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Column: The Book Department: Alice Walker: A Potpourri of Youthful Prose



Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength – 

in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own. –Alice Walker

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. New York: HBJ, 1983.

In recognition of and to bridge Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March), I present for this Book Dept. installment In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, a collection of some early writings by one of the great Black American women writers – one of the great American writers, period – Alice Walker. Walker is known most prominently for her exquisite 1982 novel The Color Purple, which earned her the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making her the first Black woman novelist to be so honored. 

As a small aside here, the lushly serene Spielberg film of The Color Purple can’t compare to reading Walker’s words on the page.

Alice Walker’s writings have intrigued me for decades, as has Walker herself, not only because her writing, even from a young age, is brave and superb, but she and I share a birthday. We were both born in the Deep South, so we entered the world under the same stars. That shouldn’t matter a whit when it comes to appreciating (or not appreciating) someone’s art, but I’ve always felt it offered a tiny extra personal link between us. [NB: I recently became aware that the commonality of Walker’s and my respective beginnings in this world and my admiration for her writings do not carry over to my endorsing or even understanding some of the personal beliefs she has more lately espoused. See addendum to this review.] 

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens is a collection of essays, reviews and speeches written by Walker between 1967 and 1983. In the chapter “Saving the Life that Is Your Own,” she writes of a growing feeling of exasperation in her young adulthood that she had been intellectually cheated as well as less affirmed as a woman and a Black person, based on the fact that she had been taught precious few of the literary works of Black and/or women authors throughout her formal education. Chalk up another tie that binds between Walker and me, as I have experienced the same feeling of a kind of abandonment in my formative education, as if the writings of women and people of color were of lesser significance than the works of white men, still the staple of literature taught in American secondary and post-secondary institutions. 

In her essay Walker says, “I write all the things I should have been able to read. Consulting, as belatedly discovered models, those writers – most of whom, not surprisingly, are women – …and in danger of being misrepresented, distorted, or lost.” (In Search of…, p. 13)

The pieces in In Search of… were published in various periodicals and offered as speeches early in Walker’s career. They cover her years as a civil rights activist in Mississippi where she and her white husband were the only interracial couple in town, through her years as an editor of Ms. Magazine and on to a loving look at the inspirations for writing The Color Purple. Though differing in style and subject, common themes are touched upon throughout this collection: the pricelessness of “herstorical” heritage; a deep concern for Black feminists within the feminist community and within the Black community; a commitment to enlarging the audience for Black American writers of the past and a loving, poetic homage to her mother’s talents. 

Walker also offers personal musings on her childhood and on the difficulty of becoming a mother during the 1970s, a time that bristled with social activism and a many-layered stack of expectations for well-educated females. In segments of our society at that time, young women like Walker found themselves adrift in a world that pressured them – even if covertly – to succeed in careers on the one hand and family life on the other and just, well, to get on with it. In her chapter “One Child of One’s Own,” Walker speaks for so many of us who came into our womanhood at that time, and, I think, for our daughters and granddaughters now, when she says, “I, like many other women who work, especially as writers, was terrified of having children. I feared being fractured by the experience if not overwhelmed.” (In Search of…, p. 363) Her ruminations on this topic seem as relevant now as when she put pen to paper to write this essay.

What has stuck with me over the years since I first read In Search of… in 1983 were Walker’s essays on the writers who influenced her. Her advocacy for and devotion to one in particular, anthropologist/author Zora Neale Hurston, author of the stellar but heavily neglected (Walker offers her take on that literary snubbing) early twentieth century novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, was uplifting. In the chapter “Looking for Zora,” Walker expresses both sadness and humor as she describes her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave in a segregated, weed-choked cemetery in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker took on this venture because of her admiration for Hurston, a remarkable scholar and author, but one relegated to near obscurity; not just because of her sex and race, but because Hurston was an independent woman when this looked at askance, regardless of an excess of talent. Standing up against the diminishment of women artists and/or artists of color continues to be a challenging prospect today, to which most of them will attest, but, thanks to essays like Walker’s on Hurston, we can learn to appreciate how far we’ve come in that respect, and how far we have yet to go. 

The two chapters on Hurston and the title essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” are the parts of In Search of… that I remember cherishing when I read this book forty years ago, and they are still the ones I leaned into after my re-read last month. If you have time to peruse only bits of ISOOMG, these are the sections I would recommend not passing up. The title chapter is a wondrously expressed homily on the pent-up artistry of Black women over the centuries, but can resonate with women of all ethnicities as well.

“How was the creativity of black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century,” Walker writes, “when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write?” (In Search of…, p. 234) 

Walker answers that with a warmly recalled family story, one that could apply to many of us who are lucky enough to think back on our own mothers and mother surrogates, whose mode of expression may have been limited due to time constraints or social acceptability. What Walker’s, as well as many of our own foremothers, did to bring beauty to their families and neighborhoods, often without even realizing it, made them artists of the first order. Walker spins tender verbal gossamer describing her mother’s art (it was one of my own mother’s arts, too), namely, building a garden full of botanical delights. 

“…my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in,” Walker says. “Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms…. It is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant almost to the point of being invisible – except as Creator: hand and eye.” (In Search of…, p. 241) This is a formidable bit of writing.

Although a couple of the chapters in In Search of… are dated – “My Father’s Country Is the Poor,” a piece about Cuba in the early 1970’s is a case in point – they all give voice to the young Alice Walker, eagerly searching an intellectual landscape few Black women writers had previously been encouraged or even allowed to explore. In Search of… contains solid, enviable writing, yes, but plucky, determined writing, too. Read it in bite-sized morsels if need be, but, read it.

Reviewer’s Addendum: My long-term admiration for Alice Walker took a puzzling turn when I began writing this review a few weeks ago. Researching incidental information about her I was tossed into a painful online briar patch regarding her several years-long-involvement with a bizarre and totally debunked conspiracy theory. This “theory,” involving the century-plus old antisemitic screed “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” was made up as a kind of joke in the early 1900s but was subsequently used as if true by political terrorists to partially justify horrific crimes by mid-century. In my research, I found a few sources offering educated guesses as to why Walker would be sucked into this conspiratorial rabbit hole, but, frankly, I can think of no excuse for it. My favorite authors become like friends to me, and I took her action as a personal affront, a kind of betrayal even. This new-found knowledge about Walker caused a conundrum for me as I questioned whether I should write a review of material by her at all, although cognizant that In Search of… was compiled from material she authored long before she gave any inkling of her interest in, let alone acceptance of this reckless and false belief. I finally decided to go ahead with the article. Canceling a great writer is not ever my initial “go-to” stance even under these circumstances and In Search of… is a fine work, as are The Color Purple, Walker’s other novels, poetry, short stories and even a gentle children’s book she wrote called Sweet People Are Everywhere. That being said, I felt it was incumbent upon me to reveal what I discovered about Walker so readers could act according to their own consciences. I cling to the hope that Walker and all those similarly ensnared in the current vast network of manipulative conspiracy theories will sooner rather than later see the error of their ways. 

***

Judith Geer was an educator for 37 years and retired from the faculty of Erie Community College in 2005. She represents the seventh generation of her family to live in Holland, and she currently resides there with her husband Charles Wightman and their cats “Ernest Hemingway” and “Emily Dickinson.” 

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