"Why do I think you must have enjoyed it, at least a little?" asked Irene.
"Of course I was glad to be the 'princess' for a long time," said Anastasia. "I don't deny it. But never without such feelings of guilt. Why was I picked to be Snow White, Cinderella, and any other white lady in distress, when all my classmates were better actresses? Why did the boys flock to me, in high school, when I couldn't dance, was afraid to make jokes, and had a mother who let them know the darker shades of black were not acceptable? Oh, finally I got so tired of black people, that was why I decided to go to college in the North. They finally seemed to me--merely thoughtless, and selfish, and so fucked up over color it was embarrassing. Then in the sixties they started crying 'freedom!' but certainly this wasn't for the likes of me."
"You already had your freedom," said Irene. "The freedom to go either way."
"To be thrown either way, you mean," said Anastasia. "Even you got in on the throwing."
Like most people who have come to believe they are better than they are, Irene resented the notion that she could be intolerant. She sat up very straight to listen to this.
"Remember Styron's Nat Turner?" asked Anastasia.
"Vaguely," said Irene, who had worked diligently over a decade to erase the book from memory.
"Well, I remember it very well. One of our professors had the nerve to teach it to our class, and when you couldn't make him see what an insult Styron's monster was to the memory of the real Nat Turner, you were so mad you wouldn't speak to anyone on campus for days. That was when you started to drink a lot. And you were this shining example of sober, intelligent black peoplehood, too!" Anastasia laughed. "Not only drunk every evening, but nastily drunk. Throwing up, starting fights, calling people names. And they couldn't really expel you; you were the only really dark black student they had. And they adored you. But you said that was shit because they could not adore you and teach Styron's version of your history at the same time. Which made absolute sense to me."
"Hypocrites, the whole bunch," said Irene.
"And so were you. You loved being adored. Being exceptional. Representing the race. I knew, from the backhanded way I was treated, that they were hypocrites. I mean, they knew I was black, I just didn't look black. I never got any of the attention you got, and I could have used some, because those white folks were just as strange to me as they were to you. But you thought everything was fine until the hypocrisy touched you."
"Oh, if only we didn't have to live with what we have been," thought Irene, feeling a surge of self-disgust. What Anastasia said was basically true; but even worse was the realization that she had viewed Anastasia in the same "backhanded" way her professors had. In fact, she had never been able to consider her entirely black, and in subtle ways had indicated a lack of recognition, of trust.
"We had gone for a walk, to help clear your head," Anastasia was saying. "I understood what you were feeling because, wonder of wonders, I felt the same way. I followed you back to your room--do you realize you were the only student in the whole school who had a private room? Remember what you said to me?"
She hadn't wanted the private room, was all she could think, but that was not the answer to the question. Irene thought and thought. She couldn't remember. She had been assigned the private room because she was "different," that she could remember.
"As we were going into your room, I said, 'God, I know just how you feel.' And you turned, right there in the doorway, and you blocked me from coming into your room, and as you closed the door very slowly in my face, you said, very distinctly, and as if you'd thought about it for a long time, 'How could you possibly?'"
Irene felt as if live coals had been thrown down her back.
"Wait, wait a minute," she said with relief, having found a straw to clutch. "Styron's book wasn't even out then. That was two or three years later!"
Anastasia looked at her, and pushed her palms against the edge of the table in front of her.
"So?" she said. "It was the same book with a different name. There's at least one racist best seller published a year."
Irene groaned. "I was drunk."
"Not good enough," said Anastasia.
"No."
Anastasia was glad she was finally able to say these things. All her life she had felt compelled to take and take and take from black people, anything they gave. Compliments and curses with the same benign, understanding silence. After all, she was exempt from their more predictable suffering, and must not presume to assert herself. Now that was over, and it felt good.
She realized that something was shifting, in her talk with Irene. They were still linked together, but it was not, now, the link of race, which had been tenuous in any case, and had not held up. They were simply two women, choosing to live as they liked in the world. She wondered if Irene felt this.
