mother and daughter
as that of a plant. The poem, “Motheroot,” suggests that the mother
acts like a nourishing root that eventually helps the flower (daughter)
blossom, though the root herself remains invisible. More often,
however, the mother is not part of a plant herself but instead is the
gardener, able to plant gardens (literary works) that grow and
multiply, building and sustaining communities with their beauty and life.
Thus, in “Beyond the Peacock,” Walker’s mother is not impressed with
the pretentious peacock that blocks O’Connor’s driveway. The peacock,
associated with O’Connor, damages gardens, just as the white literary
tradition has damaged that of blacks. 16 In “Looking for Zora,” Walker
discovers that Hurston enjoyed gardening just as her own mother did
(114), and even among the weeds at Hurston’s gravesite Walker notices
that some “are quite pretty, with tiny yellow flowers” (104). The
importance of gardening is most noticeable in “In Search” when Walker
discovers her own creative roots:
Whatever she [Walker’s mother] planted grew as if by magic,

and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties.
[. . .] And I remember people coming to my mother’s yard to be
given cuttings from her flowers; I hear again the praise
showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on,
she turned into a garden. [. . .] [T]o this day people drive by our
house in Georgia [. . .] and ask to stand or walk among my
mother’s art. (241)
182 Laurie McMillan
The “rocky soil” indicates the oppressive conditions under which

African Americans have produced art, the “cuttings” suggest that art can
inspire other art to “grow” or f lourish, and the recognition of the
gardens (or art) becomes a source of communal pride that draws people
together. In “Beyond the Peacock,” a similar testament to the creative
ability of African American woman counters the rotting house of
Walker’s childhood: the daffodils planted by Walker’s mother “have
multiplied and are now blooming from one side of the yard to the
other” (44). Such an image keeps despair at bay by encouraging the
valuing of nontraditional sources of creativity, and it simultaneously
suggests literary writings will f lourish and multiply as the daffodils
have done.
As Walker makes language and style work for her on multiple
levels, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens brings personal writing,
storytelling, and literary criticism together to form meaningful
narratives that can both draw attention to problematic conditions and
provide hopeful alternatives. Walker’s literary criticism is thus connected
directly to the way people live at the same time that it brings orderliness
to the messiness of lives; indeed, recasting lived experiences into a
tightly-knit narrative is a key way to begin transforming a history of
abuse and neglect into a vision of renewed life. By drawing on the work
of other authors and using literary devices, Walker keeps her writing
from becoming simplistic or reductive. Instead, its mediated qualities
are consistently highlighted even as its bearing on material lives is
made clear. While not all personal criticism needs to take on Walker’s
approach of storytelling, Walker does provide a strong example of
autobiographical writing that uses performance to move its readers to
political activism. Readers are called to engage in and actively
interpret Walker’s text in order that they more fully engage in and
actively interpret their own worlds.
No t E s
1. Jane Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow,” first published in New Literary
His- tory in 1987, is one of the earliest texts to receive attention for its use of
personal criticism. The autobiographical trend in scholarship visibly gained
momentum during the nineties, evidenced by a number of articles published in
The Chronicle of Higher Education (see, for example, Scott Heller, Liz McMillen,
Ruth Behar, and Daphne Patai) as well as by anthologies such as The Intimate
Critique: Autobiographical Liter- ary Criticism (1993; edited by Diane P. Freedman,
Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar), The Politics of the Essay (1993; edited
by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman), and Confessions of the
Critics (1996; edited by H. Aram Veeser). See these texts and Jeffrey Williams for
analyses of why personal criticism and other forms of experimental
scholarship have become widely used since the nineties.
2. Houston Baker writes, “The generative conditions of African life in
the New World that privilege spiritual negotiation also make autobiography the
premiere genre of Afro-American discourse” (“There Is No More” 136). Richard

Yarborough further explains that, before the twentieth century, black writers
were primarily interested in “establishing the credibility of their literary voices
and thus their view of reality,” and autobiography made a more fitting weapon
than fiction did “in the battle to gain a hearing for the true version of the
Afro-American experience” (111).
3. William Andrews explains, “[C]ritics [. . .] have treated Afro-
American autobiography [. . .] as a commentary on something extrinsic
rather than as statements of something intrinsic to themselves” (79). He calls
for Afro-American autobiography to be considered as its own genre,
“important to study for its own sake” (80).
4. Much of Alice Walker’s personal writing in “Beyond the Peacock,”
“Look- ing for Zora,” and “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” can be
considered anecdotal. While any autobiographical anecdote would fall under
the heading “personal writing,” not all personal writing is anecdotal. The
anecdote is generally a brief story based on an actual event that is used to
illustrate a point.
5. Gallagher and Greenblatt are referring specifically to the use of the
anecdote in new historicist criticism, but their observation can be applied to the
kind of personal anecdote Walker uses without distorting their argument.
6. Black feminist critics, especially, have recognized the problems that arise
when black women’s fiction is viewed as continuous with the lives of black
women. At the same time, scholars recognize the dangers of ignoring the social
position of the critic, for scholars of color do need to dominate the study of
minority literature rather than become silenced, once again, by the voices of
white critics. See Deborah McDowell, Houston Baker, and Tania Modleski for
more elaborate discussions of the twin dangers of marginalization and
exclusivity.
7. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, for example, uses the repetition of the stilted
phrase “Now did I” in order to include the interruption of kitchen routines in her
scholarship without naturalizing her experiences: “Now did I go downstairs,
now did I cut up a pear, eight strawberries, now did I add some cottage
cheese,” and so on (4). Linda Kauffman tells a story of her childhood but
follows it with multiple interpretations and critiques of those interpretations.
Nancy Miller refuses the division of theory and the personal, partially by
bringing “occasional” writing into her scholarship (that is, essays that were
written for particular occasions, some of which called for less formal tones than
Miller may have generally used when writing a book) (Get- ting Personal xi, 15).
Jane Gallop uses the “anecdote” as a point of departure, bringing theory and
personal writing together in a manner somewhat akin to Miller’s approach. A
great many other variations of performative personal criticism could be
recounted, but Jane Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow” is notably absent from
my list. Her self-presentation tends to be “naturalized” rather than
“performative.” She writes, “This is what I want you to see. A person sitting
in stockinged feet looking out of her window” (1108) and “That is why, you see,
this doesn’t sound too good. It isn’t a practiced performance, it hasn’t got a
surface. I’m asking you to bear with me while I try, hoping that this, what I
write, will express something you yourself have felt or will help you find a
part of yourself that you would like to express” (1107). Tompkins seems intent
on having readers “see” her and “connect” with her, while the writers I label
performative are more interested in showing readers portraits with very visible
frames, making the mediated quality of representation quite clear without
sacrificing contact with lived experiences.
184 Laurie McMillan
8. For more on the political power of Walker’s essays, see Pamela

Klass Mittlefehldt.
9. I spend more time developing the importance of narrative, the critical
framework of womanism, and a sense of Walker’s entire volume of essays in my
dissertation, Practice, Practice, Practice: Innovative Feminist Literary Criticism, a work
in progress from which this essay is taken. For ideas about the value of narrative,
see Susan Stan- ford Friedman’s Mappings, Jay Clayton’s The Pleasures of Babel,
and Toni Morrison’s “Memory, Creation, and Writing.” For comments on In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gar- dens, see Tuzyline Jita Allan, Pamela Klass
Mittlefehldt, and Dianne Sadoff.
10. Gates emphasizes signifying as an approach that disrupts racism: “The
ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the
Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning,
ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for
repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and
simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act” (“Blackness of
Blackness” 286). I am not arguing that Walker signifies on O’Connor, Hurston,
and Woolf because the precursor writers are racist, but instead because revising
these writers’ approaches allows Walker to bring conventions of fiction and
performance into her writing without losing her own personal investment in the
text. 11. Parenthetical citations refer to Walker’s In Search unless otherwise
noted.
12. Walker’s writing has often been linked to that of Hurston, especially in
terms of storytelling as a theme. See, for example, Molly Hite’s The Other Side of
the Story and Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey.
13. Woolf ’s use of the term “lies” is consistent with that of both Hurston
and Walker.
14. See Henry Louis Gates for an analysis of house symbolism in The
Color Purple and in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (The Signifying
Monkey 253).
15. See Sadoff for an analysis of matrilineage in Walker.
16. Walker finds the peacock that blocks the driveway “inspiring,” but
her mother answers that “they’ll eat up every bloom you have, if you don’t
watch out” (59)—an exchange that effectively expresses Walker’s mixed feelings
about O’Connor as a literary precursor.
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DE BOR AH ANNE HO OK E R
Reanimating the Trope of the Talking Book in

Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea”
I n a 1970 essay, “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience,”

Alice Walker qualifies her refusal to “romanticize the Southern black
country life” of her upbringing, recalling that while she “hated it,
generally . . . no one could wish for a more advantageous heritage than
that bequeathed to the black writer in the South: a compassion for the
earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, and an
abiding love of justice” (21). Essays published in the 1980s, such as “Am
I Blue” and “Everything is a Human Being,” and her more recent
response to the events of September 11, 2001, Sent by Earth, coalesce
that southern, rural-bred “compassion for the earth” into a recognizable
ecocritical world view. In “The Universe Responds,” for example, Walker
unabashedly stakes the richness of human creativity to the health of the
natural world: “we are connected to [animals] at least as intimately as
we are connected to trees,” she says. “Without plant life human beings
could not breathe. . . . Without free animal life . . . we will lose the
spiritual equivalent of oxygen. Magic, intuition, sheer astonishment at
the forms the Universe devises in which to express life—itself—will no
longer be able to breath in us” (191-92).
In this regard, Walker explicitly diverges from the anti-pastoral
strain in the African-American literary tradition that, since the time of
Frederick Douglass, has “expressed a profound antipathy toward the
ecological niches
The Southern Literary Journal, 37.2 (2005): pp. 81–102. Copyright © 2005 by the
South- ern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department of English. All rights reserved.
187
188 Deborah Anne Hooker
usually focused on in ecocriticism: pastoral space and wilderness”

