Living by the Word

by Alice Walker

  Since I am not white and not a man and not really Western and not a psychiatrist, I get to keep these dreams for what they mean to me, and I can tell you that I wake up smiling, or crying happily, as the case may be. It seems very simple: Because they know I love them and understand their language, the old ones speak to me. It feels too good to be true!

  I wrote this poem the morning after my dream, which I feel was not so much my dream as ours, and which I feel would sustain me forever, though Mrs. Green were joined by millions and my book banned from the planet itself.

  The old ones

  visit me

  in dreams

  to thank me for

  The Color Purple;

  They tell me,

  Daughter,

  it’s the best

  you’ve ever done.

  I can’t tell you

  how many rough

  old hands

  I’ve shook.

  Since this dream I have come to believe that only if I am banned from the presence of the ancestors will I know true grief.

  1984

  * “Ancient Ghanaians were said to have referred to the moon, a maternal symbol, as mame, and to the sun, a paternal symbol, as pape. Children of the moon, who were the stars, were said to have been called pickens. When some of the Ghanaians were brought to the New World as slaves their masters wouldn’t let them keep old traditions. But the terms didn’t change much. They began calling the father of a slave child pappy, and the mother mammy. The pickens, of course, became pickaninnies.”—Carroll Simms, artist, telling a story told to him by another artist, John Biggers, after his return from Ghana in the 1960s. In Black Art in Houston: The Texas Southern University Experience, edited by John Edward Weems, introduced by Donald Weisman (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1978).

  ** Selections from the Slave Narrative Collections (New York: Holt. Rinehart and Winston, 1970).

  OPPRESSED HAIR PUTS A CEILING ON THE BRAIN

  [This was a talk I gave on Founders’ Day, April 11, 1987, at Spelman College in Atlanta.]

  As some of you no doubt know, I myself was a student here once, many moons ago. I used to sit in these very seats (sometimes still in pajamas, underneath my coat) and gaze up at the light streaming through these very windows. I listened to dozens of encouraging speakers and sang, and listened to, wonderful music. I believe I sensed I would one day return, to be on this side of the podium. I think that, all those years ago, when I was a student here and still in my teens, I was thinking about what I would say to you now.

  It may surprise you that I do not intend (until the question-and-answer period perhaps) to speak of war and peace, the economy, racism or sexism, or the triumphs and tribulations of black people or of women. Or even about movies. Though the discerning ear may hear my concern for some of these things in what I am about to say, I am going to talk about an issue even closer to home. I am going to talk to you about hair. Don’t give a thought to the state of yours at the moment. Don’t be at all alarmed. This is not an appraisal. I simply want to share with you some of my own experiences with our friend hair, and at the most hope to entertain and amuse you.

  For a long time, from babyhood through young adulthood mainly, we grow, physically and spiritually (including the intellectual with the spiritual), without being deeply aware of it. In fact, some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. I remember the waves of anxiety that used to engulf me at different periods in my life, always manifesting itself in physical disorders (sleeplessness, for instance) and how frightened I was because I did not understand how this was possible.

  With age and experience, you will be happy to know, growth becomes a conscious, recognized process. Still somewhat frightening, but at least understood for what it is. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

  A few years ago I experienced one such long period of restlessness disguised as stillness. That is to say, I pretty much withdrew from the larger world in favor of the peace of my personal, smaller one. I unplugged myself from television and newspapers (a great relief!), from the more disturbing members of my extended family, and from most of my friends. I seemed to have reached a ceiling in my brain. And under this ceiling my mind was very restless, although all else about me was calm.

  As one does in these periods of introspection, I counted the beads of my progress in this world. In my relationship to my family and the ancestors, I felt I had behaved respectfully (not all of them would agree, no doubt); in my work I felt I had done, to the best of my ability, all that was required of me; in my relationship to the persons with whom I daily shared my life I had acted with all the love I could possibly locate within myself. I was also at least beginning to acknowledge my huge responsibility to the Earth and my adoration of the Universe. What else, then, was required? Why was it that, when I meditated and sought the escape hatch at the top of my brain, which, at an earlier stage of growth, I had been fortunate enough to find, I now encountered a ceiling, as if the route to merge with the infinite I had become used to was plastered over?

  One day, after I had asked this question earnestly for half a year, it occurred to me that in my physical self there remained one last barrier to my spiritual liberation, at least in the present phase: my hair.

  Not my friend hair itself, for I quickly understood that it was innocent. It was the way I related to it that was the problem. I was always thinking about it. So much so that if my spirit had been a balloon eager to soar away and merge with the infinite, my hair would be the rock that anchored it to Earth. I realized that there was no hope of continuing my spiritual development, no hope of future growth of my soul, no hope of really being able to stare at the Universe and forget myself entirely in the staring (one of the purest joys!) if I still remained chained to thoughts about my hair. I suddenly understood why nuns and monks shaved their heads!

