Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning

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Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning

ALICE WALKER
1975

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
POEM SUMMARY
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

Poet, novelist, and short story writer Alice Walker is one of the most prominent female African American writers of the twentieth century. Her poem"GoodNight, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is one of her most anthologized works. First published in 1975 in the Iowa Review, the poem later became the title piece in Walker's third collection of poetry, which was published four years later. Notably, "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is the last piece presented in the collection, becoming the final word in a volume that explores what can be termed bad or dysfunctional relationships. The women Walker portrays in the collection (and throughout her work) often find themselves caught between being true to themselves and following their romantic desires, options that Walker often depicts as being mutually exclusive. In "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning," the final word given on this subject is, remarkably, forgiveness, a forgiveness that permits redemption both in life and in death. The poem itself is brief, a mere fifty-six words, yet its message is concise, clear, and powerful. It is perhaps for these reasons that "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" has remained a touchstone piece in Walker's oeuvre. Widely available in anthologies and on the Internet, the poem can also be found in a 1984 edition of Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (still in print) and a 1991 volume of Walker's collected poems, Her Blue Body

Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete. Both books are published by Harvest Press.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the eighth child of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Walker. Her mother worked as a maid and her father was a sharecropper, a tenant who farmed a portion of the owner's land in exchange for a percentage of the proceeds from the harvested crop. This was a typical occupation for African Americans in the South at the time, and it was one that perpetuated the poverty and inequality rampant in the region. Notably, Walker's early experiences as an African American in the Jim Crow (segregated) South heavily influenced her later work. As a child, Walker began writing her own poetry but, when she was eight years old, her brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun. As a result, she was blinded in her right eye. The disfiguring scar tissue caused her to withdraw and become more introverted, and she began to read and write in earnest. By high school, however, Walker's scars had been removed, and she proved to be popular among her fellow students.

After high school, Walker began attending Spelman College (in 1961) on a full scholarship, which was won in part on account of her disability. There, she became involved in the civil rights movement, though she soon transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in 1963. While a student, she traveled to Africa, and when she returned she was pregnant. Walker had an illegal abortion (abortion was not legal in the United States until 1973), and she wrote several poems about her decision to do so, and of the emotions that she experienced during this period. Many of these poems were later included in her first full-length publication, a 1968 collection of poetry titled Once. Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, moved to Mississippi, and continued to work in the civil rights movement. There, she met Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer who was Jewish. The couple moved briefly to New York and married on March 17, 1967. Later that same year, they returned to Mississippi, and they were the first interracial married couple in the state, an honor that earned them death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Walker and Leventhal had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969, and they later divorced in 1976.

In the early years of her marriage, Walker taught at Jackson State College (from 1968 to 1969) and at Tougaloo College (from 1970 to 1971). In 1970, she published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and subsequently taught at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In 1973, Walker's second book of poetry Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, was published. It was her first major success, and the collection was nominated for a National Book Award. Walker's first book of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, was also published that same year. In 1974, Walker moved to New York and worked as an editor for Ms. magazine. Her second novel, Meridian, another success, was published in 1976. Following her divorce that same year, Walker moved to California.

Walker reached the height of her writing career in the ensuing period, publishing the poetry collection Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning in 1979. (The title poem of the collection was published four years prior in the Iowa Review.) She followed this success with the collection of stories You Can't Keep a GoodWoman Down in 1981. In 1982, Walker published her most acclaimed work, the novel The Color Purple, which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Notably, Walker was the first African American to win the prize in that category. The same year, Walker held a writing post at the University of California in Berkeley, and a professorial post at Brandeis University. Additionally, from 1984 to 1988, Walker cofounded and ran the Wild Tree Press.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Walker continued writing fiction and poetry, though she also made forays into children's literature, essays, and nonfiction. Some of her best-known works in these genres include her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) and the coauthored nonfiction volumeWarrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (1993). By 2000, Walker had returned to mainly writing poetry and fiction, such as Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (2003) and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart: A Novel (2004). Throughout this later period, Walker has lectured around the country and has had several notable romances, including one with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. As of 2008, Walker was living in Northern California.

POEM SUMMARY

"Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is a fifteen-line poem that consists of only fifty-six words. Almost a fifth of the poem is comprised of the title phrase. Additionally, the poem is only two sentences long. The first sentence describes what the speaker has seen, and the second relates what the speaker has subsequently learned.

Lines 1-7

The first line begins with the speaker stating that she is looking at her father, who is dead. With the finality that accompanies death, the speaker's mother is described as speaking to her dead husband in a congenial and matter-of-fact tone. Much is made of the fact that the speaker's mother is not crying; nor is she angry or happy. This stress is derived from the noted absence of any strong emotion aside from the courtesy that would be extended even to a stranger. Rather than cry over his body, bid her husband goodbye, or tell him how much he was loved, the speaker's mother does something else entirely.

Lines 8-15

She instead says the words that become the title of the poem (and, ultimately, of the collection it appeared in). Notably, Walker's father was actually named Willie Lee. Thus, this is how the first sentence in the poem ends. The second sentence explains what the speaker has learned from this peculiar act. She states that her mother's words at her father's deathbed have allowed her to realize that the only way to repair the damage that people do to one another is by forgiving them. The speaker obviously sees her mother's statement as a declaration of absolution for all of the hard times that no doubt accompany a marriage.

By declaring that she will see her husband again, the speaker's mother references heaven or the afterlife or perhaps the Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead and the day of reckoning. In this sense, the word "morning" is metaphorical, indicating a spiritual awakening rather than a physical one. Yet, the mother's statement can be seen practically. The next morning she will wake and prepare the body for burial. She will see her husband in their home and the faces of their children. This, however, is not the meaning that the speaker sees; instead, she sees the former.

This is demonstrated by the final three lines, in which the speaker indicates that she understands her mother's declaration of absolution to be one that allows an assurance for her father (and for all who are forgiven) to come back after all is said and done. This concluding observation does seem closest to the Christian belief in resurrection, though it skillfully avoids any overtly religious phrases. Because of this, the possibility of return is not only spiritual but physical and emotional as well.

THEMES

Forgiveness

The main theme of "Good Night,Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is that of forgiveness. The speaker states that her mother's words at her father's deathbed have allowed her to realize that the only way to repair the damage that people do to one another is by forgiving them.

The speaker obviously sees her mother's statement as a declaration of absolution for all of the hard times that no doubt accompany a marriage. To the speaker, this is an awe-inspiring act, one that she feels has wider implications for her father's return. This very Christian concept of forgiveness and redemption is related to the belief that all the people who have ever lived will be resurrected from their graves and judged when the world comes to an end. This may be the "morning" that the speaker's mother is referring to. In this sense, the word morning is metaphorical, indicating a spiritual awakening rather than a physical one. The mother's forgiveness, in and of itself, is rather Christ-like, given that Christ is a religious symbol for, among other things, forgiveness, absolution, and redemption.