(Bennett 208). Reacting to the early black experience of the rural South, in
a landscape distorted by slavery’s crimes and the decades of violence and
racism following its abolition, the tradition, Michael Bennett argues, has
tended to view “the relative safety of the urban environment” as a more
promising landscape of economic opportunity and social justice denied
in more conservative and isolated, rural enclaves (198).
Walker’s 1967 short story, “Strong Horse Tea,” appears, in many
ways, to echo this anti-pastoral tradition.1 Her brutally poor protagonist,
Rannie Mae Toomer, literally lives in a pasture surrounded by the “fat
whitefolks’ cows and an old gray horse and a mule” (462).2 And there
is no hint of pastoral romance in the image of the “fat winter fly”
roosting on the forehead of her child, Snooks, who will ultimately die of
“double pneumonia and whooping cough” (459). However, Walker
refuses to privilege a contrasting and more urban, albeit southern,
domain: the narrative tension of the short story is, in fact, created by
Rannie’s waiting for “a real doctor” from town to arrive with his
presumably superior arsenal of cures; having refused the help of the
community witchwoman, Aunt Sarah, and the “swamp magic” she
proffers, Rannie realizes too late that a more urban world, the traditional
anti-pastoralist preference, has ignored her plight and abandoned her to the
meager resources of her home community (459).
To complicate matters further, however, the story concludes on
an apparently anti-pastoral note, with Rannie “slipping and sliding in
the mud” of the pasture, soaked to the bone from a tremendous
thunderstorm, collecting the only thing, according to Sarah, that stands a
chance of reviving Snooks: mare’s urine, the strong horse tea of the title
(466).3 That final scene also depicts a come-uppance of sorts for Rannie:
as she catches the tea in her flimsy plastic shoe, she discovers “a leak,
a tiny crack, at her shoe’s front”; with no other recourse, she “stuck
her mouth there over the crack, and . . . freezing in her shabby wet coat,
ran home to give the good and warm strong tea to her baby Snooks”
(466). Since Snooks dies while she is in the pasture, Rannie obviously
takes the medicine. But in the context of the many polarities that critics
have identified—between town/country, folk medicine/ white medicine,
black roots and heritage/white technological progress—the particular
allegiance for which she is being chastened is not so clear.4 Rannie’s
isolation from her home community before Aunt Sarah appears argues
against its idealization, and Sarah herself acknowledges that Rannie’s
preference for the white doctor, though naïve, is almost inevitable.
The story is ambivalent, I would argue, precisely because traces
of Walker’s emerging ecoconsciousness are embedded in the traditional
anti- pastoral elements alluded to above. In an important sense, her story
takes us back to what is arguably the inception of that tradition
through a
Reanimating the Trope of the Talking Book 189
reconsideration of what Henry Louis Gates has identified as the “ur-

trope” of African-American literature—the trope of the talking book,
or as he later qualifies it, the “trope of the untalking book” (131, 165).
Predating and prefiguring Douglass’s anti-pastoral texts, the trope
appears first in James Gronniosaw’s 1770 Narrative of the Most
Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw,
An African Prince, As Related by Himself, and is subsequently repeated and
revised in a number of narratives published between 1770 and 1815, by
Olaudah Equiano, John Jea, John Marrant, and Ottobah Cugoano. (The
writings of Gronniosaw, Equiano, and Cugoano are of most interest to me
here.) This trope typically depicts untutored auditors from
predominantly oral cultures encountering the print technology of their
white masters for the first time, a confrontation that incites the desire
to speak with the book as they perceive their masters to be doing. As
Gates makes clear, this trope figures the incitement to literacy, an
acquisition that would confirm the human status of the black non-
European according to criteria set by white Enlightenment thought
(127-132).
In Walker’s revision, a similarly untutored Rannie repeatedly encounters
the advertising circulars delivered to her daily by a white mailman, and it
is in the scenes with the circulars that Walker signifies most directly on
the trope of the talking book and the texts in which they appear; her
retroping, moreover, allows us to see how the dynamics of desire at work
in “Strong Horse Tea” parallel and retroactively illuminate some of the
unexamined consequences of identifying with the worlds and the values
signified by the mystifying texts in the earlier narratives. These
consequences suggest that anti-pastoralism arises not only from a
history of brutality enacted on black bodies against a rural backdrop
but is, in philosopher David Abram’s words, an “unnoticed and
unfortunate” tendency inherent in literacy itself (273). The ambivalence of
Walker’s story arises from the tension between the historical status of the
trope as a figure for literacy, the sign refuting the animal status ascribed
to the African, and a modern awareness of the peril of estrangement from
the “more-than-human world”5 that technologies of literacy can
orchestrate.
That Walker’s text grapples with the tension between the spoken
and written word that the talking book trope thematizes can be discerned
from the many parallels her text erects with those earlier narratives.
The most obvious parallel is the appearance of printed texts to illiterate
auditors whose amazement reveals both a simple lack of literacy and a
profound unfamiliarity with the dominant forces shaping and controlling
their worlds. In three of the earlier narratives on which “Strong Horse
Tea” signifies, we see black (or, in Cugoano’s case, Native American)
auditors mystified by the appearance of a printed object—in many cases,
a holy book—which excludes them from the conversation the text
apparently “carries on” with its white interlocutors. In the 1770 edition of
his narrative, for example, the enslaved African prince
Gronniosaw observes his master as he “read prayers . . . to the ship’s crew

every Sabbath day” (11). I was “never so surprised in my life as when I
saw the book talk to my master, for I thought it did, as I observed him
to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so with me”
(11). In secret Gronniosaw took the book, “opened it, and put my ear
down close upon it, in great hopes that it would say something to me; but
I was . . . greatly disappointed, when I found that it would not speak.” Its
silence, he assumes, is a hostile response to his blackness (11).
The more well-known slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the
Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by
Himself, first published in 1789, follows a similar trajectory: Equiano, too,
sees his master and a friend, Richard Baker, “employed in reading” and,
like Gronniosaw, feels “a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I
thought they did” (48). Like his precursor, Equiano has “often taken up
a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in
hopes it would answer me” (48). The book’s silence provokes a similar
insecurity: Equiano has “been very much concerned when I found it
remained silent” (48).
Unlike Equiano and Gronniosaw, Cugoano’s revision of the trope
does not occur in his autobiography but in his Thoughts and
Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of
the Human Species, first published in Great Britain in 1878 as a
response to major eighteenth- century justifications for slavery. With its
uneasy endorsement of expanded trade between Europe and Africa as
a means of lifting black culture to the level of white, his text, in many
respects, is the one with which Walker’s is in most intimate dialogue.6
In Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments, the trope surfaces in an exemplum
within his overall argument, in his account of the Spanish conquest of the
Incan people. Demonstrating the perverse use of scripture to justify
imperialism, he dramatizes Pizarro’s meeting with the Incan King,
Atahualpa, in which a Spanish Father, Vincente Valverde, uses a breviary,
“pretending to explain some of the general doctrines of Christianity” in
addition to informing the Incan King that Pope Alexander had “invested
their master as the sole Monarch of all the New World” (63). When
Atahualpa asks where the Father had learned “things so extraordinary . . .
the fanatic Monk” held out the breviary: “in this book” (63). Like Equiano
and Gronniosaw, Atahualpa puts his ear to the pages of the book, with
the same silent reaction from the book, but not from the nascent reader:
“This, says he, is silent; it tells me nothing; and [he] threw it with
disdain to the ground”
(64) a noble, if futile, act of defiance, and one of Atahualpa’s last, as he is
soon murdered by Pizarro’s forces.
Echoing Cugoano’s exemplum, Walker situates the illiterate Rannie
within a recognizably modern permutation of that old imperializing
ethos. And, as in the earlier versions of the trope, Walker’s revision
emphasizes her
protagonist’s amazement at texts that exclude her from the symbolic

exchanges it apparently engages in with others. When the advertising
circulars come to the desperately poor Rannie, she had to ask the
mailman
what certain circulars meant that showed pretty pictures of

things she needed. Did the circulars mean that somebody was
coming around later and give her hats and suitcases and shoes
and sweaters and rubbing alcohol and a heater for the house
and a fur bonnet for her baby? Or why did he always give her
the pictures if she couldn’t have what was in them? Or what
did the words say . . . especially the big word written in red:
“S_ A_ L_ E”? (460-461)
The mailman explains that “the only way she could get the goods
pictured on the circulars was to buy them in town and that town
stores did their advertising by sending out pictures of their goods”
(461). Rannie would then “exclaim in a dull, amazed way that she
never had any money She
couldn’t ever buy any of the things in the pictures—so why did the
stores keep sending them to her?” (461) Like the Spanish clergyman, the
mailman delivers, along with the circulars, a message proclaiming the
inevitability of this particular form of economic hegemony: he explains to
Rannie “that everybody got the circulars whether they had any money to
buy with or not. That this was one of the laws of advertising, and he
couldn’t do anything about it” (461).
Obviously, like her precursors, Rannie cannot read, as her
question about “the big word written in red—S_A_L_E” demonstrates, a
question, like the silent book of her predecessors, emphasizing the
exchanges that exclude her. Unlike those earlier auditors, however,
she does not put her ear to the pages, expecting a literal voice to
emerge from the flat surface of the text, nor, like Equiano and
Gronniosaw, does she see someone mouthing words over the text.
The seeming peculiarities of these earlier representations can be
explained by recalling that those scenes exemplify the relative novelty of
print technology in the eighteenth century, when orality was still a
dominant medium for European and non-European alike, and orally-
influenced behaviors and perceptions were still evolving into the more
modern behaviors we associate with reading. For instance, the
moving lips of the masters above the text depict the residual effects of
orality on reading, when interacting with a text retained some of the
behaviors associated with face-to-face encounters. In such transitional
stages, as Walter Ong reminds us, “the written words had to be
mouthed aloud, into their full being, restored to and made to live in the
oral cavities in which [it was believed] they came into existence” (259).
What Gronniosaw and Equiano are correctly “reading,” then, is the
behavior of white readers
in this transitional period and interpreting that behavior in light of the

