In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  Boston, Massachusetts, January 25, 1976

  “The schools in Boston are back where they were when black folks stepped off the boat. Or were dragged, let me say. If all this racial furor keeps up, I’m sending my child south to school.”

  Martha is a large cinnamon-colored woman with a pleasant voice and large, beautiful eyes. She is disabled and on welfare. She cannot leave the state. Her daughter, Doris, is fifteen, and the local schools have left her with terrible grammar and no easy comprehension of what a sentence is.

  Martha is from Georgia, and has lived in Boston for nearly ten years.

  “I always thought Boston was the best,” she says. “The best place for schools, for hospitals, for intelligent, nonracist people. Well, another dream down the drain. Next to Boston today, Mississippi looks good.”

  I too have always loved Boston. I used to spend summers here, working and going to the beach. Many of my relatives live in Dorchester, a predominantly black section of the city. My brothers came to the city penniless, worked hard at dirty jobs nobody else wanted, until they could afford to buy nice homes on pleasant streets. Now, though their homes are still in good shape, the neighborhoods around them are in a shambles. Because of massive unemployment in the black community, and the consequent inability to pay mortgages, houses have been abandoned by the dozen, vandals have broken out windows, torn out the plumbing, set fire to whatever they couldn’t steal. Driving up once familiar Blue Hill Avenue to visit them I discovered I no longer knew where I was. Whole blocks are boarded up, trash clots the street corners, once-lovely homes have the look of having been assaulted: paint peels, doors fall off hinges, windows are stuffed with rags. The people on the street looked conquered.

  Martha worries if her daughter spends an unguarded five minutes in the street. Police protection of residents is a joke. In short, Boston could not care less about its poor black citizens: it has segregated them into a ghetto and it is only when they attempt to send their children outside the ghetto to school that they receive any attention at all.

  “But you brought Doris north to escape the South,” I say.

  “And I’ll send her south to escape the North.”

  I wonder if America will ever have a place for poor people. It appears they are doomed to be eternal transients.

  “When I leave here,” says my brother, a “Bostonite” for nearly twenty years, now looking forward to the freedom of retirement, “I intend to miss it like a toothache.”

  He, too, is going back south, back to the country.

  “I want peace,” he says. “Cleanliness and space around me. And just some time to be myself, before I die.”

  It is an old dream, but no less unfulfilled for all its age.

  *Many names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of my friends and relatives.

  1977

  MY FATHER’S COUNTRY IS THE POOR

  The drab, monotonous postwar architecture of Helsinki concealed the tremendous vibrancy of the youth who were gathering there from all over the world.

  In the brief two weeks of the festival, there were spectacular cultural programs, mass political rallies, and countless seminars on the struggle in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East….

  The cultural presentation given by the Cuban delegation was the most impressive event of the festival. Not that they performed in the most polished, sophisticated manner, but because their performance conveyed a fiercely compelling spirit of revolution. They were the youth of a revolution that was not yet three years old. With the U.S. delegation as audience, the Cubans satirized the way wealthy American capitalists had invaded their country and robbed them of all traces of sovereignty. They presented their attack on the invaders in plays, songs, and dances. During those days, long before Women’s Liberation had been placed on the agenda, we watched the Cuban militia women zealously defending their people’s victory.

  It is not easy to describe the strength and enthusiasm of the Cubans. One event, however, illustrates their infectious dynamism and the impact they had on us all. At the end of their show, the Cubans did not simply let the curtain fall. Their “performance,” after all, had been much more than a mere show. It had been life and reality. Had they drawn the curtain and bowed to applause, it would have been as if their commitment was simply “art.” The Cubans continued their dancing, doing a spirited conga right off the stage and into the audience. Those of us openly enthralled by the Cubans, their revolution, and the triumphant beat of the drums rose spontaneously to join their conga line. And the rest—the timid ones, perhaps even the agents—were pulled bodily by the Cubans into the dance. Before we knew it we were doing this dance—a dance brought into Cuban culture by slaves dancing in a line of chains—all through the building and on into the streets. Puzzled Finns looked on in disbelief at hundreds of young people of all colors, oblivious to traffic, flowing down the streets of Helsinki.

  —Angela Davis, writing on the 1962 World Youth Peace Festival in Helsinki, Angela Davis: An Autobiography

  PERHAPS I SAW Angela Davis at the festival. Perhaps we met. She was not ANGELA DAVIS then. Impressed by the Cubans, I too joined the conga line and danced my way through the chilly Helsinki streets. This was my first trip abroad, financed by remarkably generous women of Atlanta’s black churches, who supported me and another young woman from Spelman College in our desire to see the world from another continent and demonstrate—after the United States resumed nuclear testing in 1961—our commitment to world peace.

  Although in 1962 Angela Davis and I were both eighteen years old, her political autobiography proves she was far more politically mature than I. She appears to have grasped the international nature of oppression while I could barely see beyond the struggle of black people in the small towns of Georgia. Indeed, I was so ignorant of history and politics that when I left the festival, went to Moscow and was taken on a stroll across Red Square, I could not fathom for the longest time who the Russians were queuing up to view in Lenin’s tomb.

