The World Has Changed (10 page)

When my own novel was published, a leading black monthly admitted (the editor did) that the book itself was never read; but the magazine ran an item stating that a
white
reviewer had praised the book (which
was, in itself, an indication that the book was no good—such went the logic) and then hinted that the reviewer had liked my book because of my lifestyle. When I wrote to the editor to complain, he wrote me a small sermon on the importance of my “image,” of what is “good” for others to see. Needless to say, what others “see” of me is the least of my worries, and I assume that “others” are intelligent enough to recover from whatever shocks my presence might cause.

Women writers are supposed to be intimidated by male disapprobation. What they write is not important enough to be read. How they live, however, their “image,” they owe to the race. Read the reason Zora Neale Hurston gave for giving up her writing. See what “image” the Negro press gave her, innocent as she was. I no longer read articles or reviews unless they are totally about the work. I trust that someday a generation of men and women will arise who will forgive me for such wrong as I do not agree I do, and will read my work because it is a true account of my feelings, my perception, and my imagination, and because it will reveal something to them of their own selves. They will also be free to toss it—and me—out of a high window. They can do what they like.

 

J.O.: Have you felt a great deal of coercion to write the kind of fiction and poetry that black writers are “supposed” to write? Does this ever interfere with what you
want
to write?

 

A.W.: When I take the time to try to figure out what I am doing in my writing, where it is headed, and so on, I almost never can come up with anything. This is because it seems to me that my poetry is quite different from my novels (
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
and the one I am working on now); for example,
Once
is what I think of as a “happy” book, full of the spirit of an optimist who loves the world and all the sensations of caring in it; it doesn’t matter that it began in sadness;
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
, though sometimes humorous and cel-ebrative of life, is a grave book in which the characters see the world as almost entirely menacing. The optimism that closes the book makes it different from most of my short stories, and the political and personal content of my essays makes them different—again—from everything else. So I would not, as some critics have done, categorize my work as “gothic.” I would not categorize it at all. Eudora Welty, in explaining why she rebels against being labeled “gothic,” says that to her “gothic”
conjures up the supernatural, and that she feels what she writes has “something to do with real life.” I agree with her.

I like those of my short stories that show the plastic, shaping, almost painting quality of words. In “Roselily” and “The Child Who Favored Daughter” the prose is poetry, or prose and poetry run together to add a new dimension to the language. But the most that I would say about where I am trying to go is this: I am trying to arrive at that place where black music already is; to arrive at that unself-conscious sense of collective oneness; that naturalness, that (even when anguished) grace.

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. Toomer was, I think, a lonely, wandering man, accustomed to being tolerated and misunderstood—a man who made choices many abhorred—and yet,
Cane
is a great reward, though Toomer himself probably never realized it.

The same is true of Zora Neale Hurston. She is probably more honest in her fieldwork and her fiction than she is in her autobiography, because she was hesitant to reveal how different she really was. It is interesting to contemplate what would have been the result and impact on black women—since 1937—if they had read and taken to heart
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. Would they still be as dependent on material things—fine cars, furs, big houses, pots and jars of face creams—as they are today? Or would they, learning from Janie that materialism is the drag-rope of the soul, become a nation of women immune (to the extent that is possible in a blatantly consumerist society like ours) to the accumulation of things, and aware, to their core, that love, fulfillment as women, peace of mind, should logically come before, not after, selling one’s soul for a golden stool on which to sit? Sit and be bored.

Hurston’s book, though seemingly apolitical, is, in fact, one of the most radical novels (without being a tract) we have.

 

J.O.: Christianity is implicitly criticized in your work. Is that because it has historically been both racist and antifeminist?

 

A.W.: Although I am constantly involved, internally, with religious questions—and I seem to have spent all of my life rebelling against the church and other peoples’ interpretations of what religion is—the truth is probably that I don’t believe there is a God, although I would like to believe it. Certainly I don’t believe there is a God beyond nature. The world is God. Man is God. So is a leaf or a snake.... So, when Grange Copeland refuses to pray at the end of the book, he is refusing to be a hypocrite. All his life he has hated the church and taken every opportunity to ridicule it. He has taught his granddaughter, Ruth, this same humorous contempt. He does, however, appreciate the humanity of man-womankind as a God worth embracing. To him, 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. He “rocked himself in his own arms to a final sleep” because he understood that man is alone—in his life as in his death—without any God but himself (and the world).

Like many, I waver in my convictions about God, from time to time. In my poetry I seem to be for; in my fiction, against.

I am intrigued by the religion of the black Muslims. By what conversion means to black women, specifically, and what the religion itself means in terms of the black American past: our history, our “race memories,” our absorption of Christianity, our
changing
of Christianity to fit our needs. What will the new rituals mean? How will this new religion imprint itself on the collective consciousness of the converts? Can women be free in such a religion? Is such a religion, in fact, an anachronism? So far I have dealt with this interest in two stories, “Roselily,” about a young woman who marries a young Muslim because he offers her respect and security, and “Everyday Use,” a story that shows respect for the “militance” and progressive agricultural programs of the Muslims, but at the same time shows skepticism about a young man who claims attachment to the Muslims because he admires the rhetoric. It allows him to acknowledge his contempt for whites, which is all he believes the group is about.

In other stories, I am interested in Christianity as an imperialist tool used against Africa (“Diary of an African Nun”) and in voodoo used as a weapon against oppression (“The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff”). I see all of these as religious questions.

