Alice Walker Listening to the Inner Voices Poet, storyteller, essayist, novelist, civil rights activist, “womanist,” visionary: every photo I have seen of Alice Walker leaves a different impression. In one she stands aloof, hairfluffed out around a proud, smooth face. In another she appears in a flamboyant Hispanic dress, a rose in her chignon, laughing across the table to the writer and editor Robert Allen. Then there is a photo be took of her in the garden of her small house in Mendocino, north o f San Francisco, where they often spend weekends together. Here she squats in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, utterly belying herforty-odd years, girlish plaitsframing a shy smile, her handsfu ll offreshly cutflowers. It is yet another Alice Walker who greets me at the door of her walk-up apartment in San Francisco’s Japantown. Dressed in black sweatshirt and sweatpants, hair hugging her scalp in neat cornrow fashion, she has a soft, almost scrubbed simplicity, as though I had caught her between rising and stepping onto her plant-filled veranda for a workout. Motioning me to the sofa, she slides open the large glass doors giving onto that sunny spot, stretching and greeting “this wonderful day.” Her voice is gentle, almost dreamy, with a trace of a Southern accent. The room around us is homey but uncluttered: a white globe with the geography of the world picked out in bright colors, African prints, shelves full of books. On the table next to me is a framed certificate announcing the sale of over a million copies of her Pulitzer-winning novel, The Color Purple. There is no time for small talk: Alice Walker does not like long interviews. We have already rescheduled this one from the day before, when she flew to Los Angeles in response to a last-minute call to join a demonstration outside the South African embassy. Jesse Jackson and Maxine Anderson were present, she says. Stevie Wonder sent his manager. “Don’t know what happened there,” she muses, raising her eyebrows comically. She kicks off her sneakers and settles into an old rocking chair, a private person making a brief appearance. “I need time to dream,” she says. The deluge of media attention unleashed by her Pulitzer Prize in 1983 forced Alice Walker into a period of total retreat. Even now, she is obviously taking care not to waste too much energy on something that is not strictly necessary. Walker’s slightly absent, scrupulously polite manner reminds me that she has described herself as “author and medium,” that she regards her characters as having a life of their own, that their voices literally “sound” in her head. To be sensitive to voices requires some distance from ordinary life. Is she working on another novel, I wonder? “There won’t be any more novels until my daughter gets through high school, in a couple of years,” she says. “All my main time is for her at the moment.” This means she is not available to speak for any new characters. “The writing’s very organic,” she goes on. “I don’t know what will be coming next. But when I’ve got short time, it’s usually short things— stories, or essays, or poems.” For the moment, then, she is mother to her teenage daughter, Rebecca, public literary figure, spokeswoman for her people. In a sense, The Color Purple is the politically correct novel of the decade. This is not a literary assessment (though critics have made it the basis of both favorable and unfavorable reviews), but a way of stating the impact that the novel has had. Alice Walker is one of a growing number of black women such as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Cade Bambara, whose writing is gaining recognition. But the respectability implied by the Pulitzer prize has put the book— and its themes— squarely into mainstream America. It has propelled the lives and experiences of black women in the impoverished rural South (Alice herself grew up in Eatonton, Georgia) into chic literary circles and onto newsstands around the world. There is more to Alice Walker’s appeal, however, than the need to acknowledge a voice of racial and sexual conscience. In the course of her development as a writer, she has transformed the loves and the hates, the tenderness and the cruelty, between women and men, blacks and whites, rich and poor, into a virtually archetypal statement about the human condition. At the heart of this tension, alongside the degradation that wears down the spirit, is a message of hope. Alice Walker’s readers love her because of the vision she brings to her realism, a vision of forgiveness and renewal. She believes in our capacity to learn from the past—and from the present—that she so eloquently describes. “A lot of people, especially black people,” notes one of her admirers, “who grew up in the ‘60s and got involved in the civil rights movement, went through almost a knowing too much of life. They really saw both the best and the worst of humankind. The Color Purple does a staggering job of conveying those extremes.” In Walker’s work, “the best and the By Leonie Caldecott Clinton St. Quarterly 23
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