  I looked at myself in the mirror and I laughed with happiness! I had broken through the seed skin, and was on my way upward through the earth.

  Now I began to experiment: For several months I wore long braids (a fashion among black women at the time) made from the hair of Korean women. I loved this. It fulfilled my fantasy of having very long hair and it gave my short, mildly processed (oppressed) hair a chance to grow out. The young woman who braided my hair was someone I grew to love—a struggling young mother, she and her daughter would arrive at my house at seven in the evening and we would talk, listen to music, and eat pizza or burritos while she worked, until one or two o’clock in the morning. I loved the craft involved in the designs she created for my head. (Basket making! a friend once cried on feeling the intricate weaving atop my head.) I loved sitting between her knees the way I used to sit between my mother’s and sister’s knees while they braided my hair when I was a child. I loved the fact that my own hair grew out and grew healthy under the “extensions,” as the lengths of hair were called. I loved paying a young sister for work that was truly original and very much a part of the black hair-styling tradition. I loved the fact that I did not have to deal with my hair except once every two or three months (for the first time in my life I could wash it every day if I wanted to and not have to do anyth
ing further). Still, eventually the braids would have to be taken down (a four-to-seven-hour job) and redone (another seven to eight hours); nor did I ever quite forget the Korean women, who, according to my young hairdresser, grew their hair expressly to be sold. Naturally this information caused me to wonder (and, yes, worry) about all other areas of their lives.

  When my hair was four inches long, I dispensed with the hair of my Korean sisters and braided my own. It was only then that I became reacquainted with its natural character. I found it to be springy, soft, almost sensually responsive to moisture. As the little braids spun off in all directions but the ones I tried to encourage them to go, I discovered my hair’s willfulness, so like my own! I saw that my friend hair, given its own life, had a sense of humor. I discovered I liked it.

  Again I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself and laughed. My hair was one of those odd, amazing, unbelievable, stop-you-in-your-tracks creations—not unlike a zebra’s stripes, an armadillos ears, or the feet of the electric-blue-footed boobie—that the Universe makes for no reason other than to express its own limitless imagination. I realized I had never been given the opportunity to appreciate hair for its true self. That it did, in fact, have one. I remembered years of enduring hairdressers—from my mother onward—doing missionary work on my hair. They dominated, suppressed, controlled. Now, more or less free, it stood this way and that. I would call up my friends around the country to report on its antics. It never thought of lying down. Flatness, the missionary position, did not interest it. It grew. Being short, cropped off near the root, another missionary “solution,” did not interest it either. It sought more and more space, more light, more of itself. It loved to be washed; but that was it.

  Eventually I knew precisely what hair wanted: it wanted to grow, to be itself, to attract lint, if that was its destiny, but to be left alone by anyone, including me, who did not love it as it was. What do you think happened? (Other than that I was now able, as an added bonus, to comprehend Bob Marley as the mystic his music always indicated he was.) The ceiling at the top of my brain lifted; once again my mind (and spirit) could get outside myself. I would not be stuck in restless stillness, but would continue to grow. The plant was above the ground!

  This was the gift of my growth during my fortieth year. This and the realization that as long as there is joy in creation there will always be new creations to discover, or to rediscover, and that a prime place to look is within and about the self. That even death, being part of life, must offer at least one moment of delight.

  1987

  DEAR JOANNA

  [Sometime during the early seventies I was asked to write a letter to an imaginary young black woman, giving her some sense of my own experiences and telling her things she might need to know. I wrote a long letter, which I sent off to the person who asked for it (I no longer recall who this was), but then discovered I wanted to say even more.]

  Dear Joanna:

  Forgive me for writing again so soon. I realize you are busy reading the words of all your other sisters who also love you, but you have been constantly on my mind and each day I think of new things to share with you. Today I wanted to tell you about beauty.

  In you, there is beauty like a rock.

  So distilled, so unshatterable, so ageless, it will attract great numbers of people who will attempt, almost as an exercise of will (and of no more importance to them than an exercise), to break it. They will try ignoring you, flattering you, joining you, buying you, simply to afford themselves the opportunity of finding the one crack in your stone of beauty by which they may enter with their tools of destruction. Often you will be astonished that, while they pursue their single-minded effort to do this, they do not seem to see your sorrowing face (sorrowing because some of them will have come to you in the disguise of friends, even sisters) or note the quavering of your voice, or the tears of vulnerability in your eyes. To such people, your color, your sex, yourself make you an object. But an object, strangely, perversely, with a soul. A soul.

  It is your soul they want.