  And yet, I knew enough to know I wanted the world to survive (though, ironically, I was myself at this time illogically suicidal). I wanted peace and the abolition of the possibility of nuclear war. And I believed my job at that point (being powerless to do much else) was to begin to see other peoples not as strangers but as kin.

  My sense of the Cubans’ spiritedness stayed with me. One of them gave me a copy of Fidel Castro’s History Will Absolve Me, which I read in a tiny, wood-paneled compartment of a Russian train winding its way across the spectacular Crimea, and I read and cried, cried and read, as I recognized the essence of a struggle already familiar to me. In this passionate defense of the Cuban people’s right to revolt against tyranny, I could not help but hear the voices of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and, especially, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” would so closely resemble it.

  By making their revolution, the Cubans proved that oppression needn’t last always. Three years after the beginning of the revolution, they had also begun to kick out of their country the greedy and antisharing. Which is to say, they had begun “to overcome.” This was profoundly important to me. I think part of my “illogical” despair had been due to my sense of political powerlessness, caused to some extent by a lack of living models. I believed poor people could not win. (And, in fact, no matter how many people, poor or otherwise, protested against nuclear testing, the testing—both in the United States and in the Soviet Union—continued.) But here at last was a revolutionary people I could respect, and they made it quite clear they did not intend to lose.

  For several years, I tried to get to Cuba. Because the Cuban Revolution had been achieved through armed struggle, I was eager to see the effect on the people of having used violence to liberate themselves. I was, after all, a pacifist and a believer in the use of nonviolent means to effect social change. After the birth of my own child, I had understood fully the e
vil of waiting interminably for conditions to change at someone else’s convenience, but I still needed to know that the use of violence did not necessarily destroy one’s humanity. I wanted to confirm the truth of one of my favorite lines from Flannery O’Connor: “Violence is a force that can be used for good or evil, and among the things taken by it is the Kingdom of Heaven.” For the poor of Cuba, their own country had become “the Kingdom of Heaven.” It was in their own hands, thanks to the Cuban Revolution.

  Before the Revolution only 60 percent of those of working age had regular full-time employment.

  In the rural population, only 11 percent drank milk, only 4 percent ate meat, only 2 percent ate eggs.

  Forty-four percent had never gone to school.

  Eighty percent of the inhabitants of Havana did not have enough to eat.

  —Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba

  Today, there is work for everyone in Cuba. Everyone has enough to eat. Every Cuban child goes to school, as do many adults. Illiteracy has virtually disappeared.

  Many Americans who visit Cuba complain that life there is hard. And it is. But they do not seem adequately impressed by the fact that poverty has been eliminated, or that nearly all the people can read: that a 300,000-copy printing of a new book can be sold out in days. They do not seem awed by a country that provides free medical care to all its citizens, and labors daily to provide decent housing for everyone. 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 to bed hungry at night.

  I went to Cuba with a group of African-American artists who were selected by the editors of the Black Scholar and the Cuban Institute for Friendship Among Peoples. We were there for two weeks—not nearly long enough to comprehend all the things we saw. What follows are fragments of my experience, offered with an acute awareness that my view of Cuba is neither definitive nor complete.

  I am sitting in the Pavilion dining room of the Hotel Habana Libre, which, before the revolution, was the Havana Hilton. It is full of people who, twenty years ago, would not have been allowed through the front door. It is as if, in New York, everyone one saw on the Lexington Avenue IRT during rush hour was accustomed to spending the weekend in the Palm Court of the Plaza. I am talking to Black Panther exile Huey Newton and his wife, Gwen. He is saying:

  “If I come back to America talking like Eldridge [Cleaver], I hope black and progressive people renounce and reject me.”

  I assure him we will.

  When the Newtons came to Cuba two years ago, they asked to live “like the people.” They were sent to Santa Clara, “a very small, country town,” says Newton, but a good symbol of how the revolution has changed habits and attitudes in Cuba. He tells me about the Santa Clara park, in which, before the revolution, black people could not walk. And of how this park—now used by all the people—represents the fall of racist institutions throughout the island.

  Unable to live “like the people” on rationed food that invariably ran out before the end of the week (and unable to get the knack of wringing the necks of their own live chickens), the urban-raised Newtons moved eventually to their present suite (two small adjoining rooms, for the family of four) in the Habana Libre. Like the majority of exiles and guests of the Cuban government, they use a special identification card that allows them to eat in the hotel restaurant and to order up quantities of strong Cuban cigarettes and light and dark rum.

  The resemblance of Huey Newton to some large human cat is striking. One feels his bright brown eyes would glow in the dark. His manner is quick, graceful, lithe, and of a sinewy gentleness.

  Before mentioning the chameleonic Cleaver, now a “born again” TV Christian, Newton was speaking of his father, who died shortly after Newton arrived in Cuba.

