by Alice Walker
In the novel and in the movie (even more so in the movie, because you can see what color people are) it is clear that Mister’s father is part white; this is how Mister comes by his run-down plantation house. It belonged to his grandfather, a white man and a slave owner. Mister learns how to treat women and children from his father, Old Mister. Who did Old Mister learn from? Well, from Old Master, his slave-owning father, who treated Old Mister’s mother and Old Mister (growing up) as slaves, which they were.* Old Mister is so riddled with self-hatred, particularly of his black “part,” the “slave” part (totally understandable, given his easily imagined suffering during a childhood among blacks and whites who despised each other), that he spends his life repudiating, denigrating, and attempting to dominate anyone blacker than himself, as is, unfortunately, his son. The contempt that Old Mister’s father/owner exhibited for his black slave “woman” (Old Mister’s mother) is reflected in Old Mister’s description of Shug Avery, who, against all odds, Albert loves: “She black as tar, she nappy headed. She got legs like baseball bats.” This is a slave owner’s description of a black woman. But Albert’s ability to genuinely love Shug, and find her irresistibly beautiful—black as she is—is a major sign of mother love, the possibility of health; and, since she in her blackness reflects him, an indication that he is at least capable of loving himself. No small feat.
We have been slaves here and we have been slaves there.
Our white great-grandfathers abused and sold us here, and our black great-grandfathers abused and sold us there. This means—should mean—that we are free now. We don’t owe them anything but our example of how not to be like them in that way. Slavery forced us to discontinue relating to each other as tribes: we were all in it together. Freedom should force us to stop relating as owner and owned. If it doesn’t, what has it all been for? What the white racist thinks about us, about anything, is not as important as this question.
But crucial to our development, too, it seems to me, is an acceptance of our actual as opposed to our mythical selves. We are the mestizos of North America. We are black, yes, but we are “white,” too, and we are red. To attempt to function as only one, when you are really two or three, leads, I believe, to psychic illness: “white” people have shown us the madness of that. (Imagine the psychic liberation of white people if they understood that probably no one on the planet is genetically “white.”) Regardless of who will or will not accept us, including perhaps, our “established” self, we must be completely (to the extent it is possible) who we are. And who we are becomes more obvious to us, I think, as we grow older and more open to the voices of suffering from our own souls.
For instance, I know about Old Mister’s father—that he was a slave owner—because he was also my great-great-grandfather. But I didn’t begin to feel him, let myself feel him, until I was in my late thirties. I discovered his very real presence in an odd way: I began to hear him pleading to be let in. I wrote a poem about this called “Family Of”**:
Sometimes I feel so bad
I ask myself
Who in the world
Have I murdered?
It is a Wasichu’s voice
That asks this question,
Coming from nearly inside of me.
It is asking to be let in, of course.
I am here too! he shouts,
Shaking his fist.
Pay some attention to me!
But if I let him in
What a mess he’ll make!
Even now asking who
He’s murdered!
Next he’ll complain
Because we don’t keep a maid!
He is murderous and lazy
And I fear him,
This small, white man;
Who would be neither courteous
Nor clean
Without my help.
By the hour I linger
On his deficiencies
And his unfortunate disposition,
Keeping him sulking
And kicking
At the door.
There is the mind that creates
Without loving, for instance,
The childish greed;
The boatloads and boatloads of tongues…
Besides, where would he fit
If I did let him in?
No sitting at round tables
For him!
I could be a liberal
And admit one of his children;
Or be a radical and permit two.
But it is he asking
To be let in, alas.
Our mothers learned to receive him occasionally,
Passing as Christ. But this did not help us much.
Or perhaps it made all the difference.
But there. He is bewildered
And tuckered out with the waiting.
He’s giving up and going away.
Until the next time.
And murdered quite sufficiently, too, I think,
Until the next time.
I used to read this poem occasionally to my students, but stopped. The young white men present always thought “This small, white man” meant them, and that they were being “murdered” and excluded even in the classroom; the black men and women seemed to think the same thing, and that the “murder” was both literal and justified. They may all have had a point, and the poem does work on that level. However, the impetus for the poem came out of my struggle with my great-great-grandfather, the slave owner and rapist (what else was he? I’ve often racked my brains!) whom I had no intention of admitting into my self. The more I heard him plead, like a damned soul, to be let into my psyche (and it occurred to me that karmic justice being as exact as it is, I might be the only one of his descendants in whom his voice still exists), the more I denounced him as a white man, a killer, destroyer of the planet, a Wasichu, naturally no part of me. Get lost, you old bastard, is essentially what I said. Being a part of me already, however, he couldn’t.
