who spoke
much
of
Lebanon
and
his father’s
orchards
it was
near
a castle
near
a river
near
the sun
and
warm
&
where he
bent
and kissed
me
on the swelling
brown
smelled for
a short
lingering
time
of
apples.
WARNING
To love a man wholly
love him
feet first
head down
eyes cold
closed
in depression.
It is too easy to love
a surfer
white eyes
godliness &
bronze
in the bright sun.
THE BLACK PRINCE
Very proud
he barely asked directions
to a nearby
hotel
but no
tired-eyed
little village chief
should spend his
first night
in chilly London
alone.
MEDICINE
Grandma sleeps with
my sick
grand-
pa so she
can get him
during the night
medicine
to stop
the pain
In
the morning
clumsily
I
wake
them
Her eyes
look at me
from under-
neath
his withered
arm
The
medicine
is all
in
her long
un-
braided
hair.
BALLAD OF THE BROWN GIRL
i’ve got two
hundred
dollars
the girl said
on her head
she wore a
school cap
—blue—
& brown she
looked no
more than
ten
but a freshman in
college?
well, hard to tell—
i’ll give you
‘three hundred’
‘fo’ hunna’
‘five wads of jack’
but “mrs. whatsyourname …”
the doctor says
with impatiently tolerant
eyes
you should want
it
you know …
talk it over with
your folks
you may be
surprised.…
the next morning
her slender
neck broken
her note
short and
of cryptic
collegiate
make—
just
“Question—
did ever brown
daughter to black
father a white
baby
take—?”
SUICIDE
First, suicide notes should be
(not long) but written
second,
all suicide notes
should be signed
in blood
by hand
and to the point—
that point being, perhaps,
that there is none.
Thirdly, if it is the thought
of rest that
fascinates
laziness should be admitted
in the clearest terms.
Then, all things done
ask those outraged
consider their happiest
summer
& tell if the days it
adds up to
is one.
EXCUSE
Tonight it is the wine (or not the wine)
or a letter from you (or not a letter from you)
I sit
listen to the complacency of the rain
write a poem, kill myself there
It brings less pain—
Tonight it rains, tomorrow will be bright
tomorrow I’ll say “yesterday was the same
and my shoes too tight.”
TO DIE
BEFORE ONE WAKES
MUST BE GLAD
to die before
one wakes
must be glad (to the same extent
maybe
that it is also
sad)
a slipping away
in glee
unobserved and
free in the wide—
area felt spatially,
heart intact.
to die before one
wakes
must be joyous
full swing glorious
(rebellion)
(victory)
unremarked triumph
love letters untorn
foetal fears
unborn
monsters given
berth
(love unseen, guiltily,
as creation)
(life “good”)
to die before one
wakes
must be a dance
(perhaps a jig)
and visual-
skipping tunes of
color
across smirking
eyelids
happy bluely …
thought running gaily
out and out.
to die before
one wakes
must be
nice
(green little passions
red dying
into ice
spinningly
(like a circus)
the blurred landscape
of the runner’s
hurried
mile)
one’s lips curving
sweetly
in one’s most subtle smile.
EXERCISES ON THEMES FROM LIFE
i
Speaking of death and decay
It hardly matters
Which
Since both are on the
way, maybe—
to being daffodils.
ii
It is not about that
a poet I knew used
to say
speaking with haunted eyes
of liking and disliking—
Now I think
uncannily
of life.
iii
My nausea has nothing
to do
With the fact that
you love me
It is probably just
something I ate
at your mother’s.
iv
To keep up a
passionate courtship
with a tree
one must be
completely mad
In the forest
in the dark one night
I lost my way.
v
If I were a patriot
I would kiss the flag
As it is,
Let us just go.
vi
My father liked very much
the hymns
in church
in the amen corner,
on rainy days
he would wake
himself up
to hear them.
vii
I like to see you try
to worm yourself
away from me
first you plead
your age
as if my young heart
felt any of the tiredness
in your bones …
viii
Making our bodies touch
across your breezy bed
how warm you are …
cannot we save our little
quarrel
until tomorrow?
ix
My fear of burial
is all tied up with
how used I am
to the spring …!
A Biography of Alice Walker
Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.
Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.
Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book, Once (1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.
In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and her first story collection, In Love & Trouble (1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for Ms. magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.
With the 1982 release of her third novel, The Color Purple, Walker earned a reputation as one of America’s premier authors. The book would go on to sell fifteen million copies and be adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film by director Steven Spielberg. After the publication of The Color Purple, Walker had a tremendously prolific decade. She produced a number of acclaimed novels, including You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), as well as the poetry collections Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) and Her Blue Body Everything We Know (1991). During this time Walker also began to distinguish herself as an essayist and nonfiction writer with collections on race, feminism, and culture, including In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and Living by the Word (1988). Another collection of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, was released in 2010, followed by her memoir, The Chicken Chronicles, in the spring of 2011.
