Book Report/Literary Nonfiction

Dereka Sears Book Review & Report

Derekasears@hotmail.com Final Draft

December 13, 1999

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. 1983. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. New York. 393 pages

Biographical sketch – Alice Walker was born in 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, who were sharecroppers. At the age of eight Alice lost sight in one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. Graduating valedictorian of her senior class and receiving a "rehabilitation scholarship" made it possible for her to go to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. After spending two years at Spellman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. During her junior year here she traveled to Africa as an exchange student. It was in 1965 that she received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College.

After finishing college, Walker lived for a short time in New York, then from the mid 1960’s to the mid 1970’s, she lived in Tougaloo, Mississippi. She married a lawyer and had a daughter, Rebecca, while living there. Alice Walker was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s and in the 1990’s she is still an involved activist. She has spoken for the women’s movement, the anti-apartheid movement, for the anti-nuclear movement, and against female genital mutilation. Alice Walker started her own publishing company, Wild Trees Press, in 1984. She currently resides in Northern California with her dog, Marley.

Alice has received numerous awards and written many different pieces. Her awards include: Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple, the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award form the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Merrill Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Front Page Award for Best Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman’s Club of New York, the Townsen Prize and a Lyndhurst Prize. Some of her works include: The Color Purple, In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women, Langston Hughes, American Poet, and Living by the Word. These are just a few of her many works.

Genre, summary, and structure – This book is a collection of essays, speeches, and letters that span sixteen years of civil rights involvement and growing feminist awareness. With some of the works expanding on Walker’s fictional themes, she writes of the differences these years have and have not made to her family, the South, and an entire generation. In this, her first collection of non-fiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist. It is her intention to explore the theories and practices of feminists and feminism, incorporating what she calls "womanist" tradition of black women. The "Garden" of life, that Walker portrays in this collection covers a range of emotions from witty to serious.

Within Walker’s pieces she has a very domineering voice. The voice of someone who holds these ideas close to her heart. As with Walker’s piece The Color Purple, her writing in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, tend to touch on facts and ideas of a time when some people were not open to speaking about race relations, and women’s rights in a male dominated world. Walker opened the eyes of many with her works and made probably even more upset with her open views.

The Walker personal and style – Alice Walker is consistent in her attempt to bring an array of awareness to the readers of her writings. She not only recounts autobiographical experiences, but rather her essays subtly and brilliantly detail aspects of American political and social history and African-American folklore. Within "Gardens" she gives a type of introductory course in black women’s literature. She seems to try and touch on those blacks who have been instrumental in the long journey that African Americans embarked upon many years ago. In her writings she does not try to sugar coat the ills of society or to cater to the sensitivity of her readers. I find that her writings tell a detail account regardless of how personal it may be or even if it slaps the reader in the face. Walker wants her readers to get a true account regardless of what others may have to say about her style and way of writing. I think that her writings are better received now than were in the past when a lot of what she was writing was actually going on. Now there is more of an appreciation for the truth of times that were particularly hard for this country and blacks as a race.

Walker’s readers – Throughout her writings Walker gives a clear sense of closeness to the words. She tries to convey that this closeness is one that can be felt by women in general, but to black women in particular. She frequently refers to writers, artist, and other famous people who have become a part of this garden because of their greatness as well as their race and identity. Rather than giving her readers one big picture of what she is trying to convey, I think that she is using numerous views and areas to strike attitudes and get people to begin thinking about the different subjects that she addresses in this book.

Overall evaluation and recommendation – This collection of previously published essays, article, reviews, and speeches by Alice Walker does a great job of tracing the evolution of this talented writer. Within the essays Walker has explanations of the sources and the method of composing some of her poems, stories and novels. This book is a good comparison and companion to June Jordan’s Civil Wars, the first collection of essays and speeches of a black American woman writer who, like Walker, grew into her art and her own definition of womanhood during the civil rights and the women’s movements. Many would say that the book is only for women, and in a sense I would agree. She is eager to give women something that they can use and ponder and even relate to when looking at their own individual lives. A man could read the book and get some benefit from it if he is willing to look at live from a women’s perspective and see deep into the soul of what women are feeling in life. Her use of incorporating the political and social history and the African American folklore gives her personal accounts more validity in this skeptical world. She gives tributes to Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King that are especially emotionally powerful. A female reader, and in some instances a male reader, can find themselves in Walker’s Garden. The book is uplifting and encouraging especially for black women. I recommend this as a must read, in particular for young black women who are about to embark into the world of womenhood.