I dreamed of him. My image of him at the time—and over a period of years, and still—was of a small, white, naked, pale-eyed, pale-haired, oldish white man. Weak-looking: weak, nearsighted eyes, weak limbs. Ineffectual. Hard to imagine him raping anyone—but then, she, my great-great-grandmother, was only eleven.
That is what I learned from relatives when I began to ask questions about “this small, white man,” wringing his hands and crying and begging outside my psyche (on his knobby knees) all alone. Already I had found my Indian great-great-grandmother, and she was safely smoking inside my heart.
It took the death of John Lennon to squeeze the old man through. John had been Irish, too (though born in Liverpool). And when he was murdered (and I loved him, “white” as he was, for there is no denying the beauty and greatness of his spirit), I felt the price we pay for closing anyone off. To cut anyone out of the psyche is to maim the personality; to suppress any part of the personality is to maim the soul.
And so, I opened the heart of my soul, and there, with the Africans, are the Indian great-great-grandmother and the old white child molester and rapist. Lately I have been urging him to enlarge his personality to include singing or making music on the fiddle. And to stop shouting!
But when I wrote a poem about the peaceful coming together racially, at last, of my psyche, a black male critic wrote the following:
…So as I receive Alice Walker’s 11th book (she has edited an additional one as well) and her fourth volume of poetry, I face my usual decision: Given my disdain for what she and her work represent, in too large a part, should I assess her work? I know I can count on having to cut through her whimpering, half-balanced neurosis and wonder how on earth to avoid an exercise in negativity. And, of course, all of this contemplation begins before I even open her latest book.
After I open it, the worst slaps at me almost before I can take another breath. Her poem-dedication reads:
for two who
slipped away
almost
entirely:
>
my “part” Cherokee
great-grandmother
Tallulah
(Grandmama Lula)
on my mother’s side
about whom
only one
agreed-upon
thing
is known:
her hair was so long
she could sit on it;
and my white (Anglo-Irish?)
great-great-grandfather
on my father’s side;
nameless
(Walker, perhaps?),
whose only remembered act
is that he raped
a child:
my great-great-grandmother,
who bore his son,
my great-grandfather,
when she was eleven…
So again, here we go with the old Negro refrain of: me ain’t really a nigger…no, no… me really a injin; and let me point out the rapist in my bloodline to you. The Negro is the only species who goes around advertising he or she was raped and has a rapist in his or her bloodline, it is the kind of twisted pathology that black psychology is still trying to unravel.
Yet none of this can be taken lightly because Alice Walker is being pushed by the Liberal mainstream as the black writer in season—while they seek to remove Toni Morrison—with her incessant searching for truth and healing in black life—from that pedestal. But the truth is Mrs. Morrison won’t go for the bone of divide-and-conquer that the Liberals especially like to see black people gnawing at. One can see their dribble-laden glee when they can find a black man who through his actions or words attacks a black woman and vice versa. So, of course, they love Ms. Walker, lover of queer bourgeois Liberal affectations and deep-down hater of black.
These comments, by black poet and writer K. T. H. Cheatwood, appeared in a review of my collection of poems Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful in the Richmond (Virginia) News Leader, in the winter of 1984. Unfortunately, in quoting my poem-dedication to my white and Indian ancestors, he left off the most important section:
Rest in peace.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest in peace.
In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest in peace, in me.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest. In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.
Rest. In peace
in me
the meaning
of our lives
is still
unfolding.
Mr. Cheatwood thinks, apparently, that I should be ashamed to mention, to “advertise” my great-great-grandmother’s rape. He assumes an interest, on my part, in being other than black, of being “white.” I, on the hand, feel it is my blackness (not my skin color so much as the culture that nurtured me) that causes me to open myself, acknowledge my soul and its varied components, take risks, affirm everyone I can find (for I, too, have been called everything but a child of God), and that inasmuch as my great-great-grandmother was forced to endure rape and the birth of a child she couldn’t have wanted, as well, the least I can do is mention it. In truth, this is all the herstory of her that I know. But if I affirm that, then I can at least imagine what the rest of her life must have been like. And this, I believe, has some importance for us all.
We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. We are the slaver and the enslaved. We are oppressor and oppressed. We are the women and we are the men. We are the children. The ancestors, black and white, who suffered during slavery—and I’ve come to believe they all did; you need only check your own soul to imagine how—grieve, I believe, when a black man oppresses women, and when a black woman or man mistreats a child. They’ve paid those dues. Surely they bought our gentleness toward each other with their pain.
So, these are my thoughts, Mpinga. I love that, though born in America, you have chosen an African name. I can remember when such an expression of psychic and cultural duality would have been but vaguely understood. But times change, and people do, too. Now such affirmations are almost routine. The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior. In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.
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 so
me 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.