In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  Not having been taught black history—except for the once-a-year hanging up of the pictures of Booker Washington, George Washington Carver, and Mary McLeod Bethune that marked Negro History Week—we did not know how much of the riches of America we had missed. Somehow it was hard to comprehend just how white folks—lazy as all agreed they were—always managed to get ahead. When Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter were first seen trying to enter the University of Georgia, people were stunned: Why did they want to go to that whitefolks’ school? If they wanted to go somewhere let ’em go to a school black money had built! It was a while before they could connect their centuries of unpaid labor with white “progress,” but as soon as they did they saw Hamp and Charlayne as the heroes they were.

  I had watched Charlayne and Hamp every afternoon on the news when I came home from school. Their daring was infectious. When I left home for college in Atlanta in 1961 I ventured to sit near the front of the bus. A white woman (may her fingernails now be dust!) complained to the driver and he ordered me to move. But even as I moved, in confusion and anger and tears, I knew he had not seen the last of me.

  My only regret when I left Atlanta for New York two and a half years later was that I would miss the Saturday-morning demonstrations downtown that had become indispensable to education in the Atlanta University Center. But in 1965 I went back to Georgia to work part of the summer in Liberty County, helping to canvass voters and in general looking at the South to see if it was worth claiming. I suppose I decided it was worth something, because later, in 1966, I received my first writing fellowship and made eager plans to leave the country for Senegal, West Africa—but I never went. Instead I caught a plane to Mississippi, where I knew no one personally and only one woman by reputation. That summer marked the beginning of a realization that I could never live happily in Africa—or anywhere else—until I could live freely in Mississippi.

  I was also intrigued by the thought of what continuity of place could mean to the consciousness of the emerging writer. The Russian writers I admired had one thing in common: a sense of the Russian soul that was directly rooted in the soil that nourished it. In the Russian novel, land itself is a personality. In the South, Faulkner, Welty, and O’Connor could stay in their paternal homes and write because although their neighbors might think them weird—and in Faulkner’s case, trashy—they were spared the added burden of not being able to use a public toilet and did not have to go through intense emotional struggle over where to purchase a hamburger. What if Wright had been able to stay in Mississippi? I asked this not because I assumed an alternative direction to his life (since I readily admit that Jackson, Mississippi, with the stilling of gunfire, bombings, and the surge and pound of black street resistance, is about the most boring spot on earth), but because it indicates Wright’s lack of choice. And that a man of his talent should lack a choice is offensive. Horribly so.

  Black writers had generally left the South as soon as possible. The strain of creation and constant exposure to petty insults and legally encouraged humiliations proved too great. But their departure impoverished those they left behind. I realized this more fully when I arrived in Jackson to live and discovered Margaret Walker, the author of For My People, already there, a natural force, creating work under unimaginable pressures and by doing so keeping alive, in the thousands of students who studied under her, not only a sense of art but also the necessity of claiming one's birthright at the very source. I do not know if, in her case, settling in the South was purely a matter of choice or preference, but in the future—for other black artists—it might and must be.

  And so, ten years after the March on Washington, the question is: How much has the mountain of despair dwindled? What shape and size is the stone of hope? I know it is annoying this late in the day to hear of more “symbols” of change, but since it is never as late in the day in Mississippi as it is in the rest of the country I will indulge in a few:

  One afternoon each week I drive to downtown Jackson to have lunch with my husband at one of Jackson’s finest motels. It has a large cool restaurant that overlooks a balalaika-shaped swimming pool, and very good food. My husband, Mel Leventhal, a human-rights lawyer who sues a large number of racist institutions a year (and wins) (and who is now thinking of suing the Jackson Public Library, because a. they refused to issue me a library card in my own name, and b. the librarian snorted like a mule when I asked for a recording of Dr. King’s speeches—which the library didn’t have), has his own reasons for coming here, and the least of them is that the cooks provide excellent charbroiled cheeseburgers. He remembers “testing” the motel’s swimming pool in 1965 (before I knew him)—the angry insults of the whites as blacks waded in, and the tension that hung over everyone as the whites vacated the pool and stood about menacingly. I remember the cold rudeness of the waitresses in the restaurant a year later and recall wondering if “testing” would ever end. (We were by no means alone in this: one of the new black school-board members still lunches at a different downtown restaurant each day—because she has been thrown out of all of them.) It is sometimes hard to eat here because of those memories, but in Mississippi (as in the rest of America) racism is like that local creeping kudzu vine that swallows whole forests and abandoned houses; if you don’t keep pulling up the roots it will grow back faster than you can destroy it.

  One day we sat relaxing in the restaurant and as we ate watched a young black boy of about fifteen swimming in the pool. Unlike the whites of the past, the ones in the pool did not get out. And the boy, when he was good and tired, crawled up alongside the pool, turned on his back, drew up his knees—in his tight trunks—and just lay there, oblivious to the white faces staring down at him from the restaurant windows above.

