Alice Walker: Reaping the Ancestor's Garden

"Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender." (Alice Walker)

Alice Walker, (born 1944), the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Color Purple. The author of multiple novels, volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, children's books, and essays, she is perhaps best known for the landmark novel that focuses on Celie, a disaffected black woman from the rural South who has been deliberately disconnected from her children.

Our text points out that Walker was interviewed in 1973 by scholar Mary Helen Washington, in which the author professed a commitment to portraying the lives of black women in her novels. Gates, et al. observe that Walker "described the three types of black women characters she felt were missing from much of the literature of the United States. The first were those who were exploited both physically and emotionally, whose lives were narrow and confining, and who were driven sometimes to madness, such as Margaret and Mem Copeland in Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. The second were those who were victims not so much of physical violence as of psychic violence, women who are alienated from their own culture. The third type of black woman character, represented most effectively by Celie and Shug in The Color Purple, are those African American women who, despite the oppression they suffer, achieve some wholeness and create spaces for other oppressed communities" (Gates, et al 2425). 

Raised in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Walker left home to study first at Spelman College (HBC), and at Sarah Lawrence in upstate New York. During these years her career as a writer began to flourish, fueled by the hardships and setbacks she experienced early in her life. She became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and notably interrogated the Black Nationalist Movement for its emphasis on "Black Manhood," and its virtual negligence of the plight of African American women (2426). An ideologue, Walker outlined her notion of "Womanism," which she explained originated in the African American folk term "womanish," and "honors a long tradition of strength among black women" (2426). Womanism, for Walker, was a term that encompassed the experience of black women and a pervasive sense of self and communal belonging.

*From In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Amazon.com

Walker observed early in her career an impulse to explore the artistry of black women--not simply that of Phyllis Wheatley and Zora Neale Hurston--writers whom she identifies as "foremothers"; but the artistry of average black women, past and present. As we consider the excerpt from "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," in what ways does the author pay homage to the unknown, unseen foremothers of the past?