worst of humankind” are often described in terms of physical beauty or ugliness. In her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, a young black man destroys the beauty of his wife, Mem, because he cannot bear what that beauty represents: the grace and competence that she, and not he, is capable of bringing to their everday struggle for survival. Envy turns him from admirer into oppressor. The Color Purple's Celie reverses the novel’s process of despair—reclaiming “beauty" lost at a very young age. This equation of inner beauty with healing, with growing stronger, is more than a .fictional device, however. It is rooted in Walker's own experience. When she was eight years old, her right eye was blinded by a shot from her brother’s BB gun. For years, the wound symbolized her lack of self-confidence, her reluctance to look the world in the eye. There is a revealing moment in her account of this disfiguring trauma, when, . as a twelve-year-old, she rants at her mirror, “I do not pray for sight. I pray for beauty." The emotional importance of the ugly scar outweighed the practical importance of sight. Now, with the scar tissue removed, her eyes are remarkably beautiful. “We all become more beautiful as we are loved,” says Walker. “And if you have self-love, then you are always beautiful. I think what is tragic for people like Mem is that they exist in a society that doesn't appreciate their beauty. Their men—the very people who are supposed to help ■ them maintain their confidence— are so ground down that when they see this beauty, it arouses not admiration .but envy and fear. So they try to destroy it. And they often succeed.” She sees a similar envy at the root of relations between the races. “I was out at the hearing in South Dakota for Dennis Banks, the Native American activist who was wanted for rioting, you know? After nine years on the run he’d finally turned himself in... Anyway, on one side of the courtroom there were all these straight white men, sitting there like grey concrete blocks. “Then there was Dennis, with his long braids, his red cloak, and of course his Nikes—cause he just loves to run, right?" She smiles. “He and the other Indians in that room, though they were only dressed in old blankets and stuff, were so beautiful and dignified compared with the people judging them. “So I can see why the white people who came to this land were envious of the Native Americans. They saw that they were not only wealthy in terms of land—which they didn't consider themselves as owning anyway—but also that they were rich in honor, in truth, and integrity. Even the greediest among them wouldn’t do to the land a tenth o’f what has been done by the white men. If you can’t appreciate that kind of integrity, if you can't appreciate the culture that produced Black Elk, Crazy Horse, and Dennis Banks, then you have to say they're savages....” On a bookcase in the corner of the room is a collection of photographs: Yoko Ono, Gloria Steinem, Fidel Castro—no, this one is not a photograph, it’s the cover of his book, History Will Absolve Me: A Trial Defense Speech. I ask Alice about the essay she wrote in 1977, in which she said of Cuba: “To criticize anything at all seems presumptuous, even absurd." Critics have attacked this statement as an example of her political naivete. How does she respond to such accusations? By opening Castro's book to a page showing a picture of some slums. “I love Cuba, I love the Cuban people; I even love Fidel!” she says, becoming animated for the first time. “I know this.” She points at the picture: “I know what this is. He got rid of it." She pauses, then says, slowly, emphatically, “That’s no small thing.” Justice and Hope. Twin themes, two faces of Alice Walker. On the bookshelf there is also a picture of her parents in their youth. Her mother wears a hat and looks at the camera with a slightly inquiring glance, as if demanding something of the world. Her father, darker skinned than his wife, dressed in dungarees, recedes behind her shoulder, an anxious, almost victimized expression on his face. The title Alice gave to her essay on Cuba was “My Father's Country is the Poor.” She loves the Cuban revolution because, like her sharecropper father, who died in 1973 estranged from his youngest daughter and “racked with every poor In Alice Walker’s universe the men are reformed and forgiven, but it is the women whoprovide the momentum of forgiveness. Their work and their soul pervade her vision of the South. man’s disease,” she too had once been diminshed by a belief that “poor people could not win.” Fortunately, Walker was drawn to the way her mother looked out at the world. In her involvement with the civil rights movement, begun before she left college in 1961, she too has challenged the world with an inquiring and demanding gaze. In 1967 she married a white civil rights lawyer from the North, Mel Levan- thal: together they went to live in Jackson, Mississippi, at a time when mixed marriages had only recently become legal in that state. It was by turning that expectant gaze inward, though, that she transformed the exigencies of the situation into a continuous burst of creative activity. The material of her first novel, written in the face of that dangerous time, came from the tragedies of her own family. In her sec "A lot ofpeople; especially black people, 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.” ond novel, Meridian, she used the individual tragedies of the civil righty struggle—a struggle, she says, she set out to “tirelessly observe.” Though she participated in voter registration drives and marches, her true activism was of the eye and the pen, the ear and the voice. Her research into the unspoken story of her own culture led her