Redemption

Redemption, according to Christian belief and to the speaker in "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning," is what follows from forgiveness. True forgiveness absolves the one who is forgiven, and they are thus redeemed. It is this redemption that allows the speaker's father to return. She indicates that she understands her mother's declaration of absolution to be one that allows an assurance for her father (and for all who are forgiven) to come back after all is said and done. This is the result of redemption. Through redemption, the spirit of the speaker's father is allowed to return to the family, to be honored as a father and husband and not as a flawed man who hurt his loved ones. The speaker's mother redeems the father simply by continuing to accept, if not welcome, his presence in their lives, despite the changed nature of that presence.

Death

The speaker's mother has the last word at her husband's deathbed; therefore, it is easier for her to forgive him. Regardless, the finality of death becomes the closing punctuation on their life together. This is how death is represented in "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning." Death is both literally and metaphorically the occurrence that allows the speaker's mother to bid her husband goodbye and to forgive him. Arguably, it would be difficult to forgive Willie Lee while he was still alive, especially given the near certainty that he would do something else that would require forgiveness. Thus, the finality of death allows for the lasting authority of the forgiveness that is subsequently granted.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Write an autobiographical, confessional, free verse poem in the style of "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" and read it aloud to your class. Be sure to discuss how writing your poem added to your understanding of Walker's poem.
Read one of Walker's short stories, such as "Everyday Use," which is included in the 1973 collection Love and Trouble. Then read some of the other poems in Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning. What similarities and differences do you see between Walker's poetry and her prose? How do the different genres create different effects? Write an essay on your findings.
Do you agree or disagree with the conclusion in "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning"? Are forgiveness and absolution as powerful as the poem claims? What do you think this poem is trying to say about relationships, if anything? In an essay, discuss these topics and be sure to support your argument with quotes from the poem.
Read the collection Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning. Why do you think Walker chose to conclude the volume with the title poem? Why did she title the volume after it? Present your theories in an oral report.

Acceptance

Acceptance is related to forgiveness in that one must fully accept the past and what has happened (without anger, sadness, fear, or any other such emotion) in order to truly forgive. Additionally the title of the poem, the essential statement that is made to Willie Lee's corpse, is one of supreme acceptance. The disconcertingly matter-of-fact tone of this statement is highly stressed in the poem. The speaker's mother is described as talking to her dead husband in a congenial manner.

Much is made of the fact that the speaker's mother is not crying; nor is she angry or happy. This stress is derived from the noted absence of any strong emotion. Thus, this lack of strong emotion indicates acceptance, not only of Willie Lee's death, but also of his life. In another reading, one could argue that the opposite is the case, and that the title statement is an act of supreme denial. Rather than bid her dead husband goodbye, the speaker's mother says she will see him tomorrow. This statement, when interpreted literally, would seem to indicate that the mother does not register the death of her husband. Nevertheless, the speaker's observations following her mother's farewell to her husband do not support this second interpretation.

STYLE

Free Verse

The term free verse is a catchall phrase for poetry that is not written in any sort of metrical form, which is the mindful arrangement of words according to their stressed and unstressed syllables, often in defined patterns. "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is written in free verse. Other attributes typical to poems written in free verse are that they do not rhyme (or do so in irregular patterns), have erratic line breaks, and are written in colloquial, or everyday, language. All of these characteristics are also found in "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning." This style, which is actually a calculated lack of style, is typical of the time period in which the poem was written. Free verse was extremely popular with American poets throughout the middle period of the twentieth century.

Enjambment

Enjambment defines the way in which lines of poetry end and begin. The arrangement of the line breaks affects the way the poem is read, both silently and aloud. This is because the line breaks make the eye pause as it scans the page. This minute pause, although barely discernible, affects the poem's rhythm. In some cases, this pause can also affect the meaning of a poem. For instance an example of such an occurrence is "I ran over the cat / with my hands / petting him until he purred." At the first line, the reader would reasonably expect the phrase "I ran over my cat" to mean that the cat had been hit by a car. However, the subsequent two lines make it clear that this is not the case. If the line had read "I ran over the cat with my hands," this misunderstanding would not occur. In this manner enjambment allows poems to contain dual, even opposing meanings, thus evoking varying reactions and emotions in the reader over the course of a single poem. In "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning," this stylistic device is used to similar effect between lines 1 and 2, in which it is not clear whether the speaker's father is dead or not. The same effect occurs between lines 7 and 8, in which the title statement is made. Based on the line break, the speaker's mother could very well be about to tell her husband "I'll see you in hell" (a common enough saying that readers could reasonably expect it). Instead, the mother says something else entirely. The rhythm of the entire poem is also dictated by its enjambment. Its fitful stops and starts, especially at the end, give it a breathless feeling, yet they also give "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" an authority of declaration or proclamation.

Autobiographical Poetry

"Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is an autobiographical poem. In the case of this poem, the autobiographical nature is exceedingly obvious. Walker's father was indeed named Willie Lee, and the speaker in the poem gives her father the same name. Notably, Willie Lee died in 1973, and Walker's poem was first published two years later. The effect of autobiographical poetry is that it is more intimate and personal than other types of poetry. This tone makes the reader feel as if he or she is being spoken to directly, and it also lends an additional aura of truth and honesty to the poem. As an autobiographical poem, "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is a legacy left by the heyday of confessional poetry, a style that was immensely popular in the 1950s and 1960s. This poem, however, has much more emotional control and avoids any overly shocking content, two common hallmarks of confessional poems.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Feminism

Though Walker did not necessarily agree with critics who called her a feminist writer, no discussion of Walker's work is complete without examining this topic. Though "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is not obviously feminist in tone, it portrays a strong woman who teaches her daughter the value of forgiveness. In general, historians have identified three distinct waves of the feminist movement. The first wave (i.e., fist-wave feminism) can be traced to the suffrage movement in the late nineteenth century. The term suffrage refers to women's right to vote, a right that was not granted in the United States until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

The second wave of feminism largely took place from the 1960 to the 1980s, the height of Walker's writing career. This wave sought to establish equality in all realms of women's lives—the household, the workplace, and society in general. It is no coincidence that this wave of feminism coincided with the sexual revolution, as women's sexual rights and desires were explored amidst the growing acknowledgment of their equality as human beings. One of the greatest gains made by this movement was in securing equal access to education for women, including an end to public funding for single-sex schools. Though the political and cultural inequalities that second-wave feminism sought to address have not yet been fully eradicated, third-wave feminism emerged in the late 1980s as a means of furthering these ends and of addressing perceived problems in the second wave. Feminists at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century argue that earlier modes of feminism focused on middle-class Caucasian women, overlooking the struggles of women outside of this demographic.

