In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

“To take Toni Morrison’s statement further, if that is possible, in my own work I write not only what I want to read […] I write all the things I should have been able to read.” 

For Walker, the black writer’s task involves gaining a sense of her past and the writers who have come before her. Since many of these writers have been silenced or neglected, this is often intuitive, imaginative work, as much as it is research. 

“One wants to write poetry that is understood by one’s people, not by the Queen of England.” 

As an aspiring black woman writer, Walker had to contend with established white male writers dismissing her background as unsuitable for a poet’s. She came to realize that there is more than one suitable background, and more than one way to write poetry.  

“Blindness about other human beings, especially for a writer, is equivalent to death.” 

The racist culture of the South in which Walker grew up often fueled this “blindness about other human beings.” Walker sees the job of the Southern writer, black or white, as looking past this blindness, trying to find the source of it and trying to see people for who they are.  

“Since time was so short, the important thing, it seemed to me, was not so much teaching my ‘students’ the facts of Africa, slavery and Jim Crow (though I did as much of that as I could); I wanted to give them in addition a knowledge of what history itself is.” 

Walker is writing about her experience of teaching a Headstart class to middle-aged, largely black women, themselves aspiring to be history teachers to black children. Many of these women had had difficult lives, marked by racism and poverty, but because they were largely uneducated, they had little sense of the value or significance of their own experiences. It is this that Walker wished to teach them, as much as historical facts. She puts the word ‘students’ in quotes perhaps in order to emphasize that these women taught her as much, or more, as she taught them.  

“It is interesting to note, too, that black critics as well as white, considered Miss Hurston’s classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as second to Richard Wright’s Native Son, written during the same period. A love story about a black man and a black woman who spent only about one-eighteenth of their time worrying about whitefolks seemed to them far less important—probably because such a story should be so entirely normal—than a novel whose main character really had whitefolks on the brain.” 

Zora Neale Hurston is valuable to Walker as a writer partly because her references and influences were largely black, rather than white. She was more interested in African and Caribbean culture than in European culture; she grew up in an all-black community; and her novel was set in an entirely black world that reflected this community. She showed Walker a different, more self-accepting way to write and to be in the world.  

“I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Neale Hurston and Flannery O’Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.” 

Walker’s desire for an integrated literature is her own way of fighting the segregation that has been imposed on her, both as a writer and a citizen. She is speaking specifically here about Flannery O’Connor, a white Southern writer whom she came to love, partly because of O’Connor’s impartiality and distance from her own racist background.  

“I stand in the backyard gazing up at the windows, then stand at the windows inside looking down into the backyard, and between the me that is on the ground and the me that is at the windows, History is caught.” 

Walker wishes to capture this elusive history that lives between the white Southern slaveholder’s perspective and the perspective of black slaves. Elsewhere, she calls this history “the whole story.” She is exploring Flannery O’Connor’s former house and trying in all ways to see it from all angles. 

“What I feel at the moment of knocking is fury that someone is paid to take care of her house, though no one lives in it, and that her house still, in fact, stands, while mine—which of course we never owned anyway—is slowly rotting into dust […] All that she has meant to me is diminished, though her diminishment within me is against my will.” 

Walker has a moment of “fury” regarding the tended state of O’Connor’s former house versus the neglected state of her own childhood home. This is a moment when all of her writerly detachment and ambition to capture the “whole story” deserts her, and it shows the difficulty of the task that she has set for herself, as a writer. Yet she is aware, even as she is in the grip of this anger, that she should not let herself be defined by it—O’Connor’s diminishment is “against her will” and makes her feel diminished as well. 

“I simply feel that naming our own experience after our own fashion (as well as rejecting what does not seem to suit) is the least we can do—and in this society may be our only tangible sign of personal freedom.” 

Walker is here rejecting a white writer’s description of the minister Rebecca Jackson as a probable lesbian; she believes that the word, being derived from Greek history, should not be applied to black women, and she prefers the word “round” instead. There are other instances in the book where Walker creates her own words in the place of words that she feels have been handed down to her by white people: “Silver Writes” for “Civil Rights” is one such instance, as is her substitution of the term “womanism” for “feminism.”  

“I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.” 

For Walker, the moment when she became aware of politics—through the appearance of Martin Luther King on her television set—was also the moment when she really began to “exist.” Her point in this line is that this sort of existence, especially if you come from an oppressed group of people, is a constant struggle and cannot be taken for granted. It involves fighting not only the indifference of other people, but also one’s own ingrained indifference towards oneself.  

“But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing it one can become shackled.” 

Walker is writing here about blacks who, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, have found prosperity and have therefore become politically apathetic. She believes that freedom, in order to be maintained, must never be taken for granted. She also believes that people can become “shackled” to their material possessions, as much as to unjust social systems. 

“‘But you brought Doris north to escape the South,’ I say. ‘And I’ll send her south to escape the North.’” 

