1.1 Striving for the Womanist Ideal

It is not exaggerated to say that Walker's life is one of struggle, a struggle for her own survival and for the “survival and wholeness” of all the underclass. On the one hand, as a girl from a poor sharecroppers’ family, Walker got her chance to go to school through her mother's struggle with the landlord; and as a daughter in the family, she not just witnessed the violence and oppression inflicted upon her mother and sisters by her father, and at times, by her brothers (except one), who were all male chauvinists, but also was a victim herself. On the other hand, studying away from home and coming into contact with whites, Walker experienced and witnessed various injustice and inequality in the American society, both inside and outside colleges. She began understanding her own suffering in the social context and came to realize her duty as a contemporary intellectual. She eventually found her role as a social activist or spokeswoman for the underclass, blacks and black women in particular. Walker has been participating in various protests against social injustice and struggles for sexual, racial, and political equality. She is devoted to building “our mothers’ gardens,” viz., striving for her womanist ideal.

1.1.1 Walker's Parentage and Early years

Alice Malsenior Walker, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee Walker and Millie Tallulah (Grant) Walker, was born in Eatonton, Georgia on February 9, 1944. Her parents were both sharecroppers and earned only 300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Before the age of four, little Alice went with her parents to the fields and played while they planted, weeded and picked their crops, nobody looking after her on weekdays. Her brothers also worked in the fields and helped milk cows every morning and afternoon. Her father never enjoyed a vacation in his life. Her mother had to work as a maid, while free from farm work, to supplement the family income. Living under Jim Crow Laws, Mrs. Walker had struggles with her landlord who expected the children to work in the fields rather than go to school. She managed to send all her children to school. Alice Walker began her schooling at four, a year ahead of schedule, and enjoyed the school life very much partly because of her first teacher, Mrs. Reynolds. She studied hard with her, though she was just a little girl, and became one of the brightest students in the school. The school life nurtured Alice to grow like one of the flowers in her mother's garden.

Good times never last long. In 1952, the Walkers moved to a farm in a neighboring county, and little Alice, along with her sisters and brothers, was enrolled in a local school. But just before the new term began, her right eye was accidentally wounded in a game by one of her brothers with a bb gun. Unable to afford a car to get her to a doctor's office, her father tried a home remedy and thus missed the best treatment time. When Alice was brought to a physician a week later, a disfiguring layer of scar tissue had already formed over her eye, which was not removed until six years later. In the new school the wounded Alice was teased by the other students and her grades suffered. Therefore her parents were forced to send her back to the old school in Eatonton and let her live with her grandparents there. Every weekend when she came back to her parents, they, to solace the poor girl with the injured eye, would sit around the fireplace telling wondrous stories about her father's great-great-great grandmother Mary Poole and her mother's grandmother Tallulah, and some other stories that had been passed down in the family for generations. When Alice grew up, she learned that these tales could be traced all the way back to Africa and to Native American tribes.

Self-conscious and painfully shy, Alice felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry. At the age of fourteen she went to Boston to visit her favorite brother, who persuaded her to go to a hospital for an eye operation. Consequently, the scar tissue was removed although she remained blind in the right eye. Back to Eatonton, Alice became self-confident. She began wondering what she would be in future and got the answer quite by accident: on Wednesday, October 19, 1960, when she learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. and his cause on the television, “as in a fairy tale, my (Alice's) soul was stirred by the meaning for me of his (King's) mission—at the time he was being rather ignominiously dumped into a police van for having led a protest march in Alabama—and I fell in love with the sober and determined face of the (Civil Rights) Movement,” became interested in the Movement, and was suddenly awakened to her responsibility and mission as a contemporary black. (124)

Walker graduated from high school in the spring of 1961, honored as valedictorian and voted as the most popular girl in the school. Due to the eye injury, she could apply for a scholarship for handicapped students, which enabled her to go to Spelman College, an institution for black girls in Atlanta. She packed to leave for Spelman College in August 1961, with her mother's special gifts—a suitcase, a sewing machine and a typewriter. As Minnie Walker explained it, each of the gifts bore one of the mother's expectations of the daughter: the suitcase was for independence, the sewing machine for self-sufficiency and the typewriter for creativity. Evidently, as a daughter, Alice fulfilled her mother's wish.