Alice Walker and the Civil Rights Movement

Walker's early experiences as an African American in the Jim Crow (segregated) South heavily influenced her later work. Walker's parents were sharecroppers, and this is the context that lies behind "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning." As the daughter of sharecroppers, Walker grew up in the abject poverty and subjugation that African Americans were routinely subjected to in the years leading up to the civil rights movement. Though Walker was quite young during much of the movement (which reached its peak from 1955 to 1968), she was an active participant as a college student. Walker was invited to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s home in 1962 in recognition of her participation, and she was present at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965, Walker participated in the civil rights movement by moving to Georgia and then to Mississippi, gathering voter registrations door-to-door. This action directly addressed the issue of disenfranchised voters, whose right to vote was invalidated, most of whom were African Americans. Voter registration laws in the southern states up until this point had been written to make registering to vote a difficult and complicated process. It was during this time that Walker met Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer and a Jew. After the couple married in New York, they returned to Mississippi. They were the first inter-racial married couple to live in the state, an honor that earned them death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Understanding Walker's childhood experiences and her participation in so significant a historical movement is critical to understanding the body of her work. Walker's writing largely portrays strong black women who struggle to retain their dignity in a time that seems to rob them of that very thing. The forgiveness shown in "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is an essential aspect of that dignity.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1970s: Walker's work is often called feminist (though Walker does not entirely agree with this label), and supporters of women's rights at this time are called second-wave feminists. Where first-wave feminists addressed laws affecting women, such as the right to vote, second-wave feminists address less formal occurrences of discrimination, such as wage disparity.
Today: Since the rise of third-wave feminism in the 1990s, feminism has not taken any definable form. In the wake of measurable political, social, and cultural progress in women's rights, the focus of the current movement is largely to attempt to define what it means to be a feminist today and to identify and prioritize the inequities that have yet to be addressed.
1970s: Following the success of the civil rights movement, terms such as black power and black pride emerge. These terms describe the ongoing political and social movement toward equality. African Americans begin to embrace and promote their unique cultural identity, and some attain positions of power and importance.
Today: Though inequality between the races still exists, African Americans, like women, continue to achieve greater approximations of equality. Thus, like feminism, there is no distinct cultural movement that can be ascribed to the black community today.
1970s: On the heels of the popularity of confessional poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, poetry in the 1970s is often written in the first person and in free verse. Additionally, the poetry of the day emphasizes the emergence of female and African American poetic voices.
Today: Free verse poetry is no longer as popular as it once was, and the leading poetic movement of the day is New Formalism. Poets in this movement promote a return to the formal metric poetry that was popular up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Critical reaction to Walker's collection Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning has been somewhat mixed. The title poem of the collection is often pointed out by reviewers as a sort of flagship work that sheds insight on Walker's entire body of writing. As a flagship work, "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" defines, clarifies, and distills the overarching themes and concerns that can be found throughout Walker's oeuvre. Hanna Nowak, writing in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, observes that the poem "appropriately set[s] the tone of the poet's voice and contain[s] her essential message: a deep concern for all human beings, optimism and affirmation of life, the feeling of continuity, and a highly personal vision." Nowak additionally notes that the collection as a whole "reveals a tendency towards more public poems. These ‘facing the way’ poems … are often directly feminist in tone."

Critics do not see "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" only as a work that sheds insight on Walker's writing overall but also as a work that provides insight into Walker's personal life. This is more than likely due to the poem's autobiographical nature. For instance, Philip M. Royster, writing in Black American Literature Forum, states that "the more the persona [in the poem] speaks of forgiveness the less assured the reader feels that Walker's fundamental attitude towards her father has changed, especially when one considers her fictive portrayal of men." Here, Royster interprets "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" by combining both contexts, that of Walker's oeuvre and of her personal life. Regardless of these critical viewpoints, reviewers unanimously comment on the poem's central theme of forgiveness. Kay Carmichael even uses the poem as an example in her book Sin and Forgiveness: New Responses in a Changing World. She calls the poem a "classic statement of human dignity, endurance and acceptance of the hand life has dealt you."

CRITICISM

Leah Tieger

Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, she explores Walker's relationship with her father, particularly as it relates to her poem "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning."

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

For further insight into Walker's role in the civil rights movement, her 1997 collection of essays, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism, is a valuable resource.
No study of Walker is complete without reading her most famous novel, The Color Purple (1982). A modern classic, the story is often studied in American high schools.
To gain a better understanding of feminism and its goals, as well as to understand why Walker's work was often called feminist, read Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present (1994). Edited by Miriam Schneir, this collection of essays contains landmark writings by leading twentieth-century feminist thinkers.
Though the work of African American writer Zora Neale Hurston is well known today, it was relatively obscure during the mid-twentieth century. In fact, Walker was one of the people responsible for popularizing the author's work. The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is Hurston's best-known work.

Though Alice Walker's "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" is a meditation on forgiveness and its power, its autobiographical content naturally leads the reader to question what, exactly, is being forgiven. This curiosity arises from the strange context of the forgiveness that is granted. Certainly, it seems that grief and sadness would be the primary expressions expected of a widowed woman sitting beside her husband's body. Deathbed forgiveness is the realm of the priest, of last rites and the dying man's repentance, none of which are in evidence in the poem. What has transpired between husband and wife that forgiveness, rather than grief, is at the forefront of this deathbed scene? This question is somewhat erroneous. It is important to note that Willie Lee's wife does not actually forgive him. Instead, she bids her dead husband "good night," addressing him as she does in the title of the poem. It is the poem's speaker, Walker, Willie Lee's daughter, who ascribes this statement with its meaning. In this sense, it is not necessarily Willie Lee's wife who forgives but his daughter who does so in her mother's stead. It is this relationship between father and daughter that bears examining.

The basic autobiographical facts that inform "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" are relatively apparent. Walker's father was named Willie Lee, and he died in 1973. The poem addressing his death was first published in 1975. In her biography Alice Walker: A Life, Evelyn C. White goes so far as to claim that Walker's mother, Minnie Tallulah, actually spoke the title phrase over her husband's casket during his funeral. Yet, the tragedies that befell Willie Lee, and his daughter Alice, inform the poem far more than these dry facts. When Willie Lee was eleven years old, his mother was shot in the chest before his eyes. When Walker was eight years old, she was accidentally shot in the eye with a BB gun. These two events would forever alter Willie Lee's relationship with the women in his life. As a child, Willie Lee attempted to protect his mother from his father, Henry, an abusive alcoholic who did not love his wife, Kate. Henry kept a steady mistress for several years. Kate, in turn, later did the same. Yet, her feelings of guilt led her to end the affair. Shortly afterwards, while Willie Lee was walking with his mother, her former lover accosted them, begging Kate to resume the affair. When she refused, he shot her in front of her eleven-year-old son. Bleeding in her son's arms, Kate asked Willie Lee to undo her corset, and the boy was forced to undress his mother in order to do so. Kate died the next day. Two months later, Willie Lee's father decided to hire a young girl to work as a nanny and cook for the family. Henry was forced by propriety to marry the girl. Thus Willie Lee's mother was summarily replaced by a woman who was barely older than Willie Lee's eldest sister.

