I have a love-hate relationship with the body of work of Alice Walker.  I love Walker’s nonfiction, and even some of her autobiographical sketches, where her prose, even when it is expressing anger, is righteous anger.  Her nonfiction is clear, logical, and hard to argue with.  I hate, although hate is too strong of a work, Walker’s fiction.  Thus, I’ll use the negative designation of hate in the love-hate equation.  I hate that most of Walker’s fiction, at best, is melodramatic; at its very worst, it is pathological.

In Walker’s first two short story collections, and her first three novels, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian,` and the famous-infamous The Color Purple, there is only one Black man, Grange Copeland – and note that both Grange and his son Brownfield are earlier manifestations or sketches of Mr. from The Color Purple – who redeems himself, who is a positive role model, but that comes so much later, in his “third” life.  From the Black father who cuts his college-attending daughter’s breasts off because she’s dating a white male to Grange Copeland who, in a premeditated fashion, murders his own son, because he knows it is the only way to save his granddaughter, Ruth, from his son’s, Ruth’s father’s, hate.  Still, it takes Grange three metaphorical lifetimes to get it right.  In his first life, he fathers Brownfield, who was literally born in a field, and abandons his son and embarks on his second life, where he is a “rolling stone.”  In his third life, Grange returns to his origins, learns that he has a granddaughter, Ruth, who he learns to absolutely adore.  In the meantime, Brownfield is soon to be released from prison, having served time for murdering Ruth’s mother.  As Brownfield prepares to be released and reenter society, he is not thinking about reintegrating into society and his family and atoning for murdering the mother of his child, but asserting some evil possessive claim on his daughter.  Grange realizes that he played an outsized role in creating the monster that Brownfield has become because of, in large part, his absence and abandonment.  Grange knows that for Ruth to live, Brownfield must die.  And thus Grange’s redemption comes in the bloody act of premeditated filicide.

After I made my way through Alice Walker’s first five books of fiction, for which I was going to write a thesis for an MFA on Alice Walker’s world after I read the rest of her works, is when I came across and found Walker’s nonfiction, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.  In this collection of essays, and especially the title essay, Walker seems to lift the veil of what appears to be hatred of all men, but especially Black men, and explains her “poetics.”  Walker’s hatred of men, and Black men in particular, if I may, and it’s not that simple, is not hatred towards the male species, but what the male has done to womankind.  And Walker could care less about white men, because she believes Black folk to be superior to white folk, in all things, but especially morally.  (Read “Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells.)

In “Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells, an autobiographical sketch, Walker writes:

I thought black people superior people.  Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone.  Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday-school class and grin for television over their “victory,” i.e., the death of four small black girls.  Any atrocity, at any time, was expected from them.

Advancing Luna — and Ida B. Wells

The above passage alone endeared me to Alice Walker’s nonfiction.  It was our meeting point, where we both could unequivocally agree about something.  Additionally, Walker had launched a charge at Black men, that we do not read Black women authors, but that Black women read almost everything written by Black men that came down the pike.  Accepting that challenge, I began to read Black women writers, including but not limited to Dorothy West, Anne Petry, Alice Childress, Margaret Walker (Jubilee), Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), Audre Lorde, Sonia, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou (her five autobiographical novels) – I had already read nearly everything by our Muse – Paule Marshall (Brown Girl, Brownstones) – my mother is a first generation Bajan and her family secured three brownstones — Toni Morrison (Jazz), Octavia Butler (Wild Seed and Kindred), Ntozake Shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough), Bebe Moore Campbell (Brothers and Sisters), Jamaica Kincaid, Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place), Rita Dove, Edwidge Danticat, and Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog).  I owe Alice Walker a debt, for the challenge, which I accepted, of immersing myself in the worlds and words of Black women writers.

Alice Walker is a significant writer.  She probably does not consider any of her novels “protest” literature, but in a way, they are, though they are not appealing to or directed to a white audience, as protest literature did.  In short, Walker she cares what happens to Black men in the wide world, but whatever happens there, the degradation at the hands of white folk, the psychological and sometimes physical emasculation at the hands of white folk – nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies coming home and taking their feelings of rage at the white world out on their women and children.  No Black male can argue with that logic.