by Alice Walker
I felt even closer to my Jewish friend after she went to visit the Palestinian camps. She did not assume Palestinian women “wished her dead,” and she was happily surprised to discover they did not. She did discover she looked a lot like them (dark and Semitic: “Cousins my ass,” she said, “sisters, or somebody’s mirror is lying”), that they shared many historical and cultural similarities, and that Palestinian women were no more wedded to the notion of violence than she was. But this was during the sixties, and perhaps everything has changed since then. Unlike my husband, who considered her a traitor to Jews because she got all intimate with “the enemy,” I thought (in my naïve, “positively stereotypical” way) that her action was very Jewish. It showed courage, a sense of humor, an incorrigible one-worldism, and a faith in her own perception of reality. It took—how you say—chutzpah. She knew something I, too, deeply believe: to find out any part of the truth, women must travel themselves where they hope to find it. In my opinion and experience, imperialists of all nations and races will tell us anything to keep us fighting. For them.
There is a brilliant essay by the writer June Jordan in her book Civil Wars that black and Jewish feminists might consider using as a consciousness-raising piece. In it she describes what happened when a Jewish woman friend of hers read an essay Jordan had written denouncing the murder of a young black man in Brooklyn by Hassidic Jews. Her friend gave her a book about anti-Semitism so Jordan could “recognize her problem.” Anyone familiar with Jordan’s work (as her friend must have been: they worked together for years) would know Jordan never hesitates to denounce anyone she feels deserves it; and just as she denounces all kinds of murder, she denounces murder by Jews. This does not make her anti-Semitic; it makes her impartial.
What her friend wanted from her, it seems to me, is silent and uncritical loyalty to Jews, no matter what they do. But many black women feel that silent, uncritical loyalty is something you don’t even inflict on your child. In the sixties some black women swerved out of our historical path of challenging everything that looked wrong to us to keep mum while black men “ran the black nation.” This was psychically crippling to a generation of black women (and black people in general) and we say, Never again. We deeply appreciate the value of alliances and coalitions, but we come complete with our mouths. It is when we are silent that there is cause to worry.
Every affront to human dignity necessarily affects me as a human being on the planet, because I know every single thing on earth is connected. It depresses me that Pogrebin imagines Jewish women’s work for “civil rights, welfare rights, Appalachian relief” was work that did not “necessarily affect [their] own lives.” Meaning, logically, that this work was charity, dispensed to the backward, the poor, and the benighted, and that Jewish feminists should now be able to expect “payment” in the form of support. Fortunately I have worked with too many Jewish women in social movements to believe many of them think this—rather than that any struggle against oppression lightens the load on all of us—but if they do, we are worse off than I thought.
Jewish feminists will have to try to understand people of color’s hatred of imperialism and colonialism: we who have lost whole continents to the white man’s arrogance and greed, and to his white female accomplice’s inability to say no to stolen gold, diamonds, and furs. And yes, I suspect Jewish feminists will have to identify as Jews within feminism with as much discomfort as they identify as feminists within Judaism; every other woman of an oppressed group has always experienced this double bind. And people of color will have to try to understand Jewish fears of another Holocaust and of being left without a home at all. That is our story too. The black person who honestly believes “being anti-Semitic is one way blacks can buy into American life,” has the perception of a flea, and a total ignorance of historically documented, white American behavior. As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion. If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to the world would have been entirely different. The brotherhood of Moslem men—all colors—may exist there, but part of the glue that holds it together is the thorough suppression of women.
*In solidarity with the children and mothers of Atlanta.
1983
WRITING THE COLOR PURPLE
I DON’T ALWAYS KNOW where the germ of a story comes from, but with The Color Purple I knew right away. I was hiking through the woods with my sister, Ruth, talking about a lovers’ triangle of which we both knew. She said: “And you know, one day The Wife asked The Other Woman for a pair of her drawers.” Instantly the missing piece of the story I was mentally writing—about two women who felt married to the same man—fell into place. And for months—through illnesses, divorce, several moves, travel abroad, all kinds of heartaches and revelations—I carried my sister’s comment delicately balanced in the center of the novel’s construction I was building in my head.
I also knew The Color Purple would be a historical novel, and thinking of this made me chuckle. In an interview, discussing my work, a black male critic said he’d heard I might write a historical novel someday, and went on to say, in effect: Heaven protect us from it. The chuckle was because, womanlike (he would say), my “history” starts not with the taking of lands, or the births, battles, and deaths of Great Men, but with one woman asking another for her underwear. Oh, well, I thought, one function of critics is to be appalled by such behavior. But what woman (or sensuous man) could avoid being intrigued? As for me, I thought of little else for a year.
When I was sure the characters of my new novel were trying to form (or, as I invariably thought of it, trying to contact me, to speak through me), I began to make plans to leave New York. Three months earlier I had bought a tiny house on a quiet Brooklyn street, assuming—because my desk overlooked the street and a maple tree in the yard, representing garden and view—I would be able to write. I was not.
