In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

Womanist Prose

written by Alice Walker (1966-1982)

Excerpted Inspiring Quotes (2020-2021)

Womanist 

1.     From womanish[1]. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to femle children, “You acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good”  for one[2]. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious. 

2.     Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, prink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?” Ans: “Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.” Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.”[3]

3.     Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.

. . . 

4.     Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.

PART ONE

Chapter: SAVING THE LIFE THAT IS YOUR OWN: THE IMPORTANCE OF MODELS IN THE ARTIST’S LIFE

I love the way Janie Crawford

left her husbands

the one who wanted to change her

into a mule

and the other who tried to interest her

in being a queen.

A woman, unless she submits,

is neither a mule

nor a queen

though like a mule she may suffer

and like a queen pace the floor.

·    It has been said that someone asked Toni Morrison why she writes the kind of books she writes, and that she replied: Because they are the kind of books I want to read.”

·      She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.

·      To take Toni Morrison’s statement further, if that is possible, in my own work I write not only what I want to read – understand fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction -I write all the things I should have been able to read.

Chapter: A TALK: CONVOCATION 1972

·      But please remember, especially in these times of groupthinking and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

·      Your job, when you leave here – as it was the job of educated women before you – is to change the world. Nothing less or easier than that. I hope you have been reading the recent women’s liberation literature, even if you don’t agree with some of it. For you will find, as women have found through the ages, that changing the world requires a lot of free time. Requires a lot of mobility. Requires money, and, as Virginia Woolf put it so well, “a room of one’s own,” preferably one with a key and a lock. Which means that women must be prepared to think for themselves, which means, undoubtedly, trouble with boyfriends, lovers, husbands, which means all kinds of heartache and misery, and times when you will wonder if independence, freedom of thought, or your own work is worth it all. 

We must believe that it is. For the world is not good enough; we must make it better. 

But it is a great time to be a woman. A wonderful time to be a black woman, for the world, I have found, is not simply rich because from day our lives are touched with new possibilities, but because the past is studded with sisters who, in their time, shone like gold. They give us hope, they have proved the splendor of our past, which should free us to lay just claim to the fullness of the future.

·      (…) I must tell you about one thing I have learned since becoming an advanced ten-year-old. Any school would be worthless without great teachers.

·      BE NOBODY’S DARLING

Be nobody’s Darling;

Be an outcast. 

Take the contradictions

Of our life

And wrap around 

You like a shawl,

To parry stones

To keep you warm.

Watch the people succumb

To madness

With ample cheer;

Let them look askance at you

And you askance reply. 

Be an outcast; 

Be pleased to walk alone

(Uncool)

On line the crowded

River beds

With other impetuous

Fools. 

Make a merry gathering

On the bank

Where thousands perished

For brave hurt words

They said.

Be nobody’s darling; 

            Be an outcast.

            Qualified to live.

            Among your dead. 

·       REASSURANCE

I must love the questions

themselves

as Rilke said

like locked rooms

full of treasure

to which my blind

and groping key

does not yet fit. 

and await the answers

as unsealed 

letters

mailed with dubious intent

and written in a foreign 

tongue. 

and in the hourly making of myself

no thought of time

to force, to squeeze

the space

I grow into. 

  1972

Chapter: A WRITER BECAUSE OF, NOT IN SPITE OF, HER CHILDREN

Added by Joyce: “Buchi Emecheta wrote the book Second Class Citizen with the following dedication:”

“To my dear children,

Florence, Sylvester, Jake, Christy and Alice ,

without whose sweet background noises

this book would not have been written. “

Joyce: “In Second Class Citizen Adah is the maincharacter. She’s born as a not very welcomed girl, because her Igbo family wanted boys instead of her. She sneaks off to school because she wants to be educated. Her parents allow her to got to school, after Adah’s teachers informs them that with a high education, the bridal price increases. Adah does her many chores at home, studies her duties as a wife and works hard to enter uni. All of a sudden she’s orphaned and according to the rules, not permitted to the university exams. She goes ahead to marry a lazy student, Francis, who considers her his property. Lurking for freedom, Adah bears boys for Francis, one after the other, all while working. Francis works/hustles in London. Adah follows, not accepting his advice that she - just like hime - is now a second class citizen. Adah applies for a job in a library and gets it ! She then gets pregnant again and people look down on her instead of helping her.”

