In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  Am I mistaken in thinking I have never forgotten a pain in my life? Even those at parties, I remember.

  “I remember every moment of it perfectly,” I said. “Furthermore, I don’t like stretch marks. I hate them, especially on my thighs” (which are otherwise gorgeous, and of which I am vain). Nobody had told me that my body, after bearing a child, would not be the same. I had heard things like: “Oh, your figure, and especially your breasts [of which I am also vain] will be better than ever.” They sagged.

  Well, why did I have a child in the first place?

  Curiosity. Boredom. Avoiding the draft. Of these three reasons, I am redeemed only by the first. Curiosity is my natural state and has led me headlong into every worthwhile experience (never mind the others) I have ever had. It justifies itself. Boredom, in my case, means a lull in my writing, emotional distance from whatever political movement I am involved in, inability to garden, read, or daydream—easily borne if there are at least a dozen good movies around to attract me. Alas, in Jackson, Mississippi, where my husband, Mel, and I were living in 1968, there were few. About the draft we had three choices: the first, conscientious objector status for Mel, was immediately denied us, as was “alternative service to one’s country,” which meant, in his case, desegregating Mississippi; the second was to move to Canada, which did not thrill me but which I would gladly have done rather than have Mel go to prison (Vietnam was never one of our choices); the third was, if Mel could not become twenty-six years old in time, to make of him “a family man.”

  From my journal, July 1968:

  And now we own our house. For a brief time, surely. And if the draft calls before I am certified pregnant, what will we do? Go to Canada? Mel hates running as much as I do, which is why we're in Mississippi. I hate this country, but that includes being made to leave it …

  January 2, 1969 (two months before I became pregnant):

  Only two and a half months until Mel is 26. If we can make it without having to “flee” the country, we will be thankful. I still think his draft board has a nerve asking him to join the Army. He’s already in the Army.

  My bad days were spent in depression, anxiety, rage against the war, and a state of apprehension over the amount of annual rainfall in Vancouver, and the slow rate of racial “progress” in Mississippi. (Politicians were considered “progressive” if they announced they were running for a certain office as candidates “for all the people”; this was a subtle, they thought, announcement to blacks that their existence was acknowledged.) I was also trying to become pregnant.

  My good days were spent teaching, writing a simple history book for use in black child-care centers in Jackson, recording black women’s autobiographies, making a quilt (African fabrics, Mississippi string pattern), completing my second book, a novel—and trying to become pregnant.

  Three days after I finished the novel, Rebecca was born. The pregnancy: The first three months I vomited. The middle three I felt fine and flew off to look at ruins in Mexico. The last three I was so big at 170 pounds I looked like someone else, which did not please me.

  What is true about giving birth is… that it is miraculous. It might even be the one genuine miracle in life (which is, by the way, the basic belief of many “primitive” religions). The “miracle” of nonbeing, death, certainly pales, I would think, beside it. So to speak.

  For one thing, though my stomach was huge and the baby (?!) constantly causing turbulence within it, I did not believe a baby, a person, would come out of me. I mean, look what had gone in. (Men have every right to be envious of the womb. I’m envious of it myself, and I have one.) But there she was, coming out, a long black curling lock of hair the first part to be seen, followed by nearly ten pounds of—a human being! Reader, I stared.

  But this hymn of praise I, anyhow, have heard before, and will not permit myself to repeat, since there are, in fact, very few variations, and these have become boring and shopworn. They were boring and shopworn even at the birth of Christ, which is no doubt why “Virgin Birth” and “Immaculate Conception” were all the rage.

  The point was, I was changed forever. From a woman whose “womb” had been, in a sense, her head—that is to say, certain small seeds had gone in, and rather different if not larger or better “creations” had come out—to a woman who . . had two wombs! No. To a woman who had written books, conceived in her head, and who had also engendered at least one human being in her body. In the vast general store of “literary Women’s Folly” I discovered these warnings: “Most women who wrote in the past were childless”—Tillie Olsen. Childless and white, I mentally added. “Those Lady Poets must not have babies, man,” John Berryman, a Suicide Poet himself, is alleged to have said. Then, from “Anonymous,” so often a woman who discourages you, “Women have not created as fully as men because once she has a child a woman cannot give herself to her work the way a man can… .”

  Well, I wondered, with great fear (and resentment against all this bad news), where is the split in me now? What is the damage? Am I done for? So much of “Women’s Folly,” literary and otherwise, makes us feel constricted by experience rather than enlarged by it. Curled around my baby, feeling more anger and protectiveness than love, I thought of at least two sources of Folly Resistance “Women’s Folly” lacks. It lacks all conviction that women have the ability to plan their lives for periods longer than nine months, and it lacks the courage to believe that experience, and the expression of that experience, may simply be different, unique even, rather than “greater” or “lesser.” The art or literature that saves our lives is great to us, in any case; more than that, as a Grace Paley character might say, we do not need to know.

