The World Has Changed (26 page)

 

H.Z.: I remember in the book, you tell about how when your family was in really bad straits—maybe they were always in bad straits, but this time they really were in bad straits, giving out the surplus flour. Do you want to talk about that?

 

A.W.: Yeah, but that’s not in this book, Howie; which book are you talking about?

 

H.Z.: I’m sorry, that’s
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
.

 

A.W.: Then this was during the Depression, and she was refused flour. So, in order to feed us, she had to borrow or barter.

 

H.Z.: Yes, but before that, I have to remind you about your own story.

 

A.W.: Well, that’s because you’ve read it more recently that I have.

 

H.Z.: Yeah, I guess so. People don’t go back and read their own stuff; they don’t know what they’ve written. She was refused the flour because she was wearing this nice dress that the white woman who was giving out the flour resented. The dress had been given to her by your aunt, and this woman handing out the flour thought, you know, this is outrageous, that she’s coming here for this flour and that she should have this nice dress. Of course, what this put me in mind of—and things are always putting me in the mind of—the whole business of welfare and
the stories of welfare mothers, and “Oh God, look, they have a TV” and “Oh God, look, they have this,” and “Look, they’re wearing clothes.”

 

A.W.: And it’s all envy. My theory is that racism is all envy. In my mother’s case, this was absolutely true. Here she was, a really good-looking woman with spirit, and she had gotten these secondhand clothes and she was wearing them. You know the experience—this woman can wear a dress, I mean my mother could wear a dress. So she was there, and she still needed the flour, but this woman had this attitude that if you’re going to look better than me, I’m not going to give you anything. You know, I was listening to your
People’s History of the United States
on the way down to San Francisco, and I can see that is part of what’s been happening throughout our history, just this envy of what native people have had and what people of color have, and it’s very clear that racism in a way is a mask for this desire to have what other people have.

 

H.Z.: I guess I never thought of it as envy, but I guess it’s connected with that in that these are people that don’t have much, and people who don’t have much are vulnerable to prejudice and racism. And I guess it suggests that, very fundamental to getting rid of racism—maybe not sufficient, nothing is sufficient; well, it takes a lot—but one of the crucial things is dealing with the general impoverishment of all working people, like black, Latino, and so on, because it’s their deprivation that leads them to fight one another, all to the benefit of that top one percent.

 

A.W.: The ruling class.

 

H.Z.: The ruling class?

 

A.W.: Is that accurate? Because I am trying to find a phrase for that one percent, you know, a word, a name, so we don’t always have to get into color or whatever, but something that is really accurate.

 

H.Z.: I use the word “they.”

 

A.W.: “They.” No, Howie, I’m trying to get away from the word “they.”

 

H.Z.: They have done this to us, they control the media, they run the—

 

A.W.: It seems to me that we need a word, we need a phrase—

 

H.Z.: “Ruling class” is two words.

 

A.W.: Still, it really kind of gets it. What I don’t like about it is—there’s something about it.

 

H.Z.: Well, it’s been used a lot.

 

A.W.: But not recently.

 

H.Z.: You’re bringing it back.

 

A.W.: Well, maybe not. Not if you can come up with something better than “they.”

 

H.Z.: Maybe somebody in the audience will come up with something.

 

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The entitled?

 

A.W.: But they’re not entitled.

 

H.Z.: Maybe he means “the titled.”

 

A.W.: “Thieves,” maybe.

MICHAEL TOMS: Alice, what prompted you to start writing? What are the origins of your writing?

 

ALICE WALKER: I think a lot of different things. One was that I grew up in a very large family; I was very lonely and we always lived in very poor and small housing. I needed to be outside of the house in order to think. My head became the only sacred safe place to be most of the time because of this large family. And not a very gentle family, either. So I think I carried over that need to make a space for myself, make a world for myself. I also used to talk to spirits. So that carried over; so that every crisis in my life as a child I met with some form of written creativity.

 

M.T.: I think I remember your writing something about how your poetry only came out of crisis situations or sadness.

 

A.W.: Sadness, yes. That’s not true anymore, but it was certainly true for a number of years. It really saved my life.

 

M.T.: You recall where you wrote about your experience in, I guess it was your last year of college, at Sarah Lawrence, where you were contemplating suicide?

 

A.W.: Yes.

 

M.T.: And you were writing poetry.

 

A.W.: Yes. Yes. And it saved me. It was about a time I was contemplating suicide because I needed an abortion. I was too poor, really, and too
alone to have a child. There didn’t seem to be much of a choice, really. There was no one, for instance, to say, “I’ll take care of the child and feed it and clothe it and send it to school.” Of course, there was no one to say that about me, either. Also, it seemed to be a very untenable situation and so I started writing poetry as a way to give thanks, because eventually I was able to have the abortion and I continued with my life. The poetry was a way of acknowledging the sadness and the circumstances but also saying that I survived and my creativity survived and I would continue.

 

M.T.: And you were taking the poems as you were writing them and you were stuffing them under, I think it was Muriel Rukeyser’s door.

 

A.W.: Yes, Muriel Rukeyser had a little gardener’s cottage on the college campus, right there in the middle of the campus. She was my teacher—a formidable and wonderful woman. I put the poems under her door. That was the beginning, really, of my publishing, because I really didn’t know how to go about it and she did and just gave my poems to an agent and the agent gave them to an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and they’re still my publishers.

 

M.T.: Yes. Muriel was one of your mentors, wasn’t she?

