by Alice Walker
“Home,” under the title “Coming Home,” was originally published in the June 1995 issue of USAir Magazine. Copyright © 1995 by Alice Walker.
“Sunniness and Shade,” under the title “Twenty-five Years with the Woman Who Made Me a Mother,” was originally published in the May 1995 issue of Essence. Copyright © 1995 by Alice Walker.
“Audre’s Voice” was originally published in The Audre Lorde Compendium (London: Pandora, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Alice Walker.
“My Face to the Light” was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on December 25, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Alice Walker.
“What That Day Was Like for Me” was originally published in Million Man March/Day of Absence (Chicago: Third World Press, 1996). Copyright © 1996 by Alice Walker.
“Turquoise and Coral” was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle on May 7, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Alice Walker.
“Writing Possessing the Secret of Joy” was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle as “On the Way to ‘Secret’ ” on September 6, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Alice Walker.
“Giving the Party” was originally published in the May/June 1994 issue of Ms. Copyright © 1994 by Alice Walker.
“Disinformation Advertising” was originally published in the March/April 1991 issue of Ms. Copyright © 1991 by Alice Walker.
An edited version of “This Side of Glory” was published as “They Ran on Empty” in the May 5, 1993, issue of The New York Times (op-ed page). Copyright © 1993 by Alice Walker.
“African Cinema” was originally published in Library of African Cinema (Los Angeles: California Newsreel, 1991). Copyright © 1991 by Alice Walker.
The following essays were originally given as speeches: “Treasure,” “Heaven Belongs to You,” “I Am Salman Rushdie,” “The Story of Why I Am Here,” and “What Can I Give My Daughters …”
In memory of Ken Saro-Wiwa and
in solidarity with the peoples
of Cuba and Tibet
and
for Mumia
and
Mu
Acknowledgments
The first person I must thank for my belief in activism is my great-great-great-great-grandmother May Poole. She lived, enslaved in the North American South, throughout the nineteenth century, dying at the age of a hundred and twenty-five when my father was a boy of eleven. So strong was her spirit, and so clearly did I reflect some of it, that the elderly white woman to whom she’d been given as a wedding gift over three-quarters of a century before recognized me as her descendant from an article and photograph in the local newspaper. When I went to visit this aged woman and her husband in a nursing home before their deaths, she gave me the only photograph of May Poole in existence. In it she is undeniably old, in her nineties, according to the elderly couple, and leaning on a stick. But in her look I can still see the attitude and courage that made it possible for her to attend the funerals of almost everyone who’d ever owned her.
I thank my mother for mothering all the children within her reach who needed it, and especially for attempting to instill spiritual values, which she did by holding Bible studies with the neighborhood children in her living room. I could see, because she believed it, that every child is precious and each one must be sheltered, instructed in whatever broadens his or her appreciation of life, and physically fed, without question. Nor did she discriminate on the basis of size, color, shape of head, or degree of intelligence. She never heard of Marx, not even from me. Yet she lived the axiom “From each according to his (her) abilities, to each according to his (her) needs.” And proved that Christ was right when he said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” For her activity on behalf of children and the community resulted in making my mother a very happy, light-filled woman. She spent many years in heaven, long before she died. This was, daily, simply amazing to see.
I thank my father for his wonderful sense of humor, which effortlessly undermined the racist nonsense that passed for white supremacist wisdom while I was growing up. He would have shared a laugh with Zora Neale Hurston, who said, when stopped for going through a red light in the segregated South, “Well, I saw all the white people going on the green, so I thought the red must be for me.” He too had a story for every occasion and taught me it is possible for the word to become sharper than the sword.
I thank Trellie Jeffers and Mrs. Brown and Mr. Roberson of my high school, as well as our thoughtful, quietly heroic principal, Mr. McGlockton, for holding high expectations for me, and for diligently preparing me to encounter the world beyond my small community. Their simple belief in doing their jobs properly, and with concern for my welfare after I left their instruction, was activism at its very best.
I thank Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, radical activists, historians, and loving souls, for their example of how to agitate where you are; at Spelman College, where they were my teachers, among other places. Along with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks, they represent activism at its most contagious, because it is always linked to celebration and joy. I also thank Che Guevara and Fidel Castro for their daring as revolutionaries, but also for their writing and their speeches. Empowerment of the poor—through education, health care, and adequate housing—is always foremost in their thought; I have found this reassuring over the years as the poor and weak have steadily increased in numbers around the world, and the wealthy and politically powerful have designed ever more clever ways to humiliate and exploit them.
I thank my editor, Kate Medina, for her understanding. I thank Virginia Avery, copy editor, for her thoughtful precision. I thank my agent, Wendy Weil, for helping me find a net.
I thank my friend and administrative assistant, Joan Miura, for her unfailing courtesy, kindness, and love.
I am especially fortunate to have the example of activist teachers and friends. Efua Dorkenoo, Pratibha Parmar, Mel Leventhal, Angela Davis, John Trudell, Tillie Olsen, Marian Wright Edelman, June Jordan, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Wilma Mankiller, Gloria Steinem, Dennis Banks, Archie Roach, Estér Hernandez, Tracy Chapman, Samuel Zan, Pema Chödrön, and Nawal El Saadawi, among others, are deeply thanked, and profoundly cherished “for being there.”
OTHER BOOKS BY ALICE WALKER
Once
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women
Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems
Meridian
Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories
The Color Purple
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
Living by the Word
The Temple of My Familiar
Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, and now lives in Northern California. Her novel The Color Purple won an American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.