oral dominance of their lives.
But beyond that gesture and its interpretation by these illiterate
auditors, their prior immersion in oral culture also causes them to
“anthropomorphize” the book, a judgment connoting naiveté only when
delivered from this side of the literate/oral divide. Their perception of the
text as alive grows out of oral culture’s attribution of animation to all that
can possibly “speak.” In such cultures, the word “is of its very nature a
sound, tied to the movement of life itself in the flow of time” (Ong 20).
Because it possesses aural qualities, not just visual ones, it is not reducible
to a sign on the page of a book (Ong 20-21). David Abram argues further
that in non-literate cultures, which have not yet “fully transferred their
sensory participation to the written word . . . [people] still dwell within a
landscape that is alive, aware, and expressive . . . ‘language’ remains as
much a property of the animate landscape as of the humans who dwell
and speak within that terrain” (139). In oral cultures, then, words are tied
to speech, and speech is allied to sound, which can issue from the mouths
of men, animals, or other naturally-occurring elements. In the
environment of the strange new world that stolen people like
Gronniosaw and Equiano were confronting, speech could very well
emerge from exotic objects that may thus be animate, possessing
unfamiliar mouths of their own.
Because Rannie’s encounter with her mystifying texts occurs
after some three hundred years of print technology’s dominance, Walker
does not represent her as expecting the pages to literally speak, nor,
despite his role as conveyor of the medium, does Walker depict the
mailman “in conversation” with the print. Yet Rannie’s behavior
demonstrates that the texts do speak to her, with effects reminiscent of
those produced by the silent talking books in the earlier tropes.
Despite failing to grasp why she repeatedly receives the pictures of
all the objects she “couldn’t ever buy,” Rannie paradoxically invests her
trust in the world from which these texts emerge. Consequently, when
Aunt Sarah appears at her doorstep, having been summoned by the
mailman in lieu of the white doctor, Rannie derogates her skills as
“swamp magic” and “witch’s remedies.” Your “old home remedies I took
as a child,” she tells Sarah, “come just short of killing me” (459). Rannie
holds out for the real medicine from town, “some of them shots that
makes people well. Cures ‘em of all they ails, cleans ‘em out and
makes ‘em strong, all at the same time” (460). Since the story presents
no other forms of outside intervention, we must assume that Rannie’s
misplaced trust in the white world is somehow constructed by the
ubiquitous circulars that appear again and again, like harbingers of
future bounty, within her impoverished world. Her belief that the doctor
will eventually appear is predicated on the perpetual appearance of the
mailman and the circulars, bearing all those images of hats and
suitcases that she
mistakenly assumes will be “coming around later,” too, an assumption

with tragic consequences for her child Snooks.
In this context, Rannie appears to succumb to what critics of
twentieth- century advertising have identified as one of its most potent
mechanisms: ads function not merely to inform potential buyers of the
availability of a particular product, but in fact construct “consumers as
an integral part of the social meaning of goods” (Ewen and Ewen 21).
Like the circulars that bombard Rannie, the modern marketplace is
flooded “with suggestions that individuals should buy products in order to
encounter something in the realm of social or psychological experience that
previously had been unavailable to them” (Ewen and Ewen 21).7 The
circulars confront Rannie with what she lacks—the heater, the bonnet,
the shoes and sweaters, and the money to procure them—certifying, in
their wake, the inferiority of her local world. In the earlier encounters
with the talking book, literacy simultaneously confronts the auditors
with their inferiority and functions as the currency whereby Equiano and
Gronniosaw can acquire the value they lack. In this regard, the holy
books function like the advertising texts of “Strong Horse Tea,” in that
both discourses align the auditors’ desires with the value systems the
texts promote and, even more importantly, with the value systems their
technologies embody. To borrow Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: the
medium is the message.
Gates’ extensive study of the trope of the talking book testifies to
the holy books’ creation of the desire for “something in the realm of
social or psychological experience . . . previously . . . unavailable to” its
black auditors: “What seems clear upon reading the texts created by
[these first] black writers in English . . . is that the production of
literature was taken to be the central arena in which persons of African
descent could, or could not, establish and redefine their status within the
human community” (129). Demonstrating a mastery of arts and sciences
through writing—the hallmarks of reason and thus the eighteenth-century
criteria for human status—could refute the African’s placement on the
Great Chain of Being as “the lowest of the human races or as first cousin
to the ape” (Gates 167). Like Rannie’s reification of the white doctor,
Equiano comes to regard these who produce the texts he encounters “as
men superior to us” (56). After acquiring some English, he admits that he
“relished [the] society and manners” of his English masters, and desiring
“to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners,
[he] took every opportunity to gain instruction” in reading and writing
(56). Like Equiano, “Cugoano uses book learning and Christian religion
to distinguish Britons positively from Africans” (Wheeler 27).
Thus, for these former slaves, literacy, often first embodied in
religious discourse, signifies the unavoidable and practical
acquiescence to the Enlightenment standard prescribing human status
and value. The ubiquity
of the circulars in Rannie’s world retroactively signifies on the

inescapability of such a discourse in the eighteenth century, which was
carried on the ships that trafficked in the human commerce of slavery
and, ironically, set the terms by which human status would be
ascertained. These terms and, more importantly, the symbolic systems like
alphabetic literacy by which they were conveyed institute the first
disconnect from an animate landscape, and in them we can trace the
emergence of the anti-pastoral tradition.
The anti-pastoral tendency inherent in an Enlightenment discourse
that correlates literacy with human status has its inception in even earlier
writings that attempted to solve the problem of “classifying the people of
color” that “sea-faring Renaissance Europe” had encountered in its
myriad voyages of discovery (Davis and Gates xxiv). In The New Organon
in 1620, for example, Sir Francis Bacon attempts to de-emphasize skin
color as an index of cultural value, but in so doing he clearly negates the
reciprocity between a people and the natural elements amid which they
exist: the differences between “the most civilized province of Europe” and
“the wildest and most barbarous districts of New India,” he asserts, arise
“not from the soil, not from climate, not from race, but from the arts” (qtd
in Davis and Gates xxiv).8 This critical disconnect from the land that
Bacon asserts is figured in the earlier tropes of the talking book through
a particular motif that Walker also retropes in her story: the rejection
of “home,” which is more than a rejection of geographic locale. It
involves a disinvestment in the concrete, sensual, earthy values the home
culture embraces: Rannie rejects Aunt Sarah’s remedies with their
intimate connection to the landscape and animals—”the arrowroot or
sassyfrass and cloves, or sugar tit soaked in cat’s blood” (460)—in favor
of “some of them shots” that come pre-packaged, obscuring any
immediate perception of the materials out of which they were concocted
or their connection to a larger environment.
The rejection of home in Gronniosaw’s narrative is embedded in a
disagreement over religious faith, which nevertheless shares with
Rannie’s rejection a triumph of the abstract over the concrete.9 Like
Rannie,Gronniosaw is beguiled by advertisements—in his case, the verbal
promises of “a merchant from the Gold Coast,” who promised that he
“should see houses with wings to them walk upon the water” and “also
see the white folks” (7). Despite the fact that he is tricked by the merchant
and enslaved, Gronniosaw’s narrative paints this deception as a blessing
in disguise because it introduces him to the Christian faith. The slavery
separating him from his family is, in fact, prefigured in an earlier
spiritual alienation from them. Delivering him to Christianity, slavery is
the vehicle that allows him to validate an intuition of monotheism he
claims to have had held “from [his] infancy,” that there existed “some
great Man of Power which resided above the sun, moon, and stars,” the
objects of his family’s worship (5). He refutes his “dear” mother’s
pagan insistence that the “sun, moon, and stars” had, indeed, “made all
our country” (7), a stance estranging him from his family, who accede
to his wishes to depart with the Gold Coast merchant.
Rannie’s attribution of greater powers to a white doctor she has
never seen as opposed to the old home remedies of Sarah echoes
Gronniosaw’s intuition about the “Man of Power”—the Christian God
who, by definition, doesn’t materialize. But more significantly, both
rejections of home represent investments in abstraction, pointing to what
scholars of literacy identify as one of the most profound transformations
worked by the acquisition of alphabetic literacy. As Gronniosaw’s
rejection of his [End Page 89] mother’s pantheistic explanation suggests,
this act of abstraction diminishes the value of the felt connection
between the human and the natural world.10
The way in which literacy enables abstraction, according to David
Abram, is by instituting a “new order of participation” with one’s
surroundings:
To read is to enter in a profound participation, or chaism,

with the inked marks upon the page. In learning to read, we
. . . break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and our
ears in the surrounding terrain (where they had ceaselessly
converged in the synaesthetic encounter with animals, plants, and
stream) in order to recouple those senses upon the flat surface
of the page. (131)
With the pictographic and ideographic ciphers that predated the phonetic
system, Abram explains, reading certainly “involved a displacement of
our sensory participation from the depths of the animate environment to
the f lat surface of our walls, of clay tablets, of the sheet of papyrus.”
However, the pre-alphabetic character still embodied the “animate
phenomenon of which it was the static image” and “provoked from us
the sound of its name.” With the evolution of a strictly phonetic system,
however, one that was instigated by the Semitic aleph-beth and
modified by the Greeks and Phonecians, these “written characters no
longer refer us to any sensible phenomenon out in the world . . . but
solely to a gesture . . . made by the human mouth” (Abram 100).
Words severed from the environment lose their connection to place,
which is “superceded by a new abstract notion of ‘space’ as a homoge-
nous and placeless void” (Abram 184). And as many students of the
oral/literate divide have observed, this paring away of sensual external
referents, in effect, enables the reflective intellect; it makes possible the
conceptual leap of abstraction, the derivation of “an entirely placeless
notion of eternity—a strictly intelligible, nonmaterial realm of pure Ideas
resting outside of the sensible world” (Abram 197).11
One of these studies, Jean-Joseph Goux’s Symbolic Economies After
Marx and Freud, correlates alphabetic literacy’s displacement of affect
from the
sensuousness of the surrounding world with the triumph of monotheism