to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, the black novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. If also led her to teach a class where she encouraged black women to write the stories of their own lives. Her passion to save people from an ignorant posterity highlights Walker’s commitment to writing as a moral and political force. When she left the South, first to teach and write in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then to work as an editor on Ms. magazine in New York, she still mixed politics with art. But it is the latter that has enabled her to encompass the contradictions of the former. “Be nobody’s darling...” one of her poems begins, and she has certainly angered black people with her searing portrayals of black male violence. Nevertheless, her politics also has a generous, universalist bent. The twin themes of longing for justice and hunger for hope flow together in her writing into a stream marked by forgiveness. And indeed, in her private life as well she seems both fair and hopeful. Long divorced from Mel Levanthal, she still speaks warmly of his courageous work for desegregation. Her writing, in fact, is full of love-hate relationships: with the South, with the demands of motherhood, with her own parents, especially her' father. “When you have parents who were forced to work all their lives at something they weren’t suited to, all you can do is catch glimpses of how they might have been. My father was a great storyteller, and he had very eclectic musical tastes. He was also a great cook." But her father’s memory is one of pessimism and rage: it was her mother who actually grew the flowers among the vegetables, who brought beauty and hope into the household—-and who gave her daughter her first typewriter. In Alice Walker’s universe the men are reformed and forgiven, but it is the women who provide the momentum of forgiveness. Their work and their soul pervade her vision of the South. In fact, she believes that black people in the South are more forgiving than those of the North. “Women like my mother, who fed, clothed, and cared for white children, would watch with great sadness as their former charges heckled black children on their way to a recently desegregated school,” she says. “You’d struggled to teach them right from wrong, and yet there they were, behaving like barbarians, actin’ugiy (she grins), “as we say... Anyhow, it was that spirit of forgiveness, that capacity to endure without becoming subhuman, that made me want to go back to the South in the '60s. I wanted to see if that spirit was still there. And it was.” Six years ago, Alice Walker took that spirit—manifest in the demanding voices of The Color Purple's characters— and settled on the West Coast. Out in the California countryside, away from the bustle of the city and the hustle of the speaking circuit, she went for walks, swam, and tackled a quilt her mother (who know lives in retirement in Georgia) “swore was easy.” And she took dictation from her characters. The final scene of the novel, in which rifts are healed, hurts forgiven, and peace prevails as the characters sit on the front porch together, says Walker, is consonant with her current feeling about life, even if darker sentiments are never permanently banished. “Talk about slipping and sliding:-earlier in my life I did power myself oh anger. But now I feel— and this may go away instantly—a clarity in myself about what is possible. I don't feel, for instance, that I have to ask of anyone else more than I am prepared to do myself. Just sitting on that porch, waiting for whoever is coming, is a major attainment for me!” Though she still supports good causes, attends rallies, and speaks out on everything from nuclear weapons to famine in Ethiopia, she says her greatest satisfaction now comes from sitting round a table with a few people, sharing good food, wine, and inspired conversation. In the words of her artistic mentor, Zora Neale Hurston: “No, I do not weep at the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” Ask Alice Walker about Ronald Reagan’s America and she shrugs. “Reagan's just a topical subject, a transitory thing. He's not the underlying reality. He’s a symptom of a disease. But we can get well. I have confidence in the people of the world and in their struggle. I think that when people like Reagan are thrown up, other people are thrown up too, to counter them. I think that if we survive at all, the next four years could be very exciting—a great time for loving against the odds. “So when people say, what shall we do about Reagan, you know, I just feel he’s irrelevant. Personally I ignore him. I cannot bear to see or hear him.” In fact, there is so much of the modern world that fails to impress Alice Walker. “I think our obsession with high technology—Star Wars, artificial hearts, and all that—is very worrying,” she goes on. “I find the people on television more and more frightening to look at. They aren't real. I don't know where they come from, you know? I want to be with people who are completely alive. I don’t want to idealize native cultures—they’ve lost so much ground through being decimated by white culture—but I still think we can learn a lot from them. They don’t have high technology, but they do have an ability to listen to what is inner... In our culture so much is devised to block out that inner voice. I worry about my daughter sometimes—she’s always got something stuck on her ears, you know?” A pause. “Of course, the inner voice can be very scary sometimes. You listen, and then you go, ’Do whut? I don’t wanna do that!’ But you still have to pay attention to it." Continued on next page 34 Clinton St. Quarterly
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