The World Has Changed (37 page)

This godmother would not allow Zora to publish certain things that she wrote until godmother said she could. Her work was really controlled. In addition to her writing, Zora made films. They were on children’s games, the Mardi Gras, and on some of the conjurers whom she met in New Orleans. Among the things that she learned from these voodoo doctors and conjurers was how to kill. She became a converted soul.

I don’t know the nature of her relationship to Van Vechten, but supposedly she placed a spell on him, albeit probably playfully.
^b
The problem with rich and poor is that the poor person can never forget that the rich person is rich. And no matter how hard one may try, it’s impossible to forget that they have more than they need and you don’t have enough. There was a lot of that in Van Vechten and Zora’s relationship, although she kept saying, “I love you and it’s not because I need anything. I mean, please don’t think I’m asking for money.” And she wasn’t. It’s just that he happened to be so bloody rich, and she happened to be so bloody poor. It’s really hard to love people who have had all the advantages that you don’t have. It’s very difficult, and I can say that with a great deal of experience. Even with much effort, I still find it difficult to love people who control, who have everything. And it’s so sad because no matter what they do, the feeling remains. They can be ever so wonderful, and yet this barrier rises like a ghost.

I believe in voodoo as much as I believe in any other religion. It works for the people who need it to work, and there are probably some definite medicinal qualities the people use. In Haiti, for example, the thing that Hurston discovered about the zombies is that they know this secret that they brought from Guinea, which apparently puts a part of the brain
to sleep and allows people to appear to die. But they’re not really dead. They can be brought back, and they can be put to work, to just work and do nothing else. But the part of the brain that controls memory and speech and everything else is gone. I think that’s entirely possible. I don’t see why it couldn’t be. All of these things can probably be explained. Zora talked about the way people would collect dirt from graveyards to use to destroy people. It’s in
Tell My Horse
. What she discovered after taking some of this dirt to a chemist was that it’s full of disease and germs. So if you went to the grave of someone who died of smallpox and took the dirt, it keeps its potency up to twenty years or so, and you could actually give a horrible disease to someone.

With my own mother I understand new layers of meaning in our relationship. She was devoutly Christian and went to the church regularly as a mother of the church for most of my life when I lived at home. Yet behind that, I think she was the most sincere worshipper of nature. I know that because I am also. And I know that what’s different about the way that I relate to nature and to the earth is that I don’t feel compelled to put a Christian face on what is essentially a pagan mark. So I just love the earth and love nature, worship it, and think of it as my source of life and any kind of life. I know there is a galaxy and a cosmos, but I think that if there is a divine intelligence that orders everything, it’s too much for me to comprehend. So I’m happy to just love what I can feel. And I feel. And this I think was true of my mother in the sense that she had absolute faith in nature. But if you had asked her that, she would not have necessarily understood what you meant. But she did because I have seen her visit a house, and if there was a sprig of anything lying that had broken off of any plant, she would take it home, stick it in any little bit of soil, and would have absolute certainty that it would do well, and it did. That was her way. I grew up with a woman who was so connected to life and so much in sync with the source of all that there is. It was just wonderful watching her exist in the world, and this was true even though we were poor and we had to deal with people who hated us or couldn’t really see us. There’s no doubt in my mind that my mother was a great, great spirit, and I actually think of her as a goddess.

I love B.B. because he loves women. They can be mean, they can be bitchy, they can be carrying on, but you can tell he really loves them.
He’s full of love. I would like to be the literary B.B. King. There’s something about him that has remained true and has remained genuine. He seems to be authentic. Average people respond immediately to what he is and what he says, and I like that. That is the best kind of acceptance.

The blues can be very disturbing, actually. I love it, and I love some songs much more than others, some musicians more than others, but what’s truly disturbing is how frequently when women are singing they are telling about abusive relationships. I’m struck by that time and time again. And then of course it makes me think about all the stories those women were trying to hint at that they were not able to say. You know, I remember once, Quincy [Jones] was talking, and he laughed and said, “You know, Celie
is
the blues.” And that’s so true, because if Celie were singing, she would be like Mamie [Smith], Bessie [Smith], and Ma Rainey, all of whom were abused. Those women were abused by men. I always feel so deeply when I listen to them, and then I think about how people took it for granted that your man would be this way. Of course you’ll be abused. And so they weren’t really heard, and they got used to it, actually dancing to this. It was like a spiral that was not going up but going down. People sing about this and then expect it in relationships. It was self-perpetuating. I doubt if any of these people had relationships that nourished them. They had relationships, instead, that prompted cries of anguish that were then used to entertain. The people who were entertained modeled themselves on what they were hearing, and it was just a very bad cycle.

What I love about the blues, of course, is the music and the honesty with which the people were trying to sing about what was actually happening. I hate the kind of music that was popular back then, and is popular now, where no matter what is happening, it is a kind of
la, la, la, la
, all sweetness and light, and you can hear that phoniness in their voices. You would not want to go across the street with those people because they are totally dishonest about their emotions. They don’t know what emotions they were feeling. They are very unauthentic, but with the blues you feel like you are hearing authentic feeling and that people are struggling to find joy in life. I mean, look at Bessie. She’s got all the vitality in the world. She is connected to the source, and she knows it. And the world, the rest of the world, is really trying to tell her that she’s not anybody big, and there’s all these little ways that this is done. Your hair has to be straight if it’s kinky and you must wear powder, do something
to your nose, whatever. All of those things are really designed to try to convince you that you are not what life and poetry are about. But Bessie used all of that power she had to affirm constantly that, “Absolutely, I’m what this is all about. I mean, I don’t care what you are doing. I know what I am doing, I am here.”