·     And it is here that Adah makes the decision that seems to me impressive and important for all artists with children. She reasons that since her children will someday be adults, she will fulfill the ambition of her life not only for herself, but also for them. The ambition of her life is to write a novel, (…).” 

Chapter: Zora Neale Huston 

·      For a long time I sat looking at this fear, and what caused it. Zora was a woman who wrote and spoke her mind – as far as one could tell, practically always. People who knew her and were unaccustomed to this characteristic in a woman, who was, moreover, a. sometimes in error, and b. successful, for the most part, in her work, attacked her as meanly as they could. Would I also be attacked if I wrote and spoke my mind? And if I dared open my mouth to always be “correct”? And by whose standards? Only those who have read the critics’ opinions of Zora and her work will comprehend the power of these questions to riddle a young writer with self-doubt.

·      We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is or duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and if necessary, bone by bone. 

1979

PART TWO

Quote that opens Part two:

If you bring forth what is within you,

what is within you will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

·      Jesus

THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS

Elaine Pagels, ed. 

Chapter: The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?

·      Because we live, it can never die.

1967

Chapter: Choosing to Stay at Home

·      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 our 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

Chapter: Good Morning, Revolution - Uncollected Writing of Social Protest

The 2 following are Langstons poems:

·      GOD TO HUNGRY CHILD

Hungry child, I didn’t make this world for you. 

You didn’t buy any stock in my railroad. 

You didn’t invest in my corporation. 

Where are your shares in standard oil?

I made the world for the rich

And the will-be-rich

And the have-always-been-rich,

Not for you,

Hungry child. “

·      TIRED

I am so tired of waiting,

Aren’t you,

For the world to become good

And beautiful and kind?

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two—

And see what worms are eating 

At the rind. “

·      Langston Hughes was also a man with exquisite sense of justice and an extraordinary degree of tolerance towards individuals, qualities more hardened revolutionaries – those who understand they must shoot people and so go right ahead – scarcely have time to cultivate. He was also committed to his own personal and artistic freedom. Or perhaps he reached that point all serious revolutionary writers reach, where the knowledge that children starve to death in a world of plenty seems to demand a gun across the barricades, not a speech across podium, not a pen across the page. Writing or speaking about actions that he was not prepared, himself, to take may have seemed to make a mockery of his integrity. But even if these things are true – and I offer them merely as considerations a great artist may have had—they do not negate the fact that Langston saw the coming of revolution in America as a good, long-overdue event and was generally impressed with what he saw of revolutions in other countries. 

When he was in China in 1949 Langston saw small children sold on the streets for sex and sold to factories for labor, their parents too poor to feed them. They say this is no longer true, in China. Good Morning, Revolution.

1976

 Chapter: Making the Moves and the Movies We Want

Alice Walkers Movie Recommendation: ‘Countdown at Kusini’, Script by Ossie Davis, based on a Story by John Storm Roberts.

…serious, unequivocal opening, production to be happy about, to learn from, and – with its irrepressible music and nonstop action – to enjoy

·    First major motion picture ever produced by an organization of black women, Delta Sigma Theta. With a history of political activism that includes participation in the feminist and suffragist demonstrations of 1913, the eighty-five thousand members of America-based Delta Sigma Theta, the largestblack sorority in the world, decided they would no longer accept the degraded images of black people – especially black women – being foisted on them from the movie screen. Instead they would raise the money themselves, from among themselves, to make the kind of movie they wanted: one that reflects contemporary values and concerns of black people, and the unglued magnificence and political activism of black women.

·    Kusini explores the themes of revolution, guerrilla warfare, and the relation of Afro-Americans to the African struggle against foreign domination. 

·    One leaves the theater ready to join the next revolutionary battle, not in dejection over how much there is to be done, but in awe of the possibilities for change once an oppressed people decides to rise. 

Chapter: Lulls

·      “All those from the South,” says Lorene, “probably miss their gardens.”

“Miss going fishing.”

“Miss trees.”

“Miss having people smile at them out of true affection.”

This is the most quaintly put reason, and perhaps it is the truest of all. 

1977

Chapter: My Father’s Country Is the Poor

·      They do not say – as I feel – that a hard life shared equally by all is preferable to a life of ease and plenty enjoyed by a few. Standing in line for hours to receive one’s daily bread cannot be so outrageous if it means every person will receive bread, and no one will go hungry at night.  

