In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

by Alice Walker

  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 Brontes?)

  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 cliche tear), which "personifies" the black woman's "oppression," and another, screaming (a no less cliche 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."

  WHITE 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).

  It is, apparently, inconvenient, if not downright mind straining, for white women scholars to think of black women as women, perhaps because "woman" (like "man" among white males) is a name they are claiming for themselves, and themselves alone. Racism decrees that if they are now women (years ago they were ladies, but fashions change) then black women must, perforce, be something else. (While they were "ladies," black women could be "women," and so on.)

  In any case, Moers expects "historians of the future" to be as dense as those in the past, and at least as white. It doesn't occur to her that they might be white women with a revolutionary rather than a reactionary or liberal approach to literature, let alone black women. Yet many are bound to be. Those future historians, working-class black and white women, should have no difficulty comprehending: "Lorraine Hansberry--Young, Gifted, Black, Activist, Woman, Eloquent Affirmer of Life"; and "Sylvia Plath--Young, Gifted, White, Nonactivist Woman (in fact, fatally self-centered), Brilliant Wooer of Death."

  Of Our Mother's Continued Pilgrimage Toward Truth at the Expense of Vain Pride, or: One More River to Cross

  It was a river she did not even know was there. Hence her difficulty in crossing it.

  Our mother was glad, during the period of the above revelations--all eventually salutary to her mental health--to have occasion to address a large group of educated and successful black women. She had adequate respect for both education and success, since both were often needed, she thought, to comprehend the pains and anxieties of women who have neither. She spoke praisingly of black herstory; she spoke as she often did, deliberately, of her mother (formerly missing from both literature and history); she spoke of the alarming rise in the suicide rate of young black women all over America. She asked that these black women address themselves to this crisis. Address themselves, in effect, to themselves.

  Our mother was halted in mid-speech. She was told she made too much of black herstory. That she should not assume her mother represented poor mothers all over the world (which she did assume) and she was told that those to address were black men; that, though it appeared more black women than men were committing suicide, still everyone knew black women to be the stronger of these two. Those women who committed suicide were merely sick, apparently with an imaginary or in any case a causeless disease. Furthermore, our mother was told: "Our men must be supported in every way, whatever they do." Since so many of "our men" were doing little at the time but denigrating black women (and especially such educated and "successful" black women as those assembled),
when they deigned to recognize them at all, and since this denigration and abandonment were direct causes of at least some of the suicides, our mother was alarmed.

  However, our mother did not for one moment consider becoming something other than black and female. She was in the condition of twin "afflictions" for life. And, to tell the truth, she rather enjoyed being more difficult things in one lifetime than anybody else. She was, in her own obstacle-crazed way, a snob.

  But it was while recuperating from this blow to her complete trust in all black women (which was foolish, as all categorical trust is, of course) that she began to understand a simple principle: People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they were willing actually to remain fools. This led directly to a clearer grasp of many black women's attitudes about the women's movement.

  They had seen, perhaps earlier than she (she was notorious for her optimism regarding any progressive group effort), that white "feminists" are very often indistinguishable in their behavior from any other white persons in America. She did not blame white feminists for the overturned buses of schoolchildren from Baton Rouge to Boston, as many black women did, or for the black schoolchildren beaten and spat upon. But look, just look, at the recent exhibit of women painters at the Brooklyn Museum!

  ("Are there no black women painters represented here?" one asked a white woman feminist.

  "It's a women's exhibit!" she replied.)

  Of the need for internationalism, alignment with non-Americans, non-Europeans, and nonchauvinists and against male supremacists or white supremacists wherever they exist on the globe, with an appreciation of all white American feminists who know more of nonwhite women's herstory than "And Ain't I a Woman?" by Sojourner Truth

  There was never a time when someone spoke of "the women's movement" that our mother thought this referred only to the women's movement in America. When she thought of women moving, she automatically thought of women all over the world. She recognized that to contemplate the women's movement in isolation from the rest of the world would be--given the racism, sexism, elitism, and ignorance of so many American feminists--extremely defeating of solidarity among women, as well as depressing to the most optimistic spirit. Our mother had traveled and had every reason to understand that women's freedom was an idea whose time had come, and that it was an idea sweeping the world.

  The women of China "hold up half the sky." They, who once had feet the size of pickles. The women of Cuba, fighting the combined oppression of African and Spanish macho, know that their revolution will be "shit" if they are the ones to do the laundry, dishes, and floors after working all day, side by side in factory and field with their men, "making the revolution." The women of Angola, Mozambique, and Eritrea have picked up the gun and, propped against it, demand their right to fight the enemy within as well as the enemy without. The enemy within is the patriarchal system that has kept women virtual slaves throughout memory.

  Our mother understood that in America white women who are truly feminist--for whom racism is inherently an impossibility--are largely outnumbered by average American white women for whom racism, inasmuch as it assures white privilege, is an accepted way of life. Naturally, many of these women, to be trendy, will leap to the feminist banner because it is now the place to be seen. What was required of women of color was to learn to distinguish between who was the real feminist and who was not, and to exert energy in feminist collaborations only when there is little risk of wasting it. The rigors of this discernment will inevitably keep throwing women of color back upon themselves, where there is, indeed, so much work, of a feminist nature, to be done. From the stopping of clitoridectomy and "female circumcision" in large parts of Arabia and Africa to the heating of freezing urban tenements in which poor mothers and children are trapped alone to freeze to death. From the encouragement of women artists in Latin America to the founding of feminist publications for women of color in North America. From the stopping of pornography, child slavery, forced prostitution, and molestation of minors in the home and in Times Square to the defense of women beaten and raped each Saturday night the world over, by their husbands.

  To the extent that black women dissociate themselves from the women's movement, they abandon their responsibilities to women throughout the world. This is a serious abdication from and misuse of radical black herstorical tradition: Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer would not have liked it. Nor do I.

  Before the coming of the Europeans, for hundreds--perhaps thousands--of years, the Ohlones rose before dawn, stood in front of their tule houses, and facing the east shouted words of greeting and encouragement to the rising sun. They shouted and talked to the sun because they believed that the sun was listening to them, that it would heed their advice and pleas. They shouted to the sun because ... they felt that the sun had "a nature very much like their own."

  The Ohlones were very different from us. They had different values, technologies, and ways of seeing the world. These differences are striking and instructive. Yet there is something that lies beyond differences. For as we stretch and strain to look through the various windows into the past, we do not merely see a bygone people hunting, fishing, painting their bodies, and dancing their dances. If we look long enough, if we dwell on their joy, fear, and reverence, we may in the end catch glimpses of almost forgotten aspects of our own selves.

  --Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area

  Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning

  If we don't it may drench itself out in sorrow.

  --Joan Baez, album notes to "Farewell Angelina"

  From my journal, Jackson, Mississippi, June 15, 1972:

  If one lives long enough, nothing will seem very important,

  or the past very painful. (This will seem truer on some days than on others.)

  Rebecca said today: "I can cook soup, and eggs, and windows!"

  She also said, while drawing letters on the kitchen table: "A, D, and O." Then, "Oh-oh, the O is upside down!"

  I feel very little guilt about the amount of time "taken from my daughter" by my work. I was amazed that she could exist and I could read a book at the same time. And that she easily learned that there are other things to enjoy besides myself. Between an abstracted, harassed adult and an affectionate sitter or neighbor's child who can be encouraged to return a ball, there is no contest.

  There was a day when, finally, after five years of writing 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), I felt a pang.

  I wrote this self-pitying poem:

  Now that the book is finished,

  now that I know my characters will live,

  I can love my child again.

  She need sit no longer

  at the back of my mind

  the lonely sucking of her thumb

  a giant stopper in my throat.

  But this was as much celebration as anything. After all, the book was finished, the characters would live, and of course I'd loved my daughter all along. As for "a giant stopper in my throat," perhaps it is the fear of falling silent, mute, that writers have from time to time. This fear is a hazard of the work itself, which requires a severity toward the self that is often overwhelming in its discomfort, more than it is the existence of one's child, who, anyway, by the age of seven, at the latest, is one's friend, and can be told of the fears one has, that she can, by listening to one, showing one a new dance step, perhaps, sharing a coloring book, or giving one a hug, help allay.

  In any case, it is not my child who tells me: I have no femaleness white women must affirm. Not my child who says: I have no rights black men must respect.

  It is not my child who has purged my face from hist
ory and herstory and left mystory just that, a mystery; my child loves my face and would have it on every page, if she could, as I have loved my own parents' faces above all others, and have refused to let them be denied, or myself to let them go.

  Not my child, who in a way beyond all this, but really of a piece with it, destroys the planet daily, and has begun on the universe.

  We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.

  For a long time I had this sign, which I constructed myself, deliberately, out of false glitter, over my desk:

  Dear Alice,

  Virginia Woolf had madness;

  George Eliot had ostracism,

  somebody else's husband,

  and did not dare to use

  her own name.

  Jane Austen had no privacy

  and no love life.

  The Bronte sisters never went anywhere

  and died young

  and dependent on their father.

  Zora Hurston (ah!) had no money

  and poor health.

  You have Rebecca--who is

  much more delightful

  and less distracting

  than any of the calamities

  above.

  *Muriel Rukeyser Day, Sarah Lawrence College, December 9, 1979. In the work of this essay, and beyond this essay, I am indebted to the courageous and generous spirits of Tillie Olsen, Barbara Smith, and Gloria Steinem.--AW.

  **Except for this plate and the choice of Sacajawea (who led Lewis and Clark on their Western expedition) as the subject of the Native American plate, I loved Chicago's art and audacity.

  1979