Essay Wow!

Alice Walker

Alice Walker

There are many different types of authors in the world of literature, authors of horror, romance, suspense,

and the type that Alice Walker writes, through personal experiences. Although most critics categorize her writings

as feminist, Walker describes herself as a “womanist”, she defines this as “a woman who loves other woman…

Appreciates and prefers woman culture, woman’s emotional flexibility… and woman’s strength… Loves

the spirit… Loves herself, Regardless”. Walker’s thoughts and feelings show through in her writing of poetry and

novels. Alice Walker writes through her feelings and the morals that she has grown with, she writes about

the black woman’s struggle for spiritual wholeness and sexual, political, and racial equality.

Mrs. Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eight and youngest

child of Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker. Her parents were poor share-

croppers but wealthy in spirit and love. Her father’s great-great-great grandmother, Mary

Poole, was a slave forced to walk from Virginia to Georgia with a baby in each arm. Her

mother ’s grandmother, Tallluhah, was mostly Cherokee Indian. Mrs. Walker was always

deeply proud of her cultural in heritances. In the sumer of 1952 while playing “cowboys

and indian” with her brothers ( Mrs. Walker was the Indian with bow and arrow in hand),

she was blinded in her right eye by a BB gun pellet. She was always self concious of the

large white scar tissue left in her eye. It goes without saying that Mrs. Walker was not

an outgoing person . Most of her time was spent in seclusion and in reading every

thing that she could get her hands on. Mrs. Walker lived vicariously through the

characters in the books that she read. At the age of fourteen years old, her brother

Bill had the “cataract” removed from her eye by a doctor in Boston, but her vision

never returned.

After graduating from high school in 1961, (she was her school’s valedictorian and

prom queen that year), Mrs. Walker then left home to attend Spelman College in Atlanta,

Georgia, on a scholarship. Before leaving , her mother gave her three special gifts:

a sewing machine for self-sufficiency, a suitcase for independence and a typewriter

for creativity.

While at Spelman, Mrs Walker participated in Civil Rights demonstrations. She was

invited to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s home in 1962, at the end of her freshman year in

recognition of her invitation to attend the Youth World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland.

After attending the conference, she traveled in Europe for the summer. This began her love

for travel and encountering the many peoples and cultures of the world. In August, 1963, Mrs.

Walker traveled to Washington D. C. to take part in the “March on Washington for Jobs and

Freedom”. Perched in a tree limb to try to get a view, she could not see much of the main

podium, but was able to hear Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” address.

Upon returnig to Spelman for her junior year, Mrs. Walker learned that she had received

a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Although not wanting to leave the

Civil Rights Movement, her teachers at Spelman encouraged her to attend Sarah Lawrence

where she would be one of a handful of African-Americans at the prestigious university.

The challenge was accepted by Mrs. Walker.

At Sarah Lawrence, she enjoyed the mentoring of poet Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane

Cooper who nurtured her interest and talent in writing. Following her junior year at Sarah

Lawrence, Walker had another opportunitiy to travel, this time to Africa and Europe. Her world

traveling broadened her mind and happiness. Yet, all this turned to despair when back at the

university for her senior year, Walker realized she was pregnant. Frightened and not knowing

how to tell her parents, she considered committing suicide and even slept with a razor blade

under her pillow for several weeks. She also wrote volumes of poetry, trying to come to terms with

her feelings and worst fears. With the help of a classmate, Walker was able to have a safe

abortion. Walker is also considered an accomplished poet. Walkers first collection, Once: Poems (1968), include

works written during the early 1960’s while she attended Sarah Lawrence College. Some of these pieces relate

the confusion, isolation , and suicidal thoughts Walker experienced.

During her recovery from the depression and anxiety she had suffered, Walker wrote a short

aptly titled “To Hell With Dying”. Her mentor Mruiel Ruykeyser sent the story to publishers as

well as to the African-American poet, Langston Hughes. To Walker’s delight, the story was

published and she received a hand-written note of encouragement from Hughes. Walker was

just 21 years old. Graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, Walker returned to Georgia where

she once again participated in the Civil Rights Movement by doing door-to-door voter’s registra-

tion in Mississippi. She also met a young Jewish law student named Mel Leventhal. Alice fell

in love with the passionate Leventhal who would take Civil Rights cases into the courts. She

returned to New York City with him where he was attending law school. Leventhal encourged

Walker to write. While pondering a first novel, Walker wrote an essay titiled”The Civil Rights

Movement: What Good was It?” which became her firs published article and won her first

place in the american Scholar magazine annual essay contest.