1.1.2 Walker's College Life and Social Activism

On the bus to Atlanta, Alice Walker took a front seat which was reserved for whites only and was ordered to move. She did move but it was in those seconds of moving that she became determined to bring an end to the racial segregation and discrimination. She arrived in Atlanta just at the moment of demonstrations led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and some other civil rights activities. This first experience and impression prepared the way for her participation in the activism later. Walker worked hard at Spelman College and was soon rewarded with the opportunity to go to Europe. The trip widened her horizon. Back from Europe, she found Spelman students taking active part in the civil rights activities and joined the student protesters in their sit-ins. But soon Walker realized that Spelman's emphasis on producing “ladies” was an extreme contrast to the changes happening during the Civil Rights Movement. At the end of her sophomore year, she went to Boston first and then near the end of August of 1963, she returned to the Deep South by way of Washington, D.C., where she attended the famous 1963 March on Washington. She received a scholarship from the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College just as the new term began and went to continue her college study in New York in 1963, where she took a B. A. degree two years later. It was during this period that Walker began awakening to intellectual and social issues and participating in the Civil Rights Movement. She met Martin Luther King Jr., whom she credited with her decision to return to the South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. Alice Walker, as a young adult, volunteered her time registering voters in Georgia and Mississippi. Just as is depicted in In Search of My Mothers’ Gardens, “because of the movement, because of an awakened faith in the newness and imagination of the human spirit, because of ‘black and white together’... because of the beatings, the arrests, the hell of battle during the past years, I have fought harder for my life and for a chance to be myself, to be something more than as a shadow or a number, than I have ever done before in my life.” (125) This personal experience was incorporated into her portrayal of Meridian Hill and the students of Saxon College in her second novel Meridian.

During the summer of her last college-year, Alice Walker made a tour to Africa, “and returned to school healthy and brown and loaded down with sculptures and orange fabric” but “pregnant.” (qtd. in O'Brien, 1993: 326) At that time, abortion was a sin in the American society. Shocked and depressed, young Alice had no way out but suicidal. “For three days I (Alice Walker) lay on bed with a razorblade under my pillow,” saying “good-bye to the world,” which she realized she loved so much. (328) Fortunately, one of her friends found an abortionist for her and she had the operation. “When I woke up, my friend was standing over me holding a red rose. She was a blonde, gray-eyed girl, who loved horses and tennis, and she said nothing as she handed me back my life. That moment is engraved in my mind—her smile, sad and pained and frightfully young—as she tried so hard to stand by me and be my friend.” (329) This episode affected Alice so much that she “wrote without stopping (except to eat and to go to the toilet)” the week she returned to the school. As a result, she completed almost all of the poems (except one or two of them) in her first collection of poetry Once.

After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College Walker continued her struggle for the civil rights. In 1966 her first publication “The Civil Rights Movement: How Good Was It?” won The American Scholar essay contest. The following year (1967), Walker married Mel Leventhal, a white civil rights attorney, whom she first met in 1965, and moved to Jackson, Mississippi where she worked for voter registration drives and black studies programs. As the first interracial married couple in the former slavery state, they led a life of constant taunts and even of murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter, Rebecca in 1969, but divorced amicably in 1976. Rebecca once published a memoir entitled Black , White and Jewish, chronicling the effects of her parents’ relationship on her childhood. She is estranged from her mother, feeling that she was “a political symbol rather than a cherished daughter,” as Margarette Driscoll (2008) described in “The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother.” In spite of her daughter's misunderstanding, Walker never gives up her struggle.

In the spring of 1988, Alice Walker, along with her companion Robert Allen, joined a demonstration against nuclear weapons at Concord Naval Weapons Station in California. Consequently, they were put in prison for a short time. When asked by a reporter why she continued to demonstrate after a lifetime of marching and speaking out against injustice, she replied that it was what she felt worth doing and that, if she stopped being active in politics, she would feel uncomfortable and wrong. In truth, being an activist is part and parcel of Walker's life.

Walker keeps working as an activist in the new century. On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, and Terry Tempest Williams, author of An Unspoken Hunger, were arrested along with twenty-four others for crossing a police line during an anti-war protest rally outside the White House. Walker and 5,000 other activists associated with the organizations like Code Pink and Women for Peace, marched from Malcolm X Park in Washington D.C. to the White House. The activists encircled the White House, holding hands and singing. Interviewed by Democracy Now, Walker said of the incident, “I was with other women who believe that the women and children of Iraq are just as dear as the women and children in our families, and that, in fact, we are one family. And so it would have felt to me that we were going over to actually bomb ourselves.” Walker wrote about the experience in her essay “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For” (2006).

In November 2008, Alice Walker wrote “An Open Letter to Barack Obama” that was published on Theroot.com. She addressed the newly elected President as “Brother Obama” and wrote “\[s\]eeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina, and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.” In March 2009, Alice Walker traveled to Gaza along with a group of sixty other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink, in response to the devastation in the wake of the controversial Israeli offensive from December 2008 to January 2009. The purpose of the trip was to deliver aid, to meet with NGOs and residents, and to persuade Israel and Egypt to open their borders into Gaza. In a word, nowadays Walker continues her public struggles to help the entire people of the world attain wholeness and constantly attends to issues that allow human beings to be themselves, whole, free and healthy—issues essential to survival. She is at once active in womanist causes and concerned with issues of environment and economic justice.