Living by the Word (11 page)

Your sister, Alice

1986

Postscript

In my response to Mpinga I did not touch on what I consider the egregious hypocrisy of many of the critics of the novel and the movie. In letters sent to the producers of the film while it was being shot (letters threatening picket lines, boycotts, and worse if the script was not submitted to them, prior to filming, for approval), members of the group Blacks Against Black Exploitation of Blacks in the Media made it clear that a primary concern of theirs was not merely the character of Mister but a fear of the “exposure” of lesbianism “in the black community.” One of the letters expressed the fear that, just as the use of cocaine skyrocketed in the black community after the showing of
Superfly
, a movie about a racially mixed, black-ghetto hustler, pimp, and dope dealer that many black audiences identified with in the seventies, lesbianism, apparently in their view another “plague,” would race through the black community in the eighties. It was also stated that homosexuality was “subject to control” by the community, and that love between black women was okay as long as it wasn’t publicly expressed. (This brought to mind the sentiment of white supremacists that they don’t mind black people being free, as long as they confine their freedom to some other planet.)

If the concern of critics had sincerely been the depiction of the cruel black male character Mister, as played by Danny Glover (in a film that is, after all, about a black woman, whose struggle is precisely that of overcoming abuse by two particularly unsavory men), they were late in sounding the alarm. What of black actors, men and women, who play CIA agents? U.S. spies? Members of Cointelpro? These characters are used to legitimize real organizations that are involved in assassinating our leaders and heroes around the world and destabilizing and destroying whole Third World
countries
besides. Yet, because they’re middle-class, speak standard English, are never permitted to sleep with anybody at all, they are considered decent models for us to have.

In my opinion, it is not the depiction of the brutal behavior of a black male character that is the problem for the critics; after all, many of us have sat in packed theaters where black men have cheered (much as white racists have cheered at images depicting blacks being abused) when a black woman was being terrorized or beaten, or, as in one of Prince’s films, thrown in a garbage dumpster. Rather, it is the behavior of the women characters that is objectionable; because whatever else is happening in the novel and the film (and as is true more and more in real life), women have their own agenda, and it does not include knuckling under to abusive men. Women loving women, and expressing it “publicly,” if they so choose, is part and parcel of what freedom for women means, just as this is what it means for anyone else. If you are not free to express your love, you are a slave; and anyone who would demand that you enslave yourself by not freely expressing your love is a person with a slaveholder’s mentality.

Rather than be glad that the ability to love has not been destroyed altogether in us, some critics complain about the “rightness” of its direction, hiding behind such shockingly transparent defenses as “but what will white people think of us?” Since “white people” are to a large extent responsible for so much of our worst behavior, which is really their behavior copied slavishly, it is an insult to black people’s experience in America to make a pretense of caring what they think.

Much of the criticism leveled against me and my work by black men (and some women) has been delivered in arrogance (“I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, but…”), ignorance (“I don’t think any black people back then had wallpaper…”), bad faith (“I think the author just doesn’t like black men; after all, she was married to a white one…”), and without love.*** In the end, this simple injustice will be an undeserved burden and worrisome puzzle to our children, our next generation of rebels and poets (Dare they create from the heart? think with their own brain? make decisions that in a treacherous world inevitably involve risk or invite attack?), many of whom write to me frequently about both the film and the book and exhibit a generosity of heart and a tolerance of spirit sadly lacking in some of their parents.

1987

*
This is not to imply that all sexist cruelty among black people was inherited from white slave owners. On the contrary, in the sections of
The Color Purple
that are set in Africa there is an exploration of the historical oppression of women that is endemic to many traditional African cultures and that continues today.

** The poems in this essay are from
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
by Alice Walker. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1984.)

*** One shining example of criticism by a black man offered
with
love is the review of
The Color Purple,
the movie, by Carl Dix that appeared in the
Revolutionary Worker.
He expressed concern over the way so many of Celie’s problems seemed to be solved by her receiving a house and business left to her by her father (who had been lynched when she was a child). He correctly argues that the inheritance of private property is not a viable solution in terms of the masses of poor people and wishes that this aspect of Celie’s existence could have been more progressive. I understand this criticism and feel it does indeed project our thoughts forward into the realm of better solutions for the landless, jobless, and propertyless masses. However, I also feel that for Celie’s time—the post-Reconstruction era in the South, whose hallmark was the dispossession of blacks—this solution was in fact progressive, it spoke eloquently of the foresight of her father in his attempt to provide for her in a society where black people’s attempts to provide for their coming generations were brutally repressed.

August 19, 1983

At the hardware store in town I bought snapdragon-yellow paint for the privy. The walls will be yellow, to capture the sun and cheerfulness, and the seat will be marine blue. The door will be oriental red. I realize this sounds like a British telephone booth or perhaps a mailbox—except for the yellow.

Now I shall make a soup for lunch and perhaps put the finishing touches on my speech—or begin on the privy.

But meditate, I must!

Meditation was wonderful—forty-five minutes.

August 20, 1983

And great for peaceful dreams! Last night I had the most extraordinary, beautiful, and exquisite dream about myself and Langston Hughes. We were lovers. And he loved everything about me, even my shoes, which we were looking at, for some reason. We loved walking together. Talking. Laughing. He is so wonderful. We were at Margaret Walker’s house when he arrived, but she soon vanished. (It was as if she were the spirit connection.) And for an endless warm time we kissed and hugged and said “I love you. I love you.” It was one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling dreams I’ve ever had. We didn’t “make love,” we just loved. Deeply. So much so that this morning upon awakening and coming into the big room and facing the rainy day, it all came back to me and I began to cry because it was only a dream. But I felt Langston’s presence saying that for us the dream is real. That that can be our space, our place for being together, in love and happy. He asked me if I hadn’t found it good and happy and full. And I had to admit I had. He seemed to be, I would guess, in his thirties. Quite handsome and so sweet.

