The World Has Changed (4 page)

Before leaving Greenwich Village to establish a household with Leventhal in a three-bedroom bungalow previously owned by Edelman in Jackson’s most recently constructed Negro subdivision, i.e., “community,”
³³
Walker wrote to Mrs. Leventhal, her mother-in-law, who remained firm in her opposition to the marriage. She carefully set the stage for her last written communication to Mrs. Leventhal. Significantly, the letter opens with the notation “Mother’s Day,” a subtle, ironic criticism of Mrs. Leventhal’s abdication of her role as mother to her daughter-in-law. This opening is followed by the date of May 14, 1967, and these stage directions for a family drama conclude with the formal salutation “Dear Mrs. Leventhal.” As part of what Walker terms the “preliminaries” in a carefully composed, three-page, typed, single-spaced letter, she reconstructs for Mrs. Leventhal the contrasting reaction of Minnie Lou Grant and Willie Lee Walker to the decision of their daughter to marry a Jew, or as the men and women of their generation would phrase it, to marry outside of the race:

Walker then challenges Mrs. Leventhal to reflect upon the dangerous world of Jackson, Mississippi, that she and Mel are about to enter with only her anger as a remembrance:

More in the role of a younger woman who was providing an older woman with instruction, Walker introduces at this point in the letter the delicate matter of grandchildren: “There is a lot in the future to think about. You may be scandalized to know that we plan to raise a family.... Grandchildren are grandchildren, even if you never see them. If you never want to see them, fine, if they never know you how can they miss you? But is this really what you want? Try to be sure. Life is both long and difficult. It can also be lonely.”
³⁶
Recalling another scene in this family drama, Walker addresses Mrs. Leventhal’s insistence that certain gifts be returned to her:

Walker closes her letter to Mrs. Leventhal without sentimentality, keenly aware of the implications of the gulf that has opened up between them:

Maintaining a defiant and principled stance throughout the letter, the daughter of Minnie Lou Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker signed the letter “Sincerely, Alice Walker Leventhal.”

Mrs. Leventhal was apparently affected by her daughter-in-law’s letter. Some time later, Mrs. Leventhal returns this extraordinary letter to Walker, and on the third and last page writes the following reply in longhand: “If you need money I promise to see you thru this I will do. I am your mother in spite of a broken heart.”
³⁹
In her own way, Walker would reply to Mrs. Leventhal’s postscript some years later in a fictionalized treatment of her marriage to Leventhal in “To My Young Husband,” a story that appears in the collection of short stories
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart
(2000).

During the years of her marriage to Leventhal, from 1967 to 1976, Walker published the first of the foundational works in her expanding body of work. In the genre of the essay, she published in 1967 “The Civil
Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” This powerful reflection on the meaning of her involvement in the civil rights movement is Walker’s first published essay, and “it won the three-hundred-dollar first prize in the annual
American Scholar
essay contest.”
⁴⁰
Widely reprinted, it would appear in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
(1983), Walker’s first collection of essays. Soon after Walker and Leventhal arrived in Jackson, Mississippi,
Once
(1968) was published. This debut collection of poetry was soon succeeded by a second such volume,
Revolutionary Petunias
(1973), which earned Walker the Lillian Smith Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. During this particularly fecund period, she published the fiction that would establish her as a leading figure in the renaissance of African American women’s writings of the 1970s. A year after the birth of their daughter, Leventhal and Walker celebrated the publication of
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
(1970), a historical novel of redemption and transformation grounded in the lives of black sharecroppers of Walker’s native Georgia. Three years later, while a lecturer at Wellesley College, where she taught the first course on black women writers, she published
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women
(1973). For this debut collection of short stories Walker was awarded the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award. In 1974, she accepted an appointment in New York as editor at
Ms.
, thus leaving Mississippi and beginning a long friendship with the magazine’s co-founder Gloria Steinem. In her first year at
Ms.
(the magazine that largely defined the national debate on feminism in the 1970s), Walker wrote her landmark essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” which would be reprinted almost a decade later in a collection of essays under the same title. In 1974 she also published
Langston Hughes: American Poet
, her tribute to the poet of Harlem and the nation who provided her with support at a critical stage in her artistic development. A year later Walker published in
Ms.
“Looking for Zora,” the reconstruction of her now well-known pilgrimage to Fort Pierce, Florida, where she placed a marker on the unmarked grave of an influential literary ancestor: Zora Neale Hurston. The poet Michael S. Harper dramatically evokes this pilgrimage in his splendid poem “Alice”: “You stand waist-high in snakes / beating the weeds for the gravebed / a quarter mile from the nearest / relative, an open field in Florida: lost, / looking for Zora.”
⁴¹
Widely reprinted, “Looking for Zora” also would appear in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, and Joyce Carol Oates would include it in
The Best American Essays of the Century
(2000). In the final year of her marriage, Walker published
Meridian
(1976), a meditation on the civil rights movement and in particular the role of women in the movement. This is an experimental novel of great depth and power that, in structural and thematic terms, bears the deep imprint of Jean Toomer’s
Cane
(1923) and Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937).

 

After nine years of marriage, Walker and Leventhal agreed to divorce in 1976. The parting was amicable, though marked by sadness. Reflecting upon the divorce, Walker remarks that a desire for greater states of freedom was the basis for the end of her first and only marriage: “As long as you exist, you are changing. I cared for Mel, but I didn’t want to live with him anymore. I needed to be free.”
⁴²
Leventhal subsequently married Judith Goldsmith, and not long after the divorce Walker resumed a friendship with scholar Robert Allen, whom she had met in Howard Zinn’s Russian history course while at Spelman College. Walker and Allen would remain together until 1990, the break
occasioned by many factors, including Allen’s infidelity and Walker’s full embrace of her bisexuality.
⁴³

A year after her divorce, Walker was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. With this important recognition of her work she acquired a new degree of financial security; thus positioned, she left New York for San Francisco in 1978. With Robert Allen, Walker established a new life in a region of the nation Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison termed “the territory.” The search for a place to write and think led to Boonville, California, where she would write the novel that would establish her as a national and international figure in letters.

In characteristic fashion, Walker completed other writing projects even as she prepared to write the novel that would transform her into an iconic figure in American letters and culture. In 1979 she published
Good Night Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning
, a third volume of poems, which contains the signature poem “On Stripping Bark from Myself.” Walker’s 1973 pilgrimage to Fort Pierce, Florida, in search of Zora Neale Hurston culminated in the 1979 publication of
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader
, a collaboration with the scholar Mary Helen Washington. This commitment to the reformation of the American canon would lead Walker to establish in 1984 Wild Trees Press.
⁴⁴
Thriving in the new landscape of Northern California, which bears a striking resemblance to her native Putnam County, Georgia, in 1981 Walker published her second collection of short stories,
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
. A celebration of the tradition of resistance, resilience, and grace of black women, the invitation to the book party held at San Francisco’s Women’s Building invokes the tradition Walker honors in each story: “Your Grandmama Survived / Taft / Your Mama Survived / Hoover / You’ve Already Survived / Nixon / and / One Hundred and Forty Days / of / Reagan / Why? Because /
YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD WOMAN DOWN
/ Celebrate / the / Tradition!”
⁴⁵

With funds from the Guggenheim Fellowship almost depleted, Walker pieced together an income based upon the advance for
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
, a three-hundred-dollar-a-month retainer from
Ms.
, and fees for lectures, which she soon stopped altogether out of respect for the demands of the characters who were taking up residence in her head.
⁴⁶
“I don’t always know where the germ of a story comes from, but with
The Color Purple
I knew right away,” recalls Walker: