In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  In this way, she integrates the profession of writer into the cultural concept of mother/worker that she retains from Ibo society. Just as the African mother has traditionally planted crops, pounded maize, and done her washing with her baby strapped to her back, so Adah can write a novel with her children playing in the same room.

  The first novel that Adah writes is destroyed by her husband. It would shame his parents, he claims, to have a daughter-in-law who writes. Adah leaves him and begins another book. To support herself she works in a local library, where she amuses herself listening to what are for her simplistic woes, which her British and American colleagues insist on revealing to her. She writes her novel in bits and pieces while her children are still asleep or not so quietly playing.

  The book jacket makes clear the similarity between Adah’s life and that of the author: “Buchi Emecheta was born in 1944 near Lagos, Nigeria, and she went to school and later married there. In 1962 she went to London, where, with her five children, she still lives, working among the black youth in Paddington. She finds time for writing by getting up at four every morning, before the demands of children and job take over.”

  The notion that this is remotely possible causes a rethinking of traditional Western ideas about how art is produced. Our culture separates the duties of raising children from those of creative work. I have, myself, always required an absolutely quiet and private place to work (preferably with a view of a garden). Others have required various versions of an ivory tower, a Yaddo, a MacDowell Colony.

  Though Second Class Citizen is not stylistically exciting and is no doubt heavily autobiographical, it is no less valid as a novel. And a good one. It raises fundamental questions about how creative and prosaic life is to be lived and to what purpose, which is more than some books, written while one’s children are banished from one’s life, do. Second Class Citizen is one of the most informative books about contemporary African life that I have read.

  1976

  GIFTS OF POWER: THE WRITINGS OF REBECCA JACKSON

  IN THE SUMMER of 1830, when Rebecca Cox Jackson was thirty-five years old, she awoke in panic to the loud thunder and flashing lightning of a severe storm. For five years thunderstorms had terrorized her, making her so sick she was forced to wait them out in bed. This time, even the sanctuary of her bed was not enough; she found herself cowering miserably at the top of the garret stairs of her house believing the next blast of thunder would knock her down them. In this condition she called earnestly to “the Lord” to forgive her all her sins, since she was about to die, and to have mercy in the next world on her poor sinner’s soul. Instead of dying, however, with the utterance of this prayer her inner storm ceased, the clouded sky inside her cleared, and her heart became “light” with the forgiveness, mercy, and love of God. Her fear of storms left her permanently (she now believed the power of God's spirit would come to her in storms); and she ran from window to window throwing open the blinds to let the lightning stream in upon her. It was, she said, like “glory” to her soul.

  This was Rebecca Jackson’s first spiritual connection with the divine. She was to have many more.

  Rebecca Cox was born in 1795 of free black parents in Philadelphia. Her mother died when she was thirteen, and she spent many years with a beloved grandmother, who also died while she was young. There is no record of her father. Her young adult life, indeed her life until she was nearly forty, was lived in the home of her older brother, Joseph Cox, an elder of the influential Bethel African Methodist Episcopal church, one of the first black churches in America, founded by Richard Allen. Her husband, Samuel Jackson, lived with her in her brother’s house and was also deeply involved in the church. They had no children of their own.

  After Jackson’s spiritual conversion—as she acknowledged it in later years—she found she had been given spiritual “gifts.” That she could tell the future through dreams, for example, and nothing was hidden from her “spirit eye.” This meant that while speaking to other people or simply observing them (and frequently not even this) she was able to discern their innermost thoughts as well as ways to deal with them. “God” (manifested as an inner voice) spoke to her, she felt, directly, and as long as she did not hesitate to obey Him she could count on His help over any obstacle.

  There were many obstacles.

  For one thing, Jackson could neither read nor write, in a family and religious community that valued these skills perhaps above all others. As the eldest girl, responsible for the care of younger siblings after her mother died, as well as for her brother’s several small children, there was no opportunity to attend school. How she was even to speak intelligently about God, hindered as she was by ignorance of His written word, she could not fathom. She was also a married woman.

  It was her brother to whom she turned for help in learning to read, but, tired from his own work and often impatient with Jackson, he succeeded in making her feel even more backward and lost. He also attempted to censor or change what she dictated and wished him to write.

  So I went to get my brother to write my letters and to read them. So he was awriting a letter in answer to one he had just read. I told him what to put in. Then I asked him to read. He did. I said, “Thee has put in more than I told thee. … I don’t want thee to word my letter. I only want thee to write it.” Then he said, “Sister, thee is the hardest one I ever wrote for!” These words, together with the manner that he wrote my letter, pierced my soul like a sword… I could not keep from crying. And these words were spoken in my heart, “Be faithful, and the time shall come when you can write.” These words were spoken in my heart as though a tender father spoke them. My tears were gone in a moment.

  Incredibly, Jackson was taught to read and write by the spirit within her.

  One day I was sitting finishing a dress in haste and in prayer. [Jackson earned her living as a dressmaker.] This word was spoken in my mind, “Who learned the first man on earth?” “Why, God.” “He is unchangeable, and if He learned the first man to read, He can learn you.” I laid down my dress, picked up my Bible, ran upstairs, opened it, and kneeled down with it pressed to my heart, prayed earnestly to Almighty God if it was consisting to His holy will, to learn me to read His holy word. And when I looked on the word, I began to read. And when I found I was reading, I was frightened—then I could not read another word. I closed my eyes again in prayer and then opened my eyes, began to read. So I done, until I read the whole chapter. I came down. “Samuel, I can read the Bible.” “Woman, you are agoing crazy!” “Praise the God of heaven and earth, I can read His holy word!” Down I sat and read through… . When my brother came to dinner I told him, “I can read the Bible! I have read a whole chapter!” “One thee has heard the children read, till thee has got it by heart.” What a wound that was to me, to think he would make so light of a gift of God!

  From this time on, Rebecca Jackson found she could write her own letters and “read the Bible anywhere.” Her scriptural interpretations, however, based solely on personal spiritual instruction, caused strife not only in her own family, but also in the entire religious community of which she was a part. She was a woman, after all, when the church did not permit women as preachers, who, as soon as she received the holy message, moved immediately to spread it. The pastors and elders of the established churches (all male) accused her of “chopping up the churches,” since she declined to join any, and of being a heretic, “a woman aleading the men.” There were many threats against her and attempts made on her life.

  For the most part, Jackson’s spiritual insights came from direct, frequently ecstatic, revelation in either a dreaming or a waking state. She was also literally instructed in matters both spiritual and temporal by a spirit who arrived almost daily to give her lessons. One of the most astonishing examples of this instruction (Jackson’s “teacher” was a “fatherly” white man dressed in Quaker attire) is the following entry from her journal, “View of the Natural Atmosphere”:

  Monday evening, February
18, 1850, I was instructed concerning the atmosphere and its bounds. I saw its form—it is like the sea, which has her bounds. … It covered land and sea, so far above all moving things, and yet so far beneath the starry heavens. Its face is like the face of the sea, smooth and gentle when undisturbed by the wind. So is the atmosphere, when undisturbed by the power of the sun and moon. When agitated by these, it rages like the sea and sends forth its storms upon the earth. Nothing can live above it. A bird could no more live or fly above its face, than a fish can live or swim out of water. It is always calm and serene between its face and the starry heaven. The sight, to me, was beautiful.

  Her dreams are filled with symbols and her own activity. She can fly through the air like a bird (though higher than birds, and, interestingly, white women), walk through walls, visit other realms, and converse with angels. She can touch a hot stove while awake and not be burned, or totter with eyes closed on the very lip of a steep cellar stair and not fall. She preaches the word of God as it is revealed to her and discovers she has the power to pray sick people well and sinful people holy. All glory for these wonders she gives to God alone and repeatedly describes herself as “a little child” or “a worm of the dust.”

  One of the biggest obstacles to Jackson’s new life in Christ (Jesus, she is told, is the second Adam, and essentially a female spirit; the first Adam was essentially male and fell from grace because he permitted lust to replace spirit and therefore obedience to God) was the expectation of her husband that as his wife she must fulfill her sexual obligations toward him. But her inner voice insisted that though she might live with her husband and serve him in every other way, she could not indulge in what she termed “the sin of the fall.” To do so would put her in the same category as Adam. Her husband was at first puzzled, then convinced of her holiness, then outraged anyhow. In his wilder moments, Jackson writes, he “sought my life, night and day.” But, because her inner voice was always “leading” her, she was able to keep ahead of him, to know what he was “agoing to do” before he knew it himself.

  A year after her conversion she left her husband and her brother’s house. She became an itinerant minister who found “fellowship” (more accurately “sistership”) among other black women who organized “praying bands” that met in small groups in each other’s houses to pray, discuss the scripture and sing, and sustain each other in the arduous task of following the “true” voice within them. (Spiritual consciousness-raising groups, one might say.) It was at this time that Jackson formed a relationship with a younger woman, Rebecca Perot. These two women lived together, ate together, traveled together, prayed together, and slept together until the end of Jackson’s life, some thirty-odd years after they met.

  It was with Rebecca Perot that Jackson became a resident member of the community of Shakers at Watervliet, New York. The Shakers, a religious group that believed in nothing secular—least of all government and man-made laws (they would not fight in America’s wars; indeed, they did not recognize the country of America)—were ecstatics who shared the same spiritual views as Rebecca Jackson: they believed God was spirit (“As well ask how Jesus could be a man as how can Jesus be a woman. God is spirit”) and should be worshiped as one, preferably in silence unless the spirit itself directs otherwise. They believed in confession and repentance of sin as a prerequisite of inner peace. They believed in physical and moral cleanliness, in plain dress, in meditation and silence, and in living separate from the world. But more important than any of these, from Rebecca Jackson’s point of view, they believed in celibacy; the only religious group she ever heard of that did.