  “I could swear that boy doesn’t know what a castration complex is,” I said, thinking how the bravest black “testers” in the past had seemed to crouch over themselves when they came out of the water.

  We started to laugh, thinking of what a small, insignificant thing this sight should have been. It reminded us of the day we saw a young black man casually strolling down a street near the center of town arm in arm with his high-school sweetheart, a tiny brunette. We had been with a friend of ours who was in no mood to witness such “incorrect” behavior, and who moaned, without a trace of humor: “Oh, why is it that as soon as you do start seeing signs of freedom they’re the wrong ones!”

  But would one really prefer to turn back the clock? I thought of the time, when I was a child, when black people were not allowed to use the town pool, and the town leaders were too evil to permit the principal of my school to build a pool for blacks on his own property. And when my good friend a teenager from the North (visiting his grandmother, naturally) was beaten and thrown into prison because he stooped down on Main Street in broad daylight to fix a white girl’s bicycle chain. And now, thinking about these two different boys, I was simply glad that they are still alive, just as I am glad we no longer have to “test” public places to eat, or worry that a hostile waitress will spit in our soup. They will inherit Emmett Till soon enough. For the moment, at least, their childhood is not being destroyed, nor do they feel hemmed in by the memories that plague us.

  It is memory, more than anything else, that sours the sweetness of what has been accomplished in the South. What we cannot forget and will never forgive. My husband has said that for her sixth birthday he intends to give our daughter a completely safe (racially) Mississippi, and perhaps that is possible. For her. For us, safety is not enough any more.

  I thought of this one day when we were debating whether to go for a swim and boat ride in the Ross Barnett Reservoir, this area’s largest recreational body of water. But I remembered state troopers descending on us the first time we went swimming there, in 1966 (at night), and the horror they inspired in me; and I also recall too well the man whose name the reservoir bears. Not present fear but memory makes our visits there infrequent. For us, every day of our lives here has been a “test.” Only for
coming generations will enjoyment of life in Mississippi seem a natural right. But for just this possibility people have given their lives, freely. And continue to give them in the day-by-day, year-by-year hard work that is the expression of their will and of their love.

  Blacks are coming home from the North. My brothers and sisters have bought the acres of pines that surround my mother’s birthplace. Blacks who thought automatically of leaving the South ten years ago are now staying. There are more and better jobs, caused by more, and more persistent, lawsuits: we have learned for all time that nothing of value is ever given up voluntarily. The racial climate is as good as it is in most areas of the North (one would certainly hesitate before migrating to parts of Michigan or Illinois), and there is still an abundance of fresh air and open spaces—although the frenetic rate of economic growth is likely to ugly up the landscape here as elsewhere. It is no longer a harrowing adventure to drive from Atlanta to Texas; as long as one has money one is not likely to be refused service in “the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.” The last holdouts are the truck stops, whose owners are being dragged into court at a regular rate. Police brutality—the newest form of lynching—is no longer accepted as a matter of course; black people react violently against it and the city administrations worry about attracting business and their cities’ “progressive” image. Black people can and do vote (poll watchers still occasionally being needed), and each election year brings its small harvest of black elected officials. The public schools are among the most integrated in the nation, and of course those signs “White Only” and “Colored” will not hurt my daughter’s heart as they bruised mine—because they are gone.

  Charles Evers, the famous mayor of Fayette, is thinking—again—of running for the Mississippi governorship. James Meredith is—again—thinking of running for the same position. They make their intentions known widely on local TV. Charles Evers said in June, at the tenth commemoration of his brother Medgar’s assassination, “I don’t think any more that I will be shot.” Considering the baldness of his political aspirations and his tenacity in achieving his goals, this is a telling statement. The fear that shrouded Mississippi in the sixties is largely gone. “If Medgar could see what has happened in Mississippi in the last few years,” said his widow, Myrlie Evers, “I think he’d be surprised and pleased.”

  The mountain of despair has dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled by the eyes and by the hand. But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing for it one can become shackled. I think Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., would be dismayed by the lack of radicalism in the new black middle class, and discouraged to know that a majority of the black people helped most by the Movement of the sixties has abandoned itself to the pursuit of cars, expensive furniture, large houses, and the finest Scotch. That in fact the very class that owes its new affluence to the Movement now refuses to support the organizations that made its success possible, and has retreated from its concern for black people who are poor. Ralph Abernathy recently resigned as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference because of lack of funds and an $80,000.00 debt. This is more than a shame; it is a crime.

  A friend of mine from New York who was in SNCC in the sixties came to Mississippi last week to find “spiritual nourishment.” “But I found no nourishment,” he later wrote, “because Mississippi has changed. It is becoming truly American. What is worse, it is becoming the North.”