  It helped tremendously that by the time Rebecca was born I had no doubts about being a writer. (Doubts about making a living by writing, always.) Write I did, night and day, something, and it was not even a choice, as having a baby was a choice, but a necessity. When I didn’t write I thought of making bombs and throwing them. Of shooting racists. Of doing away—as painlessly and neatly as possible (except when I indulged in Kamikaze tactics of rebellion in my daydreams)—with myself. Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence—as it saves most writers who live in “interesting” oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.

  I began to see, during a period when Rebecca and I were both ill—we had moved to New England for a year and a half because I needed a change from Mississippi—that her birth, and the difficulties it provided us, joined me to a body of experience and a depth of commitment to my own life hard to comprehend otherwise. Her birth was the incomparable gift of seeing the world at quite a different angle than before, and judging it by standards that would apply far beyond my natural life. It also forced me to understand, viscerally, women’s need for a store of “Women’s Folly,” and yet feel on firm ground in my rejection of it. But rejection also has its pain.

  Distance is required, even now.

  Of a ghastly yet useful joint illness, which teacheth our pilgrim that her child might be called in this world of trouble the least of her myriad obstacles—

  Illness has always been of enormous benefit to me. It might even be said that I have learned little from anything that did not in some way make me sick.

  The picture is not an unusual one: a mother and small child, new to the harshness of the New England winter in the worst flu wave of the century. The mother, flat on her back with flu, the child, burning with fever and whooping cough. The mother calls a name someone has given her, a famous pediatrician—whose popular writings reveal him to be sympathetic, witty, something of a feminist, even—to be told curtly that she should not call him at his home at any hour. Furthermore, he does not make house calls of any kind, and all of this is delivered in the coldest possible tone.

  Still, since he is the only pediatrician she knows of in this weird place, she drags herself up next morning, when temperatures are below zero and a strong wind is blasting off the river, and takes the child to see h
im. He is scarcely less chilly in person, but, seeing she is black, makes a couple of liberal comments to put her at her ease. She hates it when his white fingers touch her child.

  A not unusual story. But it places mother and child forever on whichever side of society is opposite this man. She, the mother, begins to comprehend on deeper levels a story she wrote years before she had a child, of a black mother, very poor, who, worried to distraction that her child is dying and no doctor will come to save him, turns to an old folk remedy, “strong horse tea.” Which is to say, horse urine. The child dies, of course.

  Now too the mother begins to see new levels in the stories she is at that moment—dizzy with fever—constructing: Why, she says, slapping her forehead, all History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world. “Progress” affects few. Only revolution can affect many.

  It was during this same period that, risen from her bed of pain, her child well again and adapting to the cold, the mother understood that her child, a victim of society as much as she herself—and more of one because as yet she was unable to cross the street without a guiding hand—was in fact the very least of her obstacles in her chosen work. This was brought home to her by the following experience, which, sickening as it was, yet produced in her several desired and ultimately healthful results. One of which was the easy ability to dismiss all people who thought and wrote as if she, herself, did not exist. By “herself” she of course meant, multitudes, of which she was at any given time in history a mere representative.

  Our young mother had designed a course in black women writers which she proceeded to teach at an upper-class, largely white, women’s college (her students were racially mixed). There she shared an office with a white woman feminist scholar who taught poetry and literature. This woman thought black literature consisted predominantly of Nikki Giovanni, whom she had, apparently, once seen inadvertently on TV. Our young mother was appalled. She made a habit of leaving books by Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, and Zora Neale Hurston face up on her own desk, which was just behind the white feminist scholar’s. For the truly scholarly feminist, she thought, subtlety is enough. She had heard that this scholar was writing a massive study of women’s imagination throughout the centuries, and what women’s imaginations were better than those displayed on her desk, our mother wondered, what woman’s imagination better than her own, for that matter; but she was modest and, as I have said, trusted to subtlety.

  Time passed. The scholarly tome was published. Dozens of imaginative women paraded across its pages. They were all white. Papers of the status quo, like the Times, and liberal inquirers like the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice, and even feminist magazines such as Ms. (for which our young mother was later to work) actually reviewed this work with varying degrees of seriousness. Yet to our young mother, the index alone was sufficient proof that the work could not be really serious scholarship, only serious white female chauvinism. And for this she had little time and less patience.

  In the prologue to her book, The Female Imagination, Patricia Meyer Spacks attempts to explain why her book deals solely with women in the “Anglo-American literary tradition.” (She means, of course, white women in the Anglo-American literary tradition.) Speaking of the books she has chosen to study, she writes: “Almost all delineate the lives of white middle-class women. Phyllis Chesler has remarked, ‘I have no theory to offer of Third World female psychology in America. … As a white woman, I’m reluctant and unable to construct theories about experiences I haven’t had.’ So am I: the books I talk about describe familiar experience, belong to a familiar cultural setting; their particular immediacy depends partly on these facts. My bibliography balances works everyone knows (Jane Eyre, Middlemarch) with works that should be better known (The Story of Mary MacLane). Still, the question remains. Why only these?” (my italics).