Langston, wherever you are, you make me very happy and I love you.

Perhaps I should do your collected poems, as a publisher has asked me to do. If I did I could be with you more!

October 30, 1983

The U.S. govt, has invaded Grenada. I’m almost too disgusted and angry to write. Maurice Bishop was killed, along with many members of his cabinet. Where are their bodies? I’ve been wondering. Reagan is a phantom of death. Dispatching Marines, watching them blow up other people, being blown up themselves. Smiling. No one, no soul, lives in the man. This is totally frightening. And I feel the whole country is just waiting for the planet to run aground. Despair, sadness, everywhere.

Meanwhile: Rebecca and I a cozy pair. This morning she was on the sofa in my study and fell asleep on my breast. It was so like the old days(!) when she was a baby. And she is like she was, more like herself. That is: cheerful and loving, affectionate, smart, and funny. The awful New York stranger who confused me with her stepmother seems to be gone. I hope so.

January 7, 1984

No matter in what anger I have written about the black man, I have never once let go of his hand. Though he has kicked me in the shins many times.

And here I am at the end of this notebook, started in 1976, nearly eight years ago!

There have been rough times, but, over all, I feel, continue to feel, blessed. In fact, when I consider the possibilities, and the realities of many other lives, I feel this intensely.

Next month I will be forty. In some ways, I feel my early life’s work is done, and done completely. The books that I have produced already carry forward the thoughts that I feel the ancestors were trying to help me pass on. In every generation someone (or two or three) is chosen for this work. Ernest Gaines is one such. Margaret Walker. Langston Hughes and Zora. Toomer. “One plum was left for me. One seed becomes an everlasting singing tree!” Or words to that effect.

Great spirit, I thank you for the length of my days and the fullness of my work. If you wanted me to move on, come home, or whatever is next, I would try to bear it joyfully. Though I am quite joyful here. I love Rebecca and Robert and Casey (Casey makes great fires and loves to be hugged). We are a family. This seemed an impossible dream so often, in this very book. And yet it is real.

Langston was right: the dream
is
real. And if we work at it hard enough, in the dream we will always have a place.

Thank you again. I love you. I love your trees, your sun, your stars and moon and light. Your darkness. Your plums and watermelons and water meadows. And all your creatures and their fur and eyes and feathers and scales.

There are always people in history (or herstory) who help us, and whose “job” it is, in fact, to do this. One way of looking at history (whether oral or written) is as a method that records characteristics and vibrations of our helpers, whose spirits we may feel but of whose objective reality as people who once lived we may not know. Now these people—our “spirit helpers,” as indigenous peoples time after time in all cultures have referred to them—always create opportunities that make a meeting with and recognition of them unavoidable.

Sojourner Truth is one such figure for me. Even laying aside such obvious resemblances as the fact that we are both as concerned about the rights of women as the rights of men, and that we share a certain “mystical” bent, Sojourner (“Walker”—in the sense of traveler, journeyer, wanderer) Truth (which “Alice” means in Old Greek) is also my name. How happy I was when I realized this. It is one of those “synchronicities” (some might say conceits) of such reassuring proportions that even when I’ve been tempted to rename myself “Treeflower” or “Weed” I have resisted.

I get a power from this name that Sojourner Truth and I share. And when I walk into a room of strangers who are hostile to the words of women, I do so with her/our cloak of authority—as black women and beloved expressions of the Universe (i.e., children of God)—warm about me.

She smiles within my smile. That irrepressible great heart rises in my chest. Every experience that roused her passion against injustice in her lifetime shines from my eyes.

This feeling of being loved and supported by the Universe in general and by certain recognizable spirits in particular is bliss. No other state is remotely like it. And perhaps that is what Jesus tried so hard to teach: that the transformation required of us is not simply to be “like” Christ, but to
be
Christ.

The spirit of our helpers incarnates in us, making us more ourselves by extending us far beyond. And to that spirit there is no “beginning” as we know it (although we might finally “know” a historical figure who at one time expressed it) and no end. Always a hello, from the concerned spiritual ancestor you may not even have known you had—but this could strike at any time. Never a good-bye.

1986

In 1965 I stood next to a fellow American traveler in northern Uganda as he took a picture of a destitute Karamojan tribesman, who was, in fact, dying. The man was a refugee from ancestral lands to the south, now expropriated by another group, and had been forced to eke out what living he could in the barren north. He wore the briefest shredded loincloth, had at most a single tooth, and his eyes were covered with flies. He sat very still for the photograph (he had raised himself at our approach), and as we turned away held out his hand. The photographer gave him a quarter.

No doubt this memory is one reason I never travel with a camera. But another is my belief that human beings are already cameras, and that adding a second camera to the process of seeing (and remembering) shallows, rather than deepens, vision. When the TV commercial declares Kodak “the nation’s storyteller,” I shudder, because I realize our personal culture is about to become as streamlined as our public. But perhaps only poets and writers feel this.

In June of 1983 I went to China with a group of twelve American women writers that included Paule Marshall (our delegation leader), Nellie Wong, Blanche Boyd, Tillie Olsen, Lisa Alther, and my friend and travel companion Susan Kirschner, who took many beautiful pictures of our trip with a real camera, which she has shared with me, as I wish to share these imaginary or mental “snaps” with her and with the other members of our group.

1

This is a picture of Susan and me at the San Francisco airport en route to China! We are leaning against the ticket counter furiously scribbling notes to our loved ones. I have chosen the same card for my daughter as for my companion. On a white background in large black letters above a vibrant red heart are the words I AM SO-O-O HAPPY WITH YOU!