by Alice Walker
I have been helped, in thinking about this case, by the knowledge of a similar one that occurred in the United States in 1948. The great writer Zora Neale Hurston—along with two other adults she had never seen before—was accused of sodomizing a ten-year-old boy. She would have been about Winnie’s age, the mid-fifties. Though her case was thrown out of court—her passport proved she’d been in Honduras at the time of the alleged crime—the press (black and male in this instance) went to work on her anyway, quoting material from a character in one of her novels to “prove” she was guilty as charged.
Hurston, not having a Nelson Mandela or an ANC to stand up for her, and having alienated erstwhile friends by her “imperious,” “flamboyant,” and, to them, generally “uppity” behavior, attempted to bury herself in the backwoods of Florida, certain that her reputation was in ruins. She died there years later, never having known that a new generation of women would come along and recognize what she was capable of—not from court proceedings or newspapers but from the work she herself did in the world. A person’s work is her only signature; we forget this at our peril. It is to the work and the life we must turn, especially in these days of assassination by newsprint.
It is Winnie’s work—her care for children, women, the elderly, the “internal refugees,” the homeless—that speaks for her. Her care for her own daughters, stepchildren, nieces, nephews, and, as a social worker, for the black South African family as a whole. It is the warmth and character and honesty that inform every line of Nancy Harrison’s biography Winnie Mandela, and of the autobiography Part of My Soul Went with Him, in which she documents the brutality of the South African government against her and the indigenous people of South Africa. It is in every thought she has expressed on television talk shows, to independent filmmakers who sought her out during her numerous bannings, and over the bodies of hundreds of slain children, women, and men above whose coffins she has been asked to speak.
It is a line from one of these speeches, in which she mentions “liberating South Africa with our matchboxes and our necklaces” (the practice of placing a gasoline-filled rubber tire around an informer’s neck and setting it afire), that is used to give credibility to the image of her as brutal and violent. It is the image used as the basis for the frame-up.
She has not refuted the statement but claims it was taken out of context. It is interesting to note that others in the anti-apartheid movement, in moments of anger and grief, have, in their powerlessness, tossed out words of violence. Leah Tutu, for instance, the wife of Bishop Desmond Tutu, showed no compunction in stating to a television interviewer from South Africa Now, who queried her about the abuse and detainment by police of small children and the arrest of her son, that she was so angry that if she had possessed a hand grenade, she would have thrown it, she felt sure, blowing the police to bits. No one has, however, bombed a police station and accused Leah Tutu of providing the hand grenades and harming the inmates. Why?
Because the white South African government has come to know Winnie Mandela well through decades of spying, arrests, detention, and horrendous torture, and understands that, as Nelson Mandela’s wife, she really is, as the black majority long ago spontaneously labeled her, “the mother of the nation.” In white lingo, “authentic first lady.” They know that all their abuse has not destroyed her. They know she has always, characteristically, tried to “take one of them with her” whenever she has been attacked. White police, black and white spies and informers, warders, journalists, judges, recognize the fact that this lone black woman whom they have all persecuted so relentlessly may one day be in power, alongside her husband. They also suspect, correctly, I believe, that she is far more radical than her husband and has a longer and fuller memory of wrongs. They would like to be rid of her. They have tried, behind prison bars, to break her in private; they are now trying to break her publicly. If this fails, and her case is thrown out of court, as, in my opinion, it deserves to be, I do not doubt they will try to assassinate her, as has been tried in the past.
Whatever happens, as women, as black people, as comrades against oppression, we are blessed by the being of Winnie Mandela. Unlike so many of our sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers who died in detention under the boot of sadistic oppressors, Winnie Mandela survived to the point of total contact with the outside world, her life of struggle emblematic of what can be dared, challenged, achieved, endured, and overcome.
Reading through the sickening articles about her, in which she is condemned for the very enthusiasm, regality, and buoyancy of her personality and the styles of clothing she wears; roundly vilified for building a house commensurate with her years of hard work and her husband’s stature as leader of millions (never is it mentioned that the house Nelson Mandel inhabited during his last months in prison, with its spacious bedrooms, living room, television room, and swimming pool, is much nicer than the cramped three-room “matchbox” with limited privacy and very little yard to which he returned); snidely envied for remaining beautiful, young-looking, and fresh, no matter what has been done to her (Nelson Mandela is now virtually “accused” of “falling in love with her all over again.” The witch!); I was struck anew by the ease with which people believe the worst rather than the best about a person, even when the best has been a person’s whole life.
Like Nelson Mandela, I do not doubt Winnie Mandela’s word. Though one cannot, when she is angry and outraged, deny a glimpse of the Goddess Kali in her aspect, she is too much a warrior to stoop to ignoble battle against a defenseless fourteen-year-old. Too much a social worker to ignore screams she herself might have made under torture. Too much a neatnik and mother to have blood on her floors.