The scars from this event became painfully evident when Willie Lee's daughter Ruth, Walker's older sister, began to mature into a woman. Willie Lee felt that Ruth was too interested in boys, and he routinely beat her and kept her locked indoors. Beneath this brutal treatment lay Willie Lee's fear of the repercussions that awaited Ruth's perceived promiscuity. Walker, naturally, resented her father for his actions toward her sister. Thus, his behavior caused a rift in his relationship with both daughters. Yet, despite his overly protective instincts toward Ruth, Willie Lee simultaneously encouraged his sons to date as many women as possible, promoting the typical double standard that admonishes women for their desires while applauding men for theirs. Additionally, Willie Lee's sexism was apparent in all aspects of his life; he firmly believed that housework and cooking was women's work, and he and his sons did not help around the house. This was a typical attitude at the time; yet, the hypocrisy of a man subjugated because of his race, who in turn subjugated others on merit of their gender, was not lost on Walker. She often discussed this fact in various interviews and articles. Black American Literature Forum contributor Philip M. Royster quotes one such article from 1975, published the same year as "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning." According to Royster, Walker states, "I desperately needed my father and brothers to give me male models I could respect, because white men … offered man as dominator, as killer, and always as hypocrite. My father failed because he copied the hypocrisy."

Aside from the scars of Willie Lee's traumatic childhood (and their bearing on his role as a father and husband), Walker's own traumatic childhood experience further changed her relationship with her father. At the age of eight, while playing Cowboys and Indians with her brothers, Walker was accidentally shot in the eye with a BB gun. Fearing their father's anger, the children delayed telling their parents about the injury. When they finally did so, Walker lied about it, claiming she had walked into a wire that had poked her in the eye. These circumstances, brought about by the fear her father had instilled in her, likely contributed to the permanent loss of sight in Walker's right eye. Walker's parents subsequently treated her for the injury at home, and she only saw a doctor after she developed an infection and a high fever. The doctor told the family that he could save Walker's eyesight for two-hundred fifty dollars. Though that seems a small price to pay in the early twenty-first century, the Walker family's annual income at the time was three-hundred dollars. Walker's brother Bill borrowed the money, but the doctor cheated them and Walker did not regain her sight. In fact, she was left with a disfiguring scar. Later, when Walker was fourteen, Bill again took on the role of caretaker, paying for an operation to have the scar removed.

This incident underscores Walker's fear of her father, but more importantly, it underscores Willie Lee's inability to provide adequate care for his daughter. Royster makes much of this fact in his Black American Literature Forum article. He notes that "Walker, as a child, naturally expected [Willie Lee] to be her protector, her comforter, her inspiration, her rescuer," adding that, "undoubtedly, one should not expect an eight-year-old, gripped by the physical and psychic trauma of impending blindness, to cope with the imperfection of her father." Yet, as Royster notes, this problem was compounded by Willie Lee's tenuous position in the Jim Crow South. He claims that "Walker plays the role of a victim who has become angry and bitter because the person she expects to rescue her is himself a victim (as well as a persecutor)." It took Walker several years to understand and forgive her father, and he died before she did so. Royston observes that Walker's "hardheartedness towards her father prevented her grieving for him until quite a while after his death." He also quotes a remark Walker made in 1975, when she stated that "it was not until I became a student of women's liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father."

Walker's struggle to forgive her father may be why the speaker of the poem must put the words in her mother's mouth. For instance, Thadious Davis, writing in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, inadvertently points out this peculiar approach by describing the poem's "tone" as being evoked by "the civility of the mother's voice and the compassion of the daughter's thought." Certainly, this statement emphasizes the true source of the poem's act of forgiveness. Consequently, because of this indirect approach, one could infer that Walker was not yet fully able to forgive her father, though she may have known that she needed to. Or, at the very least, she knew that Willie Lee deserved forgiving. In "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning," Walker does her best to grant that forgiveness, regardless of its source. Despite the mother's statement, or the daughter's interpretation of it, the value of the forgiveness that is granted remains the same. It is the sole means through which the damage people do to one another is repaired, and it also opens up the possibility of redemption, through which the spirit of the speaker's father is honored. Davis notes that the poem thus "argues resurrection and reunion both in the here and now and in the hereafter where promised renewals and beginnings can occur." Willie Lee's presence and importance in the lives of his family members (as well as their love for him) are permitted, via this act of forgiveness, to overshadow any past wrongs. Furthermore, they open the door to understanding and empathy; and this, perhaps, is the true purpose of the poem.

Source: Leah Tieger, Critical Essay on "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning," in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Evette Porter

In the following interview with Porter, Walker discusses the autobiographical nature of her work.

On my bookshelf, I have an old dog-eared copy of In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens that over the years has become my favorite Alice Walker book. Actually, the copy belonged to my sister who gave it to my mother. But its history is irrelevant since I now possess the book, and therefore consider it my own. For reasons that are complicated and have mostly to do with my own creative ambition, Our Mothers' Gardens resonates for me much like Women Who Run With the Wolves does for other feminist writers. It fosters a certain boldness, as well as a measure of comfort and understanding for those who struggle with self-doubt in their writing.

The first essay in Our Mothers' Gardens is entitled "Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life." I read it some years ago in an effort to find my own voice as a writer. But what was most revealing about the essay is that I never imagined such a supremely confident writer as Alice Walker would ever need a model in her writing. After all, having coined the term womanist, it seemed incredible that Walker would look for wisdom in someone else. And yet it is her confidence and her apparent vulnerability that make her such a contradiction.

At 59, Alice Walker is one of only a few writers who has enjoyed critical and popular success, albeit not without controversy. Her latest book, a collection of poetry entitled Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, includes works that are as literal as "Poem for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday"; to seemingly pedestrian observations such as in "May 23, 1999"; to a series of poems that contemplate 9/11 and anticipate an increasingly hawkish climate in the U.S. While not likely to elicit as incendiary a response as some of her other books, Absolute Trust is no less radical in its ideas.

"In the introduction there is a section about Mari'a Sabina, a curandera [a healer] from Oaxaca," says Walker. "Her foundation in life is exactly that: absolute trust in the goodness of the earth," she says in a voice that's surprisingly soft. "Her foundation is actually my own, which is why I chose it. I also have absolute trust in the goodness of the earth. And I think that is my religion, to the extent that I have one," she adds. "I believe that what the earth produces, what the earth is, is good, and deserves our respect and adoration."

It is this decidedly more spiritual philosophy that Walker has expressed in her writing in recent years. And perhaps the best example of that philosophy and Walker's sometimes unconventionally temporal narrative is her novel The Temple of My Familiar, which the book jacket describes as "a romance of the last 500,000 years." The book is her favorite, says Walker. "It is more true to the way I live in the world," she says. "It is more contemporary to me. Even though it covers so much ancient history, it is still more the way that I have lived in the world, which is to be connected to many cultures, and many different kinds of people."

Throughout her life, Walker has always seemed something of a shaman—a wanderlust seeking higher consciousness, which at times has earned her both ridicule and celebrity. Though she received recognition early in her career, by and large she has earned somewhat mixed reviews. Critics and readers alike either love her or loathe her; there is no middle ground with Alice Walker.

Born in 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Malsenior was the youngest of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker's eight children, in a family of sharecroppers. When she was eight, Walker lost her sight in one eye when her older brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun during a game of Cowboys and Indians. It was a scar she bore for years, even after the disfiguring cataract was removed when she was fourteen. When she was in high school, says Walker, her mother gave her three important gifts: a sewing machine that let her make her own clothes; a suitcase, which allowed her to leave home and travel; and a typewriter, which gave her permission to write.