·      Eldridge Cleaver makes much of racism in Cuba, and it is useless to claim it does not exist. But the older Cubans, in whom racism is endemic, will be dead someday. Young Cubans will not have the social structures that allow racism to flourish. That is revolution. Not instant eradication of habits learned over a lifetime, but the abolition of everything that would foster those habits, and the creation instead of new structures that prevent them from returning.

 ·      At first glance, it is actually cheering to see that women revolutionaries also paint their faces and process their hair, but then one wonders: If a revolution fails to make one comfortable with what one is (Fidel, one notices, has not tampered with his looks or his style of dress, and has, since the revolution began, even ceased to shave), can one assume that, on a personal level, it is a success at all?

On the other hand, it is possible that a revolution frees women who are part of it to do with themselves whatever they like.  

·      In a country with such a large black and brown and gold population, this is a question that at some point the revolution might address: can equality be said to be realized if a gorgeous black women still aspires to lighter skin and straight hair, or if a luscious white woman who is brunette longs for blond hair, blue eyes, and a skinny figures?

·      Finally, I believe in the combination of compassion, intelligence, and work that characterizers the Cuban people. In spite of everything that threatens to make them less than free to be themselves, I believe, with them, that they will continue to win.

 1977

Chapter: Recording the Seasons

·      I also found motherhood onerous, a thread to my writing. The habits of a lifetime – of easy mobility, of wandering and daydreams – must be, if not abandoned, at least drastically rearranged. And all the while there was the fear that my young husband would not return from one of his trips to visit his clients in the Mississippi backwoods. 

·      In short, I could see that I felt Art was not enough and that my art, in particular, would probably change nothing. And yet I felt it was the privilege of my life to observe and “save” for the future some extraordinary lives.  

·      I should have known the truth of a popular saying among people in the black movement who chose not to become its stars and instead remained paranoid about interviews and persistently camera shy: “The revolution, when it comes, will not be televised.”

·      Writing this now, in New York City, it is impossible not to feel that black people who are poor are lost completely in the American political and economic system, and that black people and white people who are not have been turned to stone. Our moral leaders have been murdered, our children worship power and drugs, our official leadership is frequently a joke, usually merely oppressive. Our chosen and most respected soul singer – part of whose unspoken duty is to remind us who we are – has become a blonde.  

·      Fifteen years of struggle would seem to have returned many of us to the aspirations of the fifties – security, social obliviousness, improbable colors of skin and hair. And yet, there is a reality deeper than what we see, and the consciousness of a people cannot be photographed.

But to some extent, it can be written. 

 1976

PART THREE

Chapter: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

·      To Toomer, they lay vacant and fallow as autumn fields, with harvest time never in sight: and he saw them enter loveless marriages, without joy; and become prostitutes, without resistance; and become mothers of children, without fulfillment. 

For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release. They were Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality – which is the basis of Art – that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane. Throwing away this spirituality was their pathetic attempt to lighten the soul to a weight their woken-worn, sexually abused bodies could bear. 

·      Listen to the voices Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our “crazy,” “Sainted” mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over a period if centuries), who died with their real gifts stifled within them. 

And, if this were the end of the story, we would have cause to cry out in my paraphrase of Okot p’Bitek’s great poem:

O, my clanswomen

Let us all cry together! 

Come,

Let us mourn the death of our mother,

The death of a Queen

The ash that was produced

By a great fire!

O, this homestead is utterly dead

Close the gates

With lacari thorns, 

For our mother

The creator of the Stool is lost!

And all the young women

Have perished in the wilderness!

·      Viginia Woolf, in her book A Room of One’s Own, wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself.

What are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself? This sickly, frail black girl who required a servant of her own at times – her health was so precarious – and who, had she been white, would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and most of the men in the society of her day.

·      Her loyalties were completely divided, as was, without question, her mind. 

·      So torn by “contrary instincts” was black, kidnapped, enslaved Phillis that her description of “the Goddess” – as she poetically called the Liberty she did not have – is ironically, cruelly humorous. And, in fact, has held Phillis up to ridicule for more than a century. It is usually read prior to hanging Phillis’s memory as that of a fool. 

·    Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one’s status in society, “the mule of the world,” because we have been handed the burdens that everyone called “Matriarchs,” “Superwomen,” and “Mean and Evil Bitches.” Not to mention “Castrates” and “Sapphire’s Mama.” When we have pleaded for understanding our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in the farthest corner. When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats. To be an artist and a black woman, even today, lowers our status in many respects, rather than raises it: and yet, artists we will be.

·      She made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers’ overalls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds. 