  Unfortunately, this is entirely possible, and causes one to search frantically for an alternative direction. One senses instinctively that the beauty of the Southern landscape will not be saved from the scars of greed, because Southerners are as greedy as anyone else. And news from black movements in the North is far from encouraging. In fact, a movement backward from the equalitarian goals of the sixties seems a facet of nationalist groups. In a recent article in The Black Scholar, Barbara Sizemore writes:

  The nationalist woman cannot create or initiate. Her main life’s goal is to inspire and encourage man and his children. Sisters in this movement must beg for permission to speak and function as servants to men, their masters and leaders, as teachers and nurses. Their position is similar to that of the sisters in the Nation of Islam. When Baraka is the guiding spirit at national conferences only widows and wives of black martyrs such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Queen Mother Moore can participate. Other women are excluded.

  This is heartbreaking. Not just for black women who have struggled so equally against the forces of oppression, but for all those who believe subservience of any kind is death to the spirit. But we are lucky in our precedents; for I know that Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman—or Fannie Lou Hamer or Mrs. Winson Hudson—would simply ignore the assumption that “permission to speak” could be given them, and would fight on for freedom of all people, tossing “white only” signs and “men only” signs on the same trash heap. For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle, and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged. And that is also my experience with the South.

  And if I leave Mississippi—as I will one of these days—it will not be for the reasons of the other sons and daughters of my parents. Fear will have no part in my decision, nor will lack of freedom to express my womanly thoughts. It will be because the pervasive football culture bores me, and the proliferating Kentucky Fried Chicken stands appall me, and neon lights have begun to replace the trees. It will be because the sea is too far away and there is not a single mountain here. But most of all, it will be because I have freed myself to go; and it will be My Choice.

  1973

  GOOD MORNING, REVOLUTION: UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS OF SOCIAL PROTEST

  IN HER INTRODUCTION to this extremely important collection of Langston Hughes’s previously uncollected revolutionary work, Faith Berry, its editor, makes the following observation: “Langston Hughes was best known as a folk poet, pursuing the theme ‘I, too, sing America.’ But that image, which he accepted though did not choose, is only part of his legacy.

  “During a career which covered four decades, in which he tried every literary genre, he wrote some of the most revolutionary works by any American writer of his generation. He was called the ‘poet laureate of the Negro race,’ but never for reasons which included his most radical verse. Editors, publishers and critics who hailed him as ‘poet laureate’ ignored that part of his canon which did not fit his popular image. Seen from their perspective, his revolutionary prose and poetry represented an aberration, an isolated phase of his career.” However, as Berry demonstrates, Langston Hughes’s revolutionary “phase” spanned forty years, and lasted as long as he lived.

  For those who have misjudged the nature of Langston Hughes’s political commitment, and they are many, this comment by Saunders Redding in the foreword of this book will relieve some of the guilt: “Hughes was a revolutionary writer and poet. If, heretofore, the fact has not been operative in the making of his reputation, it is in part Hughes’ own fault. That was the way he wanted it” (my italics). The plot, as they say, thickens. What does Redding mean?

  It appears that Langston, with his characteristic warmth toward any idea he felt beneficial to poor and colored peoples, liked very much the revolutionary social and political changes he witnessed in Russia in the early thirties. What is more, he fell in love with the idea of Revolution itself; and with the firm touch of a true believer, he personalized it:

  Good morning, Revolution:

  You’re the very best friend

  I ever had.

  We gonna pal around together from now on.

  The long poem “Good Morning, Revolution,” from which this verse is taken, was published in New Masses in 1932. Two years later, in the same publication, Hughes wrote:

  REVOLUTION

  Great mob that knows no fear—

  Come here!

  And raise your hand

  Against this man

 
Of iron and steel and gold

  Who’s bought and sold

  You—

  Each one—

  For the last thousand years.

  Come here.

  Great mob that knows no fear.

  And tear him limb from limb.

  Split his golden throat from

  Ear to ear,

  And end his time forever,

  Now—

  This year—

  Great mob that knows no fear.

  But it was his outright admiration of the Soviet Union that caused him trouble, as was true of many writers who found themselves, in the fifties, hounded by McCarthyism. Although Langston was never a member of the Communist Party, Berry writes, he fell victim “to that era of unparalleled paranoia, when anyone who ever had expressed praise of Russia was branded a public enemy and treated as such. In March 1953, summoned to testify before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Committee on Government Operations, he was pressed to answer such questions as ‘Would you tell this committee frankly as to whether or not there was ever a period of time in your life when you believed in the Soviet form of government?’”

  Being black and with perfectly good sense, good eyesight, and a highly educated sensibility about racial and economic matters, Langston had found “the Soviet form of government” quite appealing, having as it did clear advantages over the Jim Crow system of democracy he was used to in America. In an essay called “The Soviet Union and Color” Langston wrote: “In a museum in Ashkabad, capitol of Turkmenia, I saw signs on the wall as curiosities for the school kids to look at: SARTS KEEP OUT, in both the Turkomen and Russian language. I was told that in the old days these signs were at the entrances of the big beautiful public park in the heart of Ashkabad. In Tzarist times that park was only for Europeans—white people, not for the native peoples whom whites contemptuously named “sarts,” a word equivalent to our worst anti-Negro terms.