In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  The line in Wallace’s book that has given black women more cases of apoplexy than any other is this one: “I think that the black woman thinks of her history and her condition as a wound which makes her different and therefore special and therefore exempt from human responsibility.” Like the majority of black women in America, I am delighted when another black woman speaks her mind and offers her own opinion, but this one—even in context—is a stunner. In what way have we not been responsible? How have we been exempt? This statement seems criticism taken to such extreme that there is nothing one can think of to which it actually applies.

  The one statement in Wallace’s book that I made an effort to suppress (beyond writing notes to the author herself: all ignored, as far as I can see in the book) is this one:

  From the intricate web of mythology which surrounds the black woman, a fundamental image emerges. It is of a woman of inordinate strength, with an ability for tolerating an unusual amount of misery and heavy, distasteful work. This woman does not have the same fears, weaknesses, and insecurities as other women, but believes herself to be and is, in fact, stronger emotionally than most men. Less of a woman in that she is less “feminine” and helpless, she is really more of a woman in that she is the embodiment of Mother Earth, the quintessential mother with infinite sexual, life-giving, and nurturing reserves. In other words, she is a superwoman.

  Through the years this image has remained basically intact, unquestioned even by the occasional black woman writer or politician [my italics].

  Her editor requested an endorsement of the book. I agreed but only if this paragraph was removed. “It is a lie,” I said. “I can’t speak for politicians but I can certainly speak for myself. I’ve been hacking away at that stereotype for years, and so have a good many other black women writers.” I thought, not simply of Meridian, but of Janie Crawford, of Pecola, Sula, and Nell, of Edith Jackson, even of Iola LeRoy and Megda, for God’s sake. (Characters by black women writers Ms. Wallace is unacquainted with; an ignorance that is acceptable only in someone not writing a book about black women.) “Fifty thousand black women will call you on this one,” I ranted further.

  I was too late. Nor was there any apparent attention paid to anything I’d said. My earlier “advice” had in no way been made use of. And perhaps the editor and Wallace were correct not to be swayed. Fifty thousand black women have so far not even managed to write letters of protest to Ms. (where an excerpt of the book appeared) with their objections, though I have received both letters and phone calls, as if it is my responsibility to make the bad parts of Black Macho go away.**

  No one can do that now. Nor can we carp continually about the bad parts without facing the many truths of the good parts. And there are good parts. It is a book that, while not sound or visionary or even honest enough to “shape the eighties,” can still help us shape our thinking. It is, in short, an expression of one black woman’s reality. And I persist in believing all such expressions (preferably stopping short of self-contempt and contempt for others) are valuable and will, in the long run, do us more good than harm.

  *For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow Is Enuf

  **Presumably because I was an editor at Ms. at the time and held responsible for every black piece published, though I was not the editor for Wallace’s piece.

  1979

  BROTHERS AND SISTERS

  WE LIVED ON a farm in the South in the fifties, and my brothers, the four of them I knew (the fifth had left home when I was three years old), were allowed to watch animals being mated. This was not unusual; nor was it considered unusual that my older sister and I were frowned upon if we even asked, innocently, what was going on. One of my brothers explained the mating one day, using words my father had given him: “The bull is getting a little something on his stick,” he said. And he laughed. “What stick?” I wanted to know. “Where did he get it? How did he pick it up? Where did he put it?” All my brothers laughed.

  I believe my mother’s theory about raising a large family of five boys and three girls was that the father should teach the boys and the mother teach the girls the facts, as one says, of life. So my father went around talking about bulls getting something on their sticks and she went around saying girls did not need to know about such things. They were “womanish” (a very bad way to be in those days) if they asked.

  The thing was, watching the matings filled my brothers with an aimless sort of lust, as dangerous as it was unintentional. They knew enough to know that cows, months after mating, produced calves, but they were not bright enough to make the same connection between women and their offspring.

  Sometimes, when I think of my childhood, it seems to me a particularly hard one. But in reality, everything awful that happened to me didn’t seem to happen to me at all, but to my older sister. Through some incredible power to negate my presence around people I did not like, which produced invisibility (as well as an ability to appear mentally vacant when I was nothing of the kind), I was spared the humiliation she was subjected to, though at the same time, I felt every bit of it. It was as if she suffered for my benefit, and I vowed early in my life that none of the things that made existence so miserable for her would happen to me.