·      During the “working” day, she labored beside – a not behind – my father in the fields. Her day began before sunup an, and did not end until late at night. There was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts, never a time free from interruption – by work or the noisy inquiries of her many children. And yet, it is to my mother – and all our mothers who were not famous – that I went in search of the secret of what has fed that mmuzzled and often mulilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the black woman has inherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to this day. 

·      And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. 

·      This poem is not enough, but it is something, for the woman who literally covered the holes in our wallswith sunflowers.: 

They were women then

My mama’s generation

Husky of voice – Stout of 

Step

With fists as well as 

Hands

How they battered down 

Doors 

And ironed 

Starched white

Shirts 

How they led

Headragged Generals

Across mined

Fields

Booby-trapped

Kitchens

To discover books

Desks

A place for us 

How they knew what we 

Must know 

Without knowing a page o

Of it

Themselves.

·     Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength – in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own. 

·    Perhaps Phillis Wheatley’s mother was also an artist. Perhaps in more than Phillis Wheatley’s biological life is her mother’s signature made clear.

1974

CHAPTER: From an Interview 

·      This is true for me, where poems are concerned. When I am happy (or neither happy nor sad), I write essays, short stories and novels. Poems – even happy ones – emerge from an accumulation of sadness. . . . 

·      I was always conscious of the need to be secure; Philadelphia and, I assume, never had worried about material security, our deepest feelings began to miss each other. I identified her as someones who would afford to play poor for a while (her poverty interrupted occasionally by trips abroad), and she probably identified me as one of those inflexible black women black men constantly complain about: the kind who interrupt light-hearted romance by saying, “Yes, well… but what are the children going to eat?”

·      When I started teaching my courses in black women writers at Wellesley (the first one, I think, ever), I was worried that Zora’s use of black English of the twenties would throw some of the students off. I didn’t. They loved it. They said it was like reading Thomas Hardy, only better. In that same course I taught Nella Larsen, Frances Watkins Harper (poetry and novel), Dorothy West, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, among others. Also Kate Chopin and Virgina Woolf – not because they were black, obviously, but because they were women and wrote, as the black women did, on the condition of humankind from the perspective of women. It is interesting to read Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own while reading the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, to read Larsen’s Quicksand along with The Awakening. The deepthroated voice of Sojourner Truth tends to drift across the room while you’re reading. If you’re not a feminist already, you become one. 

 ·      Women writers are supposed to be intimidated by male disapprobation. What they write is not important enough to be read. How they live, however, their “image,” they owe to the race. Read the reason Zora Neale Hurston gave for giving up her writing. See what “image” the Negro press gave her, innocent as she was. I no longer read articles or reviews unless they are totally about the work. I trust that someday a generation of men and women will rise who will forgive me for such wrong as I do not agree I do, and will read my work because it is true account of my feelings, my perception, my imagination, and because it will reveal something to them if their own selves.

 ·      The writers – lik the musician and painter – must be freeto explore , otherwise she of he will never discover what is needed (by everyone) to be known. This means, very often, finding oneself considered “unacceptable” by masses of peplewho think that the writer’s obligation is not to explore or to challenge, but to second the mases’ motions, whatever they are. 

 ·      It is interesting to contemplate what would have been the result and impact on black women – since 1937 – if they had read and taken to heart Their Eyes Were Watching God. Would they still be as dependent on material things – fine cars, furs, big house, pots and jars of face creams – as they are today? Or would they, learning from Janie that materialism is the dragrope of the soul, have become a nation of women immune (to the extent that is possible in a blatantly consumerist society like ours) to the accumulation of things, and aware, to their core, that love, fulfillment as women, peace of mind, should logically come before , not after, selling one’s soul for a golden stool on which to sit. Sit and be bored. 

·      I loved her so much it came shock – and a shock I don’t expect to recover from—to learn she was ashamed of us. We were poor, so dusty and sunburnt. We talked wrong. We didn’t know how to dress, or use the right eating utensils. And so, she drifted away, and I didn’t understand it. Only later did I realize that sometimes (perhaps) it becomes too painful to bear: seeing our home and family – shabby and seemingly without hope – through the eyes of your new friends and strangers. She had felt – for her own mental health – that the gap that separated us from the rest of the world was too wide for her to keep trying to bridge. She understood how delicate she was. 

·      I believe in listening – to a person, the sea, the wind, the trees, but especially to young black women whose rocky road I am still traveling. 

