The World Has Changed (42 page)

About the possibility of it starting up again, all of these children, many of them under the age of fifteen, about to be terrorized, brutalized, and killed—so many of them—so, to be able to make any kind of gesture that means that the people who are about to be harmed will know that we are saying we don’t agree—just the ability to do that made me so joyful.

I was completely happy. And I think that we could learn to live in that place of full self-expression against disaster and self-possession and happiness.

 

A.G.: You have had a continued relationship with the police officer who put handcuffs on you.

 

A.W.: Yes, because he really didn’t want to do it. And I could see that they really did not want to arrest us. And he, this African American man, truly did not want to arrest me. And I totally understand that. Would you want to arrest me? No. No, no. You would not. So even as they were handcuffing me, they were sort of apologizing.... I thought that you put the handcuffs [with] your hands in front, but they put them behind you. . . .

Then later, after we were released.... They take your shoes, I was there trying to put my shoes back on, and he came over, and he got down on his knees, and he said, “Let me help you.” And I said, “Sure.”

And I put my foot out, and he helped me with my shoes, and we started talking about his children. Well, first of all, he told me about his wife. He said, “You know, when I told my wife that I had arrested you, she was not thrilled.” And so, then I asked him about his family, and he told me about his children, and I told him I write children’s books. And so he said, “Oh, you do? Because, you know, there’s nothing to read. The children are all watching television.” I said, “That’s true.” So it ended up with me sending books to them and feeling that this is a very good way to be with the police....

I realized fairly recently—I went to Houston to the Astrodome to take books and other things to the [Katrina evacuees], and the police, a lot of them [were] also African Americans.... It was very clear that they, like the people who had lost their homes, really wanted some
books. But, as one of them said to me, “I really would like a book, but I’m not the people. I’m the police.” And I said to him, and then some of the people said that, too, they said, “You know, these people are the police, they’re not the people.”

However, I said to the people and to the police that the police are the people, and we have to remember that the police are the people.... And so, there they were, these big guys who probably had not had anybody offer them a book to read in years, if ever. They had gone into the army and into the police force because they did not have an education. That’s part of why they’re police....

 

A.G.: I was reading Evelyn White’s biography of you, called
Alice Walker: A Life
, and she goes back to 1967, and you had just come to New York, and you were submitting an essay to
American Scholar
. It was 1967, so you were about twenty-three years old. And it was entitled “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” You won first prize. It was published. “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?”

Can you talk about the civil rights movement to the antiwar movement? The antiwar movement, what good is it?

 

A.W.: Well, as I was saying about the civil rights movement . . . sometimes you can’t see tangible results. You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal. And a lot of it has to do with the ability to express yourself, your own individual dream and your own individual road in life. And so, we may never stop war.

We may never stop war, and it isn’t likely that we will, actually. But what we’re doing as we try to stop war externally, what we’re trying to do is stop it in ourselves. That’s where war has to end. And until we can control our own violence, our own anger, our own hostility, our own meanness, our own greed, it’s going to be so, so, so hard to do anything out there.

So I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one that we have dominant today.

 

A.G.: Speaking about movements, Rosa Parks died recently. It was the fiftieth anniversary, on December first, of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The corporate media, in describing Rosa Parks, talked about her as a tired seamstress who sat down on that bus, and when the white bus driver said, “Get up,” she simply refused. She was tired. She was no troublemaker.

But Rosa Parks, of course, was a troublemaker. Can you talk about the importance of movements and what it means to be an activist, why it doesn’t diminish what you do but actually adds to Rosa’s . . . reputation and her legacy.

 

A.W.: I was thinking about Rosa Parks, because I was in Africa when she died, and I missed everything.

 

A.G.: Where?

 

A.W.: I was in Senegal, in a little village south of Dakar. I was visiting this great African writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, who wrote a famous and wonderful book called
Two Thousand Seasons
, which I recommend to everyone. He’s a great, great writer, but when I got back and I realized that she had died, I didn’t actually feel like doing anything. I waved. I waved to her.

What I remembered about her was the last time that I had seen her . . . one day in Mississippi, we happened to be at the same event. I think she was being honored for, you know, everything that she had given us, and we were at the same table, and I think that I may have offered to escort her to the restroom, and I was in there with her. And she—while she was getting herself together to go back out into the reception, she suddenly took down her hair, and Rosa Parks had hair that came all the way down to her, you know, the lower back, and she quickly ran her fingers through it.

I was just stunned. I had no idea. She then twisted it up again, and she put it the way you’ve seen her, you know, always with the little bun, very neat, and I said to her, “My goodness, what’s all this, Miss Rosa?” And she looked at me, and she said, “Well, you know, I’m part Choctaw, and my hair was something that my husband dearly, dearly loved about me. He loved my hair.” And she said, “And so, when he died, I put it up, and I never wear it down in public.” Now there’s a Rosa.

So, you know, writers are just—we live by stealth, and so I immediately had this completely different image of this woman: the little, quiet
seamstress sitting on the bus, even the activist who was so demure and so correct. And I thought, this woman, hallelujah, was with a man who loved her and loved her with her hair hanging down, and she loved him so much that when he died, she took that hair that he loved, and she put it up on her head, and she never let anyone else see it. Isn’t that amazing?

So to answer your question, for me, to be active in the cause of the people and of the earth is to be alive. There is no compartmentalization. It’s all one thing. It’s not like I just exist to go into a little room and write. People have that image of writers, that that’s how we live, but it’s not really accurate, not the kind of writing that I do. I know that what I write has a purpose, even if it’s just for me, if I’m just trying to lead myself out of a kind of darkness.