Encouraged and wanting to find solitude to work on the novel, she applied for and won a

Writing Fellowship at the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. While working on

her first novel, Walker and Leventhatl wed and moved back to Mississippi where he could

pursue Civil Rights litigation. Despite threats of physical violence due to their inter-racial

marriage, Leventhal worked on many cases for the NAACP and Walker worked as a black

history teacher for the local Head Start program. During the time of the Vietnam war era,

men with pregnant wives were not being drafted and Walker found herself to be pregnant.

This pregnancy prevented Leventhal from being drafted. This happiness soon faded as she

heard word that her hero, Dr. King had been slain. She attended King’s funeral services in

Atlanta. Upon returnig to Mississippi, she found it hard to contain her grieving. In deep mourn-

ning, Walker lost her unborn child. she continued her writing, accepted a teaching position

at Jackson State University and published her first volume of poetry, “Once”.

Upon reading this novel , I found it to be one of loss and acceptance and loss again. In this

work”Once”, one can feel all the pain that Walker felt during these trying times of her life. The birth

and death of hope in the death of her slain hero and her unborn child.

Walker again became pregnant and finished her first novel, The Third Life of George Copeland

the same week her daughter Rebecca Grant was born. Walker’s novel received literary praise

but also criticism. The story involves the murder of a woman by her husband. Many African-

American critics felt she had dealt too harshly with the black male characters in her book.

“The Third Life of Grange Copeland” (1970), again carries many of her prevalent themes, particularly the

domination of powerless women by equally powerless men. In this novel, which spans the years between the

Depression and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, walker showed three generations

of a black sharecropping family and explored the effects of poverty and racism on their lives. Because of his

sense of failure, Grange Copeland leads his wife to suicide and abandons his children to seek a better life in

the North. His traits are passed on to his son, Brownsfield, who in time murders his wife. In the end of the

novel, Grange returns to his family a broken yet compassionate man and attempts to make up for all the

hurt he has caused in the past with the help of his granddaughter, Ruth. While some people accused

Walker of reviving stereotypes about the dysfunctional black family, others praised her use of intensive, descriptive

language in creating believable characters

Walker rebutted such claims, saying ” that women are all too often abused by men they love”.

Next she became a writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College. Whe received a fellowship from

Radcliffe Institue. Then in 1972, she accepted a teaching positio at Wellesley College. At

Wellesley , She began one of the first women’s studies courses in the nation, a women’s

literature course. She also wanted to introduce her students to African -American women

writers. In her search for material, she found Zora Neale Hurston, a much forgotten Harlem

renassance writer. Walker was passionate in her discovery of Hurston. Later she would edit

an anthology of Hurston’s work and place a memorial on zora’s unmarked grave in Florida.

Seemingly inspired by this new heroine, Walker wrote fervently. In 1973, she published her first

collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women , and her second

volume of poetry Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. She won numerous awards for her

stories. She also edited a book about another writing hero, Langston Hughes. Next Walker

became an editor for “Ms. Magazine.” She worked on her poetry and prose daily. In 1976,

she published her second novel, Meridian. the book chronicled a young woman’s struggle

during the Civil Rights Movement. Walker had much personal experience to draw from.

At the same time, her marriage to Leventhal ended. Meridian received much acclaim and

she accepted a Guggeheim Fellowship to concentrate full time on her writing.

She left “Ms.” and moved to San Francisco where she still maintains a residence today.

In Callifornia, Walker fell in love with Robert Allen, editor of “Black Scholar.” They moved to a

country home in Mendocino. There, her writing proliferated. She published her second book

of short stories, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. In 1982, she finished The Color

Purple which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, American Book Award and escalated Walker to

worldwide fame. Alice endured a backlash of criticism from the African-American writer’s

community that she again portrayed black men too harshly. Walker was shocked and dismayed

by such criticism. Perhaps in explanation, she published In Search of Our Mother’s Garden in

1983, which contained many essays on her “womanist” ideology.

Walker took an active role in the making of The Color Purple into a motion picture, produced

by Quincy Jones and directed by Stepven Spielberg. She did not, however, write the screen-

play. She wa able to voice opinions on various parts of the story and casting. Walker was both

delighted and disappointed in the screen renderig of her story. Her beloved characters were

not her own on screen, but she did admire the power performances by the actors. When The

Color Purple was premiered in her hometown of Eatonton, She received a heros welcome and

parade in her honor. Her sister Ruth began “The Color Purple Foundation” which does charitable

work for education. In 1984 Walker published her third volume of poetry. Horses Make a Land-

scape Look More Beautiful. Walker followed this in 1988, with her second book of essays,

Living By the Word. In 1989 , she published her epic novel The Temple of My Familiar. Walker

next published another volume of poetry, Her Blue Body: Everything We Know: Earthling Poems.

