The Third Life of Grange Copeland (30 page)

I wrote several chapters of the novel while at McDowell, but I left in March to be married. My husband and I moved to Mississippi that summer, where he continued his legal activities in behalf of human and civil rights while I wrote textbook materials for the fledgling Headstart schools that were being set up all over the state, taught at two local colleges, and did other, more expressly political, work. I also continued to carry the novel forward. It was completed in November of 1969, three days before my only child, a daughter, was born. I was twenty-five.

It was an incredibly difficult novel to write, for I had to look at, and name, and speak up about violence among black people in the black community at the same time that all black people (and some whites)—including me and my family—were enduring massive psychological and physical violence from white supremacists in the southern states, particularly Mississippi. I will always be grateful that the people involved in the liberation of black people in the South almost never spoke of expediency, but always of justice, of telling the truth, of standing up and being counted, of fighting for one’s rights, of not letting nobody turn you round. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” they said. “Everybody’s got a right to the tree of life,” they said. “We want our freedom and we want it now,” they said. Black women and children did not merely echo these expressions, they, along with black men, formulated them.

But even so, given the amount of pain involved in the thinking about, and in telling, why write such a novel?

The simplest answer is, perhaps, that I could not help it. A more complicated one is that I am a woman of African heritage and so naturally I insist on all the freedoms. Why not?

The most disturbing incident in the novel, the brutal murder of a woman and mother by her husband and the father of her children, is unfortunately based on a real case. In my small hometown of Eatonton, Georgia, there was when I was growing up, and there still is now, an incredible amount of violence. “Eatonton is a violent little town,” is what is said by the locals when all other attempts to explain some recent disaster have proved useless. The black people there, as in so many parts of the world, are an oppressed colony, and as one of our great African-American writers has said (and I paraphrase), in their frustration and rage they
of course
kill each other. But what, I wondered, would happen if you could show the people in the oppressed colony the futility of this? In any case, perhaps the violence of my hometown was impressed upon me even more than upon many others because I visited the local black funeral home several times a week. I had a job as babysitter right next door, and my sister worked in the funeral home itself, as beautician and cosmetologist. On one side of the hall she shampooed, pressed and curled the hair of the living, on the other side she did the same for countless cadavers; she also made up their faces and sometimes bodies, covering bruises, cuts, gunshot wounds, scratches and tears as best she could with her magic tricks arsenal of assorted powders and paints.

But even she was unable to do much for the victim around whose demise this story is built. Needing to share her frustration and, I assumed, outrage (we never discussed how she felt), she invited me into the room where Mrs. Walker (same last name as ours) lay stretched on a white enamel table with her head on an iron pillow. I describe her in the novel exactly as she appeared to me then. Writing about it years later was the only way I could be free of such a powerful and despairing image. Still, I see it; not so much the shattered face—time has helped to erase the vividness of that sight—but always and always the one calloused foot, the worn, run-over shoe with a ragged hole, covered with newspaper, in its bottom.

Another irony: Mrs. Walker’s daughter was one of my classmates. Her name was Kate. Was this not the name of my own grandmother, also shot to death by a “lover”? And who, in whispered family conversations, was somehow blamed for this? I think I must have spent the rest of the school year staring at Kate as at an apparition. When I offered my sympathy (a Southern expression, so sweet, if ineffectual, “to offer one’s sympathy”) she barely responded. The weight of caring for the household and for numerous siblings now rested on her. She was, like me, thirteen years old. She wondered aloud if they, the white prison authorities, the only kind there were and probably still are, in Eatonton, would let her father out of prison soon. He was the only means of support the family had. By now her father’s violence haunted my dreams; I never wanted him to be let out.

In my immediate family too there was violence. Its roots seemed always to be embedded in my father’s need to dominate my mother and their children and in her resistance (and ours), verbal and physical, to any such domination. Discussing this with my husband, who came from a different culture entirely (or so I thought) from mine, I discovered there had also been precisely the same kind of violence in
his
family. Seeing the dead body of Mrs. Walker there on the enamel table, I realized that indeed, she might have been my own mother and that perhaps in relation to men she was also symbolic of all women, not only including my husband’s grandmother and mother, who were as different from my own, I had thought, as possible, but also of me. That is why she is named Mem, in the novel, after the French
la mime,
meaning “the same.”

