The World Has Changed (6 page)

And then there is the enormous, complex body of work written after 1983, that is, after
The Color Purple
. The novels of this second rich period include
The Temple of My Familiar
(1989), which rivals
The Color Purple
in popularity, along with
Possessing the Secret of Joy
(1992);
By the Light of My Father’s Smile
(1998); and
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
(2004). As a poet, Walker produced in this second period
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
(1984),
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965–1990
(1991),
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth
(2003), and
A Poem Traveled Down My Arm
(2003). In the genre of the essay, Walker’s productivity parallels that in other genres:
Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973–1987
(1988),
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism
(1997),
Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon
(2001), and
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness: Meditations
(2006). And in this second, highly productive period, she continued to write books for the juvenile reader, namely
Finding the Green Stone
(1991),
There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me
(2006), and
Why War is Never a Good Idea
(2007). As a writer of short stories, Walker solidified her strong reputation in this genre with the publication of
Alice Walker: The Complete Stories
(1994) and enlarged it with
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart
(2000).

The work Walker produced from 1984 up to the present differs from the writing of the first period in a number of important ways. To begin, Walker is interested in exploring questions related to history, but in this second period her interest in history is limited neither to the South nor
the nation but rather encompasses the history of humankind in an effort to weave a narrative across millennia. This interest in human history is most evident in
The Temple of My Familiar
, Walker’s tribute to Lucy—the oldest archaeological remains of a human being found to date. Further, as a storyteller Walker has moved beyond her native Georgia to California and to Hawaii as well as to Mexico, Central America, and Europe, and once again in
Possessing the Secret of Joy
there is a return to Africa. The corpus that flows from
The Color Purple
is also more deeply concerned with questions related to spirituality and the need for a spiritual practice, and also with human psychology, human sexuality, and human development. Another hallmark of the work of this second period is voice. Throughout this body of work, Walker not only speaks as witness and rebel but also assumes the voice of the elder and earthling. This new voice is a function of the achievement of a particular maturity, which is accompanied by an increased awareness of the interrelatedness of all human existence, and thus also a responsibility to make her readers aware of this fact, and of the urgency of working for peace, justice, and reconciliation through art-governed expressions that both instruct and illuminate. The work of this second period is also distinguished by an increased concern for the health and well-being of the planet and other beings, that is, all forms of life in nature, with whom we must learn to coexist. It is through this concern that Walker explores questions related to ecology, the environment, vegetarianism, the culture and history of indigenous peoples, and why war is never a good idea.

 

While there are, inevitably, some points of convergence between these two organically related bodies of work, they nevertheless have emerged as quite distinct from one another. What they reflect is the manner in which Walker herself has changed and the impact of change upon her own development as a human being and artist. This division is also evidence of an expansive imagination and of a curious, compassionate, and probing intelligence that reflects her openness to new stories, new visions, and new points of view
irregardless
(an ungrammatical, forceful rendering of “in spite of” that appears on Walker’s license plate) of the expectation of some critics that her art conform to their demands.

Across this rich division in Walker’s writing is the continuity of her belief in activism. The Georgia writer’s earliest examples of activism are within her own family. There is the powerful example of May Poole, Walker’s great-great-great-great-grandmother who was “enslaved in the North American South” and who walked from Virginia to Georgia with a child on each hip. She died at the age of 125. In the year of her death Willie Lee Walker, Walker’s father, “was a boy of eleven.” Some have observed that in her own life Walker exhibits the “attitude and courage” of May Poole, qualities that made it possible for this former slave to “attend the funerals of almost everyone who’d owned her.”
⁶⁵
After May Poole, there is, of course, the courageous example of Walker’s parents. Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Grant Walker resisted white supremacy in Putnam County in a variety of ways, but in particular through their insistence upon their right to exercise the franchise; through their leadership as members of Ward Chapel, a Methodist church in Putnam County where Walker was baptized; through their leadership in the establishment of East Putnam Consolidated, an elementary and middle school for blacks in segregated Putnam County; and through the high value they placed upon spiritual values and humor as an antidote to the absurdity and brutality of white supremacy. Their
defiant stand against injustice, often at the risk of their own lives, is also part of the foundation of Walker’s activism.