over polytheism or the pagan animism that Gronniosaw’s mother, for
example, espouses. The inception of monotheism, given with the Mosaic
laws, corresponds to the advent of the Semitic aleph-beth around 1500
B.C. Like the alphabetic letters, monotheism involves a paring away of
investment in external referents and transfers that investment to “to the
letter, to writing, to alphabetic signifiers” (Goux 145). This paring away of
external referents is echoed in the Mosaic prohibition against making
images of God, which also “implies a shift of emphasis from sensorial
perception to the abstract idea” (Goux 136). Studies of myth also point to
this prohibition against idolatry as the historical passage from rituals that
involved the worship of female deities, mother goddesses, and all the
connections to the sensual and to the earth such worship implied.12
Thus monotheism, Gronniosaw’s “intuition,” which severs him from
his pagan homeland religion, is a form of iconoclasm congruent with
the paring away of sensual referents in the alphabet, and, in fact, the
two are interdependent. In learning to read, Gronniosaw, Equiano, and
Cugoano not only acquire the status of human being as defined by
Enlightenment thought, they also move from the wider, more sensual
worldview of orality into the more ascetic straits of monotheistic
Christianity, something they embrace at the philosophical level, which is
itself, according to Ong, Abram, and Goux, a noetic state arising from
alphabetic culture. To escape commodity status/ animal status, they
master the denatured logic of the word via one of its more prominent
discourses—Christianity. In so doing, they abandon certain prior kinds of
relationships with the world, self, and others, a move that, obviously,
offers other compensations. As Ong affirms, “With writing, the earlier
noetic state undergoes a kind of cleavage, separating the knower from the
external universe and then from himself. This separation makes possible
both ‘art’ (techne) in the ancient Greek sense of the detached abstract
analysis of human procedures and science, or detached abstract analysis
of the cosmos” (18).13
Rannie certainly does not become literate in the course of the
story, and in that regard deviates from the course of her precursors who
do go on to write their way into human history. However, her son’s
death, which is precipitated, in part, by her misplaced faith in the
developed, literate world, one that advertises itself to her daily through
the circulars, suggests certain liabilities inherent in the conceptual leap of
abstraction: Rannie identifies with an abstraction instead of with the
concrete resources of her community and suffers for it.
In fact, the images in the advertising circulars function like a parody
of the ideal forms of Platonism, concepts that could not have assumed the
form of “concept” without the transformations wrought by alphabetic
writing that Ong, Goux, and Abram describe. Realistically, because
Rannie has no
money, the perfect forms of hat, heater, sweater, and suitcase exist only in
a “nonmaterial” plane. Because she has nothing to exchange for them,
they will remain out of her reach, fundamentally outside of her sensible
world. She will never touch them, smell them, taste them, feel their heat,
their warmth, or their comfort. And yet, like the ideal forms of
Platonism or the invisible god of monotheism, the world from which
they emerge comes to act as the standard for all meaning and value.
Rannie places her belief in the invisible white doctor—an abstraction—
who has also come to exist, in her mind, in a higher, albeit distant realm
of perfection and authority than Aunt Sarah. With her sassyfrass tea,
cat’s blood, and strong horse tea, Sarah and her “nigger magic” are,
to Rannie, imperfect replications of that ideal form.
The way in which Walker constructs Sarah’s response to Rannie’s
perception deepens the story’s ambivalence: that response not only
certifies the efficacy of her connection to the landscape of orality, with
its intimate investments in the natural world, but also reveals her
recognition of the almost inescapable and perverse identification by those
who are culturally oppressed with that culture’s dominant interests and
modes of exchange. In her most compassionate commentary, she initially
chides Rannie for her belief in the “white mailman, white doctor,” but
then admits to feeling “sadly glad that the young always grow up
hoping. It did take a long time to finally realize that you could only
depend on those who would come” (463).14 Walker’s emphatic “did”
suggests Sarah’s familiarity with this phenomenon: perhaps she, too, had
grown up hoping, and it had taken her a long time to lose that hope and
adopt a certain fatalism with regard to the beneficence of the outside
world. What she sees in Rannie, she has seen before; her paradoxical
“sadly glad” signifies both her compassionate understanding of
inexperience and youth denigrating tradition in favor of the new and the
potential losses and gains inherent in choosing one world view to the
exclusion of the other.
But Sarah’s summation of the cure for that ambivalence—”You
could only depend upon those who would come”—is more than a
fatalistic affirmation of the pragmatism of using who or what is at
hand (463); it is a statement conveying the logic of the word in an oral
culture, which is a logic of presence. And because Sarah represents
Rannie’s only hope, the story affirms this logic.15 As Ong writes, “Real
words are always sounds, always events, which exist only while they
are going out of existence In oral or
oral-aural communication both speaker and hearer must be alive” and
present to one another. “The case is quite different with writing. Once
I have put a message into writing, it makes no difference so far as the
text goes whether I am dead or alive” (233).16 Like the word passed
between two interlocutors in an oral situation, Sarah and her help are
present to Rannie. And as she continually reminds Rannie about the
white doctor from town, an abstract derivative of the printed circulars,
“He ain’t” (463).
Sarah and her swamp magic are poised against the influence of
the advertising circulars and the white doctor from town in a way that
affirms the power inherent in an oral culture’s perception of a
landscape that is, according to Abram, “alive, aware, and expressive”
(139). In this opposition, Walker complicates the anti-pastoral
representation of literacy as liberation when the texts in her story are
directly linked with impotence and death. The circulars take on their
most ominous signification when they are metonymically associated
with Snook’s death. When Walker introduces us to the child, “his hard
wasted skull” partially concealed “under a pile of faded quilts,” she calls
attention to the sound of his breath with a particular simile: his fretful
breathing “caused a faint rustling in the sheets near his mouth like the
wind pushing damp papers in a shallow ditch” (459). This sound haunts
Rannie’s final meeting with the mailman. Standing in the pouring rain,
she desperately begs him to fetch the white doctor from town. Uneasy in
the face of her “hungry desperation,” he “stuffed a wad of circulars
advertising hair dryers and cold creams into her hands” instead (461). In
her anguish, Rannie drops the circulars, “trampling [them] under her
feet” as she crossed back under the fence into the pasture where she
lived” (462). As the only printed texts introduced in the story, the circulars
are the “damp papers” pushed by the wind, resurrecting the sound of
Snook’s labored breath, and implicating the circulars in the
circumstances of his death.
In another instance, the circulars are figured in such a way to
demonstrate their impotence in the face of other natural forces. While
Rannie prevents Aunt Sarah from ministering to Snooks as she waits
for the doctor, “a cold wind . . . shoot[s] all around her from the
cracks in the window framing; faded circulars blew inward from the
wall” (463). Unable to buy the items represented, Rannie has converted
the circulars to a particular kind of use value, futilely plastering them on
her walls of her house against the onslaught of the cold Georgia
weather.
On the one hand, both figurations involving the circulars can be
read as an indictment of all that Rannie has been denied by the forces of a
dominant and racist culture, which routinely relinquishes the welfare of
its neediest members to the invisible hand of the market. Snooks’ death
results, in part, from Rannie’s implicit exclusion from the avenues that
might have alleviated her poverty—education, jobs, and all the
fundamental opportunities literacy enables. The texts plastered on the
walls would thus metaphorize the only “insulation” available to her
against her present deprivation. In this kind of reading, literacy would
assume the same potentially redemptive status as in the anti-pastoral
narratives of Frederick Douglass and, as Gates asserts, of “virtually all the
slave narratives published between 1789 and 1865” (148).
But there are alternative ways to read this contest between wind and
the text, which Walker emphasizes by situating the entire narrative
within
a disturbance of the air, in a thunderstorm that reaches its crescendo