After graduating from high school as valedictorian, Walker enrolled at Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961 on a scholarship. Two years later, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, to escape Spelman's "puritanical" atmosphere. It was at Sarah Lawrence that she wrote what would be her first [collection of] published poems, Once. Written during a traumatic period shortly after having had an abortion, Walker's teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Muriel Rukeyser, herself a poet, gave Alice's poems to her agent, who in turn showed them to an editor at Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, which published the collection.

After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, Walker received a writing fellowship and was making plans to go to Senegal, when her life took a different turn. Instead of going to West Africa, she flew to Mississippi. "That summer marked the beginning of a realization that I could never live happily in Africa—or anywhere else—until I could live freely in Mississippi," she wrote. After spending time in Mississippi and Georgia registering black voters, she returned to New York and worked in the city's welfare department. In 1967, she married Mel Leventhal, a white civil rights lawyer and activist who she met while in Mississippi. And in 1969, she gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca.

During this time, she continued to write; and in 1970, at age 26, Walker published The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the manuscript of which she completed just days before giving birth. The novel, which chronicles violence and infidelity over several generations of a black family, marked an auspicious fiction debut. Two years later, she published In Love and Trouble, a collection of short stories, and a book of poetry entitled Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, which was nominated for a National Book Award and won the Lillian Smith Award. In 1976, she published the novel Meridian.

"The first books were written partly as a duty to my ancestors, to my grandparents and my parents and the ones before that," says Walker. "Meridian doesn't fall into that," she acknowledges. "That was more because I was living in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement and I wanted to write a novel that looked not just at the politics, but at the heart of the people. And I wanted to see what the relationships were like between men and women as they came up against the fascism, and racism, and Nazism of white supremacy. So since I was a writer and living in the South, it was very natural to write about what was happening," says Walker, who also taught black studies and creative writing at Jackson State University and Tougaloo College from 1968 to 1971.

"The thing about my work is that even when it's painful, it's joyful—because I can do it," says Walker. "I grew up in the South in what most people would consider fairly impoverished circumstances. It wasn't easy to actually be able to go to college and learn to write, and I did," says Walker.

"I saw a murdered woman when I was thirteen," her tone, sober. "She had been killed by her husband," she continues, "and I knew that somehow I had to learn—even as a 13-year-old—I had to learn how to make sense of this. I had to learn to make people see it for what it was—murder. When someone kills you, it is murder," she says adamantly. "I don't care if they're your husband, your boyfriend or whatever. So the pain of writing about that 20 years later, or however long it was, was intense. But so was the joy, because I had looked at her face—which had been pretty much blown off—and I had made a promise to myself, and to her, that one day I would make other people see what I saw," says Walker, echoing a theme that runs through much of her writing.

In 1978, Alice Walker moved to northern California. Four years later, she published what is probably her most celebrated work, The Color Purple. Though, at the time, unusual in its epistolary form, the precedent for Walker's character Celie in The Color Purple can be traced to Janie Crawford, Zora Neale Hurston's heroine in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston, whose life and work Walker began researching in 1970, provides the model in Janie Crawford that Alice Walker chose for herself. She writes in "Saving the Life That Is Your Own":

I love the way Janie Crawford

left her husbands

the one who wanted to change her

into a mule

and the other who tried to interest her

in being a queen.

A woman, unless she submits,

is neither a mule

nor a queen

though like a mule she may suffer

and like a queen pace the floor.

The novel The Color Purple, which takes place from 1900 to the 1940s, tells the story of Celie, a womanchild, who after years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father and later her husband, finds dignity, independence and kinship in her relationships with other black women. Told mostly in a series of letters written by Celie and her sister, Nettie, the novel won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

"Even though I wrote The Color Purple here [in California]—I actually lived in New York for a while. I couldn't really write there, because I was an editor at Ms. magazine and that took a lot of time. I had a child, and I was getting divorced, and all that life—just life, life, life," she explains.

At the time, Walker decided to move to San Francisco to write, resuming a relationship with an old friend from her college days at Spelman, Black Scholar editor Robert Allen, who had attended Morehouse. Almost immediately, the two decided to sell their house in San Francisco and move to Mendocino, an area in northern California that reminded Walker of her native Georgia.

"I wrote The Color Purple as a way of communicating with the spirit of black people and my people—in celebration. So that pretty much completed the cycle," says Walker of her early works. "I had written In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women—those were mostly black women in the South. And then, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down—those were women North and South. It was about their spiritual development."

But it was The Color Purple that became a best-seller and caused quite a stir—especially among black men. Among critics, Walker's book was decried for being overly harsh in its depiction of the brutality of its black male characters, while she was chided for being too much a feminist—or womanist, to use Walker's words. In what was a generally positive review in The New York Times, black literary critic Mel Watkins cited the "pallid portraits of the males" as the novel's biggest transgression. Others, like poet Sonia Sanchez and Ishmael Reed, were far more biting in their criticism.

"I wrote a complete book called The Same River Twice, which is about the [Color Purple] controversy and my response to it," says Walker. "I wrote it and published it about ten years after the film The Color Purple." In The Same River Twice, she describes the sometimes vicious attacks surrounding the release of the movie The Color Purple, the rejection of her screenplay adaptation of the novel by Steven Spielberg, her mother's failing health, her own battle with Lyme disease and the breakup of her relationship with Allen.

"In general, I don't seem to care very much about what people think about what I'm doing," she says, pausing then, quickly adding, "if they don't actually try to physically harm me." For the most part, Walker seems to have quietly ignored her detractors. "I'm pretty clear about what I'm supposed to be doing here, and I do that," she says, calmly. "Their job is to criticize, and they do that. So I feel like, it works out. I write and speak, and band with people that I feel need me," she continues.

"I got very involved, after that, in the struggle to end genital mutilation and I wrote Possessing the Secret of Joy. And that was very different from anything I would have written living in Georgia or Mississippi, because we don't have that there, thank goodness. So it depends, you know. Then, with By the Light of My Father's Smile, I was very much interested in showing how important it is for fathers to bless the sexuality of their daughters. And if they cannot do that, then the daughter cannot bless them by having confidence in them, and letting them be a part of their lives."

Her writing sometimes mirrors her own life. In a moving collection of short stories published in 2001, The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, Walker reveals some of the intimate details of her own life. In a chapter called "Memoir of a Marriage," she writes: "Beloved, A few days ago I went to see the little house on R. Street where we were so happy. Before traveling back to Mississippi I had not thought much about it. It seemed so far away, almost another dimension." Further, in the same chapter, she continues, "I went back with the woman I love now. She had never been South, never been to Mississippi, though her grandparents are buried in one of the towns you used to sue racists in." Like much of Walker's writing, The Way Forward is elliptical. There is an ambiguity as to whether Walker is writing for the reader, for an intimate, or for herself.

"My job, in a way, is helping people to have that closer look—whether it's female genital mutilation, or wife battering, or child abuse," she says. "On the other hand, being able to love wherever you wish and whoever you want, and seeing that as an expression of the freedom that we have. My personal life is just like everybody's," she admits, "filled with my friends, community and events that are pretty much mine."