So it broadens everything, being active in the world. You see the world. It’s like, you know, I’m learning to paint now, and what I realize, learning to paint, is that I’m learning to see. And activism is like that. When you are active, and you must know this so well, that the more you are active, the more you see, the more you go to see. You know, you are curious. One thing leads to another thing, and it gets deeper and deeper, too. And there’s no end to it.

 

A.G.: How do you write?

 

A.W.: What do you mean?

 

A.G.: Well, Isabel Allende said that she starts each new book on the same day of the year. I can’t remember the date. Maybe it was January 9, something like that.... What about you? What is your process?

 

A.W.: I start each book when it’s ready and never before. And what I do is I try to find—if it’s forming, you know, and if I’m attentive to my dreams, I know that it’s coming, and I know that it’s time to take a year or two. In the early days the big challenge was finding the financing to do that, because for many years I was a single mother. I was lecturing and making a living that way, or teaching, and so I had to think hard and plan, and some of my early journals are just pages of additions of how much this costs and how much that costs, and how much is left at the end of the month, and whether I can afford this and that. So that was the challenge, to find the time, because what I understand completely is
that you—in order to invite any kind of guest, including creativity, you have to make room for it....

I learned, partly through meditation, which I have done for many years, that you can really clear yourself of so much that’s extraneous to your purpose in life, so that there is room for what is important to your spirit, something that has to be given space and something that has to be given voice.

 

A.G.: How did you start
The Color Purple
?

 

A.W.: I got a divorce. I got a divorce, because I really knew that I could not stay in my marriage and write about these wild women. And also, I left New York. And I—and it started really just because one of the characters, while I was walking through Manhattan, said through my consciousness, “You know, it’s not going to work here. We are just not the kind of people who would come forth in Manhattan.”

So, they basically carried me through all this incredible anguish of divorce, because I, unlike many people who divorce out of hatred or anything, I actually loved my husband very much. He’s a very, very good person, but I needed to write this book, and he claimed that the hills in San Francisco made him nauseous.

So I came here, and I ended up in Boonville, because I needed to be in the country, and so I had enough money to work on it for maybe a year, because I got a Guggenheim grant, $13,000, and I just headed for the hills. We rented a little cottage in an apple orchard, and I didn’t know how long it would take, but it took just about a year.

 

A.G.: Did you ever envision then the kind of impact it would have on the world? Did you think about the people you were writing it for?

 

A.W.: Oh, I thought about the people I was writing it for. The people I was writing it for are the people who are in the book. That’s who I was writing it for. It never crossed my mind to really be that concerned about the people who would be reading it now, and that’s still true. I mean, I’m happy that people relate to it and love it. I think it’s worthy of love. But my contract was always really with the people in it and whether I could make them live in the way that they deserve to live, and it was a very high, very high experience to be able to do that, and when I wrote
the last page, I burst into tears just from gratitude and love of them and of being . . .

I don’t know how many of you know the work of Jean Toomer. He’s just a wonderful writer. But he talks about how in every generation, there is one person—or, as he puts it, there is one plum left on the tree, and all of the other plums are gone with the wind and so forth. There is this one plum, and that plum with one seed, that’s all you need, really, to start it all over again, and that’s another reason for us to be more hopeful about life.

So I really had that feeling of being this one plum with this one seed, because from what I could see, there wasn’t anybody else who had the same kind of love for these particular people that I had, or the capacity to be faithful to the vision of them that I held. So I felt very blessed and very chosen, in a way, like my ancestors were really present with me the entire time I was writing. They never went away. They were just really there, and I have felt their caring, and I still feel it. And it means that I never feel alone. It’s impossible.

 

A.G.: For someone who hasn’t read the book, for a young person who is wondering why they should bother picking up
The Color Purple
, what would you say it’s about?

 

A.W.: Well, I was just in Molokai last week. I just got back a few days ago, and Molokai is the island that is least known among the islands, and it’s because it used to be a leper colony, and there are actually lepers who still live there. And I was looking through a book about Molokai and about Kalaupapa, which is where the lepers are, and there was a photograph of this man who had leprosy, and it had eaten away his nose and most of his mouth and his ears and a lot of his face, and he just had this incredibly beautiful beaming face. What was left of his face was just completely aglow. And what he said he had learned from living in this place of lepers all of his life was that the most horrible things can happen to people, and they can still be happy. So I feel that when you read
The Color Purple
, no matter what is happening in your life, or how difficult the whole huge miasma of sorrow that seems to be growing, there’s a way that you can see through the life of Celie, that if you can continue and if you can stay connected to nature and also to your highest sense of behavior toward yourself and toward other
people, if you can really keep that struggle going—you may not always win it.

You remember how Celie said to Harpo at some point that he should beat Sofia, that he should beat his wife, well, that was a low point, but she was still struggling to be someone who would outgrow that kind of thinking. And so, what you learn is that life can be really hard. People can abuse you, people can take advantage of you in terrible ways, but there is something in the human spirit that’s actually equal to that and can overcome that, and that is the teaching of
The Color Purple
.

 

A.G.: You write in
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult
, “What I have kept, which the film avoided entirely, is Shug’s completely unapologetic self-acceptance as outlaw, renegade, rebel and pagan.” Do you see yourself that way?