The World Has Changed (2 page)

Alice Walker
December 7, 2008

 

 

 

 

 

The World Has Changed:
Wake up & smell
The possibility.
The world
Has changed:
It did not
Change
Without
Your prayers
Without
Your faith
Without
Your determination
To
Believe
In liberation
&
Kindness;
Without
Your
Dancing
Through the years
That
Had
No
Beat.

 

The world has changed:
It did not
Change
Without
Your
Numbers
Your
Fierce
Love
Of self
&
Cosmos
It did not
Change
Without

 

Your
Strength.

 

The world has
Changed:
Wake up!
Give yourself
The gift
Of a new
Day.

 

The world has changed:
This does not mean
You were never
Hurt.
The world
Has changed:
Rise!
Yes
&
Shine!
Resist the siren
Call
Of
Disbelief.
The world has changed:
Don’t let
Yourself
Remain
Asleep
To
It.

—Alice Walker

 

The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker
is the first collection of interviews and conversations with Alice Walker, whose expanding corpus is a permanent part of our national literature. Spanning the years from 1973 to 2009,
The World Has Changed
maps many of the changes that have occurred in Walker’s writings and life for more than three decades. These changes have occurred within the complex and dynamic context of national and world events. Within the pages of this volume, Walker emerges as an artist and activist who has generated change in the world and who also has been transformed by change in the world. Ever the alert, probing, engaged, and compassionate figure, she is both inside and outside the change that is the subject of her art and the force behind her activism.

Walker’s art and activism have their origins in post-Depression, segregated rural Georgia. It is this particular landscape that provided the self-described “daughter of the rural peasantry” with her first words, her first canvas as it were, and a means of establishing through the medium of art a human connection with what would become a worldwide readership. In the opening lines of “Three Dollars Cash,” Walker pays tribute to her origins in Putnam County, Georgia, where she was born on February 9, 1944, to Minnie Lou (Tallulah) Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker, both sharecroppers: “Three dollars cash / For a pair of catalog shoes / Was what the midwife charged / My mama / For bringing me.”
¹
In the poem Minnie Lou Walker recalls the family’s circumstances at the time of the birth of Walker, the last child of eight: “We wasn’t so country then / You being the last one—And we couldn’t, like / We done / When she brought your / Brother, / Send her out to the / Pen / And let her pick / Out A pig.”
²
When Walker was born her parents could
pay Miss Fannie, the midwife, “three dollars cash” for her services. This represented progress—“We wasn’t so country then”—for a family whose income in the 1940s was approximately $20 per month.

 

According to Minnie Lou Walker, Walker began to write well before she began to walk. She and other family members remember how “Baby Alice” would crawl underneath the house and with a twig “write” in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. The family library, such as it was, was composed of cast-off books from whites and gifts from black teachers in Putnam County. As a child, Walker was drawn to other expressive art forms, namely painting and the piano, but without the resources to buy oils or to pay for music lessons, she continued to write, a practice that complemented her already solitary nature. Concerned about the welfare of her child as she picked cotton, and in defiance of the white landlords who believed that black children should be in the fields rather than sitting at desks, Minnie Lou Walker enrolled “Baby Alice” in East Putnam Consolidated, an elementary and middle school established through the
leadership of her parents, Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Walker, and other elders in her community. The building of the first school was burned down, presumably by white supremacists. Undeterred, Willie Lee Walker and others rebuilt East Putnam Consolidated, and Walker began her education there at the age of four. Although she would pick cotton along with other family members as a child, Walker flourished in school under the almost parental attention of Miss Reynolds and other black teachers who recognized and nurtured her gifts.
³
As a student, she was curious about everything, mastered her lessons, delivered flawless recitations, and continued to write.