New York, whose people I love for their grace under almost continual unpredictable adversity, was a place the people in The Color Purple refused even to visit. The moment any of them started to form—on the subway, a dark street, and especially in the shadow of very tall buildings—they would start to complain.
“What is all this tall shit anyway?” they would say.
I disposed of the house, stored my furniture, packed my suitcases, and flew alone to San Francisco (it was my daughter’s year to be with her father), where all the people in the novel promptly fell silent—I think, in awe. Not merely of the city’s beauty, but of what they picked up about earthquakes.
“It’s pretty,” they muttered, “but us ain’t lost nothing in no place that has earthquakes.”
They also didn’t like seeing buses, cars, or other people whenever they attempted to look out. “Us don’t want to be seeing none of this,” they said. “It make us can’t think.”
That was when I knew for sure these were country people. So my lover* and I started driving around the state looking for a country house to rent. Luckily I had found (with the help of friends) a fairly inexpensive place in the city. This too had been a decision forced by my characters. As long as there was any question about whether I could support them in the fashion they desired (basically in undisturbed silence) they declined to come out. Eventually we found a place in northern California we could afford and that my characters liked. And no wonder: it looked a lot like the town in Georgia most of them were from, only it was more beautiful and the local swimming hole was not segregated. It also bore a slight resemblance to the African village in which one of them, Nettie, was a missionary.
Seeing the sheep, the cattle, and the goats, smelling the apples and the hay, one of my characters, Celie, began, haltingly, to speak.
But there was still a problem.
Since I had quit my editing job at Ms. and my Guggenheim Fellowship was running out, and my royalties did not quite cover expenses, and—let’s face it—be
cause it gives me a charge to see people who appreciate my work, historical novels or not, I was accepting invitations to speak. Sometimes on the long plane rides Celie or Shug would break through with a wonderful line or two (for instance, Celie said once that a self-pitying sick person she went to visit was “laying up in the bed trying to look dead”). But even these vanished—if I didn’t jot them down—by the time my contact with the audience was done.
What to do?
Celie and Shug answered without hesitation: Give up all this travel. Give up all this talk. What is all this travel and talk shit anyway? So, I gave it up for a year. Whenever I was invited to speak I explained I was taking a year off for Silence. (I also wore an imaginary bracelet on my left arm that spelled the word.) Everyone said, Sure, they understood.
I was terrified.
Where was the money for our support coming from? My only steady income was a three-hundred-dollar-a-month retainer from Ms. for being a long-distance editor. But even that was too much distraction for my characters.
Tell them you can’t do anything for the magazine, said Celie and Shug. (You guessed it, the women of the drawers.) Tell them you’ll have to think about them later. So, I did. Ms. was unperturbed. Supportive as ever (they continued the retainer). Which was nice.
Then I sold a book of stories. After taxes, inflation, and my agent’s fee of ten percent, I would still have enough for a frugal, no-frills year. And so, I bought some beautiful blue-and-red-and-purple fabric, and some funky old secondhand furniture (and accepted donations of old odds and ends from friends), and a quilt pattern my mama swore was easy, and I headed for the hills.
There were days and weeks and even months when nothing happened. Nothing whatsoever. I worked on my quilt, took long walks with my lover, lay on an island we discovered in the middle of the river and dabbled my fingers in the water. I swam, explored the redwood forests all around us, lay out in the meadow, picked apples, talked (yes, of course) to trees. My quilt began to grow. And, of course, everything was happening. Celie and Shug and Albert were getting to know each other, coming to trust my determination to serve their entry (sometimes I felt re-entry) into the world to the best of my ability, and what is more—and felt so wonderful—we began to love one another. And, what is even more, to feel immense thankfulness for our mutual good luck.
Just as summer was ending, one or more of my characters—Celie, Shug, Albert, Sofia, or Harpo—would come for a visit. We would sit wherever I was sitting, and talk. They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly. They were, of course, at the end of their story but were telling it to me from the beginning. Things that made me sad often made them laugh. Oh, we got through that; don’t pull such a long face, they’d say. Or, You think Reagan’s bad, you ought’ve seen some of the rednecks us come up under. The days passed in a blaze of happiness.
Then school started, and it was time for my daughter to stay with me—for two years.
Could I handle it?
Shug said, right out, that she didn’t know. (Well, her mother raised her children.) Nobody else said anything. (At this point in the novel, Celie didn’t even know where her children were.) They just quieted down, didn’t visit as much, and took a firm Well, let’s us wait and see attitude.
My daughter arrived. Smart, sensitive, cheerful, at school most of the day, but quick with tea and sympathy on her return. My characters adored her. They saw she spoke her mind in no uncertain terms and would fight back when attacked. When she came home from school one day with bruises but said, You should see the other guy, Celie (raped by her stepfather as a child and somewhat fearful of life) began to reappraise her own condition. Rebecca gave her courage (which she always gives me)—and Celie grew to like her so much she would wait until three-thirty to visit me. So, just when Rebecca would arrive home needing her mother and a hug, there’d be Celie, trying to give her both. Fortunately I was able to bring Celie’s own children back to her (a unique power of novelists), though it took thirty years and a good bit of foreign travel. But this proved to be the largest single problem in writing the exact novel I wanted to write between about ten-thirty and three.