One friend I spoke to about the trial said to me: But, you know, she may well be guilty.
And I replied: Given the complete corruption of the white supremacist system in South Africa, how could anybody presume to judge?
But what if, on some other occasion, Winnie Mandela should fall from the obviously high standard of behavior she has always set herself, and should do something horrible and sad enough to make an earlier Winnie and the rest of us grieve?
Even in that case, ostracism, isolation, and prison would not be the answer, no more than they’d be if—in this interminable and bloody battle for our people’s lives and dignity—she’d lost her hearing or her legs. As oppressed people, we ask a lot from people who stand up for us; however, a complete absence of mistakes, errors of judgment, or emotional and spiritual breakdowns should never be required. We have a duty also, I believe, to the people who forfeit their own happiness to hold high the standard of our integrity and Being. It is, at the least, to give a thought to the context of their actions, to study them, to have the humility to place gently at their feet the stone we’ve come to throw.
Songs, Flowers,
and Swords
Who Will Carry Any of Us?
In the summer of 1966 I left my job as a caseworker at the Welfare Department in New York City and went to offer my services, for as long as I could afford to do so, to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. I was subsisting on savings and a small grant, which saw me through nearly two months of diverse Civil Rights work while attached to the Legal Defense Fund in Jackson, headed at that time by Marian Wright,* of whom I had heard.
On the afternoon I arrived in Jackson, I was taken to the local black restaurant and there saw for the first time the man I would marry. We did not speak. He was across the room with his colleagues—other law students like himself—and I was secretly hostile to whites in the Movement, though when we were introduced on a later occasion I managed to camouflage this, I think, quite well. In a very short time we were in love, with Mississippi as well as with each other, and after a year in New York while he finished law school and I wrote essays and short stories, we were married (by a white Jewish woman judge who had married many interracial Movement couples, and to whom we presented a bouquet of pink tulips in token payment for her services) and moved back to Mis
sissippi, in 1967, to work and live. Our daughter was born there in 1969, and with the exception of a year and a half she and I spent in Cambridge, we lived in Mississippi for seven years.
It was during this period that several of my earliest essays were written. What strikes me as I read them over is how deeply I was affected by my mother’s life, and by one incident in particular: the story she told of the day she asked for government-sponsored food during the Depression and was denied it. The imagined scene of her humiliation reverberates through my work, as it has reverberated through my life. Indeed, it is quite ineradicable. That anyone could refuse my mother food sends me alternately into rage or despair, even today, when mothers all over the world are refused food or, worse, given (then sold) baby formula that kills their children, since it is often mixed with brackish, germ-infested water in villages where hygienic cooking conditions are unknown. But gradually I felt much more rage than despair, and that is what became more evident as I continued writing the essays.
That I am coming to take my mother’s place—both darker and stronger—and I am accompanied by all the poor and dark mothers of the world, and we will not, finally, be denied—neither the food we need for our bodies nor the sustenance we need for our souls.
For though in the very early essays I appear to feel the world is mostly reserved for our “sons,” “brothers,” and “fathers,” there begins the rising, effortlessly—because by its own earned force—of the dark women who become mothers and endless reflections of my mother. Mrs. Hudson writing her autobiography under a tree. Mrs. Hamer singing with sad eyes, but singing. All the anonymous quilters and flower growers I met during those hot days and fearful nights in the American South. Fighting Boss so-and-so … Fighting Miss Ann … Fighting the Klan …
The Klan again to be fought. Also nuclear power. Also prisons. Also lynching. Also, again, forever, it seems, the fight for land, for peace, for work. For a country in which our children may grow and not simply grow up.
I accept the criticism that I am trying to carry my mother, and that the weight is—heavy. Not “too heavy,” as one woman has said. But who, I ask, will carry any of us if not we ourselves? No, nothing is heavier than this determination to affirm a mother the world despises. But at the same time, nothing is more joyous and more light. To watch my mother’s smile as she reads In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens is to know true happiness. To know that she realizes I recognize and deeply value her worth. What prize, what praise, what criticism, can stand against this? This moment when mother and child look into each other’s eyes and both can say: Yes, beloved, I understand.
That moment is the true beginning of adulthood for women, the true moment of rest and relinquishing of us by our mothers. For we have at last arrived at the place where they always stood: vengeful, harassed, irritable, odd, and we did not know why.