  Now he says, apologetically, “You would probably not approve of him.”

  I realize he is wary of me because I am a feminist. It pains me to assume Newton is not. But, thinking how much easier it is to approve of dead people than of live ones, I shrug. “I’m prepared to like him,” I say, puffing on a cigarillo, and hoisting my glass of rum. “Give me his case.”

  “We lived on a farm in Louisiana and he did not want my mother to work. He told the white bossman, ‘When you send Miss Ann out in the fields to work, I’ll send out my wife.’”

  This did not seem impossible to comprehend. We were eating delicious stewed rabbit, like my father used to make. I smiled to think of myself eating rabbit in a fancy Havana restaurant, talking to Huey Newton about whether I approved of his sharecropper father or not. It was a moment.

  “The problem,” said Gwen, “was that the choice of not working was not made by your mother.”

  “You mean she wanted to work?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah, I guess so,” said Huey.

  Suddenly I remembered Louisiana, certainly one of the ugliest American states. Flat, hot, with houses miles apart. Black women and white women might go crazy there from boredom.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I don’t approve of your father. I understand, but don’t approve. Your father’s concern was for his own pride, his rebellion against the white man. It wasn’t about your mother.”

  Earlier we had been together in their suite. Their two children made a brief appearance. I had brought the family gifts of magazines, books, T-shirt iron-ons for the children. Gwen is a stunning woman, with large, serene black eyes and hair that stands by itself. She and Huey seem to be the only blacks in Havana wearing the Afro hair style. The Cubans apparently consider long hair an expression of antisocial behavior. This is incredible, considering that “longhairs” won the revolution.

  Before I left the United States I had heard ugly rumors about Newton. That he’d been a pimp, and had murdered a young black woman prostitute because she called him a punk; that he’d pistol-whipped his tailor (!), and other such charges.

  To my indirect questions, he responds that he was vilified and framed, probably by the FBI, and that he fled to Cuba to save his life. He will be returning to the United States, however, because he is both homesick and innocent.

  To dissipate the tension that accumulates around this exchange, we talk about trivia: an ideal way to spend an afternoon with exiles who miss their country and who don’t speak the language of the country they’re in. We discuss movie stars. (He knows some personally, I know none.) Gwen encourages Huey to explain to me the meaning of his favorite movie: it is a Japanese classic called The Forty Outcasts. His eyes become brilliant as he describes the story: it is apparently about the sacrifices involved in maintaining one’s honor in a society of men whose rules for membership are patently absurd.

  Our best poets

  write poetry full of holes:

  The women who love women, never tell.

  The men who love men write of wombs.

  The genius who loves both is rendered mute

  by the complexity of choice.

  The black father of white children suffers in silence.

  The mother of the dope fiend is ashamed to reveal her

  shame

  The poetry is full of holes, I say.

  They will not give you life,

  but pseudo-life

  where all halves can be made to fit.

  Is it because they know that even Cuba

  that liberated country

  would tolerate anything

  that helped the Revolution

  except a gay discoverer of a cure for cancer

  or a Jehovah’s Witness

  whose musing paradisical agronomy

  would provide milk and honey

  dirt cheap

  for this Promised Land?

  —ruminations of the author

  And the story of the Cuban writer who was living abroad and came home when the Revolution triumphed. The Revolution became the center of his life
. He worked as a journalist with great enthusiasm, with great euphoria, writing propaganda for the Revolution. But they found out that he was a homosexual. They didn’t want to wound him by any accusation, and they didn’t fire him from his job. They just said that he could go on drawing his pay but that he must stop going to the office. He understood why they told him this and became deeply depressed. He was rejected by the Revolution he loved so much. He left Cuba and committed suicide in Rome.

  —Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba

  We are sitting in a bus outside the Moncada Barracks (now part museum, part school); it was here, in 1953, that the Cuban insurrectionists, led by Fidel Castro, attempted to seize the weapons that would have meant control of the surrounding Oriente Province. They were defeated, temporarily. Fidel fled to the mountains: others were tortured, murdered, or jailed—as Fidel was—after capture.

  The Dramatist in our group declaims dramatically that it is a matter of record that half the city of San Francisco is homosexual. She declares further her intention, because of this threat to her and her children, to move. We are ten black American artists—painters, poets, musicians, novelists. I feel a sad bitterness in the air. Some of us say, with disgust, “Move!” It is not that we are gay; it is probably that we have known the pain of moving into neighborhoods where we were not wanted.

  When I heard that Jehovah’s Witnesses are banned in Cuba and considered counterrevolutionary, I did not feel deeply disturbed, though it meant that some of my relatives, as recent converts to this religion, would be unwelcome there. Cuba’s government-sanctioned dislike of homosexuals, however, seemed to me unfair and dangerous. An affront to human liberty and a mockery of the most profoundly revolutionary statement in the Cuban Family Code: “All children are equal.” Surely homosexuals are born as well as made? One assumes a Jehovah’s Witness chooses her or his religion. But if a child is born a homosexual what is to be done about it?