 

In 1952 the world changed in a dramatic way for Walker. In a game of cowboys and Indians with her brothers Bobby and Curtis, she was accidentally shot in her right eye with a BB gun. In “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,” Walker reconstructs this pivotal event:

The physical result of the accident is that Walker lost the vision in her right eye. The psychological result is that she became alienated and depressed. She also became more observant, detached, and empathetic. Walker delved more deeply into reading and writing. She also turned to nature, which did not look away when she raised her face, now disfigured by the scar tissue covering her right eye, as did many classmates and adults. In the pastoral “O Landscape of My Birth,” Walker evokes the loneliness and pain of that dark period and how she was further diminished by the razing of a tree, her “dearest companion”: “and
I see again with memory’s bright eye / my dearest companion cut down / and can bear to resee myself / so lonely and so small / there in the sunny meadows / and shaded woods / of childhood / where my crushed spirit / and stricken heart / ran in circles / looking for a friend.”
⁵
The loss of vision in her right eye, along with the trauma and isolation that came with it, led to the creation of a strong inner vision that would become the foundation of her art. The scar tissue covering her right eye was eventually removed through the aid of her older brother William when Walker was fourteen. A physician once told her that eyes are sympathetic, and so for many years she lived with the fear of going blind. “The unhappy truth,” recalls Walker many years after the event, “is that I was left feeling a great deal of pain and loss and forced to think I had somehow brought it on myself. It was very like a rape. It was the first time I abandoned myself, by lying, and is at the root of my fear of abandonment. It is also the root of my need to tell the truth, always, because I experienced, very early, the pain of telling a lie.”
⁶

Walker’s commitment to truth telling assumed written form in a scrapbook. The first published reference to her scrapbook appears in Gloria Steinem’s “Alice” in
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
(1983). There Walker observes: “From the time I was eight, I kept a notebook. I found it lately and I was surprised—there were horrible poems, but they were poems. There’s even a preface that thanks all of the people who were forced to hear this material—my mother, my teacher, my blind Uncle Frank.”
⁷
As she tells us, Walker began keeping her scrapbook in 1952 at the age of eight years old; the last addition, a photograph taken of her in her room at Packard Hall at Spelman College, was made in March 1962. Like many girls her age, she kept a record of her thoughts, dreams, and experiences, a practice that would prepare her to become a writer. Containing poems, essays, reflections, and photographs of herself, her friends, and her family, the scrapbook is the earliest record we have of Walker’s effort to achieve conscious eloquence. One of the most striking features of this record of childhood and adolescence is the dedication: “I, ALICE MALSENIOR WALKER, ON THIS DAY, MY 15TH BIRTHDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1959, DO DEDICATE THIS COLLECTION OF MY WORKS TO MYSELF, AND TO THOSE WHO HAVE INSPIRED ME MOST: MOTHER, FATHER, RUTH, UNCLE FRANK, MR. ROBERTSON, MR. HORTON, MR. RICE, AND MR. NELSON.”
⁸
The dedication and its bold type reveal many things.
First, there is a sense of the high value Walker attached to her own person and vision, a value that is not grounded in egocentrism but rather in a self-love that is both nurturing and empowering. There is also an awareness, at the age of fifteen, of the contributions she would make as a writer to the world of letters. We would not expect such boldness, self-confidence, and a sense of self-worth from the one-eyed daughter of sharecroppers who came of age in an environment governed by a social order stained by the relentless operations of patriarchy and white supremacy, a social order committed to her subordination, if not annihilation. We are conscious here, as we are in the other parts of her corpus, of the manner in which this “daughter of the rural peasantry” made creative, inspiring use of personal tragedy as well as racism, sexism, class and caste oppression, and any other species of trouble. The bold, self-assured stance Walker assumes in this first of many dedications and throughout the volume prefigures the stance she would assume some years later in the signature poem “On Stripping Bark from Myself”: “I find my own / small person / a standing self / against the world / an equality of wills / I finally understand.”
⁹
Following this clear and powerful canto comes the concluding one, in which the speaker delivers a final meditation on her potentiality that is laced with defiance for those intent upon her destruction: “My struggle was always against / an inner darkness: I carry within myself / the only known keys / to my death—to unlock life, or close it shut / forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color / yellow / and the sun, I am happy to fight / all outside murderers / as I see I must.”
¹⁰
In addition to prefiguring the self-confidence that would sustain her even during periods when she was suicidal, the dedication also contains, characteristically, an acknowledgment of those who inspired and supported her writerly efforts.