Many of my essays, those in In Search as well as those in this collection,* along with reviews and statements of various kinds, were written between novels and short stories and poems; before, during, and after a divorce; and while raising a child, for the most part, alone. The assumed support of a healthy women’s movement is evident, I think, in the tone of many of them, particularly the dozen or more pieces that were published in Ms. magazine, where I was a fiction editor and then a contributing editor for many years. There is a story about the essay “Lulls” (published in In Search) that illustrates the importance to writers like me of a women’s movement, and of publications both feminist and black.
Editors at The New York Times asked me to write a piece on Black America for the bicentennial issue of the Times magazine. Rather, it became clear while I was writing it that they wanted it for the bicentennial issue. I had made a point of the fact that I was against involvement in this particular celebration, feeling how much of the status quo such celebration affirmed. In any case, I might have been talked into publishing the article in the bicentennial issue except for one thing: Over a very expensive lunch at Sardi’s (where the bottle of wine cost thirty dollars), the two editors (white, middle-aged men) made clear in accepting the piece that they wished me to delete from my considerations of Black America my references to personal affection and sexual love. Leaving a one-sided expression mostly of fear, disappointment, and distress. Their view of Black America, not mine. Because to me, it is precisely our personal memories of joy and delight in each other and our present passions and loves that sustain us.
I was so angered I demanded the return of the piece and flew out of the restaurant in a rage (wishing terribly I had at least turned over the table and crashed the wine bottle against some handy object). And both The Black Scholar and Ms. published the article, as it stood.
The Times simply called on another black woman writer, who wrote them a better piece than they deserved. And I’ve often wondered if the editors who worked with her ever explained why they contacted her about the article so late. Probably not.
Having a receptive place to publish—not just the odd essay snatched back from the jaws of the Times—is of primary importance because it is so freeing. Though I’ve met many people, black and white, who criticize me for publishing in Ms. (others hate that I publish in New Age, In These Times, or Mother Jones), they somehow manage to ignore the fact that that is where they read me. What they don’t realize is that some of the other publications they wish I would appear in have more than once received work from me that has been kept without comment (or payment) for over a year. Among other responses.
Someone has said that if I write about the birth of my child and I am not rhapsodic, this will hurt the child. Holding my daughter close to me, however, all I can promise her is not to lie. All I can claim to offer her truly is the example of my life. This is what I know. One’s experience, in fact, is all one ever truly owns. If the essay “One Child of One’s Own” (from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens) is painful to her, I believe nonetheless it is better than a lie. Surely better than the lies I was told—“for my own good”—only to sniff them out eventually and become entangled in them.
We are, as women writers with children, in that marvelous spot of danger in which there is great risk but, as well, great possibilities for change. We can simply refuse to leave our children unarmed with the truth as we have experienced it. And that is my intention. Undertaken not with the arrogance of someone who possesses another (as yet another person has said) but with the humility of one who believes with all her soul that love is best expressed through truth.
Every one of these writings represents my struggle not simply to survive the past and remain nurtured by it but to embrace the present and fight for the future. In my mind I see us all quite clearly: poor and dark women, mothers in all the ways we are, marching with our songs, flowers, and (where necessary) swords.
* Marian Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fund.
* “Songs, Flowers, and Swords” was written originally as an introduction to Living by the Word, an earlier collection of essays.
PART THREE
What Can I
Give My Daughters,
Who Are Brave?
Home
Fat, Balding, Rueful, Content
I divide my time between a venerable “painted lady” Victorian in San Francisco and a woodsy writing retreat in the hills of Mendocino. Because I’ve been happier in Northern California than in other places I’ve lived—Georgia, where I grew up, Boston, Mississippi, and New York—I’ve assumed this area is my definitive “home.” It is, and it isn’t. It has taken me several decades to understand why this is so.
When I went away to college in 1961, I left behind not only my aging parents but also much of my connection to my siblings. Because I was youngest, they left the nest before I did. One sister had become a university administrator, another a cosmetologist. One brother went into the Navy; a second joined the Marines. Two other brothers worked as mechanics; first in our small town, Eatonton, Georgia, and later in Boston, where they and their young families settled.
My favorite brother, Jack,* invited me to live with his family during summers, where I baby-sat my infant nephew Johnnie or worked as a waitress or clerk. Staying at my brother’s meant I could save to go to college, an experience he firmly encouraged, though it was one he, a young father of modest earnings, could not have. His wife, Joy, and I were compatible from the start. After toiling at our respective jobs all day, we had only to glimpse each other to begin a merry evening of conversation, cooking, and eating, while her adoring husband, my gruff but tenderhearted brother, looked on. In fact, pleasure in his family characterized my brother’s demeanor. No matter how weary he was after a day underneath broken-down cars, or fixing giant thousand-pound tires on the frigid highways of New England, he came through the front door beaming, happy to see his family, glad to be home.