  The fact that she was not allowed at official matings did not mean she never saw any. While my brothers followed my father to the mating pens on the other side of the road near the barn, she stationed herself near the pigpen, or followed our many dogs until they were in a mating mood, or, failing to witness something there, she watched the chickens. On a farm it is impossible not to be conscious of sex, to wonder about it, to dream … but to whom was she to speak of her feelings? Not to my father, who thought all young women perverse. Not to my mother, who pretended all her children grew out of stumps she magically found in the forest. Not to me, who never found anything wrong with this lie.

  When my sister menstruated she wore a thick packet of clean rags between her legs. It stuck out in front like a penis. The boys laughed at her as she served them at the table. Not knowing any better, and because our parents did not dream of actually discussing what was going on, she would giggle nervously at herself. I hated her for giggling, and it was at those times I would think of her as dim-witted. She never complained, but she began to have strange fainting fits whenever she had her period. Her head felt as if it were splitting, she said, and everything she ate came up again. And her cramps were so severe she could not stand. She was forced to spend several days of each month in bed.

  My father expected all of his sons to have sex with women. “Like bulls,” he said, “a man needs to get a little something on his stick.” And so, on Saturday nights, into town they went, chasing the girls. My sister was rarely allowed into town alone, and if the dress she wore fit too snugly at the waist, or if her cleavage dipped too far below her collarbone, she was made to stay home.

  “But why can’t I go too,” she would cry, her face screwed up with the effort not to wail.

  “They’re boys, your brothers, that’s why they can go.”

  Naturally, when she got the chance, she responded eagerly to boys. But when this was discovered she was whipped and locked up in her room.

  I would go in to visit her.

  “Straight Pine,”* she would say, “you don’t know what it feels like to want to be loved by a man.”

  “And if this is what you get for feeling like it I never will,” I said, with—I hoped—the right combination of sympathy and disgust.

  “Men smell so good,” she would whisper ecstatically. “And when they look into your eyes, you just melt.”

  Since they were so hard to catch, naturally she thought almost any of them terrific.

  “Oh, that Alfred!” she would moon over some mediocre, square-headed boy, “he’s so sweet!” And she would take his ugly picture out of her bosom and kiss it.

  My father was always warning her not to come home if she ever found herself pregnant. My mother constantly reminded her that abortio
n was a sin. Later, although she never became pregnant, her period would not come for months at a time. The painful symptoms, however, never varied or ceased. She fell for the first man who loved her enough to beat her for looking at someone else, and when I was still in high school, she married him.

  My fifth brother, the one I never knew, was said to be different from the rest. He had not liked matings. He would not watch them. He thought the cows should be given a choice. My father had disliked him because he was soft. My mother took up for him. “Jason is just tender-hearted,” she would say in a way that made me know he was her favorite; “he takes after me.” It was true that my mother cried about almost anything.

  Who was this oldest brother? I wondered.

  “Well,” said my mother, “he was someone who always loved you. Of course he was a great big boy when you were born and out working on his own. He worked on a road gang building roads. Every morning before he left he would come in the room where you were and pick you up and give you the biggest kisses. He used to look at you and just smile. It’s a pity you don’t remember him.”

  I agreed.

  At my father’s funeral I finally “met” my oldest brother. He is tall and black with thick gray hair above a young-looking face. I watched my sister cry over my father until she blacked out from grief. I saw my brothers sobbing, reminding each other of what a great father he had been. My oldest brother and I did not shed a tear between us. When I left my father’s grave he came up and introduced himself. “You don’t ever have to walk alone,” he said, and put his arms around me.

  One out of five ain’t too bad, I thought, snuggling up.

  But I didn’t discover until recently his true uniqueness: He is the only one of my brothers who assumes responsibility for all his children. The other four all fathered children during those Saturday-night chases of twenty years ago. Children—my nieces and nephews whom I will probably never know—they neither acknowledge as their own, provide for, or even see.

  It was not until I became a student of women’s liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father. I needed an ideology that would define his behavior in context. The black movement had given me an ideology that helped explain his colorism (he did fall in love with my mother partly because she was so light; he never denied it). Feminism helped explain his sexism. I was relieved to know his sexist behavior was not something uniquely his own, but, rather, an imitation of the behavior of the society around us.

  All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience. “The more things the better,” as O’Connor and Welty both have said, speaking, one of marriage, the other of Catholicism.

  I desperately needed my father and brothers to give me male models I could respect, because white men (for example; being particularly handy in this sort of comparison)—whether in films or in person—offered man as dominator, as killer, and always as hypocrite.

  My father failed because he copied the hypocrisy. And my brothers—except for one—never understood they must represent half the world to me, as I must represent the other half to them.**

  *A pseudonym.

  **Since this essay was written, my brothers have offered their name, acknowledgment, and some support to all their children.