At Butler-Baker High School, where she graduated as valedictorian of her class, Walker’s activism was nurtured by Mr. McGlockton, her “quietly heroic principal,” and also through the example of such teachers as Trellie Jeffers, Mrs. Brown, and Mr. Robertson, all of whom had high expectations of their honor student and who did their utmost to prepare her to “encounter the world beyond [her] small community.” “Their simple belief in doing their jobs properly, and with concern for my welfare after I left their instruction,” remembers Walker, “was activism at its very best.”
⁶⁶

The earliest record of Walker’s resistance to injustice took place while she was employed as a salad girl at Rock Eagle, a 4-H center in Eatonton. Then a student at Butler-Baker High School, Walker and her black classmates were discussing the consequences of segregation in their daily lives as they drove to Rock Eagle to report to work. Captured in Evelyn White’s indispensable biography of Walker, this episode is remembered by Porter Sanford III, a classmate of Walker, and his recollection includes Bobby “Tug” Baines, another classmate:

In his adulthood, Sanford would recall in admiration that “Alice was always real serious about her issues.”
⁶⁸

Walker would express again her contempt for segregation while en route to Spelman College in August 1961. Inspired by the example of Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, who refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white passenger, thereby catalyzing the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, Walker adopted a similarly defiant stance after
boarding a segregated Greyhound bus leaving Eatonton for Atlanta. In open defiance of the Jim Crow laws, she sat in the bus’s white section until she was forced to move by the driver. Walker recalled the event years later in the following manner: “A white woman (may her fingernails now be dust!) complained to the driver, and he ordered me to move. But even as I moved, in confusion and tears, I knew he had not seen the last of me. In those seconds of moving, everything changed. I was eager to bring an end to the South that permitted my humiliation.”
⁶⁹

While a student at Spelman, Walker committed herself “to bring[ing] an end to the South that permitted [her] humiliation” through her involvement in the civil rights movement. With the encouragement of Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, teachers, activists, and mentors at Spelman at the time, Walker took part in the demonstrations sponsored by student organizations based at the Atlanta University Center who were working in partnership with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She acquired a global framework for dissent through her selection as a delegate to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland, in 1962. As a delegate representing Spelman College, one of Walker’s sponsors was Coretta Scott King, whom she would much later interview for an article after King’s husband’s assassination. This article would appear in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
. Walker’s commitment to the civil rights movement was deepened through her attendance of the historic 1963 March on Washington organized by Bayard Rustin, a model for Grange Copeland of
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
. As already mentioned, after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College she accepted an internship at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson, Mississippi, where, with her future husband, Mel Leventhal, she wrote depositions based upon the testimony of black sharecroppers who had been evicted from their homes as a result of their efforts to register to vote.

Walker’s participation in the civil rights movement served as the foundation and framework for her participation in other social justice movements. Her deep commitment to the women’s movement and the end of violence against women is manifest in her life in a variety of ways, including her attendance at Boston’s first Take Back the Night rally in the 1970s. In her role as editor at
Ms.
and through her many groundbreaking essays published during her tenure at the magazine, Walker has been unstinting in her condemnation of sexism and patriarchy, in
documenting the racism in the women’s movement as well as the particular forms of oppression experienced by black women and other women of color. In her highly regarded definition of womanism, Walker has provided a theoretical model useful to activists and academics in their efforts to map and theorize about the interlocking oppressions of African American women. Walker’s commitment to end violence against women has led her to resist the practice of clitoridectomy, or what has been termed female genital mutilation (FGM). In collaboration with the British filmmaker and activist Pratibha Parmar, she produced the documentary
Warrior Marks
(1993), which she describes as a liberation film. With the accompanying eponymous volume, Walker and Parmar successfully elevated FGM to a global issue, and this has led to a reduction of this practice in African countries.

As the daughter of sharecroppers in the segregated South, Walker has been inspired by the revolution in Cuba in 1959 led by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. She first visited Cuba in 1978 and has made three trips since then. Wishing to make sense of the revolution and to stand
in solidarity with the people of Cuba, on these trips Walker has been accompanied by such artists, cultural workers, and revolutionaries as Bernice Johnson Reagon, Angela Davis, Pratibha Parmar, and Margaret Randall. On a visit to Cuba in 1995 she and others in her delegation had an audience with Fidel Castro. The trips to Cuba are an effort on Walker’s part to learn as much as possible about the implementation of the goals of the revolution so that she might continue to defend Cuba’s sovereignty against critics in the United States. On her several trips to Cuba she has not only delivered medicine but also raised with Cuban citizens, government officials, and with Castro himself difficult questions concerning racism and homophobia in Cuban society, and she continues to track the efforts of the Cuban government to address these and other forms of discrimination.