Alice Walker’s Journals Depict an Artist Restless on Her Laurels
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“The Color Purple” is a novel about women, but one man takes up precious room. For much of the book, Celie, the narrator, refers to the epistolary novel’s principal patriarch (aside from the God to whom she addresses her letters) only as “Mr. _____.” She has passed from one man’s domain to another’s, handed off by the only father she knows to live with Mr. _____ in wedlock, though her sister, Nettie, is the one he really wanted. Yet, in a world ruled by men, Celie provides our perspective; even their speech must flow through her pen. And so she at least sets the tone. We hear breathlessness, for example, when she learns that “Shug Avery is coming to town!” That Shug Avery—the sharp and singing Queen Honeybee—knows exactly who she is. Shug knows Celie’s husband, too, but not as Mr. anything. In the novel’s twenty-third letter, Shug lies abed in his home, barking orders at someone called Albert, a name Celie doesn’t recognize. “Then I remember,” she writes. Albert is Mr. _____. The name is not a secret; Celie has always known it.
It was the fall of 1985, and Alice Walker was in London when she received an “urgent call from Steven.” She had spent much of the past summer on Steven Spielberg’s set, in North Carolina, as a consultant and as an awed bystander amid the wounding process of adapting her novel to film. The novel itself had taken on the aura of stardom, having won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and surpassed a million copies in sales. But filmmaking has its own exigencies, and that fall, to her annoyance, two days elapsed before she and Spielberg were able to connect (owing in part, as she puts it, to the “nasty hoarding of the single lobby telephone by our receptionist”). And then:
The exchange appears in “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000” (Simon & Schuster), edited by the late Valerie Boyd. I am struck by the entry’s final lines. The last word sags with fatigue, or maybe a certain pragmatism, pulling Albert and Celie and Steven back down to earth. “What are you doing in London?” the director asks. “Readings,” the writer answers—no more, no less.
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Walker knew that her words, even the most diaristic, could well be destined for a public audience, and she knew this even before a word of hers was ever published. This conviction seems a precondition for a writing career, the kind of vanity without which one writes in vain. The pages of the journal leave a record of both the pulsing epiphanies and the irritations of daily existence, and chart, for a dimly perceived intimate reader, the progress of a literary pilgrim. Pain, joy, spells of depression, unease, engagement, even disaffection—all are material. They’ll feed the writings; they’ll sustain the readings.
Born in 1944, Walker grew up within a familial arrangement fixed by its historical background. Throughout her life, Walker’s parents, Willie Lee and Minnie Lou, worked on and around the land, in and around white people’s homes—legacies of that postbellum enterprise sharecropping, “which so resembles slavery,” Walker later reflected. The Walkers were proud that they could pay the midwife who brought Walker into the world, but her mother was returned to the fields not long after giving birth. As the last of eight children, Walker was adored and also distanced from her older siblings, many of whom were her part-time caretakers. Then, at the age of eight, a shot from a brother’s BB gun struck her right eye. She lost vision in the eye and the injury left behind a crust of scar tissue that Walker began lowering her head to hide. As she later wrote, “It was great fun being cute. But then, one day, it ended.”
She withdrew into her room and into novels, scribbled poems, and thought about suicide. She conceived of herself as an unsightly, blighted person; only when she was fourteen did the surgical assistance of a kindly ophthalmologist help her regain the sense that she might be beautiful. “It was during those six years that much new feeling was born within me,” Walker reflects in a 1977 entry. “Those six years that made me a human being. Those six years—so unbelievably painful—that made me a writer.” Still, she adds, “Knowing all this, I ask myself, Would you be willing to go through those 6 years again? And I answer, No.”
After two years at Spelman College, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence, bent on becoming a writer. Walker then reversed her great migration and arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, invigorated by Dr. King’s cause. There she met another civil-rights activist named Melvyn Leventhal, a New York University law student interning with the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund. She didn’t think much of white people in the movement, but she was paired with the intern on the task of taking depositions from cheated sharecroppers. Their mutual vulnerability nurtured familiarity, a Black woman and a Jewish man driving around hostile territory, dodging racist threats by day which kept them up at night. At a motel, the two read aloud from the Song of Songs while awaiting the cloaked wrath of a sundown town.