when Rannie fetches the tea. Walker implies the wisdom of reconnecting
with what Abram identifies as one of the casualties of the advent of both
Christianity and alphabetic literacy: the “ancient association” of language
“with the invisible breath” of the wind (254). “In the oral, animistic
world of pre-Christian and peasant Europe,” Abram says, “all things—
animals, forests, rivers, and caves—had the power of expressive speech,
and the primary medium of this collective discourse was the air. In the
absence of writing, human utterance, whether embodied in songs, stories,
or spontaneous sounds, was inseparable from the exhaled breath” (253-
54).
Walker contrasts both the impotence and death-dealing connotations
of the circulars to the oral ministrations of Aunt Sarah, which are
beneficent precisely because they are “of a piece” with the “invisible
breath” of the wind. When Rannie finally relents and allows Sarah to
examine Snooks, the old woman “hum[s]a thin pagan tune that pushed
against the sound of the wind and rain with its own melancholy
power” (464). Imitating the sound and breath of the wind, she knows,
is important for her sympathetic medicine; accordingly, she “blew against
his chest,” giving Snooks the only relief he will know (464). His breathing
eases, momentarily responding to her “pagan tune,” her breath, and her
touch, suggesting the vitality and power of her connection to the greater-
than-human world. Unlike Rannie, Sarah has not severed her
connection to the elements but, as is characteristic in an oral culture,
responds to them in kind, recognizing the wind as an animate force,
conveying important information, speaking to her in a meaningful
way.
The etymology of the word describing Sarah’s tune—pagan—obviously
refers to landscapes beyond the city or town, those rejected by the
anti- pastoral tradition and those historically most resistant to the initial
spread of Christian dogma. Walker’s depiction of the vitality of Sarah’s
pagan medicine as opposed to the impotence and death associated
with the written texts retroactively figures one of the sacrifices involved for
those who created those earlier texts of the trope of the talking book,
where Enlightenment thought, reason, and literacy demanded a thorough
divorce from any association with the “lower” animals in the Great
Chain of Being, and, by extension, to any investment in the power they
or other elements in an animate environment might represent.
As the holy book’s appeal to Gronniosaw, Cugoano, and Equiano
affirms, Christianity was one of “the greatest factors in the advancement
of alphabetic literacy in both the medieval and modern eras,” particularly
because it brought with it “the technology upon which that faith
depended” (Abram 254). Conversion often involved “training the senses
to participate with the written word,” and as such, it was one means by
which pagan associations with the enveloping environment could be
broken. Gronniosaw’s rejection
of his mother’s paganism aptly exemplifies such an effect: “As the written
text began to speak . . . the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to
fade” (Abram 254).
Walker further complicates our typically positive acceptance of
literacy’s superiority by retroping one of the most familiar anti-pastoral
motifs: the black body that bears the impress of the animal. Most
famously, Douglass affixes the image of the “brute” to the moment
“the dark night of slavery closed in upon [him],” when the slave
breaker Covey had momentarily eroded Douglass’s desire to read (95).
In other instances, Douglass “uses the same animalistic imagery to
describe the slaveowner as that which had been applied to him as a
slave” (Bennett 205), a frequent motif in many abolitionist texts at least as
far back as the 1830s, used to figure slavery’s degrading effects on master
and chattel alike.
The animal images linked to Rannie’s body are clearly connected
to this tradition, suggesting how vestiges of slavery continue to shape the
harsh conditions in which Rannie and those like her exist. She lives in
abject poverty, in a house within a pasture, “surrounded by dozens of fat
whitefolks’ cows” (462), a locale placing her literally and categorically
in the same field with animals. Other negative animal imagery
resurrects the precise ideology of black subhumanity that the prior texts
of the trope of the talking book were created to refute: Rannie’s neglect of
herself and her anguish over Snooks mark her face in “a long row of
whitish snail tracks” (459). When the mailman encounters her waiting to
send him for the doctor, he is repelled by Rannie’s “wet goat” smell, a
characteristic combining the connotations of dark, pre- Christian
sensuality and modern squalor (461).
But with Sarah, the animal markings work to different effect. In
Walker’s first description of the conjure woman, Sarah wears “magic
leaves around her neck sewed up in a possum skin next to a dried
lizard’s foot” (459), her eyes “aged a moist hesitant blue that gave her
a quick dull stare like a hawk” (460). Sarah’s hawk-like stare and her
subsequent wisdom suggest her access to a broader, more
transcendent perspective than that available to Rannie; while her
perspective and her powers may be god-like in the context of her locale,
the hawk imagery also implies that neither is so lofty and abstract,
like those of the invisible Christian god, so as to divorce her entirely
from the landscape she surveys. Sarah wears animal parts like totems,
out of respect for the power they contain and “in order to draw to
herself the power of those plants and animals with which she treats
illness” (Estes 215), a recognition of her felt connection to the larger
world upon which her ability to heal depends.
The story’s climactic scene seems to offer Rannie a very painful
experience of this felt connection to the animal world; in it her body is
literally marked by an animal, and she is drawn into a kind of exchange
that illuminates all that
she has rejected in her preference for what the print circulars represent.
When Sarah sends her into the pasture to collect the “strong horse
tea,” Rannie, in her anxiety, forgets a container in which to catch the
urine. She ends up “slipping and sliding in the mud, rac[ing] after the
big mare, holding out, as if for alms, her plastic shoe” (466). As the term
“alms” suggests, Rannie goes looking for a handout, a gift from the
animal world. This act involves her in a kind of exchange that delivers
markedly different effects than the commodity exchanges called for by
the advertising media, exchanges isomorphic to alphabetic literacy in a
crucial way.
Commodity exchange is, like the acquisition of literacy, a minimalist
drama, staged with all excess environmental distractions pared away. Unlike
barter or gift-giving, for example,commodity exchange forestalls the
emotional engagement of the parties involved. “A market exchange has
an equilibrium
. . . you pay to balance the scale . . . the whole point is . . . to make
sure the exchange itself doesn’t” affectively involve one person with
another (Hyde 10). The equivalent exchange of goods for money is
like the reduction of each signifying mark in the alphabet to a single
sound, suppressing all excess emotional or “sentimental” investments that
might inhere in the objects being sold. In so doing, each symbolic register
of exchange reveals a remarkable kind of efficiency, reminding us of the
historical coincidence of alphabetic writing and the appearance of
monetary economies.17
On the positive side, this type of exchange prevents, for example,
entangling relationships with every person with whom one exchanges money
for goods or services, situations that would be emotionally exhausting as
well as inefficient. However, the mailman’s polite disengagement from
Rannie’s anguish negatively epitomizes the pervasive effects of this kind of
exchange, a form clearly underwriting the circulars he delivers. Conversely,
in the giving of alms, in the giving of any gift, Lewis Hyde reminds us,
“there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body,”
creating the phenomenon of reciprocity, and in a broader context,
constructing sociality itself (9). The pastoral scene at the end of Walker’s
story is a literalization of that particular abstraction: the body of the mare
literally empties a part of itself, admittedly a distasteful part of itself, into
Rannie’s shoe. The sociality figured in this act is thus that between
animal and human.
The gift is an erotic form of exchange; it institutes a bond, whether
the bond is desired or not. And in this story, the gift comes from an
animal, and it is inscribed as a cure. Admittedly, it does Snooks no
good, but it is a cure inasmuch as it involves Rannie in a drama that
signifies her indebtedness to the more than human world that she has
rejected by rejecting Aunt Sarah and her “swamp magic.” But this gift
comes with a parting volley, another literalization of the shift of weight
from body to body involved in the gift transaction that Hyde describes
above: “In parting, the old mare snorted and
threw up one big leg, knocking [Rannie] back into the mud” (466). Her
body is once again marked by an animal in this final scene.
In the context of the larger opposition set up by the narrative,
Rannie’s body ironically bears the deepest and most painful imprint
of animality precisely because she buys into the value system represented
by the advertising circulars, instituting a delay that leads her finally into
the encounter with the pastured mare. Walker thus revises the
progression seen in the earlier texts of the talking book trope, where
identification with print culture and the values its technology embodies
refute the connection to “lower” forms of life. In Walker’s retroping,
the negative connotations of animality can be seen as a construct of
alphabetic literacy, which, as Abrams’ explanations lucidly show, tends to
diminish the felt connections, common to oral culture, between
humanity and the other inhabitants of its natural environment. The
animate world is silenced, cast aside, regarded as inferior, in alphabetic
culture; those not possessing literacy, like Equaino, Groniossaw and
Cugoano, are similarly regarded and regard themselves as inferior until they,
understandably, choose to learn to read and write. If alphabetic literacy
has historically tended to distance us from a living environment, then
“Strong Horse Tea” complicates the notion of literacy as it has often been
constructed in those texts it retropes, as an unqualified and
uncomplicated signifier of cultural superiority. As Walker later asserts, in
a more explicit statement of her ecocritical perspective, in the essay, “Am
I Blue”: what “animals try to tell us” is this: ‘Everything you do to us will
happen to you; we are your teachers, as you are ours. We are one lesson”
(7). Rannie’s marking and the reminder of reciprocity it signifies are early
indicators of such a view.
The mare’s kick, David Estes reminds us, also takes place in an
environment “charged”by the lightning bolt, that archetypal image of
epiphany (225). That kick, the imprint of the animal world on the human,
insists that, like Rannie, we forget that external reference and ground of
all grand human abstractions at our peril. Yet despite the “unnoticed and
unfortunate side- effects” of alphabetic literacy that I have explored here,
Walker’s own writing clearly shows us that words can be used to point
the way back to our senses, to involve us in richer and more profound
relationships with the more-than- human world. This recognition, as many
other ecocritical writers have pointed out, carries profound implications for
all systems of exchange and thus for all current and future terrestrial
dramas.
No t E s
1. The 1967 edition of Walker’s In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black
Women, in which “Strong Horse Tea” first appeared, was unavailable at the time
of this writing. I am using the version reprinted in the 1986 expanded edition of
Modern Stories of the
South. Notably, the story appearing in this anthology differs in many ways from
that appearing in the 1973 edition of In Love & Trouble, the earliest edition
containing the story that I was able to locate. While it is impossible to document
each alteration here, significant variations from the 1973 version will be noted as
I cite correspond- ing passages in the 1986 version.
2. In the 1973 version of the story, the phrase reads “fat whitefolks’ cows
and an old gray horse and a mule or two.” An additional sentence following this
phrase in the 1973 version emphasizes Rannie’s poverty: “Animals lived there in
the pasture all around her house, and she and Snooks lived in it” (93).
3. David C. Estes acknowledges a lack of documentation for the
efficacy of mare’s urine as a cure for Snooks’ diseases in two standard folklore
references: Harry Middleton Hyatt’s Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork
(Hannibal, MO: Western Publishing Co, 1970) and Newbell Niles Puckett’s
Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1926); however, Estes does catalogue a number of African American
folk beliefs about the use of human and animal urine to cure certain physical
ailments as well as to alter the nature of one’s luck (221-222). For other folk
medicine sources for the story, see also Mark Royden Winchell’s “Fetching the
Doctor: Shamanistic House Calls in Alice Walker’s ‘Strong Horse Tea’”
(Mississippi Folklore Register 15.2 [1981]: 97–101).
4. For example, in a 1993 essay, “Our People, Our People,” in Alice
Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond. (Ed. Lillie P. Howard
[Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1993] 31–42), Trudier Harris contexualizes
“Strong Horse Tea” within the framework of Walker’s inconsistent depiction
of African American folk culture over a twenty-year period. The story, Harris
argues, opposes Walker’s depiction of folk culture to “feminist politics.” Rannie
Mae Toomer is drawn so as “to show the futility of her position as a lone
female, with a child, in the middle of nowhere. Walker imposes feminist
politics upon folk culture and makes it one of the villains . . . a monster used to
degrade Rannie” (35).
Earlier, in “Folklore in the Fiction of Alice Walker: A Perpetuation of
His- torical and Literary Traditions” (Black American Literature Forum, 11
[1977]: 3–8), Harris reads the story as symbolically depicting the “consequences
of moving on to better things—the technology of the white world, here or the
white world in general—at the expense of something more valuable—one’s
heritage and roots” (7). Similarly, Keith E. Byerman’s brief commentary on
“Strong Horse Tea” in Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent
Black Fiction (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985) identifies the tension “between folk
wisdom and conventional systems of order” wherein “a strong folk female figure
must deal with the unbelief of a woman who has, either consciously or
unconsciously, adopted an antifolk system of values. The validity of that system
must be called into question and then the folk alternative given primacy” (139).
Estes’ argument frames the story within the tradition of African American
folk medicine, techniques employed by slaves to assert some modicum of control
over and undermine the master’s propertied claim to their bodies. For him, the
story confronts a belief in modern medicine with subversive folk medical
traditions, practices by which “the power and self-esteem” of these folkways
are preserved (214).
5. The term, the “more-than-human world,” is David Abram’s.
6. As the presence of the advertising circulars indicates, the story is
obviously concerned with the issue of capitalistic production, specifically the
inequalities and allure of wealth and status that such a system produces.
Cugoano confronts similar
issues in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the
Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Noting the contradictions that
inevitably mark his polemic, given the extant discourses on racialism (17),
Roxann Wheeler points out that Cugoano’s Christian sentiments make him
fully aware of the “corrupt- ing influence of attractive foreign commodities” on
native populations while he nevertheless proposes “social commerce (of non-
human commodities) tempered by Christian convictions” as “the only route to
civil, commercial society in Africa” (27).
7. In the context of eighteenth-century commercialism, Wheeler identifies
[End Page 99] “one of the most widely shared sentiments of late-century writers”
as “what motivational speakers today call ‘retail therapy.’ Olaudah Equiano and,
to a lesser extent, Cugoano, following the early Quaker abolitionist Anthony
Benezet, adopt this view In contemporary documents, consumption of
English goods
figures as a primary antidote to savagery and as the key to cultural assimilation
with the British” (25).
8. The “climatological” explanation for race persisted far into the
eighteenth century, according to Wheeler; however, philosophers like David
Hume, Adam Ferguson, and others began to argue for “the influence of other
external factors on those societies. In fact, mode of government or the extent
to which a society was commercialized were increasingly offered as the most
important factor shaping societal development” (20).
9. John Marrant, a free black man in whose narrative the trope is again
revised, like Gronniosaw, rejects the religious orientation of his family. He leaves
them, to wander in the South Carolina wilderness and preach among the
Cherokee, abandoning his family after his conversion to Methodism, a change
for which they “revile and ridicule” him (qtd in Weyler 47). See Karen Weyler’s
“Race, Redemption, and Captivity in the Narratives of Briton Hammon and
John Marrant” in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Eds.
Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould. [Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2001] 39–53).
10. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observes, the 1770 edition of
Gronniosaw’s narrative claims that he “related” his tale “himself,” while the
1774 edition claims to be “written by himself” (132–133). In the context of
Gronniosaw’s “intuition” about monotheism, it is at least reasonable to suspect
that it may be a retroactive effect of the acquisition of literacy and Christian
conversion. As Ong notes about the noetic changes instigated by literacy, “the
mind does not enter into the alphabet or the printed book or the computer so
much as the alphabet or print or the computer enters the mind, producing new
states of awareness” (47).
11. See for example, Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap
P of Harvard University Press, 1963) and The Muse Learns to Write:
Reflections of Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986); Walter J. Ong, S.J. The Presence of the Word (New
Haven: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1967) and Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982); Jack Goody, The
Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987); Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC: The Alphabetization of the
Popular Mind (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988); and Albert Lord, The
Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).
12. For more on the specific connection between the cultural devaluation
of women and the ascendancy of the alphabet, see Goux, 134–151. See also
Leonard
Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
(New York: Viking, 1998), 64–120.
13. Thus Equiano, as Gates has so thoroughly analyzed, is profoundly
perceptive to represent his old self and new self in rhetorically different ways
(153– 157). See his discussion of Equiano’s self-conscious use of “two distinct
voices to distinguish . . . the simple wonder with which the young Equiano
approached the New World of his captors and a more eloquently articulated
voice that he employs to describe the author’s narrative present” (153)
14. Sarah’s compassionate musings do not exist in the 1973 edition of
“Strong Horse Tea.” That section of the story reads: “She was sipping something
hot from a dish. When would this one know, she wondered, that she could
only depend upon those who would come” (93). Also absent in the 1973
edition and present in the 1986 Modern Stories of the South are Sarah’s earlier
musings, while Rannie is conversing with the mailman, about the allure of an
allegedly “superior” white culture:
“White mailman, white doctor. White doctor, white mailman,” she
murmured from time to time, putting the poker down carefully and
rubbing her shins.
“You young ones will turn to them,” she said,” when it is us what got
the power”. (462)
15. To emphasize the point, Walker has Rannie echo Sarah’s dictum, when
she realizes that Sarah is the only help available: “How could she have
thought anyone else could help her Snooks, she wondered brokenly, when you
couldn’t even depend on them to come!” (464)
16. In this context, Ong observes that “because writing carries within
it always an element of death, the tragic literary work—or simply the serious
written work in general, the work which deals with life and death honestly—
often turns out to be in some way about itself. That is to say, a work about
death often modulates
readily, if eerily, into a work about literature. For death inhabits texts” (238).
17. For an extensive examination of this correlation, see Goux, 9–63
and 213–244.
Wo R K s C I t E D
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human
World. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
Bennett, Michael. “Anti-Pastoralism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery.”
Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla
Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001.
195–210.
Cugoano, Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings. Ed.
Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Davis, Charles T. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave’s Narrative. Oxford:
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
Written by Himself. Ed. Benjamin Quarles. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1960.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African. An authoritative text / written by himself. 1794. Ed. Werner
Sollors. New York: Norton, 2001.
Estes, David C. “Alice Walker’s ‘Strong Horse Tea’: Folk Cures for the Dispossessed.”
Southern Folklore 50 (1993): 213–29.
Ewen, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American
Consciousness. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies After Marx and Freud. Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw. Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the
Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince as Related by Himself.
Leeds: Davies and Booth, 1841. Microfilming Corp of America, 1980. Fiche#
13311.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. 3rd ed. New York:
Vintage Books, 1983.
Ong, Walter J., S.J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Walker, Alice. “Am I Blue.” Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 3–8.
———. “The Black Writer and Southern Experience.” In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 15–21.
———. “Everything is a Human Being.” Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987.
San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 139–152.
———. “Strong Horse Tea.” In Love and Trouble: Stories About Black Women. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. 88–98.
———. “Strong Horse Tea.” Stories of the Modern South. Expanded Edition. Eds. Ben
Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. 459–466.
———. “The Universe Responds.” Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 187–193.
Wheeler, Roxann. “Betrayed by Some of My Own Complexion: Cugoano, Abolition
and the Contemporary Language of Racialism.” Genius in Bondage: Literature of
the Early Black Atlantic. Eds. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2001. 17–38.
Alice Walker Chronology
1944 Alice Walker is born on 9 February to Willie Lee and

Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker, sharecroppers in Eatonton,
Georgia.
1952 Walker loses the sight in one eye, the result of a bb-gun
accident. 1965 Walker receives her B. A. at Sarah Lawrence
College, one of six
black students in her class.
1967 Walker marries Melvyn Leventhal, a civil-rights attorney, on
17 March. They have a daughter, Rebecca, two years later.
They are divorced in 1976.
1968 Walker’s first book, Once: Poems is published.
1968 Walker teaches black studies and literature at Jackson State
College, Tugaloo College, Wellesley, and University of
Massachusetts until 1973. She is active in the Civil Rights
Movement and in the feminist movement.
1970 The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker’s first novel, is
published.
1976 Walker’s second novel, Meridian, is published.
1979 Walker edits I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora
Neale Hurston Reader, initiating a Hurston revival.
1982 Walker’s third novel, The Color Purple, is published. It wins
the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.
207
208 Chronology
1983 Walker’s collection of feminist essays, In Search of Our

Mother’s Gardens, is published.
1984 With writer Robert Allen, Walker founds Wild Trees Press, which
publishes books of “special insight,” particular from a feminist
perspective.
1985 Stephen Spielberg produces the movie adaptation of The
Color Purple. It is nominated for Academy Awards in eleven
categories, winning for best musical score.
1989 Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar is on the New York
Times Bestseller List for over four months.
1993 Walker co-produces Warrior Marks, a documentary movie
about female circumcision.
2004 Walker publishes her ninth novel, Now Is the Time to Open
Your Heart.
2005 A musical adaptation of The Color Purple opens on Broadway.
Contributors
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale

Uni- versity. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s
Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse
(1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism
(1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American
Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium:
The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of
Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the
literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors.
His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
(1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why
(2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
(2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
(2004), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In 1999,
Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts
and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the
International Prize of Catalo- nia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and
the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.
LOUIS H. PRATT wrote James Baldwin (1978) and Alice Malsenior

Walker: An Annotated Bibliography, 1968–1986 (1988).
JOSEPH A. BROWN is director of Black American Studies at

Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He wrote To Stand on the
Rock: Medita- tions on Black Catholic Identity (1998).
209
210 Contributors
ALICE FARLEY, formerly Alice Hall Petry, teaches at Southern

Illinois University, Edwardsville. She has written books on F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, and George Washington Cable.
LYNN PIFER is a professor of English at Mansfield University,

Pennsylva- nia and the Director of Mansfield’s Frederick Douglass
Institute.
FELIPE SMITH is Assistant Professor of English at Tulane

University, where he teaches African American and American
literature. He wrote American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and Black
Literary Renaissance (1998).
ROBERT JAMES BUTLER, Professor of English and director of

College Honors at Canisius College, is the author of Native Son: The
Emergence of a New Black Hero (1992).
GAIL KEATING is senior instructor in English at Pennsylvania State

University, Worthington Scranton.
BONNIE BRAENDLIN is associate professor of English at Florida

State University.
DEBORAH E. BARKER is Assistant Professor of English and

Women’s Studies at the University of Mississippi.
MARCIA NOE is a professor of English and Coordinator of Women’s

Studies at The University of Tennessee at Chatanooga. She wrote
Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland and is a senior editor of The
Dictionary of Midwestern Literature.
MICHAEL JAYNES is a graduate student in English at The

University of Tennessee at Chatanooga.
LAURIE MCMILLAN is assistant professor and writing coordinator

at Marywood University.
DEBORAH ANNE HOOKER is assistant head of the English depart-

ment at North Carolina State University.
Bibliography
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1968–1986. New York: Garland Pub., 1989.
Barnett, Pamela E. “’Miscegenation,’ Rape, and ‘Race’ in Alice Walker’s
Meridian.” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South, 39:3
(2001 Spring), pp. 65–81.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Philadelphia : Chelsea House,
2000.
———. Alice Walker: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Broomall, PA: Chel-
sea House, 2000.
Brooker, Will, and Deborah Jermyn, eds. The Audience Studies Reader.
London, England: Routledge, 2003.
Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the
Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.
Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1989.
Cheung, King-Kok. “’Don’t Tell’: Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and
The Woman Warrior,” PMLA, 103 (March 1988): 162–174.
Christian, Barbara. “Novels for Everyday Use: The Novels of Alice Walker,”
in Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), pp. 180–238.
———. “Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward,” in Black
Women Writers (1950–80): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans.
Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984, pp. 457–477.
———. “The Contrary Women of Alice Walker: A Study of Female
Protagonists in In Love and Trouble,” in Black Feminist Criticism:
Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985,
pp. 31–46.
211
212 Bibliography
Davis, Thadious M. “Alice Walker’s Celebration of Self in Southern Generations,”