  They will want to crack it out of the rock and wear it somewhere—not inside them, where it might do them good, but about them—like, for example, a feather through their hair, or a scalp dangling from their belt.

  As frightening as this is, it has always been so.

  Your mother and father, your grandparents, their parents, all have had your same beauty like a rock, and all have been pursued, often hunted down like animals, because of it. Perhaps some grew tired of resisting, and in weariness relinquished the stone that was their life. But most resisted to the end. The end, for them, being merely you. Your life. Which is not an end.

  That resistance also is your legacy.

  Inner beauty, an irrepressible music, certainly courage to say No or Yes, dedication to one’s own Gods, affection for one’s own spirit(s), a simplicity of approach to life, will survive all of us, through your will.

  You are, perhaps, the last unconquered resident on this earth. And must live, in any case, as if it must be so.

  1973

  IN THE CLOSET OF THE SOUL

  [At a reading of my work at the University of California at Davis in 1986 I met an African-American couple, both of whom had African names. The wife asked for a copy of a poem to Winnie Mandela I had read, which I gave her. She then asked about my reaction to criticism of the character Mister in The Color Purple. She was very intense, beautiful, and genuine, and I wanted to give her an answer worthy of her inquiry. I wrote this essay, which I sent to her.]

  Dear Mpinga,

  You asked if I was shocked at the hostile reaction of some people, especially some black men, to the character of Mister in the book and more particularly in the movie The Color Purple. I believe I replied only half jokingly that no, I was beyond shock. I was saddened by the response, disappointed certainly, but I have felt better as I’ve tried to put myself in the place of the men (and some women) and tried to understand the source of what appears to be in many a genuine confusion, yes (as you say), but also a genuine pain.

  An early disappointment to me in some black men’s response to my work—to The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian, for instance—is their apparent inability to empathize with black women’s suffering under sexism, their refusal even to acknowledge our struggles; indeed, there are many black men who appear unaware that sexism exists (or do not even know what it is), or that women are oppressed in virtually all cultures, and if they do recognize there is abuse, their tendency is to minimize it or to deflect attention from it to themselves. This is what happened, to a large extent, with the movie. A book and movie that urged us to look at the oppression of women and children by men (and, to a lesser degree, by women) became the opportunity by which many black men drew attention to themselves—not in an effort to rid themselves of the desire or tendency to oppress women and children, but, instead, to claim that inasmuch as a “negative” picture of them was presented to the world, they were, in fact, the ones being oppressed. The people responsible for the picture became, ironically, “outside agitators.” We should just go back to the sickness we came from.

  It has been black men (as well as black women and Native Americans) who have provided in this culture the most inspiring directions for everyone’s freedom. As a daughter of these men I did not hear a double standard when they urged each person to struggle to be free, even if they intended to impart one. When Malcolm said, Freedom, by any means necessary, I thought I knew what he meant. When Martin said, Agitate nonviolently against unjust oppression, I assumed he also meant in the home, if that’s where the oppression was. When Frederick Douglass talked about not expecting crops without first plowing up the ground, I felt he’d noticed the weeds in most of our backyards. It is nearly crushing to realize there was an assumption on anyone’s part that black women would not fight injustice except when the foe was white.

  I was saddened that, in their need to protect their egos from already well-known-to-be-hostile-an
d-indifferent white racists (who have made plain for centuries that how they treat us has little to do with the “positive” or “negative” image we present), many black men missed an opportunity to study the character of Mister, a character that I deeply love—not, obviously, for his meanness, oppression of women, and general early boorishness, but because he went deeply enough into himself to find the courage to change. To grow.

  It is a mistake to assume that Celie’s “meekness” makes her a saint and Mister’s brutality makes him a devil. The point is, neither of these people is healthy. They are, in fact, dreadfully ill, and they manifest their disease according to their culturally derived sex roles and the bad experiences early impressed on their personalities. They proceed to grow, to change, to become whole, i.e., well, by becoming more like each other, but stopping short of taking on each other’s illness. Celie becomes more self-interested and aggressive; Albert becomes more thoughtful and considerate of others.

  At the root of the denial of easily observable and heavily documented sexist brutality in the black community—the assertion that black men don’t act like Mister, and if they do, they’re justified by the pressure they’re under as black men in a white society—is our deep, painful refusal to accept the fact that we are not only the descendants of slaves, but we are also the descendants of slave owners. And that just as we have had to struggle to rid ourselves of slavish behavior, we must as ruthlessly eradicate any desire to be mistress or “master.” I have not, by any means, read or even seen all the negative reviews of Mister’s character and its implications for blacks in America. However, in the ones I have read, I’ve been struck by the absence of any analysis of who, in fact, Mister is. Nobody, no critic, that is, has asked this character, “Boy, who your peoples?”