How can a family, a community, a race, a nation, a world, be healthy and strong if one half dominates the other half through threats, intimidation and actual acts of violence? Living as I was in Mississippi it was easy to see how racist violence sapped the strength and creativity of the entire population. Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation not because of the federal government’s meddling in its affairs, beginning with the Civil War, as white apologists for the state’s poverty at the drop of a hat exclaimed, but because every tiny surplus of energy not used in immediate living day-to-day was put into maintaining a hypocritical, artificial and basically untenable separation of the races, with domination of black people attained through violence. Beatings, castrations, lynchings, arrests or imprisonments were daily events, as they are now in a similarly doomed racist society in South Africa. It is almost bitterly comic today, as we see our exploited, poisoned, depleted planet wobbling underneath our collective weight, to think that white supremacists have actually thought, and in places still think, that they can acquire peace and security for themselves in the world by dispossessing people of color.

Mrs. Walker was half of her world, as people of color are more than half of the people on the planet. Could I make the reader realize this fact, and see the connection between her oppression as a woman (and the oppression of her children) and ours as a people? Could I make the reader care? Is grief alone to be our profit from experiencing tragedies that few people wish to see? And what of the writer s duty to those who fall, pitiful, poor, ill-used, under an embarrassed pall of silence?

“We own our own souls, don’t we?” the beautiful old man, Grange Copeland, demands of his son, Brownfield, who unfortunately cannot answer this question in the affirmative any more than our current legion of community drug users and dealers can. Their self-hatred and sense of futility is the same as Brownfield’s, as is their violence against others, though now stretching beyond mere family members and menacing entire peoples, entire worlds.

In a society in which everything seems expendable, what is to be cherished, protected at all costs, defended with one’s life? I am inclined to believe, sadly, that there was a greater appreciation of the value of ones soul among black peopie in the past than there is in the present; we have become more like our oppressors than many of us can bear to admit. The expression “to have soul,” so frequently spoken by our ancestors to describe a person of stature, used to mean something. To have money, to have power, to have fame, even to have “freedom,” is not at all the same. An inevitable daughter of the people who raised and guided me, in whom I perceived the best as well as the worst, I believe wholeheartedly in the necessity of keeping inviolate the one interior space that is given to all. I believe in the soul. Furthermore, I believe it is prompt accountability for one’s choices, a willing acceptance of responsibility for one’s thoughts, behavior and actions, that makes it powerful. The white man’s oppression of me will never excuse my oppression of you, whether you are man, woman, child, animal or tree, because the self that I prize refuses to be owned by him. Or by anyone.

There are some people who could never be slaves; many of our enslaved ancestors were among them. That is part of the mystery and gift passed on to us that has kept us, generation after generation, going. This is the understanding that is encoded in the lives of the “soul survivors” of this novel, Grange Copeland and his granddaughter, Ruth. It is an understanding about the possibility of resistance to domination that all people can share.

—Alice Walker

Wild Trees

Mendocino County

California

October 1987

Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel
The Color Purple
, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.

Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.

Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book,
Once
(1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.

In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel,
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
(1970), and her first story collection,
In Love & Trouble
(1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for
Ms.
magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.

With the 1982 release of her third novel,
The Color Purple
, Walker earned a reputation as one of America’s premier authors. The book would go on to sell fifteen million copies and be adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film by director Steven Spielberg. After the publication of
The Color Purple
, Walker had a tremendously prolific decade. She produced a number of acclaimed novels, including
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
(1982),
The Temple of My Familiar
(1989), and
Possessing the Secret of Joy
(1992), as well as the poetry collections
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
(1985) and
Her Blue Body Everything We Know
(1991). During this time Walker also began to distinguish herself as an essayist and nonfiction writer with collections on race, feminism, and culture, including
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
(1983) and
Living by the Word
(1988). Another collection of poetry,
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
, was released in 2010, followed by her memoir,
The Chicken Chronicles
, in the spring of 2011.

Currently, Walker lives in Northern California, and spends much of her time traveling, teaching, and working for human rights and civil liberties in the United States and abroad. She continues to write and publish along with her many other activities.