"You were my objective correlative," said Irene. She struggled over each word, as if she would unmask her own confusion in this matter, or else. "You see, my great fear in college was that I could hardly avoid becoming an ordinary bourgeois success. I was bright, energetic, attractive, with never a thought of failure, no matter what sociologists say. Those students who were destined, within ten years, to know the names of the designers of their shoes and luggage, to vacation in Europe once a year and read two best sellers every five--while doing a piss-poor job of teaching our children--scared the hell out of me. That life, and not the proverbial 'getting pregnant and dropping out of school,' represented 'the fate worse than death.'
"Your dilemma was obvious. You, even objectively speaking, didn't know who you were. What you were going to do next; which 'you' would be the one to survive. At the same time that I condemned you for your lack of commitment to anything I considered useful, I used you as the objectification of my own internal dilemma. In the weirdest way, your confusion made mine seem minor by comparison. For example, I understood that the episode with Source was a short cut, for you, to the kind of harmonious, multiracial community that you could be happy in, and which I also believed possible to create in America. But politically this is a shaky vision. It was, in a way, convenient for me to think how much more shaky your 'dope & guru' program was. I was looking toward 'government' for help; you were looking to Source. In both cases, it was the wrong direction--any direction that is away from ourselves is the wrong direction."
"Ah, ah," said Anastasia, shaking her head from side to side, though the "ah, ah" was affirmative. "I was attracted to you because your destiny seemed so stable. Whatever else, you would remain a black woman. Black women, even the bourgeois successes, don't desert."
"Can't desert. Some of them certainly would if they could."
Anastasia laughed, as did Irene.
Anastasia now felt smug. Whatever she was, she thought, her child, which she hoped to have someday, would be a Native American, once more and at last at the beginning of things.
"You know," she said thoughtfully, rising and collecting her things, because although it was still disconcertingly bright outside, it was after midnight, "Source made us use his name as our mantra during meditation, so there'd be no part of our consciousness he was excluded from. But you know how mantras are: at first they sound like someone's name and you keep getting that person in your mind. But soon the name becomes just a sound. For me, the sound became a longing and then a direction for my life." She shrugged. "I knew I had to merge this self with something really elemental and stable, or it would shatter and fly away." She smiled, thinking of the man she loved.
"You're happy to be going home to him, eh?" said Irene.
"Positively ecstatic," said Anastasia, beaming.
"Write," said Irene. "I've missed you."
"You have?" asked Anastasia.
Irene hushed her with a hug that was not an embrace of shoulders; she hugged her whole body, feeling knee against knee, thigh against thigh, breast against breast, neck nestled against neck. She listened to their hearts beating, strong and full of blood.
As they le
ft the bar they passed a group of tourists who were pointing off merrily into the distance. Irene and Anastasia looked in the direction they were pointing and began to smile. They thought they were finally seeing the great elusive mountain, a hundred miles away. They were not. It was yet another, nearer, mountain's very large feet, its massive ankles wreathed in clouds, that they took such pleasure in.
* Rev. H. Mattison, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life (New York, 1861), as quoted in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life, edited, with an Introduction, by Bert James Lowenberg and Ruth Bogin (The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pa., and London, 1976).
A Biography of Alice Walker
Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States' preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.
Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker's parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice's brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker's dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.
Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book, Once (1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.
In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and her first story collection, In Love & Trouble (1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for Ms. magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.
With the 1982 release of her third novel, The Color Purple, Walker earned a reputation as one of America's premier authors. The book would go on to sell fifteen million copies and be adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film by director Steven Spielberg. After the publication of The Color Purple, Walker had a tremendously prolific decade. She produced a number of acclaimed novels, including You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), as well as the poetry collections Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) and Her Blue Body Everything We Know (1991). During this time Walker also began to distinguish herself as an essayist and nonfiction writer with collections on race, feminism, and culture, including In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) and Living by the Word (1988). Another collection of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, was released in 2010, followed by her memoir, The Chicken Chronicles, in the spring of 2011.
Currently, Walker lives in Northern California, and spends much of her time traveling, teaching, and working for human rights and civil liberties in the United States and abroad. She continues to write and publish along with her many other activities.
