I ask about the vulnerability of that inner voice to outer pressures—political aims, for instance. How does she distinguish between spirituality and ideology? She is quiet for a moment, rocking on her porch. “Well I really know now, in a way that I didn’t know before, that the spirit cannot be killed,” she says finally. “The need to worship, to express one’s gratitude for being alive in this beautiful world, isn’t going to go away. The capacity to worship whatever is wonderful in us is innate. Revolutions that don’t understand that are bound to fail in the long run. You cannot express this feeling adequately to a tank, or even to a full belly, or proper education (though heaven knows I know the value of those things). That would be like worshipping your toe. Or your toenail.” Is this, I ask, a turn toward religion? Her mother is a devout Christian whose religious attitude was no part of the baggage her daughter left home with. Have her feelings changed? “The church grows wherever it’s needed,” she replies. “If you need it, like my mother, that’s fine. But personally I don't go much for organized religion. Organized is exactly what is is: organized by someone else. If you are controlled in that way, then you are in danger of losing your spontaneity." I put it to her that there might be a parallel between the structures of religious expression and the structures of artistic expression. I say that while she could have told The Color Purple spontaneously to a small group of people sitting round a table together, I for one am glad she organized that spontaneity into a form that could include more of us. Again she pauses, swinging back and forth in her rocking chair. “Perhaps the church tries to teach us how to feel in the same way that art tries to teach us how to see,” she says. “Some people do need art in order to see. But many of us don’t. As we grow through life, our understanding comes to fit our personal experience. I really do have confidence in that process. It’s...organic—yes, that’s the word. My faith in the organic process keeps me going.” It isn’t easy to take issue with Alice Walker. After our meeting, she sent me a letter. She wanted to amend an impres sion she might have given when talking about the “rape of the earth” perpetuated by white man's culture. “It isn’t just indigenous peoples who can offer us good things to shape the future with,” she wrote. “We must accept and use and love what is good from all of us. Each people. Each gender. Each race. Even each age...." Her rhetoric nonetheless has down-to- earth repurcussions. She’ll fly thousands of miles to host a concert for Oxfam, then give a reading in San Quentin jail. She’ll use the proceeds of The Color Purple to launch, in partnership with Robert Allen, a new publishing venture called Wild Trees Press in order to present writing that embodies the qualities they feel are missing from mainstream culture. As she shows me their first book, a collection of short stories by a local writer called J. California Cooper, she once again becomes animated and open. She describes the strong folk flavor of Cooper's style as belonging to the tradition of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. The next book will be different—a first novel by a Virginia writer named Jo Anne Brasil, about a white teenager coming of age in Boston. The aim of the press is to publish writers, of any race, age, or sex, who celebrate the human values that Walker and Allen hold dear. “The other day I read something about how diamonds come to be,” she tells me as I am leaving. “Of course I hate the way they are mined, the exploitation of the miners, and so on. But I was amazed by the description. “Diamonds start out as black coal, deep in the belly of the earth, being crushed so you’d have thought they’d be destroyed. But no. They just get harder and purer. They become the most precious thing in the world—a diamond.” Leonie Caldecott is the author of Women of our Century. This story is reprinted from New Age, Box 220, Brighton, MA 02135. PASTRIES • LUNCH • LIGHT DINNERS PAPAMATON 5829 S.E. MILWAUKIE • 232-9440 • CLOSED SUN-MON '7 0 1 N.W 23rd • 228-7317 • CLOSED SUN me 3725 SE D 2 I 3 V 8 I - S 1 I 4 O 7 N 0 le summer suppers tuesday-friday salad basket, entree dessert S9.50 & up 5:30-9;OO Saturdays byfreservation east Indian feast champagne hors JJieiyfes. salat, reg. or veg, entrees, dessert H 8 5:30 8 30 • DELICATESSEN • PICNIC SUPPLIES •IMPORTED BEER •FINE WINE Mon-Fri 8:30-6:00 7901 S.E. Stark Sat 8:30-3:00 253-9436 STRUDEL HOUSE < < Chef Owners ^'Mike & Carol Korgan, a.c.f. 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