Walker writes often in these essays about her conflicted relation to the South, where she grew up. While it is home to her, it is also a racist, hostile place. Yet the North, although more socially liberal, also feels less friendly to her; in particular, she finds that there is less of a community in the North among black people. In this essay, “Lulls,” she speaks to black friends and relatives in both the North and the South and finds that, like her, almost none of them feel entirely settled where they are.  

“Standing in line for hours to receive one’s daily bread cannot be so outrageous if it means every person will receive bread, and no one will go to bed hungry at night.” 

For Walker, the benefits of socialism seem self-evident and justify the difficulties inherent in it. She notes that life in Cuba is hard, but no harder than life under a capitalist system.  

“We were eating delicious stewed rabbit, like my father used to make. I smiled to think of myself eating rabbit in a fancy Havana restaurant, talking to Huey Newton about whether I approved of his sharecropper father or not. It was a moment.” 

This passage shows Walker’s restlessness and cosmopolitanism, as well as her attachment to home. It demonstrates her sense of humor and observations as a writer. 

“That is revolution. Not instant eradication of habits learned over a lifetime, but the abolition of everything that would foster those habits, and the creation instead of new structures that prevent them from returning.” 

Walker understands the attraction of swift and violent revolutions, but also insists in these essays that real change is slow, and that revolutionaries must concern themselves with “the least glamorous stuff” (as she writes in “The Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist”). Martin Luther King, Jr. is a role model for her partly because of the patience inherent in his philosophy of non-violence. 

“And now I saw that these young Cubans did not see themselves as I saw them at all. They were, like their music, well blended into their culture and did not need to separate on the basis of color, or to present any definition of themselves at all.” 

Walker’s sense of her own African-American identity encounters a shock in Cuba, where citizens of all colors identify themselves as Cubans first and by their race second. She sees this attitude towards race as being one beneficial consequence of the socialist system, in which all citizens are treated equally. 

“After all, it is but a short distance from understanding that, just as a life of mere survival is insufficient for the flourishing of the spirit, the spirit is an insufficient support for human life if it lacks a full expression of its essence.”  

Walker is troubled by the Cuban treatment of homosexuals, and by a rumor that gay people are imprisoned under the Castro regime. She is, however, hopeful that this will change because of the enlightenment that Cubans have already shown in embracing a socialist system. Her belief that a spirit needs “a full expression of its essence” is also manifest in her writings on “womanism,” and in her appreciation of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston. 

“Fifteen years of struggle would seem to have returned many of us to the aspirations of the fifties—security, social obliviousness, improbable colors of skin and hair. And yet, there is a reality deeper than what we see, and the consciousness of a people cannot be photographed. But to some extent, it can be written.” 

In her despair with what seems to be a backwards social and political climate, Walker finds solace and hope in the act of writing, which bears witness to what is not visible and is therefore its own sort of political act.  

“Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.” 

For Walker, writing poetry often comes out of a feeling of pain and isolation. Yet this feeling, which brings her right up to the edge of death, renews her appreciation for the world and her happiness to be alive. 

“For me, black women are the most fascinating creations in the world.” 

A central project in Walker’s life and writing is celebrating black women and restoring them to visibility. It is not an angry project but a joyous one that does not cancel out Walker’s fascination with the world in general. 

“One thing I try to have in my life and my fiction is an awareness of and openness to mystery, which, to me, is deeper than any politics, race, or geographical location.” 

Flannery O’Connor is an important writer to Walker partly because of this sense of “mystery” and detachment in her own work. For Walker, however, this sense of mystery does not come out of traditional religious feeling (O’Connor was Catholic) but is rather its own sort of religion.  

“To isolate the fantasy we must cleave to our reality, to what we know, we feel, we think of life. Trusting our own experience and our own lives; embracing both the dark self and the light.” 

Walker is writing here about the problem of “colorism”—that is, favoritism towards lighter-skinned blacks—within the black community. She is making the point that racial oppression can go deep, to the point of making people oppress themselves. Fighting this therefore requires self-examination, introspection, and hard work of a quiet kind.  

“Nor do I have faith in politicians, scientists, or ‘experts.’ I have great faith, however, in individual people: you with the toothbrush, you in the sack, and you there not letting any of this shit get between you and that turkey sandwich.” 

Walker’s lifelong activism has given her this faith in individuals. She understands the power of having one’s mind changed and being woken up politically, having experienced this herself as a young girl, seeing Martin Luther King, Jr. on television for the first time. As a black woman growing up in the racist South, she also learned not to trust traditional authority.   

“But many black women feel that silent, uncritical loyalty is something you don’t even inflict on your child.” 

As a black woman, and also as an artist, Walker is suspicious of excessive group loyalty. She is aware that it often comes at the expense of another marginalized group. This was the case among her community of black feminists, many of whom felt that they needed to protect black men no matter how these men treated them.