 

J.O.: Could you tell me about the genesis of your title poem “Revolutionary Petunias”? Why was “Sammy Lou” chosen as the heroine of the poem?

 

A.W.: The poem “Revolutionary Petunias” did not have a name when I sat down to write it. I wanted to create a person who engaged in a final struggle with her oppressor, and won, but who, in every other way, was “incorrect.” Sammy Lou in the poem is everything she should not be: her name is Sammy Lou, for example; she is a farmer’s wife; she works in the fields. She goes to church. The walls of her house contain no signs of her blackness—though that in itself reveals it; anyone walking into that empty house would know Sammy Lou is black. She is so incredibly “incorrect” that she is only amused when the various poets and folksingers rush to immortalize her heroism in verse and song. She did not think of her killing of her oppressor in that way. She thought—and I picture her as tall, lean, black, with short, badly straightened hair and crooked teeth—that killing is never heroic. Her reaction, after killing this cracker-person, would be to look up at the sky and not pray or ask forgiveness but to say—as if talking to an old friend—“Lord, you know my heart. I never wanted to have to kill nobody. But I couldn’t hold out to the last, like Job. I had done took more than I could stand.”

Sammy Lou is so “incorrect” she names her children after presidents and their wives; she names one of them after the founder of the Methodist church. To her, this does not mean a limitation of her blackness, it means she feels she is so black she can absorb—and change—all things, since everybody knows that a black-skinned Jackie Kennedy still bears resemblance only to her own great aunt, Sadie Mae Johnson.

But the most “incorrect” thing about Sammy Lou is that she loves flowers. Even on her way to the electric chair she reminds her children to water them. This is crucial, for I have heard it said by one of our cultural visionaries that whenever you hear a black person talking about the beauties of nature, that person is not a black person at all, but a Negro. This is meant as a put-down, and it is. It puts down all of the black folks in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana—in fact, it covers just about everybody’s mama. Sammy Lou, of course, is so “incorrect” she does not even know how ridiculous she is for loving to see flowers blooming around her unbearably ugly gray house. To be “correct” she
should consider it her duty to let ugliness reign. Which is what “incorrect” people like Sammy Lou refuse to do.

Actually, the poem was to claim (as Toomer claimed the people he wrote about in
Cane
, who, as you know, were all as “incorrect” as possible) the most incorrect black person I could, and to honor her as my own—on a level with, if not above, the most venerated saints of the black revolution. It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness, stand.

Although Sammy Lou is more a rebel than a revolutionary (since you need more than one for a revolution) I named the poem “Revolutionary Petunias” because she is not—when you view her kind of person historically—isolated. She is part of an ongoing revolution. Any black revolution, instead of calling her “incorrect,” will have to honor her single act of rebellion.

Another reason I named it “Revolutionary Petunias” is that I like petunias and like to raise them because you just put them in any kind of soil and they bloom their heads off—exactly, it seemed to me, like black people tend to do. (Look at the blues and jazz musicians, the blind singers from places like Turnip, Mississippi, the poets and writers and all-around blooming people you know, who—from all visible evidence—achieved their blooming by eating the air for bread and drinking muddy water for hope.) Then I thought, too, of the petunias my mother gave me when my daughter was born, and of the story (almost a parable) she told me about them. Thirty-seven years ago, my mother and father were coming home from somewhere in their wagon—my mother was pregnant with one of my older brothers at the time—and they passed a deserted house where one lavender petunia was left, just blooming away in the yard (probably to keep itself company)—and my mother said, “Stop! Let me go and get that petunia bush.” And my father, grumbling, stopped, and she got it, and they went home, and she set it out in a big stump in the yard. It never wilted, just bloomed and bloomed. Every time the family moved (say twelve times) she took her petunia—and thirty-seven years later she brought me a piece of that same petunia bush. It had never died. Each winter it lay dormant and dead-looking, but each spring it came back, more lively than before.

What underscored the importance of this story for me is this: modern petunias do not live forever. They die each winter and the next spring you have to buy new ones.

In a way, the whole book is a celebration of people who will not cram themselves into any ideological or racial mold. They are all shouting, “Stop! I want to go get that petunia!”

Because of this they are made to suffer. They are told that they do not belong, that they are not wanted, that their art is not needed, that nobody who is “correct” could love what they love. Their answer is resistance, without much commentary, just a steady knowing that they stand at a point where—with one slip of the character—they might be lost, and the bloom they are after wither in the winter of self-contempt. They do not measure themselves against black people or white people; if anything, they learn to walk and talk in the presence of Du Bois, Hurston, Hughes, Toomer, Attaway, Wright, and others—and when they bite into their pillows at night these spirits comfort them. They are aware that the visions that created them were all toward a future where all people—and flowers too—can bloom. They require that in the midst of the bloodiest battles or revolution this thought not be forgotten.

When I married my husband there was a law that said I could not. When we moved to Mississippi three years after the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, it was a punishable crime for a black person and a white person of opposite sex to inhabit the same house. But I felt then—as I do now—that in order to be able to live at all in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose. Otherwise, I’d just as soon leave. If society (black or white) says, “Then you must be isolated, an outcast”—then I will be a hermit. Friends and relatives may desert me, but the dead—Douglass, Du Bois, Hansberry, Toomer, and the rest—are a captive audience.... These feelings went into two poems, “Be Nobody’s Darling” and “While Love Is Unfashionable.”