With Absolute Trust, Alice Walker returns to the genre where her literary career began. While the poems vary widely in subject, they are strongly influenced by the events of 9/11 and embrace a more "outsider" global perspective.

"I don't think there is a limit to what people can say about grief," says Walker. "And I don't think there's a limit to what one can say about the need to sit ourselves down and talk about what kind of future we want, if indeed we have one.

"I think all I can say is that now I'm an older person. I'm someone who has had much more experience than in the beginning. But in some ways, I'm concerned about the same issues, the same emotions. I'm concerned with the safety of our people, the planet, people who are in deep trouble around the world," she explains, reflecting on how her poetry has changed over the years. "I think that with time, we begin to understand a little better that some things we thought were horrible, unbearable … can be bearable as we get older. For instance, in my earlier poetry … I wrote poems about suicide. And now I don't think about that very much. It's interesting because I think that to wage continuous war in the world is a kind of suicide. In a sense, the suicide that I see now is a global one. It's humanity that seems to be interested in ending itself. But I don't feel interested in ending myself. I think that's progress."

Finally, I ask her why she chose to publish Absolute Trust, since she acknowledges in the preface to the book that in the past two years she had resigned herself not to write anymore.

"Poetry comes when it wants, and it is not dependent on whether you want to write poetry or not," says Walker. "I was in Mexico a while ago last year and the poems just started to come. I think it was partly because they had been accumulating over a number of years," she says, recalling her first book of poetry. "That's why it's absurd to say I can give this up," she adds. "Creativity is so powerful that you can't give it up. It might give you up, but you can't give it up."

Source: Evette Porter, "Absolute Alice: Feminist-Writer-Poet-Activist and Literary High Priestess Alice Walker Returns to Form with a Collection of Poems about War, Falling Bodies, the Ancestors, Trees and Everything Holistic Here on Earth," in Black Issues Book Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, March-April 2003, pp. 34-38.

Adrian T. Oktenberg

In the following review, Oktenberg provides an overview of twenty-five years of Walker's poetry.

Alice Walker wrote poems before she ever dreamt of prose, considered herself a poet well after she published her first fiction, and yet (it seems to me) her poetry has not been taken as seriously as her fiction and essays. Is her poetry less good, less important, than her other writing? In Her Blue Body we now have the complete texts of all of Walker's poetry books to date, together with sixteen new poems. Walker has also provided short introductions for each volume, describing some of the circumstances or context in which each book was written. This is a retrospective as well as a forward-looking collection, and we may now be able to evaluate Walker's position as a poet in mid-life.

Alice Walker came of age in the sixties, and has always written in support of "the revolution." In one of her essays, she speaks of feeling embarrassed whenever she is introduced as an activist. Although she has attended her share of meetings and demonstrations, and given speeches—a particularly brilliant one, called "What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?" is included in Her Blue Body as a prose poem—Walker's activism has taken the form of thinking and writing. But the fundamental questions in her work are all about revolution. What it means to those engaged in it; how it is to be achieved humanely against multiple oppressions which are hardly humane; where it is going and what exactly it is aimed to accomplish. That is the more public version of Walker's concern.

The parallel and more private version is how, as an oppressed person herself, Walker can survive oppression, how it can become possible for her (and by extension others like her) to live a full life. These more private concerns are the ones primarily addressed in the poems.

For Walker, any fundamental change begins first in the self. In Her Blue Body, she speaks of her "growing realization [in the Sixties] that the sincerest struggle to change the world must start within." In a sense, Her Blue Body tracks the record of that which is starting within.

Because the poems focus on "Alice Walker" herself, used as a kind of laboratory in which possibilities for change are experimented with, charted and tested, they are intensely personal. They read like a journal or notebook which ranges over Walker's characteristic themes and concerns—instances of racist or sexist oppression, and resistance; the South as crucible, home and garden; Africa as a place of struggle and also as a spiritual source; love and trouble; what she renames the "silver writes" movement, which was the formative event for much of her thinking; suicide poems and poems that celebrate life and explore growth. These themes and concerns are the same ones that appear in Walker's prose—but in the poems, freed of the need to be of service in a narrative or argument, they appear in a much less constrained way. Walker's poems have a quality of immediacy and accessibility, as if the author happens to be thinking aloud or, in Sappho's phrase, sharing her thoughts "face to face as a friend would."

I can't be sure, but I have a sense that for Walker poetry comes before prose; it is the thought in the first instance, the one closest to the spirit, the most inspired. Walker is a writer who is capable of lyrical prose; she is also a genuinely mystical poet. Her language is full of mystical hallmarks—oxymorons, paradoxes, contradictions. Her poetry is about questions, not answers—more specifically, about the process of finding the right questions. A Walker poem starts with the self—sometimes with the body, or an impulse, an observation, an emotion, an inchoate idea—and then plays it out on the page, with all the twists, turns, backtracks, asides and outright contradictions of thought unfolding.

For this reason Walker's poems may first appear unpolished or unsophisticated, perhaps less "good" than those of some other poets. But Walker is not a "bad" poet, just one who has been misunderstood, misplaced, misconceptualized. We are locked into distinguishing art as a weapon, art that serves "the people" or "the revolution," from art that exists for itself, has a value "in itself." We find it difficult to include within the rubric of revolutionary art poetry that is mystical. Alice Walker is both a mystical and a revolutionary poet, an apparent contradiction in terms but one that she exemplifies nonetheless.

Pick almost any Walker poem—"Revolutionary Petunias" "Facing the Way," "Stripping Bark from Myself," "Family Of," "Remember," "Expect Nothing," "Be Nobody's Darling"—they are about one or another aspect of revolution but they are also all mystical poems. "Revolutionary Petunias" is a paradox, insisting that flowers and especially the exuberant color purple go on existing in the midst of, in spite of, and even because of, oppression and death. Here is "The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom":

Rebellious. Living.

Against the Elemental Crush.

A Song of Color

Blooming

For Deserving Eyes.

Blooming Gloriously

For its Self.
 
Revolutionary Petunias. (p. 235)

Like Walker's life and work, the poem is built on contradiction. How can a Black woman, sentenced to silence and invisibility, ever expect to write, speak, be heard, seen? I read "this flower" in the title as Walker speaking through clenched teeth. (Does anyone remember Philip Levine's poem from the sixties about pigs being brought to slaughter? "Not this pig.") Walker's "this flower" is just as rebellious, insisting on the flower's (and her own) right to bloom for no other reason but its, or her, self. If every one of us insisted, against the odds, on fully expressing our natures, then we would have revolution; the world would be turned upside down. That's her parable.