  During her time with the Shakers, Jackson knew much spiritual richness and love. For the first time in her life she felt understood and warmly treasured as one who revealed obvious gifts from God. As much as she had been despised in the A.M.E. churches for her stand on celibacy (in her view, an absolute necessity if one wanted to lead a spiritual life), she was embraced by the Shakers, who agreed with her that inasmuch as Jesus Christ was unmarried and celibate, this was the example he wished his people to follow.

  With the passing of time, however, disagreements surfaced, primarily because Jackson felt compelled always to follow her own inner voice or “invisible lead” and could not follow the Shaker leaders unless instructed by her inner lead to do so. Shortly before the Civil War she was commanded by her inner voice to minister to her own people—ravaged by slavery and persecution—whose destitution she felt the Shakers did not adequately address. But when she requested leave to follow the commandment, the Shaker leadership would not give her its blessing to do so. She and Perot left Watervliet anyway, though Jackson was accused of apostasy, of attempting to lead others “in her own gift.”

  With time, the rift was healed. Rebecca Jackson received instruction from her inner lead that she might accept orders and instruction from the Shaker elders and eldresses. After this submission she was given a Shaker blessing to minister to black people in a black Shaker settlement, which she established in Philadelphia in the 1870s. With this blessing came the authority of being a recognized religious group, as well as a Shaker promise to render aid to the new settlement in time of trouble. There is no record that Jackson either requested or received such aid.

  A core group of sisters lived together in a single large house, supporting themselves by daywork, as seamstresses or laundresses in the city … [Shaker records tell us]. White Shakers, visiting from Watervliet and New Lebanon in 1872, described the residence of the family in slightly awestruck terms, as “almost palatial” with its modern plumbing, central heating, “a large drawing room, sufficient for twenty souls to sit down,” a carpeted meeting room with “marble” mantels .. . “very nice, almost extravagantly so.” Their description of the services that took place that evening … is also thoroughly admiring.

  In 1878 eight black women, three black children, and three white women (one of them Jewish) lived in the Shaker commune, members of Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot’s spiritual family.

  The little band of Shaker sisters survived after Rebecca Jackson's death, in 1871, at least until 1908, when the last reports of the group were recorded.

  Gifts of Power is an extraordinary document. It tells us much about the spirituality of human beings, especially of the interior spiritual resources of our mothers, and, because of this, makes an invaluable contribution to what we know of ourselves. A simple review could not begin to do it justice, for it is a contribution of many facets, some readily comprehended, some not. What, for instance, are we to make of Rebecca Jackson’s obviously gnostic beliefs (that the “resurrection” occurs in life, not after death; that the spirit of “Christ” is manifested through the “mind” in visions and dreams and not through the bureaucracy of the church) a hundred years before the Nag Hammadi “Gnostic Gospels, the Secret Teachings of Christ” was found? What are we to make of her discovery that she had not only a divine Father but also a divine Mother—which is consistent with pre-Western Indian and African religious belief? What are we to make of the reasons that suggest why so many black women (Rebecca Jackson only one of them*) abandoned the early black churches to find religious audiences of their own? (The established churches insisted on “civilized” worship, everyone singing at the same time out of the same book; whereas the women wanted the passion and glory of spontaneous inspired worship and song, behavior the male leaders of the churches called “heathenish.” What the male leaders termed “progress” in the black church, i.e., subdued, calm, rather Presbyterian behavior, the women called “letting the devil into the church.”) What are we to make of Jackson’s ability to “manufacture” spiritually a “father” she had never had? And what are we to make of the remarkable general power of Rebecca Jackson herself—a woman whose inner spirit directed her to live her own life, creating it from scratch, leaving husband, home, family, and friends, to do so?

  Jean McMahon Humez has done a magnificent job in editing Gifts of Power. There is only one point at which I stoppe
d, while reading her splendid and thorough introduction, to question her obviously deep knowledge of her material. It is when she discusses the relationship between Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot (known among the Shakers as “the two Rebeccas”). Unlike other black women who were spiritual leaders and were single and traveled alone, Rebecca, Humez writes, “after breaking with her husband and brother … lived and traveled throughout the rest of her life in close relationship with a single cherished, intimate woman friend who shared her religious ideas. Perhaps, had she been born in the modern age, she would have been an open lesbian” (my italics).

  Though women ministers who worshiped and lived with other women were perceived by the male leaders of the early churches as “closeted lesbians,” because they followed their own inner voices rather than the “fathers” of the church, there is nothing in these writings that seems to make Jackson one. It would be wonderful if she were, of course. But it would be just as wonderful if she were not. One wonders why, since Jackson mentions more than once her “deadness” to sexuality or “lust,” Humez implies she was a lesbian? The example she gives of “erotic” activity on Jackson’s part is a dream Jackson relates which involves Rebecca Perot’s long hair. In the dream another woman combs all her hair out, and Rebecca Jackson is upset because she had worked so hard on Perot’s hair and “had got it so long.”

  Considering that our culture has always treasured long hair nearly as much as reading, and frequently as much, I submit that this does not qualify as an erotic dream. A more telling dream, in my opinion, is one related by Rebecca Perot, in which she saw herself as queen and Rebecca Jackson as king of Africa.