1973

CHAPTER: A Letter to the Editor of Ms.  

·     And of course I thought of Frederick Douglass. And I knew that his newspaper would have been pleased to cover our conference, because we are black and we are women and because we intend to be as free as anyone. 

·     Women who wanted their rights did not frighten him, politically or socially, because he knew his own rights were not diminished by theirs. 

·     How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names. Yet, we do not know them. Or if we do, it is only their names we know and not the lives. 

·    And I thought of the mountain of work black women must do. We must work as if we are the last generation capable of work – for it is true that the view we have of the significance of the past will undoubtedly die with us, and future generations will have to stumble in the dark, over ground we should have covered. 

·     Someone claimed, rhetorically, that we are the only “true queens of the universe.” I do not want to be a queen, because queens are oppressive, but even so the thought came to me that any true queen knows the names, words, and actions of the other queens in her lineage and is very sharp about her herstory. I think we might waive the wearing of a crown until we have at least seriously begun our work. 

·    And we talked and we discussed and we sang for Shirley Chisholm and clapped for Eleanor Holmes Norton and tried to follow Margaret Sloan’s lyrics and cheered Flo Kennedy’s anecdotes. And we laughed a lot and argued some. And had a very good time.

1974

CHAPTER: Breaking Chains and Encouraging Life

If I hadn’t helped my sister

They’d have put those chains on me!

-Niobeth Tsaba

SONG OF SISTER’S FREEDOM

CHAPTER: If The Present Looks Like The Past, What Does The Future Look like? 

 -       You may recall that we were speaking of the hostility many black black women feel towards light-skinned black women, and you said, “Well, I’m light. It’s not my fault. And I’m not going to apologize for it.” I said apology for one’s color is not what anyone is asking. What black black women would be interested in, I think, is a consciously heightened awareness on the part of light black women that they are capable, often quite unconsciously, of inflicting pain upon them; and that unless the question of Colorism – in my definition, prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color – is addressed in our communities and definitely in our black “sisterhoods” we cannot, as a people, progress. For colorism, like colonialism, sexism, and racism, impedes us. 

-       But for some of our parents it is as if freedom and whiteness were the same destination, and that presents a problem for any person of color who does not wish to disappear. 

-       A necessary act of liberation within myself was to acknowledge the beauty of black black women, but I was always aware of swimming against the tide. 

-       This essay is for you. You are younger than I, so I think of you as a younger sister who will take all that your older sisters have learned even further. A sister I do not wish to lose to the entreaties of parents or grandparents standing behind you whispering “lighten up” or “darken up” the race. Nor do I, a dark woman, intend to give you up. When we walk down a street together and those who hate their black mothers admire only you (really your skin color and hair) we will not let this divide us, but will think instead with pity of their ignorance and sure end in self-eradication. For no one can hate their source and survive, as has been said. 

-       The three black women novelists of the nineteenth century turned away from their own selves in depiction “black womanhood,” and followed a black man’s interpretation of white male writers’ fantasies. Consequently, as late as 1929, which explored the very real trials of a black black woman in a white and a color-struck black society. 

-    (Footnote:) *The recent discovery of Harriet E. Wilson’s 1859 novel, Our Nig, which predates Brown’s novel by several years, makes her our first known black novelist. Her story is also, interestingly, about the life of a woman of biracial parents: the mother whitem the father black. However, possession of a lighter skin fails to exalt her condition as a black indentured servant in a hostile white, middle class Northern household before the Civil War. 

-       Many dark-skinned black women find it hard to identify with Janie Crawdord and speak disparagingly of her “mulatto privileges.” “Privileges” that stem from being worshipped for her color and hair, and being placed – by her color-struck husbands – above other black women while not being permitted to speak in public because her looks are supposed to say it all. 

-       The man chooses; frequently with the same perceptivity with which he chooses a toy.

-       Every black man in Their Eyes Were Watching God lusts after Janie Crawford. They lust after her color and her long hair, never once considering the pain her mother and grandmother (one raped by a white man, one by a black) must have endured to “pass along” these qualities to her. Never once thinking of Janie’s isolation because of her looks she did not choose, or of her confusion when she realizes that the same men who idolize her looks are capable of totally separating her looks from her self.  