 

A.W.: Yes.

 

M.T.: Who were some of your other mentors?

 

A.W.: Well, in Georgia, my high school teachers and my first-grade teacher. I went to an all-black school in Georgia, and I had many wonderful teachers who cared about me and my family and knew the culture and cared about everything. It wasn’t just about teaching for them; it was really about nurturing and bringing us up in the best possible way with good values. Then at Spelman, where I went before Sarah Lawrence, I had Howard Zinn, who was—and still is—this incredibly funny, irreverent, wonderful radical history professor. And Staughton Lynd, who is also a really great historian and political activist. So these two men were very much a part of my life at Spelman.

 

JUSTINE TOMS: Can you describe how that was, how they mentored you?

 

A.W.: Well, I don’t know if I would say they mentored me deliberately. You know, it was more a case of my recognizing in them great qualities of leadership and kindness and just following, learning from them in that way. But they didn’t just take me under the wing, so to speak. There were too many other people who needed the same thing.

 

J.T.: Did you ever go back and see your first-grade teacher again?

 

A.W.: I see her all the time when I go back. Miss Reynolds. I never learned to call her by her married name, either. She has always been Miss Reynolds and always warm and kind and loving—and she still is.

 

J.T.: I know in much of your writing you include a lot of storytelling, and there have been times—I know in one of your more recent books, the most recent,
Possessing the Secret of Joy
, you have a moment in there where a man is dying and someone, one of the characters in your book, is sitting with him as he is dying and is sharing a painful experience and it is being written by another. And when it’s truly written this man dies, then, really much more peacefully. I think you’re really capturing something here about storytelling and witnessing each other. Can you speak about how that is in your life?

 

A.W.: I think the world is made of stories. I see this more and more in my own life. I was just in Australia, for instance. I spent some time in the bush with aboriginal women. We just talked about each others’ lives and the stories. They were very curious to know the stories of my culture, and I was equally curious to know the stories of their culture. And what we discovered was just that they knit. There’s a place at which they come together. It’s when your stories knit, and when you look into the eyes of a person whose stories you’re sharing—they’re sharing yours—it’s when you look into each others’ eyes and you see “aha” in the eyes that you can let go and you can move on to whoever else you need to talk to. It is the same with this character. He has chosen this man to give the story to. The man, Adam, doesn’t even want it. And this is so true to life, isn’t it? I mean, how many more horror stories can we bear to hear? But he finds himself really hearing the story, and the story sinks in, and this man who is dying has enough wisdom and human feeling to see it sink in. I mean, he looks and he sees; that story just sinks right through the eyes and down into the heart. And it’s there; it’ll be there until Adam dies.

Then he can die. He’s done it. He’s passed this on. This is what the world is made of. It is made of people passing on their stories; dying, but not until they’ve done it. It’s interesting, because I always feel when I finish a book, whatever it is, that it is perfectly fine to leave then. I’m sometimes amazed that I’m still around to start another one. But there is a feeling of completion that is just inherent in storytelling. When you finish the story, something does end.

 

J.T.: So, in listening to each others’ stories, it’s like an exercise of keeping the heart open. How does one keep their heart open hearing sometimes very painful stories and hold that? How do you do that for yourself?

 

A.W.: Then you come to the skill and the craft of the storyteller. Not to mention the theatrics of the storyteller. It is not just about you keeping your heart open, it’s about the storyteller being good enough so that your heart is going to open whether you want it to or not. You know? So if you can just bring your body there and have your ears, and just anything, anything else at all that connects you to this person. In Adam’s case, he is connected to the person because he’s been on this AIDS floor taking care of people. He can’t really just leave this man to die alone, because he’s interested. He becomes interested in alleviating some of his suffering. Then the storyteller does the rest.

 

M.T.: What about the difference between storytelling and advice? You’ve written about that.

 

A.W.: What did I say?

 

M.T.: Well, you said that advice didn’t have the strength and power of storytelling.

 

A.W.: Oh, exactly. You know, to really do your job well you have to—that’s where theatrics come in. You embellish things, you make them, you fix it so that people have something that becomes a part of them rather than something that is plastered on them.

 

M.T.: So it’s easier to identify with the story, to put yourself in it?

 

A.W.: Yes, because you don’t really feel that it’s implicating you personally. There’s a distance. It’s a beautiful verbal weaving that you can admire. It’s only after you’ve gone home that you think, “My goodness, I’ll never be free of that design.”

 

M.T.: You know, I grew up with radio; the radio was like a storyteller coming into my home. I think now with the children exposed to television, the average preschooler has seen six thousand hours of television, and it’s not the same thing. The storytelling is so important for developing one’s imagination, particularly in a young child.

 

A.W.: Exactly.

 

M.T.: And that’s not happening anymore. What’s your view of television? What is your opinion of television?

 

A.W.: I’m not fond of it. I’m not as hostile to it as I was, primarily because I’ve learned how to use it. I can give myself two hours a week to watch television, and whether I use those two hours or not is up to me, but I can do that. I could watch two hours of news, say, or I could watch some really exquisite movie or special or something. I think, though, that for many people, there is no real sense of how to use it. They are addicted, pure and simple. They will watch anything that comes across the screen. This has had an incredibly damaging effect not only on children in general—and on people in general—but for black culture and Native American people it has been absolutely destructive. Not only do they get images that are not their own, but they get images in which they are pigeonholed in positions of weakness and just very bad ways.