In 1991 she published a children’s story, Finding the Green Stone. This was soon followed by her

fifthe novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, which chronicles the psychic trauma of one dwoman’s life

after genital mutilation. Her interest in ending genital mutilation took her jon a journey to Africa

with filmaker Pratibha Parmar to make a documentary called “Warrior Marks: Female Genital

Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women.

She also wrote a companion book Warrior Marks chronicling her experiences. In 1996,

Walker published The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, In which she describes through

essays and journall entries the loss of her beloved mother, the break-up of her 13-year relationship

with Robert Allen, her own battle with Lymes disease and depression, and her awakening

sense of bi-sexuality. the book also contains her own version of the screenplay to The Color Purple

and many of her notes and remembrances from the making ot her novel into film.

The next year Walker published another non-fiction title Anything We Love Can Be Saved:

A Writer’s Activism with more essays inspired by her ever expanding political activism. From

the Civil Rights Movement to the Anti-Nuclear Movement , the Environmental Movement, the Womens

Movement( she continues as a contributing editor to “Ms.” magazine), and most recently the movement

to protect indigenous people, their cultures and natural environments. Alice Walker remains

an outspoken activist on issues of oppression and power, championing the victims of racism,

sexism and militry-industialism and seeking to preserve our natural heritages. In September 1998,

Walker published By the Light of My Father ’s Smile, her first novel in six years, the book examines

the connection between sexuality and spirituality. The multi-narrated story of several generations

explores the relationships of fathers and daughters.

As in previous fiction, Walker weaves back and forth through time and individual perspectives,

Walker weaves back and forth through time and individual perspectives, her characters seeking

redemption, forgiveness and peace. Walker’s newest work jis a collection jof stories called

The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart. the stories combine autobiography and fiction as she

examines the bindings and breakings of relationshiips with friends and family and ljovers.

Alice is a vegetarian, gardener, world traveler and spiritual explorer. This Black American,

while going through much in her young life , used her unfortunate accident as a “spring board”

to a future that was adventurous and rewarding. In many of her novels and short story’s ,

there are characters which to me, that is Alice Walker. One in particular stand s out in my

mind in the book The Color Purple, where the character of ‘Harpo’s wife’, Sophia, is beaten and

in return looses her eye. Then you have the character of Celie who is constantly told she is ugly

and feels ugly. Walker shows her dislike of men through most of her novels and it holds true for this

notable book, with Celie’s lesbian relationship with Shug Avery. Alice Walker lived through

the historical times of the African -American in the South and all that it was. Politically passionate

and the champion of the down trodden was the blazing sword of this great writer. Walker was

a woman with deep feelings and truly resounded through every work that i used as my source.Overall

Alice Walker has been a very influential author throughout the black community, and her audiences are very

much interracial. Although many of the criticisms are controversial on her view of black men and their abuse

toward black women, that depiction can not be narrowed down to only that, there is much more that

is present in Alice Walkers writing. Her feelings, morals and the opinions Walker has towards women, sexuality,

and racial equality shine through her works of all literature. So many authors and poets influenced her in

he journey through the literary world. These Authors were some of her first loves: Arma Bentemps,

Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Huges, Zora Neale Hurston (major), Nella Larsen and Jean Toomes(major).

There were some African writers that Walker read and ingrainded them in her mind .Writers such as;

Elechi Ahmadi, Bessie Head, Camara Laye and Okot p.’Bitek.

Alice Walker had an uncommon love of women. That love transferred to noted women authors and poets as

well. Some where ; Charlotte Bront’e, Kate Chopin, Simon de Beauvoir, and Doris Lessing. Author who

added to her insights to the South were; William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Conner.

Walker use of words and thoughts were based somewhat on the philosophy of two of her favorite philosophers,

Albert Camus and Nietzsche.

Russian writers influenced her also. they were Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorkiy, Tolstoy and Turgenyev.

Poetry, her second love, was fueled by such notable poets such as; EE Cummings, Emily Dickerson,

Robert Graves, Japonese Haiku, Li Po(Li Bai) Ovid , William Carlos and Zein Epigrams.

Good or bad, it hung within the walls of her spiritual being until it cried to be released. This notable

lady writer picked up the pieces of her unfortunate beginning and used it as a stepping stone to write

about the one thing she knew the most about….herself.