Leventhal was neither the first white boy Walker ever messed with nor the first she dared bring home, but he was the one she married, in 1967. Walker’s entries as a newlywed glow with a passion forged in an atmosphere of righteousness. Yet the confluence of Mississippi and marriage proved suffocating. After the birth of their daughter, Rebecca, Jackson was no longer a city of burgeoning love but an enclosure bounded by bigotry and small-mindedness on both sides of the color line. Leventhal, working with the Legal Defense Fund full time, kept long hours, eroding Walker’s time to write and her pride in the nobility of her husband’s profession. “Mel wants to stay here til he makes his mark—am I to stay here til Mississippi makes its mark on me?” she writes.
Three days before her daughter was born, Walker completed the manuscript for her début novel, “The Third Life of Grange Copeland” (1970). The title character is a Black sharecropper made mean by the emasculating, embittering circumstances of his time, race, and class; his “third life” comes with the epiphany of personal responsibility for his violence. “Nobody’s as powerful as we make them out to be,” he tells his son at the end of the novel. “We got our own souls, don’t we?” Reviews were mostly complimentary, but Jet played up the supposed hypocrisy that a novelist who espoused racial pride married a white man—a sidelong critique of Walker’s political fitness that followed her throughout her career. A woman who had published a study of Flannery O’Connor, writing in the Saturday Review, was scandalized by Copeland’s seemingly redemptive violence toward whites. Walker wrote a letter to the Saturday Review and sent copies of it to several close associates (including Muriel Rukeyser) and new book-tour acquaintances (Jesse Jackson, Studs Terkel), with the following note: “Let me put it this way, all my heroes died during the last ten years, and they did not die for me or my people to continue to be insulted by people who apparently spent the last decade reading Updike.”
In 1971, Walker was granted a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, at Harvard, which allowed the work of writing to continue. She finished a second manuscript of poems, “Revolutionary Petunias,” which became a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry. Perhaps best known for the incantatory poem “Be Nobody’s Darling” (“Be an outcast. / Take the contradictions / Of your life / And wrap around / You like a shawl”), the volume, inspired by her mother’s green thumb, exalts the moxie of that flower, cut and resurrected into beauty. The flower, as the final poem has it, is now “Blooming / For Deserving Eyes. / Blooming Gloriously / For its Self.”
The next year, Walker returned to the Radcliffe Institute “alone,” as she writes in her journal—Rebecca had been left in her father’s care—in order to write fiction. Reflecting on her newfound solitude, which offered what Walker called a “much needed sense of freedom and possibility,” she left behind a beatific reminder: “Don’t forget that during this period you wrote 3 stories & began the 2nd novel!” “In Love & Trouble,” thirteen short stories about thirteen Black women, appeared in 1973; “Meridian,” a novel about a student of that name who becomes a civil-rights activist, came out in 1976. Between those books, Walker travelled to Eatonville, Florida, in search of the resting place of an author “who had guts & soul & a loud mouth!” That was Zora Neale Hurston, the nearly forgotten author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
When Walker was asked whether she thought artists should have children, she responded (in her own recounting), “They should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one.” In a 1979 essay titled “One Child of One’s Own,” she elaborated on her peculiar twist on such woman-to-woman wisdom (“since we were beyond discussing why this question is never asked artists who are men”), and revisited the issues that Virginia Woolf had broached half a century earlier concerning writing’s material requirements. Black women especially, Walker observed, live out the marginality of the domestic, in their homes and those of others. “Progress affects few,” she writes. “Only revolution can affect many.”
Walker’s journals become a place for accounting, often literally, tallying earnings from teaching, advances, honoraria. At times, the financial receipts are interspersed among a more general inventory. In an entry from 1974, when she and her husband moved to New York, she notes, “We are leaving Jackson. . . . My father is dead. . . . My novel is between 1st and 2nd drafts. . . . I have accepted a job as an editor of Ms. For $700.00 a month plus $750 per article. . . . In Love & Trouble was the editor’s choice of The New York Times last week. . . . Revolutionary Petunias was nominated for a National Book Award.” She adds, “It will be interesting to see if my depressions continue, after all this.”
Reality is one way of accounting for Walker’s accounting. Such caution was necessary for a writer who is not only a writer but Black and a woman and single to boot; she and Leventhal split up in 1976. In an entry from the following year:
Then she writes, “Risk makes my back ache.”