Her Blue Body tracks Walker's self over 25 years of revolutionary struggle: the "young self, the naive promiscuous self, the ill or self-destructive self, the angry and hurt self," as well as the selves that encompass resistance, change and growth. Speaking of the seventies, a period of "breakdown and spiritual disarray" for herself as for many others, Walker writes: "My years-long period of lamentation was finally ended when I realized I was capable not only of change, but of forgiveness, and could assume that others were also. For it is change in the self, along with the ability to forgive the self and others, that frees us for the next encounter." "On Stripping Bark from Myself," in I'll See You in the Morning, Willie Lee, is one of Walker's best and most emblematic poems. Here it is in full:

Because women are expected to keep silent about

their close escapes I will not keep silent

and if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will please

mark the spot

where I fall and know I could not live

silent in my own lies

hearing their "how nice she is!"

whose adoration of the retouched image

I so despise.
 

No. I am finished with living

for what my mother believes

for what my brother and father defend

for what my lover elevates

for what my sister, blushing, denies or rushes

to embrace.
 

I find my own

small person

a standing self

against the world

an equality of wills

I finally understand.

Besides:
 

My struggle was always against

an inner darkness: I carry within myself

the only known keys

to my death—to unlock life, or close it shut

forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color yellow

and the sun, I am happy to fight

all outside murderers

as I see I must.

(pp. 270-271)

While stripping bark from a tree can kill it, in stripping herself, discarding the lies shaped by others as well as her own self-deceptions, Walker finds her true, undistorted self. She intimates that the process of healing, which feels like slow death or destruction, is necessary "to unlock life." This paradoxical process produces a paradoxical result, a "small … self/against the world/ an equality of wills" [my italics]. In another poem, "Having Eaten Two Pillows," she speaks of her "ambition" to be "just anyone," another contradiction in terms but one that Walker adopts from Bessie Head as "the correct relationship to other people and to the world."

Traditional mystical poetry seeks God, not earthly revolution. But Walker seeks a spiritual revolution fully as much as one that overthrows political and economic institutions. Her poems on Malcolm X, on Christ and others make clear that her revolution would include love and laughter; it would combine "Justice and Hope" [my italics]. Walker has always been a spiritual writer, becoming more so in recent years, until now, when she is perfectly at ease seeking union with the earth and with that long line of spirits that "stretches all the way back, perhaps, to God; or to Gods." Her spirituality is pagan, African and Native American, in its sources rather than Christian (Walker has always been ambivalent about Christianity, especially the organized kind). In The Temple of My Familiar, her most recent novel, she finds God not only in every human being but also in animals, trees, laughter and breath.

Walker's single best poem, which gives this book its title, is probably "We Have a Beautiful Mother." Its deep personification of the earth, its ease, make it one of her most spiritual statements:

We have a beautiful

mother

Her hills

are buffaloes

Her buffaloes

hills.
 

We have a beautiful

mother

Her oceans

are wombs

Her wombs

oceans.
 

We have a beautiful

mother

Her teeth

the white stones

at the edge

of the water

the summer

grasses

her plentiful

hair.
 

We have a beautiful

mother

Her green lap

immense

her brown embrace

eternal

Her blue body

everything

we know (pp. 459-460)

Her Blue Body reflects the inner journey of an extraordinary writer over 25 years of struggle. It teaches us, not yet at the end, to cherish and celebrate life.

Source: Adrian T. Oktenberg, "Revolutionary Contradictions," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 3, December 1991, pp. 24-25.

Philip M. Royster

In the following excerpt, Royster analyzes the role of black men in Walker's writing, her relationship with her father, and her portrayal of his death in her poem "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning."

THE WRITER AS ALIENATED RESCUER

Walker has committed her efforts to at least two great social movements that have stimulated the alteration of consciousness in the last half of the twentieth century: the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Liberation Movement. Walker's involvement with these movements both generates and reflects her intention, first articulated in 1973, to champion as a writer the causes of black people, especially black women: "I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival whole, of my people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women" (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 250).

In a 1984 interview, Walker revealed that, since childhood, she has seen herself as a writer who rescues: "‘I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it’" (Bradley 36). Walker's fiction confronts such issues as racism, intraracism, sexism, neocolonialism, and imperialism in order to transform both society and the individual. She expressed her commitment to change in 1973 with the affirmation: "I believe in change: change personal, and change in society" (Gardens 252). In The Color Purple, she seems to be preoccupied with the task of overcoming black male sexist exploitation of black women.

Yet, along with this commitment to change, Walker holds other attitudes that have the potential to frustrate her goals. She indirectly announced one such attitude in Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems through a persona who articulates the position of an outcast to the social order: "Be nobody's darling; / Be an outcast. / Qualified to live / Among your dead" (32). The concerns of this fictive persona resound in Walker's nonfictive voices, but in the nonfiction the speaker expresses a need to be both somebody's darling (that somebody is usually an older man) and an outcast (who uses her art as a means to rescue victims). The personas in both her fiction and nonfiction also experience feelings of inadequacy as rescuers, and they appear to be both infatuated with and plagued by notions concerning suicide, death, and the dead. (Although Walker seems to consider herself to be a medium, she simultaneously articulates perennial fantasies concerning suicide.)

Walker's perception of herself as a writer who is a social outcast apparently began after her brother blinded one of her eyes with a bb gun when she was eight years old: "I believe … that it was from this period—from my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast—that I began really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out. I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems" (Gardens 244-45). The accident seems to have led Walker to feel both alienated from her environment and perceptive of people and their lives. Her confidence in her insight undoubtedly helped to prepare her for the role of a rescuer, yet the fact that she no longer felt like a little girl engendered attitudes that would ultimately frustrate her goal. Her experiences of the loss of her childhood, the shame of a disfiguring scar, and social inadequacy would soon give rise, in her writing, to voices with tones of resentment, anger, and bitterness, on the one hand, and voices that articulate the desire to feel again like a little girl (or a darling to older men), on the other. The speaker of one of her poems that appears in The American Poetry Review (6.1 [1977]: 28-29) expresses something of the intensity of Walker's alienation when she asserts: "I find my own / small person / a standing self / against the world" (qtd. in Erickson 86-87). One of the comforts for the outcast persona is her as-yet-unending search for father figures with whom to be a darling….

BLACK MEN

Undoubtedly, Walker's alienation from black men influences her portrayal of them in fiction. Her audiences may achieve greater tolerance of her perceptions of men if they consider Walker's portrayal of male characters as part of the aftermath of the childhood accident in which she was blinded in one eye after her brother shot her with a bb gun. David Bradley asserts that "after that accident, she felt her family had failed her, especially her father. She felt he had ceased to favor her, and, as a child, blamed him for the poverty that kept her from receiving adequate medical care. He also, she implies, whipped and imprisoned her sister, who had shown too much interest in boys…. In company with her brothers, her father had failed to ‘give me male models I could respect’" (34). Walker's disenchantment sounds like that of a child who no longer feels like her father's darling. She seems to be at odds with her father, her brothers, and her family. Walker is more explicit about her disenchantment in an article first published in 1975: "I desperately needed my father and brothers to give me male models I could respect, because white men … 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" (Gardens 330-31). Walker's assertion of a mutual need between men and women to reflect the opposite half of the world is discordant with her disapproval of the loyalty some black women feel towards black men. Her perception that there was an absence of adequate young-adult male images within her childhood influences her literary portrayals of young black males: The central characters are flat stereotypes depicting, as Bradley notes, images of malevolence or impotence (34). Also, one might ask whether Walker's alienated perception of the males in her family was involved with her decision to marry a white man, despite her articulation of a problem with the image of the white male.