From "Coretta King Revisted" This short essay is reflection of occasions when Alice Walker had the opportunity to be in the company of Coretta Scott King.

"When I saw Corretta again it was at Dr. King’s funeral, when my husband and I marched behind her husband’s body in anger and despair… The week after that long, four hour mile walk across Atlanta, and after the tears and anger and the feeling of turning gradually to stone, I lost the child I had been carrying. I did not even care. It seemed to me, at the time, that if "he" (it was weeks before my tongue could form his name) must die no one deserved to live, not even my own child… A week later, however, I saw Coretta’s face again, on television, and perhaps it was my imagination, but she sounded so much like her husband that for a minute I thought I was hearing his voice…. I knew then that my grief was really self-pity; something I don’t believe either Martin or Coretta had time to feel. I was still angry, confused, and , unlike Coretta, I have wandered very far, I think, from my belief in God if not from my faith in humanity, but she pulled me to my feet, as her husband had done in a different way, and forced me to acknowledge the debt I owed, not only to her husband’s memory but also to the living continuation of his work." (147-148)

From "Looking for Zora" This piece tells of Walker’s experience when she went to Eatonville, Florida trying to find information about the black writer, Zora Neale Hurston. This trip gave her some leads and she had the chance to speak with a lady who know Zora. This passage is a reflection on this trip.

"There are times---and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of them---when normal responses of grief, horror, and son on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of emotion one feels. It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because I have come to know Zora through her books and she was not a teary sort of person herself; but partly, too, it is because there is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And a this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity." (115)

From "The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?" Written while in New York living with a struggling young Jewish law student who became her husband. It was Walker's first published essay. Talking about the Civil Rights Movement and its results.

"It was just six years ago that I began to be alive. I had, of course, been living before—for I am now twenty-three---but I did not really know it. And I did not know it because nobody told me that I---a pensive, yearning, typical high-school senior, but Negro---existed in the minds of others as I existed in my own." (122)

This piece being a reflection on the March and on the feats that have been overcome as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. In these passage she is questioning the option staying in the prejudice South an people moving back home to the South.

"But would one really prefer to turn back the clock?… It is memory, more than anything else, that sours the sweetness of what has been accomplished in the South. What we cannot forget and will never forgive."(166)

"And if I leave Mississippi---as I will none of these days---it will not be for the reasons of the other sons and daughters of my parents. Fear will have no part in my decision, nor will lack of freedom t express my womanly thoughts. It will be because the pervasive football culture bores me, and the proliferating Kentucky Fried Chicken stands appall me, and neon lights have begun to replace the trees. It will be because the sea is too far away and there is not a single mountain here. But most of all, it will be because I have freed myself to go; and it will be My Choice."(170)

From "Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected writings, of Social Protest – This is a collection of Langston Hughes’s previously uncollected revolutionary work. Editors, publishers, and critics feel that his revolutionary prose and poetry represented an aberration, an isolated phase of his career.

"Some of Langston’s best poems are in this collection, and they point to his basic impatience for Revolution, an impatience that was only partly racial.

Hungry child,

I didn’t make this world for you

You didn’t buy any stock in my railroad.

You didn’t invest in my corporation.

Where are your shares in standard oil?

I made the world for the rich

And the will-be-rich

And the have –always-geen-rich,

Not for you,

Hungry child."

From " In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens" – This piece seems to be an attempt to look into the lives of the black women and their heritage of a love and beauty and a respect for strength----in search of a mother’s garden.

"When the poet Jean Toomer walked through the South in the early twenties, he discovered a curious thing: black women whose spirituality was so intense, so deep, so unconscious, that they were themselves unaware of the richness they held. They stumbled blindly through their lives: creatures so abused and mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy even of hop. In the selfless abstractions their bodies became to the men who used them, they became mere than "sexual objects," more even than mere women: they became "Saints." Instead of being perceived as whole persons, their bodies became shrines: what was thought to be their minds became temples suitable for worship. These crazy Saints stared out at the world, wildly, like lunatics---or quietly, like suicides; and the "God" that was in their gaze was as mute as a great stone." (231-232)