  1975

  PART FOUR

  JUST EAST OF the central African great jungle belt lies an open Savanna believed to have been the home of the first human beings—hunters and gatherers set apart from the great apes in part by their ability to walk upright, which enabled them to fashion tools. Now, studies being carried on… propose that the first implements crafted by these people were not designed by men to hunt animals, as has long been assumed, but by women, to gather plants for eating.

  —“New Anthropological Finds: The Swords Started Out as Ploughshares,” MS. Gazette, August 1979

  SILVER WRITES

  IT IS TRUE—

  I’ve always loved

  the daring

  ones

  Like the black young

  man

  Who tried

  to crash

  All barriers

  at once,

  wanted to

  swim

  At a white

  beach (in Alabama)

  Nude.

  Of all the poems I wrote during the period of most intense struggle for Civil Rights* (the early sixties), this one (from Once) remains my favorite. I like it because it reveals a moment in which I recognized something important about myself, and my own motivations for joining a historic, profoundly revolutionary movement for human change. It also reveals why the term “Civil Rights” could never adequately express black people’s revolutionary goals, because it could never adequately describe our longings and our dreams, or those of the non-black people who stood among us. And because, as a term, it is totally lacking in color.

  In short, although I value the Civil Rights Movement deeply, I have never liked the term itself. It has no music, it has no poetry. It makes one think of bureaucrats rather than of sweaty faces, eyes bright and big for Freedom!, marching feet. No; one thinks instead of metal filing cabinets and boring paperwork.

  This is because “Civil Rights” is a term that did not evolve out of black culture, but, rather, out of American law As such, it is a term of limitation. It speaks only to physical possibilities—necessary and treasured, of course—but not of the spirit. Even as it promises assurance of greater freedoms it narrows the area in which people might expect to find them No wonder “Black Power,” “Black Panther Party,” even “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” and “Umoja” always sounded so much better and sui generis, if in the end they accomplished (perhaps) less.

  When one reads the poems, especially, of the period, this becomes very clear. The poems, like the songs of that time, reveal an entirely different quality of imagination and spirit than the term “Civil Rights” describes. The poems are full of protest and “civil disobedience,” yes, but they are also full of playfulness and whimsicality, an attraction to world families and the cosmic sea—full of a lot of naked people longing to swim free.

  *Older black country people did their best to instill what accurate poetry they could into this essentially white civil servants’ term (acknowledging the ultimate power behind the formulation of the majority of America’s laws) by saying the words with a comprehending passion, irony, and insight, so that what one heard was “Silver writes.”

  1982

  ONLY JUSTICE CAN STOP A CURSE

  TO THE MAN GOD: O Great One, I have been sorely tried by my enemies and have been blasphemed and lied against. My good thoughts and my honest actions have been turned to bad actions and dishonest ideas. My home has been disrespected, my children have been cursed and ill-treated. My dear ones have been backbitten and their virtue questioned. O Man God, I beg that this that I ask for my enemies shall come to pass:

  That the South wind shall scorch their bodies and make them wither and shall not be tempered to them. That the North wind shall freeze their blood and numb their muscles and that it shall not be tempered to them. That the West wind shall blow away their life’s breath and will not leave their hair grow, and that their fingernails shall fall off and their bones shall crumble. That the East wind shall make their minds grow dark, their sight shall fail and their seed dry up so that they shall not multiply.

  I ask that their fathers and mothers from their furthest generation will not intercede for them before the great throne, and the wombs of their women shall not bear fruit except for strangers, and that they shall become extinct. I pray that the children who may come shall be weak of mind and paralyzed of limb and that they themselves shall curse them in their turn for ever turning the breath of life into their bodies. I pray that disease and death shall be forever with them and that their worldly goods shall not prosper, and that their crops shall not multiply and that their c
ows, their sheep, and their hogs and all their living beasts shall die of starvation and thirst. I pray that their houses shall be unroofed and that the rain, the thunder and lightning shall find the innermost recesses of their home and that the foundation shall crumble and the floods tear it asunder. I pray that the sun shall not shed its rays on them in benevolence, but instead it shall beat down on them and burn them and destroy them. I pray that the moon shall not give them peace, but instead shall deride them and decry them and cause their minds to shrivel. I pray that their friends shall betray them and cause them loss of power, of gold and of silver, and that their enemies shall smite them until they beg for mercy which shall not be given them. I pray that their tongues shall forget how to speak in sweet words, and that it shall be paralyzed and that all about them will be desolation, pestilence and death. O Man God, I ask you for all these things because they have dragged me in the dust and destroyed my good name; broken my heart and caused me to curse the day that I was born. So be it.