I had planned to give myself five years to write The Color Purple (teaching, speaking, or selling apples, as I ran out of money). But, on the very day my daughter left for camp, less than a year after I started writing, I wrote the last page.
And what did I do that for?
It was like losing everybody I loved at once. First Rebecca (to whom everyone surged forth on the last page to say goodbye), then Celie, Shug, Nettie, and Albert. Mary Agnes, Harpo and Sofia. Eleanor Jane. Adam and Tashi Omatangu. Olivia. Mercifully, my quilt and my lover remained.
I threw myself in his arms and cried.
*Ironically and unfortunately, “lover” is considered a pejorative by some people. In its original meaning, “someone who loves” (could be a lover of music, a lover of dance, a lover of a person …), it is useful, strong and accurate—and the meaning I intend here.
1982
BEAUTY: WHEN THE OTHER DANCER IS THE SELF
IT IS A BRIGHT summer day in 1947. My father, a fat, funny man with beautiful eyes and a subversive wit, is trying to decide which of his eight children he will take with him to the county fair. My mother, of course, will not go. She is knocked out from getting most of us ready: I hold my neck stiff against the pressure of her knuckles as she hastily completes the braiding and then beribboning of my hair.
My father is the driver for the rich old white lady up the road. Her name is Miss Mey. She owns all the land for miles around, as well as the house in which we live. All I remember about her is that she once offered to pay my mother thirty-five cents for cleaning her house, raking up piles of her magnolia leaves, and washing her family’s clothes, and that my mother—she of no money, eight children, and a chronic earache—refused it. But I do not think of this in 1947. I am two and a half years old. I want to go everywhere my daddy goes. I am excited at the prospect of riding in a car. Someone has told me fairs are fun. That there is room in the car for only three of us doesn't faze me at all. Whirling happily in my starchy frock, showing off my biscuit-polished patent-leather shoes and lavender socks, tossing my head in a way that makes my ribbons bounce, I stand, hands on hips, before my father. “Take me, Daddy,” I say with assurance; “I’m the prettiest!”
Later, it does not surprise me to find myself in Miss Mey’s shiny black car, sharing the back seat with the other lucky ones. Does not surprise me that I thoroughly enjoy the fair. At home that night I tell the unlucky ones all I can remember about the merry-go-round, the man who eats live chickens, and the teddy bears, until they say: that’s enough, baby Alice. Shut up now, and go to sleep.
It is Easter Sunday, 1950. I am dressed in a green, flocked, scalloped-hem dress (handmade by my adoring sister, Ruth) that has its own smooth satin petticoat and tiny hot-pink roses tucked into each scallop. My shoes, new T-strap patent leather, again highly biscuit-polished. I am six years old and have learned one of the longest Easter speeches to be heard that day, totally unlike the speech I said when I was two: “Easter lilies / pure and white / blossom in / the morning light.” When I rise to give my speech I do so on a great wave of love and pride and expectation. People in the church stop rustling their new crinolines. They seem to hold their breath. I can tell they admire my dress, but it is my spirit, bordering on sassiness (womanishness), they secretly applaud.
“That girl’s a little mess,” they whisper to each other, pleased.
Naturally I say my speech without stammer or pause, unlike those who stutter, stammer, or, worst of all, forget. This is before the word “beautiful” exists in people’s vocabulary, but “Oh, isn’t she the cutest thing!” frequently floats my way. “And got so much sense!” they gratefully add … for which thoughtful addition I thank them to this day.
It was great fun being cute. But then, one day, it ended.
I am eight years old and a tomboy. I have a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, checkered shir
t and pants, all red. My playmates are my brothers, two and four years older than I. Their colors are black and green, the only difference in the way we are dressed. On Saturday nights we all go to the picture show, even my mother; Westerns are her favorite kind of movie. Back home, “on the ranch,” we pretend we are Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Lash LaRue (we’ve even named one of our dogs Lash LaRue); we chase each other for hours rustling cattle, being outlaws, delivering damsels from distress. Then my parents decide to buy my brothers guns. These are not “real” guns. They shoot “BBs,” copper pellets my brothers say will kill birds. Because I am a girl, I do not get a gun. Instantly I am relegated to the position of Indian. Now there appears a great distance between us. They shoot and shoot at everything with their new guns. I try to keep up with my bow and arrows.
One day while I am standing on top of our makeshift “garage”—pieces of tin nailed across some poles—holding my bow and arrow and looking out toward the fields, I feel an incredible blow in my right eye. I look down just in time to see my brother lower his gun.
Both brothers rush to my side. My eye stings, and I cover it with my hand. “If you tell,” they say, “we will get a whipping. You don’t want that to happen, do you?” I do not. “Here is a piece of wire,” says the older brother, picking it up from the roof; “say you stepped on one end of it and the other flew up and hit you.” The pain is beginning to start. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I will say that is what happened.” If I do not say this is what happened, I know my brothers will find ways to make me wish I had. But now I will say anything that gets me to my mother.