-       What is being said is this: that choosing the “fair,” white-looking woman, the black man assumes he is choosing a weak woman. A woman he can own, a woman he can beat, can enjoy beating, can exhibit as a woman beaten; in short, a “conquered” woman who will not cry out, and will certainly not fight back. And why? Because she is a lady, like the white man’s wife, who is also beaten (the slaves knew, the servants knew, the maid always knew because she doctored the bruises) but who has been trained to suffer in silence, even to pretend to enjoy sex better afterwards, because her husband obviously does. A masochist. And who is being rejected? Those women “out of the middle of the road”? Well, Harriet Tubman, for one, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Shirley Chisholm. Ruby McCullom, Assata Shakur, Joan Little, and Dessie “Rashida” Woods. 

-       But perhaps we can learn something, even from the discouraging models of earlier centuries and our own time. Perhaps black women who are writers in the twenty-first century will present a fuller picture of the multiplicity of oppression – and of struggle. Racism, sexism, classism, and colorism will be very much a part of their consciousness. They will have the wonderful novels of black African women to read – Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and others – as nineteenth century black women did not. They will have the record of the struggles of our times. They will not think of other women with envy, hatred, or adulation because they are “prizes.” They will not wish to be prizes themselves. How men want them to look, act, speak, dress, acquiesce in beatings and rape will mean nothing whatsoever to them. They will, in fact, spend a lot of time talking to each other, and smiling. Women of all colors will be able to turn their full energies on the restoration of the planet, as they can’t now because they’re tied up with all this other stuff: divisions, resentments, old hurts, charges and countercharges. 

-       In any case, the duty of the writer is not to be tricked, seduced, or goaded into verifying by imitation or even rebuttal, other people’s fantasies. In an oppressive society it may well be that all fantasies indulged in by the oppressor are destructive to the oppressed. To become involved in them in any way at all is, at the very least, to loose time defining yourself.

-       To isolate the fantasy we must cleave to reality, to what we know, we feel, we think of life. Trusting our own experience and our own lives; embracing both the dark self and the light. 

1982

CHAPTER: Looking to the Side, and Back

-       Many of these women find themselves hating lesbians because in a sense the lesbian has “gotten away clean.” She isn’t concerned about what black men do; she can even view some of their behaviors as amusing, if absurd – and, in fact, frequently and unfortunately, copies it. There is a hatred of women of color who marry or establish relationships whit white men because in addition to the very real historical weight such unions must bear, there is just a general resentment of unformulaic joy. A rigidity has set in; the same vital instinct to “preserve the race and culture” from dilution through intermarriage – or, where lesbians are concerned, through extinction – causes a narrowing of the range of choice. The result is that only in great stress – and often deliberately brutal isolation – are a hundred somewhat stunted flowers allowed to bloom; while the one flower that is truly desired (the married, black heterosexual couple) is often watered wuth the tears of conformity and compromise – and is, consequently, unhealthy. 

-       It was he Radcliffe symposium that I saw that black women are more loyal to black men than they are to themselves, a dangerous state of affairs that has its logical end in self-destructive behavior. 

But I also learned something else: 

The same panelist who would not address the suicide rate of young women of color also took the opportunity to tell me what she thought my “problem” was. Since I spoke so much of my mother, she said my problem was that I was “trying to ‘carry’ my mother, and the weight is too heavy.” (….) “But why shouldn’t you carry your mother; she carried you, didn’t she?”

CHAPTER: To the Black Scholar

-       Look hard at yourself. Look hard at how you feel, really, about the people among whom fate so indifferently dropped you. Would you feel better as someone else? Look at what we actually do to each other. Look at what we actually say. Look about you as if there were no white people about, whom you have been wishing to impress. Know that if we fail to impress each other, we’ve lost something precious that we once had. 

CHAPTER: Brothers and Sisters 

Copy Past the whole chapter

Joyce takeaway: It’s up to you to change, be aware of your thought and reflections, and actions. Question them, there’s no excuse for continuing the imitation of what “men do”. Educate yourself. 

PART FOUR

CHAPTER: Writing the Color Purple:

Joyce: What stuck with me is that her characters visited her, spend time with her and she spend time to get to know them. 

CHAPTER: One Child of One’s Own 

-       People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they were willing actually to remain fools. 

Joyce: Book recommendation put in words “who knows more of nonwhite women’s herstory than “And Ain’t I a Woman?” by Sojourner Truth” and the Book “Meridian”: “a book “about” the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, socialism, the shakiness of revolutionaries, and the radicalization of saints – the kind of book out of the political sixties that white feminist scholar Francine du Plessix Gray declared recently in the New York Times Book Review did not exist..”