  Why only these? Because they are white, and middle class, and because, to Spacks, female imagination is only that. Perhaps, however, this is the white female imagination, one that is “reluctant and unable to construct theories about experiences I haven’t had.” (Yet Spacks never lived in nineteenth-century Yorkshire, so why theorize about the Brontës?)

  It took viewing “The Dinner Party,” a feminist statement in art by Judy Chicago, to illuminate the problem. In 1975 when her book, Through the Flower, was published, I was astonished, after reading it, to realize she knew nothing of black women painters. Not even that they exist. I was gratified therefore to learn that in “The Dinner Party” there was a place “set,” as it were, for black women. The illumination came when I stood in front of it.

  All the other plates are creatively imagined vaginas (even the one that looks like a piano and the one that bears a striking resemblance to a head of lettuce: and of course the museum guide flutters about talking of “butterflies”!). The Sojourner Truth plate is the only one in the collection that shows—instead of a vagina—a face. In fact, three faces. One, weeping (a truly cliché tear), which “personifies” the black woman’s “oppression,” and another, screaming (a no less cliché scream), with little ugly pointed teeth, “her heroism,” and a third, in gim-cracky “African” design, smiling; as if the African woman, pre-American slavery, or even today, had no woes.** (There is of course a case to be made for being “personified” by a face rather than a vagina, but that is not what this show is about.)

  It occurred to me that perhaps white women feminists, no less than white women generally, cannot imagine black women have vaginas. Or if they can, where imagination leads them is too far to go.

  However, to think of black women as women is impossible if you cannot imagine them with vaginas. Sojourner Truth certainly had a vagina, as note her lament about her children, born of her body, but sold into slavery. Note her comment (straightforward, not bathetic) that when she cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard her. Surely a vagina has to be acknowledged when one reads these words. (A vagina the color of raspberries and blackberries—or scuppernongs and muscadines—and of that strong, silvery sweetness, with, as well, a sharp flavor of salt.)

  And through that vagina, Children.

  Perhaps it is the black woman’s children, whom the white woman—having more to offer her own children, and certainly not having to offer them slavery or a slave heritage or poverty or hatred, generally speaking: segregated schools, slum neighborhoods, the worst of everything—resents. For they must always make her feel guilty. She fears knowing that black women want the best for their children just as she does. But she also knows black children are to have less in this world so that her children, white children, will have more (in some countries, all).

  Better then to deny that the black woman has a vagina. Is capable of motherhood. Is a woman.

  So, our mother thought, cradling her baby with one hand, while grading student papers with the other (she found teaching extremely compatible with child care), the forces of the opposition are in focus. Fortunately, she had not once believed that all white women who called themselves feminists were any the less racist, because work after ambitious work issued from the country’s presses and, with but a few shining examples (and our mother considered Tillie Olsen’s Silences the most shining), white women feminists revealed themselves as incapable as white and black men of comprehending blackness and feminism in the same body, not to mention within the same imagination. By the time Ellen Moers’s book Literary Women: The Great Writers was published in 1976—with Lorraine Hansberry used as a token of what was not to be included, even in the future, in women’s literature—our mother was well again. Exchanges like the following, which occurred wherever she was invited to lecture, she handled with aplomb:

  WHITE STUDENT FEMINIST: “Do you think black women artists should work in the black community?”

  OUR MOTHER: “At least for a period in their lives. Perhaps a couple of years, just to give back some of what has been received.”

  WH
ITE STUDENT FEMINIST: “But if you say that black women should work in the black community, you are saying that race comes before sex. What about black feminists? Should they be expected to work in the black community? And if so, isn’t this a betrayal of their feminism? Shouldn’t they work with women?”

  OUR MOTHER: “But of course black people come in both sexes.”

  (Pause, while largely white audience, with sprinkle of perplexed blacks, ponders this possibility.)

  In the preface to Ellen Moers’s book, she writes: “Just as we are now trying to make sense of women’s literature in the great feminist decade of the 1790s, when Mary Wollstonecraft blazed and died, and when, also, Mme. de Stael came to England and Jane Austen came of age, so the historians of the future will try to order women’s literature of the 1960s and 1970s. They will have to consider Sylvia Plath as a woman writer and as a poet; but what will they make of her contemporary compatriot, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry? Born two years before Plath, and dead two years after her in her early thirties, Hansberry was not a suicide but a victim of cancer; she eloquently affirmed life, as Plath brilliantly wooed death. Historians of the future will undoubtedly be satisfied with the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s posthumous volume (named not by Hansberry, but by her former husband who became executor of her estate), To Be Young, Gifted, and Black; and they will talk of her admiration for Thomas Wolfe; but of Sylvia Plath they will have to say “young, gifted, and a woman” (my italics).