I know what the earth says. Life in earth says,
Be like me. I mean, I grow bananas, I grow strawberries, I have trees dropping nuts all the time, I have waterfalls.
I mean the earth says constantly,
I am not a poor person.
The earth says,
I have everything.
And so do we. That is one of the reasons, on a whole other level, why people who do have everything are constantly robbed of it. You know, it’s like people come up on something that’s just magnificent, and they just can’t stop until they’ve stripped it and killed it. This is what’s happening to the earth itself. And we are no different; we’re the same. There’s no such thing as mankind or peoplekind having the earth. I mean, please, have a little humility before all of this. Before all of this. Just one little red clover—you can’t make that. So, we live in paradise.

MARGO JEFFERSON: Do you remember the first things you ever wrote, first words, first poem?

 

ALICE WALKER: No. [laughter]

 

M.J.: Do you remember why you wrote it, or why you started to write?

 

A.W.: I think I started to write because I was in love with the feel of pen on paper, or pencil on paper, and that it was something that I could do in solitude, and it was something that seemed to feed me as a little child.

 

M.J.: You were the youngest of eight.

 

A.W.: I was the youngest of eight.

 

M.J.: So solitude—

 

A.W.: Was hard to find. [laughter] And very much something I
loved
.

 

M.J.: And where did you find—where did you write? Where did you go off?

 

A.W.: I went off behind the house. Well, actually, there’s a story that my mother told. She said that when I was crawling, she would look for me, because apparently, you know, I had a way of getting away from them, and she would look for me, and I would have crawled to the back of the house and I would be writing in the sand with a twig or in the margins
of a Sears, Roebuck catalog, and I think she said that that was, as far as she was concerned, that was my beginning as a writer.

 

M.J.: So she always took note of it.

 

A.W.: Well, I think she took note of it fifty years later, you know. [laughter]

 

M.J.: I think she
had
to take note of it fifty years later.

 

A.W.: It wasn’t that way, she wasn’t—

 

M.J.: You mean, she wasn’t “Oh, my daughter.”

 

A.W.: No, no, no, no, this was not the kind of family, actually, where there was that kind of thing happening a lot. Although my sister took notice, one of my sisters took notice, and
that
was enough, and my teachers took notice, and, as you know, you just need one person to
notice
that you’re doing something and to say, “My goodness, that’s wonderful, that’s different, that’s whatever,” but at least they notice.

 

M.J.: I have to say, it took you as many years to notice your mother’s garden as a form of art, right, in a sense?

 

A.W.: Well, in a sense, it took me a long time to really get it, to really get—

 

M.J.: Let me just go back. Alice grew up in Eatonton. I always want to call it Eatonville because of Hurston—

 

A.W.: I know, Zora.

 

M.J.: Georgia, on a farm. All right, so your mother and her garden.

 

A.W.: Well, my mother had this amazing ability to grow anything, and in fact, she’d also
can
anything, and my sister says this, my sister says, “Anything that could grow or that, you know, could walk around, my mother could put it in a jar,” meaning, you know, she could . . . [laughter]
But she had this amazing ability and so her garden was something that was a work of art, and I have relatives here tonight, who I’m so happy they’re here, because they remember this garden. They may not remember it in all the ways that I did growing up, but it was such a sanctuary, and I saw that when my mother, having worked in some other woman’s kitchen all day, or worked in the dairy with my father all day, or worked in the fields all day, when she came home, and she kicked off her shoes, she went into her garden, and she was in, you know,
bliss
, she was in a place that only artists and extremely religious people and spiritual people get to. She was in this
amazing
state of grace. And
that
is why when I grew up, and I understood that, I realized that as daughters and, of course, sons too, but especially daughters, we are often looking for that, we are in search of our mothers’ gardens, that place that lifts us very high.

 

M.J.: And that when you first wrote
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, which was in the early seventies, you were also speaking very particularly about the garden as the way for a woman to find her art, her creativity, and, as you said at the time, Virginia Woolf said a woman needed at least a room of her own, and most black women, you know, had
no
space of their own, not a room, not necessarily anything, even a plot of land, and most black women did not necessarily have pen and paper of their own, or literacy of their own, so you were talking about art forms that live in the realm of the vernacular, the oral, what people call “crafts.”

 

A.W.: Yes, and also, knowing that if we can understand these quote “crafts” as art, and if we can understand the fulfillment that comes from creativity, then whatever it is that we have that we do,
that
is our art, that is our sanctuary, that is where we become holy, and this was very important to talk about with people, because often people just say, “Well, you know, I don’t know how to do anything, I don’t have a gift, I’m not creative, I don’t, you know.” But I could see that in my community, these women who were making these incredible quilts, and you know quilts have now been shown and acknowledged to be a very high art form.

 

M.J.: With the quilts of Gee’s Bend, just finally—they just finished off that notion that art and these kind of crafts are—

 

A.W.: Exactly, exactly. And that is what, that is one of the things we could bring to the culture. These overlooked areas of creativity that gave our ancestors so much joy, because art, as you know, is
joyful
. People often ask me, well you know, you write so many sad stories, aren’t you weeping and moaning and groaning? Not at all. Even if I am weeping and moaning and groaning, the joy is just right there, because the whole point about creativity is that you can
do
it, that you’re able to actually do it, that what you envision is something that someone else can see, can touch, can smell, can feel, and they can feel
exactly
and know exactly what you felt, and this is a kind of magic.