The plain math belies an insistent apprehension that extends beyond bills. Tracking the business of being a writer serves the dual function of recording growing renown, honoraria, and advances tucked beside notices of reviews and awards. “More than okay,” for Walker, won’t be secured by an added zero or two. In an entry from 1978, little punctuation separated financial and emotional needs:
At this point, she was with Robert Allen, a longtime editor of The Black Scholar and someone she’d known from her Spelman days. She was as worried about falling out of love with him as she was about loving him at her own expense. The precarities of love matched those of money.
Walker’s permanent departure from the South and her further freedom of movement—toward New York, then toward San Francisco—accompanied her rising profile. Not that she was universally adored; her mixed feelings about movement work didn’t go unnoticed. Like Hurston before her, she was viewed within certain literary circles as someone who had opportunely endeared herself to white women. Gloria Steinem was a friend, and Walker became a regular contributor to Ms., which published such essays of hers as “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” and “One Child of One’s Own,” both of which later appeared in a collection that defined “womanism,” the Black-woman-loving ethos that Walker had named. Skeptics such as Sonia Sanchez and Ishmael Reed suggested that Walker had somehow sold out Black folks in order to get in good with white feminism. But Walker was ambivalent toward Ms., and not just because of the “starvation wages” she was paid. A draft of a letter from the eighties that she sent to two editors at the publication discloses the paternalism she experienced at the office: “Whenever I spoke there was a curiously respectful silence punctuated by even more respectful chuckles. Then the business of the magazine continued.”
If such experiences felt diminishing, the recurring tallies—bills of literary health—were evidently restorative:
It was New Year’s Day, 1978.
Even after such careful, consoling inventory, though, peace can be easily dashed, perhaps by an article in the paper about a writer you know. The next year, reading a profile of Toni Morrison in the Times Magazine, Walker snags on the fact that the paperback rights to “Song of Solomon” sold for more than three hundred thousand dollars:
Later, after a dinner with Morrison, Walker reports on a remark of Quincy Jones’s: “Anyone would expect you to be enemies.” She balks at the notion, albeit in a way that undermines the avowed magnanimity: “Even when I’ve felt bad about something Toni allegedly said or did against me—for instance, keeping Bob Gottlieb from taking me on at Knopf when I was trying to leave Harcourt—I’ve always felt that if I did my work things would be okay.” Noting that Morrison has been offered a “substantial position” at Princeton, she adds, “I feel glad for her success. It isn’t my kind of success. There doesn’t seem much laying up for days with her lover in it, but perhaps there is. I hope so. I know I couldn’t stand Princeton for a day.”
Walker’s preoccupation with finances seems to increase in proportion to her resources. A series of 1981 entries affix the completion of her third novel—“I intend to call it: . . . The Color Purple . . . Or Purple . . . I think the first”—to the prospect of land acquisition in Mendocino, in Northern California: “I offered 90,000. The place haunts me a little still. Though in order to afford it I would have to raise my offer at least 10,000. . . . How could I do it?” She does the math again, and it works out; the following year, she purchases “20 acres of very hilly but beautiful Mendocino land.”
“Looking back over this diary I see I’m concerned about money,” she worries at one point. “It has dawned on me lately that insecurity is one of the biggest killers of art. Somehow the novel, or the next collection of stories, is seen as happening only when I’m in my own house, and managing things okay.” As much as she insists on her detachment from material things, her journaled inventories reveal a rich person’s penchant for collecting homes. (“Just sold ‘Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’ to Dial for $2,500 advance—that will pay for the bathroom! Fantastic.”) Yet the sharecropper’s eighth child always saw herself as a tourist in the realm of affluence, even with cash on hand.
It’s possible to divine a connection between a habit of acquisition that seems compulsive, if only for the apparent discomfort she feels about it, and the intense, erratic bouts of depression that choke her ability to write. Walker never knows what triggers them—menstrual hormones, she surmises, or “deep loneliness.” She puts her faith in the usual measures: a healthier diet, less weed, and lots and lots of meditation. By the time the writing returns, the episodes are in the rearview mirror. “The point is, I am all better now,” she writes on one occasion. “Enjoying being alive.” In later years, with the guidance of a therapist, Walker speculates about why she finds herself managing so many rooms of her own: “I buy houses because I need places to run to.”