Currently, Walker lives in Northern California, and spends much of her time traveling, teaching, and working for human rights and civil liberties in the United States and abroad. She continues to write and publish along with her many other activities.
Alice’s parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, in the 1930s. Willie Lee was brave and hardworking, and Minnie Lou was strong, thoughtful, and kind—and just as hardworking as her husband. Alice remembers her mother as a strong-willed woman who never allowed herself or her children to be cowed by anyone. Alice cherished both of her parents “for all they were able to do to bring up eight children, under incredibly harsh conditions, to instill in us a sense of the importance of education, for instance, the love of beauty, the respect for hard work, and the freedom to be whoever you are.”
Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston during her days in New York City. Hurston, who fell into obscurity after her death, had a profound influence on Walker. Indeed, Walker’s 1975 essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” played a crucial role in resurrecting Hurston’s reputation as a major figure in American literature. Walker paid further tribute to her “literary aunt” when she purchased a headstone for Hurston’s grave, which had gone unmarked for over a decade. The inscription on the tombstone reads, “A Genius of the South.”
Alice (front) in Kenya in 1965. She traveled there to help build the school pictured in the background as part of the Experiment in International Living Program. It was here that Walker first witnessed the practice of female genital mutilation, a practice that she has since worked to eradicate.
Walker with her former husband, Melvyn Leventhal, a Brooklyn native. The couple met in Mississippi and bonded over their mutual involvement in the struggle for civil rights—he as a budding litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, she as one of the organization’s workers responsible for taking depositions from disenfranchised black voters. Despite disapproval from their respective families, Alice and Melvyn wed in New York City in 1967. They then returned to Mississippi, where they were often subjected to threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually the pressures of living in the violent, segregated state, coupled with their divergent career paths, caused the pair to drift apart. They divorced amicably in 1976.
Alice and Melvyn with their daughter, Rebecca, who would also grow up to become a writer, in 1970. Alice had just published her debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which garnered significant praise and prompted these perceptive words from critic Kay Bourne: “Most poignant is the relating of the lives of black women, who were ready and strong and trusted, only to so often be abused by the conditions of their oppressed lives and the misdirected anger of their men.” Alice characterized it as “an incredibly difficult novel to write,” since it forced her to confront the violence African Americans inflicted on each other in the face of white oppression.
Alice and her partner of thirteen years, Robert L. Allen, a noted scholar of American history, pose for a portrait. The picture was taken at a celebration the couple hosted after the publication of I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, an anthology of Zora Neale Hurston’s writings that Alice edited.
Walker being taken into custody at a 1980s demonstration against weapons shipments sent from Concord, California, to Central and South America. Her shirt reads: “Remember Port Chicago.” This is a reference to an explosion that killed hundreds of sailors stationed in Concord during World War II—most of them black—while they were loading munitions onto a cargo vessel. Walker has remained a dedicated political activist since the 1960s, when she returned to the South after graduating from Sarah Lawrence to help register black voters. Recently, she was arrested with fellow California-based author Maxine Hong Kingston in Washington, DC, during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “My activism—cultural, political, spiritual—is rooted in my love of nature and my delight in human beings,” Walker explains.
Walker with celebrated historian Howard Zinn, who taught one of her classes at Spelman College, in the 1960s. Walker developed a lifelong friendship with Zinn and considered him one of her mentors. The two shared a passion for political activism and a desire to shed light on the con
ditions of the oppressed. “I was Howard’s student for only a semester,” she says, “but in fact, I have learned from him all my life. His way with resistance—steady, persistent, impersonal, often with humor—is a teaching I cherish.”
A photograph of Walker taken in 2007 at a ceremony for her dog, Marley, and her cat, Surprise. “Marley appeared,” she says, but “Surprise slept through it!”
Walker at her country home in Northern California, where she has lived since the early 1980s. “What attracted me to this part of the world—Northern California—is really the resemblance to Georgia that it has,” she once told an interviewer. “This has been a very good place for me,” she went on, “a very good place for dreaming.”
Walker writing on the front porch of her California home. She has lived in many different places throughout the world—including Africa, Hawaii, and Mexico—and finding a place to write has always been a matter of utmost importance for her. She once said that “books and houses” are what she “longed for most as a child.” Years after her tenant farming childhood, Walker is happy to have a place she can truly call home.
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copyright © 1968 by Alice Walker
cover design by Connie Gabbert
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