Walker's father died in 1973, before she had effected a reconciliation with him, and his death aggravated her alienation before it propelled her toward confronting it. She told David Bradley: "‘You know, his death was harder than I had thought at the time. We were so estranged that when I heard—I was in an airport somewhere—I didn't think I felt anything. It was years later that I really felt it. We had a wonderful reconciliation after he died’" (36). Walker's estrangement seems to date from her childhood accident. It also appears that her hardheartedness towards her father prevented her grieving for him until quite a while after his death. The year 1973 also marks Walker's last year in Mississippi, when she continued her struggles against depression and the urge to commit suicide: "My salvation that last year was a black woman psychiatrist who had also grown up in the South. Though she encouraged me to talk about whether or not I had loved and/or understood my father, I became increasingly aware that I was holding myself responsible for the conditions of black people in America. Unable to murder the oppressors, I sat in a book-lined study and wrote about lives …" (Gardens 226). The correspondence between the issue that Walker holds against herself and that which precipitated her alienation from her father is startling: She feels just as inadequate at rescuing black people as she felt he was inadequate at rescuing her after the childhood accident.

As the concerns of her therapist suggest, Walker seems ignorant of her father's life. It may be this ignorance that she tried to relieve on the visit to her father's grave that she reports in the Bradley interview: "‘I didn't cry when he died, but that summer I was in terrible shape. And I went to Georgia and I went to the cemetery and I laid down on top of his grave. I wanted to see what he could see, if he could look up. And I started to cry. And all the knottedness that had been in our relationship dissolved. And we're fine now’" (36). Since Walker elsewhere says that it took years for her to allow herself to grieve for her father, it is difficult to take literally this assertion of dissolved knottedness. Moreover, this account seems to undercut her 1975 statement concerning her father's sexism: "It was not until I became a student of women's liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father" (Gardens 330). The persona of the poem "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning" insists that there is real forgiveness of the father and a "healing / of all our wounds" (Good Night 53), but the more the persona speaks of forgiveness the less assured the reader feels that Walker's fundamental attitude towards her father has changed, especially when one considers her fictive portrayal of men. Yet it is certain that finding ways to forgive her father has been a continuing concern of Alice Walker's.

In 1975 she had not yet laid to rest the ghost of her father. She reveals that she perceives older men as father figures: "Dr. Benton, a friend of Zora [Neale Hurston]'s and a practicing M.D. in Fort Pierce, is one of those old, good-looking men whom I always have trouble not liking. (It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed them all.)" (Gardens 109). Speaking of Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps in 1971, Walker observed that "We must cherish our old men" (Gardens 135). And, speaking of old men as a category, she notes, "I love old men" (Gardens 138). The persona's attitudes and attachments to older men suggest that she may be in search of someone with whom she can play the role of darling, even daughter, to complete a circle involving a father figure that she abandoned in childhood in the aftermath of an accident. Elderly black men are portrayed with at least approval and often veneration because she liked her grandfathers who to her appeared to be gentle, in contrast to younger adult black males. Walker says, "‘I knew both my grandfathers and they were just doting, indulgent, sweet old men. I just loved them both and they were crazy about me’" (Bradley 36). An ongoing effect of her childhood accident seems to be that she sees younger men (who would be in the age range that her father was when she became alienated from him and her brothers) with a jaundiced eye.

Walker's attitude towards her father is further uncovered by the connections she draws between a dream she had of him while she was in Cuba (during which he returned to look at her with something missing in his eyes) and her meeting with a Cuban revolutionary, Pablo Diaz, once a poor sugar cane cutter who had risen to the role of an "official spokesperson for the Cuban Institute for Friendship Among Peoples." Of Diaz she says, "Helping to throw off his own oppressors obviously had given him a pride in himself that nothing else could, and as he talked, I saw in his eyes a quality my own father's eyes had sometimes lacked: the absolute assurance that he was a man whose words—because he had helped destroy a way of life he despised—would always be heard, with respect, by his children" (Gardens 214). Walker's response to the Cuban revolutionary exposes circular and emotional reasoning: She may not respect her father because, since he did not bring about the end to his own oppression, he did not afford any assurance that what he said would be respected. Walker might be paraphrased, "I don't respect you because you don't expect me to respect you"; or, more to the point, "I don't respect you because you have not fulfilled my expectations." It appears that in her nonfictive assertions concerning her father, Walker plays the role of a victim who has become angry and bitter because the person she expects to rescue her is himself a victim (as well as a persecutor). (This attitude is similar to that she expresses when she attacks the judgment of the black community that will not protect black women accosted by black men.) She will not bear the sight of her father's anguish; she will not bear its weight on her consciousness. And his anguish is all the more unbearable because Walker, as a child, naturally expected him to be her protector, her comforter, her inspiration, her rescuer. Undoubtedly, one should not expect an eight-year-old, gripped by the physical and psychic trauma of impending blindness, to cope with the imperfection of her father (and also her older brothers). Moreover, to his plight as a sharecropper, one must add whatever may have been his personal shortcomings in order to get an accurate picture of the child's confrontation with his inadequacies. Walker was not merely disappointed but also frustrated by her father's anguish: She could not rescue him or make him into what she wanted or expected him to be, just as she has been unable to rescue black people. In other words, her continual rejection and condemnation of black people because they are either victims, persecutors, or inadequate rescuers may be, indeed, a reflection of her unresolved attitudes towards her father. Walker's suicidal impulses may be the result of her feeling like a child who is unable to be a daughter and a darling because no one appears (or remains) adequate to be the father she discarded as a child. Like a pendulum, Walker's recorded attitudes swing slowly back and forth between a victim's suicidal depression and a persecutor's deadly anger and thirst for revenge. The personas of the adult Walker continue to reject the father of her youth (all young men) waiting for her in her dreams and search out older men who fit her perceptions of her grandfathers, who appear to be adequate enough to rescue her, and for whom she can be a darling. She may be in search of not so much our mothers' gardens as our fathers' protecting arms….

Source: Philip M. Royster, "In Search of Our Fathers' Arms: Alice Walker's Persona of the Alienated Darling," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986, pp. 347-67.

SOURCES

Carmichael, Kay, "Alice Walker's ‘Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning,’" in Sin and Forgiveness: New Responses in a Changing World, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 42-43.

Davis, Thadious, "Poetry as Preface to Fiction," in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gate, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, Amistad, 1993, pp. 275-83.

Freedman, Estelle, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, Ballantine, 2003.

Nowak, Hanna, "Poetry Celebrating Life," in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gate, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, Amistad, 1993, pp. 179-92.

Royster, Philip M., "In Search of Our Fathers' Arms: Alice Walker's Persona of the Alienated Darling," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986, pp. 347-70.

Walker, Alice, "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning," in Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning, Doubleday, 1979, p. 53.

White, Evelyn C., Alice Walker: A Life, W. W. Norton, 2005.

Williams, Juan, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, Penguin, 1988.