Alice's parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, in the 1930s. Willie Lee was brave and hardworking, and Minnie Lou was strong, thoughtful, and kind--and just as hardworking as her husband. Alice remembers her mother as a strong-willed woman who never allowed herself or her children to be cowed by anyone. Alice cherished both of her parents "for all they were able to do to bring up eight children, under incredibly harsh conditions, to instill in us a sense of the importance of education, for instance, the love of beauty, the respect for hard work, and the freedom to be whoever you are."
Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston during her days in New York City. Hurston, who fell into obscurity after her death, had a profound influence on Walker. Indeed, Walker's 1975 essay, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," played a crucial role in resurrecting Hurston's reputation as a major figure in American literature. Walker paid further tribute to her "literary aunt" when she purchased a headstone for Hurston's grave, which had gone unmarked for over a decade. The inscription on the tombstone reads, "A Genius of the South."
Alice (front) in Kenya in 1965. She traveled there to help build the school pictured in the background as part of the Experiment in International Living Program. It was here that Walker first witnessed the practice of female genital mutilation, a practice that she has since worked to eradicate.
Walker with her former husband, Melvyn Leventhal, a Brooklyn native. The couple met in Mississippi and bonded over their mutual involvement in the struggle for civil rights--he as a budding litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, she as one of the organization's workers responsible for taking depositions from disenfranchised black voters. Despite disapproval from their respective families, Alice and Melvyn wed in New York City in 1967. They then returned to Mississippi, where they were often subjected to threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually the pressures of living in the violent, segregated state, coupled with their divergent career paths, caused the pair to drift apart. They divorced amicably in 1976.
Alice and Melvyn with their daughter, Rebecca, who would also grow up to become a writer, in 1970. Alice had just published her debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which garnered significant praise and prompted these perceptive words from critic Kay Bourne: "Most poignant is the relating of the lives of black women, who were ready and strong and trusted, only to so often be abused by the conditions of their oppressed lives and the misdirected anger of their men." Alice characterized it as "an incredibly difficult novel to write," since it forced her to confront the violence African Americans inflicted on each other in the face of white oppression.
Alice and her partner of thirteen years, Robert L. Allen, a noted scholar of American history, pose for a portrait. The picture was taken at a celebration the couple hosted after the publication of I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, an anthology of Zora Neale Hurston's writings that Alice edited.
Walker being taken into custody at a 1980s demonstration against weapons shipments sent from Concord, California, to Central and South America. Her shirt reads: "Remember Port Chicago." This is a reference to an explosion that killed hundreds of sailors stationed in Concord during World War II--most of them black--while they were loading munitions onto a cargo vessel. Walker has remained a dedicated political activist since the 1960s, when she returned to the South after graduating from Sarah Lawrence to help register black voters. Recently, she was arrested with fellow California-based author Maxine Hong Kingston in Washington, DC, during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "My activism--cultural, political, spiritual--is rooted in my love of nature and my delight in human beings," Walker explains.
Walker with celebrated historian Howard Zinn, who taught one of her classes at Spelman College, in the 1960s. Walker developed a lifelong friendship with Zinn and considered him one of
her mentors. The two shared a passion for political activism and a desire to shed light on the conditions of the oppressed. "I was Howard's student for only a semester," she says, "but in fact, I have learned from him all my life. His way with resistance--steady, persistent, impersonal, often with humor--is a teaching I cherish."
A photograph of Walker taken in 2007 at a ceremony for her dog, Marley, and her cat, Surprise. "Marley appeared," she says, but "Surprise slept through it!"
Walker at her country home in Northern California, where she has lived since the early 1980s. "What attracted me to this part of the world--Northern California--is really the resemblance to Georgia that it has," she once told an interviewer. "This has been a very good place for me," she went on, "a very good place for dreaming."
Walker writing on the front porch of her California home. She has lived in many different places throughout the world--including Africa, Hawaii, and Mexico--and finding a place to write has always been a matter of utmost importance for her. She once said that "books and houses" are what she "longed for most as a child." Years after her tenant farming childhood, Walker is happy to have a place she can truly call home.
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