In the spring of 1983, the news that “The Color Purple” had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction—Walker was the first Black woman to receive it—appears in an entry warmed by a lover’s body heat. “I just had to take him in my arms & have our way with him,” she writes of Robert. The relationship, perhaps because it dates to their youth, isn’t untouched by the loves-me-nots of adolescent drama. From a previous inventory: “I love the way his body feels. His skin. His chest. I love his touch. . . . I love the dumb way he holds me, as an animal would hold me, loving but without words.” One month Walker giddily exhales her ardor, and the next she begs for another kind of release, from love itself, and then it starts all over again. A true romantic, she is both sustained and crushed by the exquisite agony of love’s repetitions.
Against the occasional pose of a jaded intellectual, Walker’s infatuations exhibit the unabashed pleasures of being charmed. Her trepidation at Steven Spielberg’s plans is alleviated over a dinner: “After a moment of near I don’t know what, uneasiness, he came in & sat down & started right in showing how closely he has read the book. . . . Quincy & Steven & I got slightly tipsy and energetic in our thoughts of a movie about Celie & Shug & Nettie.” The rapturous sense of creative intimacy that hangs in the air is a kind of romance, too.
Something else has long hung in the air. One Veterans Day, when she’s in her twenties, the haze of cannabis unlocks a thought: “Sexual and strong and not always heterosexual.” The “daughters of bilitis,” as she refers to them in the entry, in sidelong reference to the historic activist organization, were never far from Walker’s world, as a student at Sarah Lawrence and as a woman writer of the nineteen-seventies. Her time with Robert and with male crushes like Quincy Jones coincide with nights out at the lesbian bar La Femme and spent with other lovers—we encounter the names Bertina, Mercedes.
But Walker remains cautious about naming herself as late as the nineties, even as she suspects that her sexuality might be “a case of everyone knowing I’m a lesbian but me.” A 1992 entry mentions dinner with the musician Tracy Chapman, who comes “in jeans & boots, and carrying a coffee cake she baked herself” and arrives like an exhalation, at last. “I consider it a gift from the universe—at last the figure I’ve walked behind has turned around! And she is a woman! And she is black! And she is a singer! Only the first fact, that she is a woman, kept me afraid of wanting this to happen before.” The journals offer an intimate view of a relationship that was kept as quiet as it could be at the time. Yet Chapman, like other partners, becomes something of an emotional lifeline as well. Walker speculates that this is the end of her real-estate habit: “Houses no longer mean love to me. Love means love.”
“Bisexuality,” a word favored by her longtime friend June Jordan, doesn’t suit her. “Of course I am bi-sexual, if by that is meant I find both women and men sexually & spiritually attractive,” she writes in 1995, a journaled draft of a talk for an upcoming Black gay and lesbian conference:
The word that Walker chooses for herself is a purple womanism meant to capture the boundless flush of ecstasy and good sex and good company evidenced in her journals. But the appetite of ambition isn’t to be slaked. To be full is an achievable condition; to stay full is not.
The journal entries selected for “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire” conclude eight days into the year 2000, but Walker has maintained a blog since 2008. Her posts are more hortatory than her journal entries, but not necessarily more disciplined. In 2012, she wrote her first post on David Icke, whose “freedom of mind,” she writes, “reminds me very much of Malcolm X.” She recommended a video for those who “haven’t been exposed to his thinking.” Icke’s thinking includes the theory that mankind has unwittingly been ruled by an intergalactic race of reptilians since antiquity. In an interview four years ago for the Times Book Review, Walker praised Icke’s 1995 book, “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” which promotes anti-Semitic crackpottery about who runs the world. Walker, a proper boomer, seems also to have been diving deep into the brackish waters of YouTube.
Is this a late-life aberration, or can the tropism be traced to a deeper angst that was missed in its time? “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire” does not contain the totality of the journals (sixty-some volumes in their entirety repose in the Rare Book Library at Emory University, embargoed until 2040), but what’s here exposes no sinister taproot. Rather, its entries accumulate to tell a story about accumulation—of pages, prizes, lovers, real estate, renown—and about the perpetual inadequacy of accumulation. Perhaps it’s significant, though, that Walker remains best known for a book of letters by a young woman for whom writing is a register of emancipation and self-discovery, but also of fear, tattooed on the page by an elided name that everyone knows but that cannot be spelled out. Having grown up in a place where conspiracies, racial and sexual, were daily realities to be reckoned with, Walker may have developed a belated hunger for more. “And, of course, there will be a volume two,” she writes in a 2021 postscript to the selection of journals. We like stories that take us from yearning to fulfillment, from blinkered parochialism to high-hearted enlightenment, but, as her journeys attest, the traffic on such routes moves in both directions. ♦
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