Southern Quarterly, 21 (Summer 1983): 38–53.
Erickson,Peter. “‘Cast Out Alone/To Heal/And Recreate/Ourselves’: Family-
based Identity in the Work of Alice Walker,” College Language
Association Journal, 23 (Spring 1979): 71–94.
Fike, Matthew A. “Jean Toomer and Okot p’Bitek in Alice Walker’s ‘In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,’” MELUS, 25:3–4 (2000 Fall–Winter),
pp. 141–60.
Gaston,Karen C. “Women in the Lives of Grange Copeland,” College
Language Association Journal, 24 (March 1981): 276–286.
Gates Henry L. and K.A. Appiah, eds. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past
and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Harris, Trudier. “From Victimization to Free Enterprise: Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple,” Studies in American Fiction, 14 (Spring 1986): 1–17.
———. “On The Color Purple, Stereotypes, and Silence,” Black American
Literature Forum, 18 (Winter 1984): 155–161.
Howard, Lillie P. ed. Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond.
West- port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Kelly, Ernece B. “Paths to Liberation in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
(1982).” Fisher, Jerilyn and Ellen S. Silber eds. Women in Literature:
Reading through the Lens of Gender. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003, pp.
75–78.
Kim, Minjung. “The Subversiveness of the Letters from Africa: Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple.” Feminist Studies in English Literature, 8:2
(2001 Winter), pp. 105–129
McDowell, Deborah E. “The Self in Bloom: Alice Walker’s Meridian,” College
Language Association Journal, 24 (March 1981): 262–275.
Noe, Marcia; Jaynes, Michael. “Teaching Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’:
Employ- ing Race, Class, and Gender, with an Annotated Bibliography.”
Eureka Stud- ies in Teaching Short Fiction, 5:1 (2004 Fall).
Parker-Smith, Bettye J. “Alice Walker’s Women: In Search of Some Peace of
Mind,” in Black Women Writers (1950-80): A Critical Evaluation, pp. 478–
493.
Sol, Adam. “Questions of Mastery in Alice Walker’s The Temple of My
Familiar.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 43:4 (2002 Summer),
pp. 393–404.
Stein, Karen F. “Meridian: Alice Walker’s Critique of Revolution,” Black American
Literature Forum, 20 (Spring-Summer 1986): 129–141.
Wall, Wendy. “Lettered Bodies and Corporeal Texts in The Color Purple,” Studies
in American Fiction, 16 (Spring 1988): 83–97.
Watson, Reginald. “The Power of the ‘Milk’ and Motherhood: Images of
Decon- struction in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s The
Third Life of Grange Copeland.” CLA Journal, 48:2 (2004 Dec).
Bibliography 213
Warhol, Robyn R. “How Narration Produces Gender: Femininity as Affect

and Effect in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Narrative, 9:2 (2001
May), pp. 182–187
Washington, Mary Helen. “An Essay on Alice Walker,” in Sturdy Black
Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, edited by Roseann P. Bell
and others. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979, pp. 133–149.
White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. New York, NY: Norton, 2004.
Whitsitt, Sam. “In Spite of It All: A Reading of Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’.”
African American Review, 34:3 (2000 Fall), pp. 443-59.
Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Acknowledgments
Pratt, Louis H., “Alice Walker’s Men: Profiles in the Quest for Love and
Personal Values,” Studies in Popular Culture, 1989; 12 (1): 42–57. Reprinted
by permission of the author’s estate.
Brown, Joseph A., “‘All Saints Should Walk Away’: The Mystical Pilgrimage
of Meridian,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and
Letters, 1989 Spring; 12 (2 (39)): 310–320. © Charles H. Rowell. Reprinted
with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Petry, Alice Hall. “Alice Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction,”
Modern Language Studies, 1989 Winter; 19 (1): 12–27. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher, Modern Language Studies.
Pifer, Lynn. “Coming to Voice in Alice Walker’s Meridian: Speaking Out

for the Revolution,” African American Review, 1992 Spring; 26 (1): 77–88.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Smith, Felipe. “Alice’s Walker’s Redemptive Art,” African American Review,

1992 Fall; 26 (3): 437–451. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Butler, Robert James. “Alice Walker’s Vision of the South in The Third
Life of Grange Copeland,” African American Review, 1993 Summer; 27 (2):
195–204. Reprinted by permission of the author.
215
216 Acknowledgments
Keating, Gail. “Alice Walker: In Praise of Maternal Heritage,” Literary

Griot: International Journal of Black Expressive Cultural Studies, 1994 Spring;
6 (1): 26–37. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Braendlin, Bonnie. “Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar as a

Pastiche,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and
Bibliography, 1996 Mar; 68 (1): 47–67. Reprinted by permission of the
author.
Barker, Deborah E., “Visual Markers: Art and Mass Media in Alice
Walker’s Meridian,” African American Review, 1997 Fall; 31 (3): 463–479.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Noe, Marcia. “Teaching Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’: Employing Race,

Class, and Gender,” with an Annotated Bibliography, Eureka Studies in
Teaching Short Fiction, 2004 Fall; 5 (1): 123–136. Reprinted by permission of
the author.
McMillan, Laurie. “Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker’s In Search of

Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Journal of Modern Literature, 2004 Fall; 28 (1): 107–
123.
© 2004 Indiana University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Hooker, Deborah Anne. “Reanimating the Trope of the Talking Book in

Alice Walker’s ‘Strong Horse Tea,’” Southern Literary Journal, 2005
Spring; 37 (2): 81–102. © 2005 The Southern Literary Journal. Reprinted by
permission of The Southern Literary Journal, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Index
Abbott and Costello, 45

art, 145
abortion, 14, 35, 139
A Sudden Trip, 42
“Abortion, The” (short story),
Atahualpa, 190
44 Abram, David, 189, 192,
Auerbach, Nina, 101, 165
195
Autobiography, 171
adoption, 137, 139
autobiography, 174
Advancing Luna, 44, 46
“Advancing Luna and Ida B. Autry, Gene, 41
Wells” (short story), 35, 41
Bachman, John, 143
Africa, 41, 109, 112
Bacon, Francis, 194
myths, 119
Baker, Richard, 190
religion, 29
religions, 24 Baptist Church, 65
slavery, 121 Barnum, P. T., 143–144, 153
slave trade, 190 Beauvoir, Simon de, 70
African American heritage, 159 Beyond the Peacock (essay), 169,
African Americans 175–176, 180–181
literary heritage, 176, 179 Bible, 95
literary tradition, 90, 187 Big Chill, The (movie), 48
oppression of, 175 bildungsroman, 118, 121, 123
use of repetition, 175 Black Boy, 96
women, 101 Black Muslims, 7, 34–35
African heritage, 159 Black Power, 37
AIDS, 116 Black Writer and the Southern
Alabama, 103 Experience, The, 89
Selma, 64 Black Writer and the
Anchorage, Alaska, 36, 45, 48 Southern Experience, The
(essay), 187
alphabetic literacy, 199, 202
blues, 43
Bible, 199
Bona and Paul, 78, 82
Amadi, Elechi, 34
Box Seat, 78
Am I Blue (essay), 187, 202
Brontës, 70
anti-white violence, 36
Bronx Zoo, 43
21
7
218 Index
Brothers Grimm, 56 concubinage, 34

Browning, Robert, 56 Concubine, The, 34
Brown vs. Board of Education, 54 Connecticut, 148
Buddhism, 24
Conversions and Visions (essay),
24
Calhoun, Rory, 136 Cugoano, 190, 193, 196, 199,
California 202
hedonism in, 125
Cugoano, Ottobah, 189
Campbell, Joseph, 96
Cane, 76–79, 81–82
Carson, Johnny, 159 Davenport, Doris, 116
Cartland, Barbara, 40 Davis, Bette, 136
Cather, Willa, 105, 165 Death, 62
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 156–157 Desire Under the Elms, 156, 157
children Devil Child (article), 141
effect of segregation upon, 54 “Diary of an African Nun, The”
“Child Who Favored Daughter, (short story), 35, 37, 42–44
The” (short story), 36–37, 43, Didion, Joan, 43
45, Douglass, Frederick, 16, 96, 187,
47 198, 200
Chomsky, Noam, 134 Du Bois, W. E. B., 16, 83, 98
Chopin, Kate, 70
Christianity, 35, 74, 144, 190, 195– Each One, Pull One (poem), 85
196, 199 Easy Rider (movie), 48
Christology, 71, 74, 76, 78, 80–81, “Elethia” (short story), 8, 43–44,
83, 86 46–47
Civil Rights Movement, 28, 51, Ellison, Ralph, 94, 98
61, 64, 73, 80, 125, 133–135, Enlightenment, 189, 194
145–151, 153 “Entertaining” God (short story),
Civil Rights Movement: What Good 43, 46
Was It?, The (essay), 60, 133 Equaino, 202
Clark, Kenneth, 54 Equiano, 190–193, 196, 199
class, 116, 119, 156, 160–161, 163 Equiano, Olaudah, 189
clichés Eros Turannos (poem), 42
use of, 128 Essence, 33
clitoridectomy, 116 Estes, David, 202
Coetzee, J. M., 116 Europe, 194
Collins, Addie May, slave trade, 190
64 Evers, Medgar, 64
Color Purple, The, 5, 9, 14, 30, 33, “Everyday, Use” (short story),
44, 72, 75–76, 81–85, 96, 107, 36–37, 103, 109, 155–156, 158,
116, 119, 122, 125, 127, 163–165 161–165
Color Purple, The (movie), 6 Everything is a Human Being
“Coming Apart” (short story), 35, (essay), 187
37–38, 45–46
Communities of Women, 101, 165
Index 219
“Everything That Rises Must Gronniosaw, James, 189

Converge” (short story), 176 Guevara, Che, 64, 153
Eve Tempted, 153
Hansberry, Lorraine, 85
“Fable, A” (short story), 45 Head, Bessie, 128
“Fame” (short story), 35, 39, 42, Hemenway, Robert, 180
47 Hero with a Thousand Faces, 96
Farm Service Administration, “Her Sweet Jerome” (short story),
153 35–37
Farrell, Susan, 155 Hinduism, 24
Faulkner, William, 164 Holiday, Billie, 84
Fejee Mermaid, 143–144 Hollywood, 135, 137, 141, 153
feminism, 33, 52, 63, 170, 172 Horses, 85
Feminist Romanticism, 124 “How Did I Get Away with Killing
Fern, 78 One of the Biggest Lawyers in
Fiji Islands, 143 the State? It Was Easy” (short
Florida, 29, 176 story), 36, 42
“Flowers, The” (short story), 34, How to Keep Your Husband Happy
45–46 (article), 141
folklore, 101 Hughes, Langston, 41, 81
folktales, 43, 94 Humanitätsideal, 119
folk traditions, 53 Hurston, Zora Neale, 19, 20, 24,
From Behind the Veil, 19 69, 71, 76, 79, 81–85, 123, 164,
175–177, 179, 180
gardening, 105–106, 181
Gardner, Ava, 136 “I Cant Have Your Baby” (short
Gardner, Tracy A., 38 story), 137–138, 140
Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 71, 81, illegitimate children, 137
118, Illinois
175, 189 Chicago, 34
gender, 156, 158, 161, 163 immigrants, 106
Georgia, 13, 41, 89, 91–92, 96 incest, 45
Atlanta, 37, 148 In Love & Trouble, 7, 33–38, 48,
Eatonton, 77 163–164
Giddings, Paula, 116 In Search of Our Mothers’
Gold Coast, 195 Gardens, 77, 99, 101, 103, 106,
Goux, Jean-Joseph, 111, 113,
195 Grands Récits, 116, 118, 139, 164–165, 175–176,
Les, 124 Grass, 181
Günter, 123 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Great Depression, 43, 70, 153 (essay), 169, 175, 177, 182
Greeks, 195 “In Search of Our Mothers’
Greek Slave, The, 143–144 Gardens” (short story), 164
Groniossaw, 202 integration, 96
Gronniosaw, 190–194, 196, 199
220 Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus
Vassa, the African, The Written by
Himself, 190 Index
interracial marriage, 96
Invisible Man, 19
Is Love Really Necessary
“Lover, The” (short story), 35–36,
(article), 152
38, 41, 47
“I Was a Victim of the Beat
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 124
Generation” (short story),
137
magazines, 136–138, 140
Malcolm X, 16, 64, 85
Jackson, George, 64
Marrant, John, 189
Jea, John, 189
marriage, 152
Jesus, 71, 127
“Married at Seventeen” (story), 137–
Jet, 136, 141, 147
138
Maynard, Joyce, 115
Kafka, Franz, 123 McLuhan, Marshall, 193
Kennedy, John F., 64 McNair, Denise, 64
Kennedy, Robert, 64 men
King, B. B., 65 depiction of, 5, 17
King, Martin Luther, 16, 27, 64, Meridian, 14, 20–25, 27–28, 30–31,
74, 33, 46, 51, 54, 56, 61–62, 73, 75,
85, 147 79–80, 119, 122, 125, 134–135,
Ku Klux Klan, 64 148–149, 151, 164–165
Michelangelo, 157
Lamumba, Patrice, 64 Michigan
language Detroit, 64
use of, 128 Miller, Arthur, 156
Larsen, Nella, 85 miscegenation, 41
“Laurel” (short story), 35, 40–41 Mississippi, 15
Lessing, Doris, 70 Mosaic laws, 196
“Letter of the Times, A” motherhood, 61, 63, 137-139
(short story), 35, 38, 46 Motheroot (poem), 181
Letters to a Young Poet, Ms., 33, 41, 45–46
35 Letter to the Mules and Men, 70
Galatians, 30 Life, 137 My Last Duchess (poem), 56
Li Po, 43 mysticism, 23–24, 27
literary criticism, 170, 174
Liuzzo, Viola, 64
Nadinola Bleaching Cream, 141
Living By the Word, 83, 116
Narrative of the Most Remarkable
Look, 137
Particulars in the Life of James
Looking for Zora (essay), 76, 169,
Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An
175–177, 180–181 African Prince, As Related by
Lorde, Audre, 38 Himself, 189
National Geographic, 149
National Library Week, 147
Native Americans, 23, 126,
189
Inca, 190
religion, 24
Index 221
Native Son, 97 Pizarro, 190

