In preparation for a lecture in the course I teach, African American Literature in the 20^th Century, I am re-reading excerpts from Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. In her prose, Walker makes nearly perfect sense. I don’t argue against any of her observations. Her fictional world, though, is pathological. As a Black male, Walker’s fiction is hard to digest, because there is not one redeeming Black male character, apart from Grange Copeland from Walker’s first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, though Grange’s son, Brownfield, is the evilest male character in Alice Walker’s fictional world, and Mister.

I don’t think, as a Black male, that I am Walker’s target audience – she does not write for Black men – though I feel like a target is on my back. Ironically, I binge-read hundreds of Black women authors – yes, there are hundreds – at Walker’s instigation. She claimed that Black men, including Black male authors, did not read Black women writers.

This morning, during my commute, I was reading Walker’s essay, “Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” in which she writes about giving a reading at a college. One of the audience members asked what Walker considered “the major difference between the literature written by black and white Americans.” Walker muses that it is “not the difference between them that interests me, but, rather, the way black writers and white writers seems to me to be writing one immense story.”

Walker, continuing this line of thought, and it is worth quoting in full:

Still, I answered that I thought, for the most part, white American writers tended to end their books and their characters’ lives as if there were no better existence for which to struggle. The gloom of defeat is thick. By comparison, black writers seem always involved in a moral and/or physical struggle, the result of which is expected to be some kind of larger freedom. Perhaps this is because our literary tradition is based on the slave narratives, where escape for the body and freedom for the soul went together, or perhaps this is because black people have never felt themselves guilty of global, cosmic sin.

This made me think of the “sin” of police brutality, and specifically the 1991 case of Rodney King, who was severely beaten by errant blue knights of Los Angeles Police Department. Despite his severe beating, Rodney King wanted “to let go, to let God deal with it…. I didn’t want to be angry my whole life.”

Maybe Rodney King did not have an inner Bigger Thomas!

Despite his severe beating, Rodney King asked us all to “just get along.”

“Can’t we all just get along?”

I don’t know if this capacity to forgive white folk has been baked or beaten into the being of Black folk, but it is amazing grace beyond what a slaver can even imagine.