New Age, 119, 126 Platonism, 196
New England, 38, 41 Pollack, Jackson, 157
New Guinea, 149 polygenesis, 143
New Organon, The, 194 “Porn” (short story), 35, 38–39, 42,
New York, 144 46
New York City, 15, 41 pornography, 35, 37–39, 46
New York Times, 15, 146 Porter, Katherine Anne, 163
Bestseller List, 5 Possessing the Secret of Joy,
New York Times Book Review, 46 116 poststructural theory,
Nile River, 41 174
Nin, Anaïs, 70 poverty, 81, 91
“Nineteen Fifty-Five” (short Powers, Hiram, 143–144
story), 36, 47 premarital sex, 137
Nixon, Richard M., 150 Presley, Elvis, 48
“No Fathers for Their Babies” proslavery, 143
(stories), 137 Prosser, Gabriel, 16
Nott, Josiah C., 143 Publishers Weekly, 6
Pulitzer Prize, 5, 33
O’Connor, Flannery, 43, 55, 163
OConnor, Flannery, 47, 175–176, quilts, 37, 103–105, 108–110, 156–
179, 180–181 157, 159, 160–161, 163–165, 167
Of Mules and Men, 81, 177
Old Artist: Notes on Mr. Sweet, Race, 158–159
The, 69 race, 119, 142, 156, 159, 161, 163
Olsen, Tillie, 70 racial identity, 134
Once, 33 racism, 15, 91, 93–94, 116
ONeill, Eugene, 156 rape, 15, 35, 41–42
Ong, Walter, 191, 197 Raveen, 141
On Stripping Bark from Myself “Really, Doesnt Crime Pay?”
(poem), 60 (short story), 35–36, 43, 79
oral tradition, 43, 191 Real Romance, 136
rebellion, 52–53
patriarchal society, 51, 55 redemptive art, 70
patriarchy, 117 Reed, Ishmael, 47
Paul, St., 30 religion, 20
personal criticism, 174– “Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff, The”
175 “Petunias” (short (short story), 35, 43, 47, 70, 81
story), 46 Revolutionary Petunias, 33
phallogocentrism, 124 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 35
Phonecians, 195 River-Merchants Wife: A Letter,
photography, 150–151 The (poem), 43
Picasso, Pablo, 157 Robertson, Carole, 64
Pickens, Slim, 136 Robeson, Paul, 16
222 Index
Robinson, E. A., 42
“Source” (short story), 35–36, 42,
rock music, 119
46–47
Rockwell, Norman, 47
South, 78–79, 89–93, 96–97, 144,
Roman Catholicism, 71
152–153, 164, 177, 187
romance, 152
Room of Ones Own, A, 102, black experience in,
165, 177–178 90 flight from the, 95
folk art, 94
“Roselily” (short story), 7, 34, 42,
music, 94
46
South America, 126
slavery, 121
sadomasochism, 35, 37–38, 46 South Carolina
Sarah Lawrence College, 41
Charleston, 143
Saving the Life That Is Your Own,
69, 75, 90 Steinem, Gloria, 64
Saxon College, 14, 25, 53, 57, 59 Stepto, Robert B., 19, 29
segregation, 8, 36, 41, 54–55, 92, “Strong Horse Tea” (short story), 37,
43, 47, 188–189, 193
135
“Sudden Trip Home in the Spring,
Selma March, 64
A” (short story), 35, 40, 47
Semitic alphabet, 196
Sent by Earth, 187 suicide, 69, 139
sentimental novels, 138 “Suicide of an American Girl, The”
(short story), 64
Sepia, 136, 141
Sweet Georgia Brown (song), 47
September 11, 2001, 187
sex, 60, 119, 137 Symbolic Economies After Marx and
Freud, 195
sexism, 15, 116
sexual exploitation, 37
sexual identity, 134 Take Back the Night, 45
sexuality, 134, 141–142 Tan, 136–137, 141, 147
sharecropping, 91, 92 Taoism, 24
“Should This Sado-Masochism Be Taylor, Alanson, 143
Saved?” (short story), 35 Teish, Luish, 38
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Temple of My Familiar, The, 75, 85,
bombing, 65 115, 117–118, 120, 122–124,
slave narrative, 171 127–129
slavery, 53, 83, 95–96, 116, 121, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 19–
20, 29, 76, 81–82
144,
Third Life of Grange Copeland,
148, 190, 200
The, 14, 30, 33, 72, 90, 99, 119
images of women, 144 Thornton, Big Mama, 48
motherhood, 138, 140
Thoughts and Sentiments on the
Smith, Bessie, 84, 145
Evil and Wicked Traffic of the
Smithsonian Institution, 103 Slavery and Commerce of the
Snow White, 56 Human Species, 190
soap operas, 134
Time, 126
Song of the Son (poem), 78, 82
Index 223
“To Hell with Dying!” (short story), Welcome Table, The (short story), 36–
8, 41, 47, 69 37, 43
Tonight Show, The, 36 Welty, Eudora, 164
Toomer, Jean, 76–78, 80, 82–83, 85 Wesley, Cynthia, 64
touring shows, 143 Wheatley, Phillis, 176, 178
True Confessions, 136, 147 Whos on First? (comedy routine), 45
Truth, Sojourner, 59 Williams, Tennessee, 156
Twelve Million Black Voices, 153 Wise Blood, 43
Wolcott, James, 115
Uncle Remus, 47 womanism, 117, 124
Universe Responds, The (essay), 187 women
University of Chicago, 147 as sexual objects, 147
Womens Liberation Movement,
171
Vietnam War, 46, 150
violence Wonder, Stevie, 75
against women, 38, 45 Woolf, Virginia, 70, 102, 165,
Virginia, 143 175–179
voodoo, 35 Wright, Richard, 96, 153
voter registration, 96
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman
Down, 8, 33,35–42, 44–45, 48,
Washington, D.C., 80, 103
164
Washington Post, 6
We Drink the Wine in France
(short story), 37 Zora Neale Hurston (essay), 84

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VODE0N

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

Edited and with an introduction by

Copyright ©2007 by Infobase Publishing

Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alice Walker / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom.

You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide

Editorial Consultant, Brian L. Johnson

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Editor’s Note vii

Alice Walker’s Men: Proﬁles

“All Saints Should Walk Away”:

Alice Walker: The

Coming to Voice in Alice

Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art 69

Alice Walker’s Vision of the

Alice Walker: In Praise of Maternal Heritage 101

Alice Walker’s The Temple

Visual Marker’s: Art and Mass

Teaching Alice Walker’s “Everyday

Telling a Critical Story: Alice

Reanimating the Trope of the Talking

Alice Walker 207

Bibliography 211 215

My Introduction amiably questions Walker’s firm assumption that

A contemporary writer who calls herself “author and medium” is by

We live in a society, as blacks, women, and artists, whose

you know—is to trust your own self-evaluation in the face of

There are times—and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of

It is only later, when the pain is not so direct a threat to

This may not be Browning at the grave of Shelley, but it is close

What gives singularity to the black writer’s burden in

By extricating herself from cultural control, Janie/Hurston

writers—in particular Alice Walker—with the intertext for later

Janie, in effect, has rewritten Joe’s text of himself, and

That is admirably precise and accurate; The Color Purple’s Celie

Alice Walker’s Men: Proﬁles in the Quest for Love

M any literary critics, perhaps understandably, have viewed Alice

. . . I wanted to explore the relationship between men and

“tramps” and “traitors” when men are heroes for engaging in

Walker’s sense of outrage at these injustices led her to formulate

Nothing that happens to Black men in this country does

folks as opposed to dark-skinned Black folks; and Black

Essentially, then, the problem is one of images: how Black men

. . . reject white attempts at portraying black reality. They are

Perhaps one of the striking features of Walker’s prose is that she

Something strains upward behind her eyes. She thinks of

“A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring” is a short story, narrated by

stunted ambition and thwarted romance, both of which cause Mr.

And he beat her unmercifully because he believes that all women

Albert’s abuse of his children might be described as benign

On those nights he would threaten to kill Margaret and Brownﬁeld,

Brownﬁeld was afraid to move away and afraid to stay. When

Because he had no money, Grange had rejected Margaret’s idea

embraces. He insisted in believing that Grange had been an attentive,

. . . he hated him for everything and always would. And he

He no longer had, as his father had maintained, even the desire