The World Has Changed (50 page)

What is fascinating is that now I see that writing fiction has been a way for me to have a memory, though it is largely, well, fictional.

1
Alice Walker, “Three Dollars Cash,” in
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965–1990
(New York: Harvest, 1996), 161.

2
Ibid., 161.

3
Evelyn C. White,
Alice Walker: A Life
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 361.

4
Alice Walker, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,” in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1983), 386–87.

5
Walker, “Three Dollars Cash,” in
Her Blue Body Everything We Know
, 414.

6
White,
Alice Walker
, 40.

7
See Gloria Steinem’s
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
(New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1983), 294.

8
The Alice Walker Archive, Box OBV 1, in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

9
Alice Walker, “On Stripping Bark from Myself,” in
Her Blue Body Everything We Know
, 270–71.

10
Ibid., 271.

11
Alice Walker, “A Talk: Convocation 1972,” in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, 38.

12
Ibid.

13
Ibid., 39.

14
White
Alice Walker
, 112.

15
Ibid., 114.

16
Ibid., 112–18.

17
Ibid., 125–26.

18
Ibid., 127.

19
For “Suicide of an American Girl,” see Alice Walker Archive, Box 73, Folder 1.

20
Alice Walker Archive, Box 88, Folder 19.

21
Ibid.

22
Underwritten by the brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch, the Merrill Fellowships were awarded annually to students of Spelman College and Morehouse College through the generosity of Charles Merrill, trustee emeritus and former chair of the board of Morehouse College. The Merrill Fellowship came with
a cash award of $2,000. See Evelyn White’s
Alice Walker: A Life
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2004,) 89, 130.

23
White,
Alice Walker
, 138.

24
This statement appears as a headnote for Walker’s prize-winning essay “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, 119.

25
White,
Alice Walker
, 136–37.

26
Ibid., 137.

27
Alice Walker Archive, Box 2, Folder 4.

28
Ibid., Box 2, Folder 6.

29
Ibid.

30
White,
Alice Walker
, 154.

31
Ibid., 156.

32
Alice Walker Archive, Box 2, Folder 6.

33
White,
Alice Walker
, 156.

34
Alice Walker Archive, Box 2, Folder 6.

35
Ibid.

36
Ibid.

37
Ibid.

38
Ibid.

39
Ibid.

40
Walker, “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, 119.

41
Michael S. Harper, “Alice,” in
Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 66.

42
White,
Alice Walker
, 280.

43
Ibid., 413.

44
Alice Walker established Wild Trees Press in 1984 and operated it with Robert Allen until 1988. The mission statement of the press was “We publish only what we love.” White,
Alice Walker
, 388.

45
Ibid., 326–27.

46
Alice Walker, “Writing
The Color Purple,
” in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, 358.

47
Ibid., 355.

48
Alice Walker Archive, Box 51, Folder 1.

49
Ibid.

50
The key to
The Color Purple
identifies Celie as her great-grandmother, but in correspondence dated September 18, 2009, Walker states that the victim of rape and the model for the character Celie was her great-grandmother Anne.

51
Alice Walker Archive, Box 51, Folder 1.

52
Ibid.

53
Alice Walker to Rudolph P. Byrd, correspondence, September 18, 2009.

54
Alice Walker Archive, Box 51, Folder 1.

55
Ibid.

56
Ibid.

57
Alice Walker, “Writing
The Color Purple
,” in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, 358.

58
Roland Freeman,
A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories
(Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1996), 150.

59
Alice Walker, “Writing
The Color Purple
,” in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, 360.

60
White,
Alice Walker
, 358–59.

61
Ibid., 360.

62
Ibid., 359.

63
Ibid., 298–99.

64
Ibid., 22–23.

65
Alice Walker,
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism
(New York: Random House, 1997), xiii.

66
Ibid., xiv.

67
White,
Alice Walker
, 53.

68
Ibid.

69
Ibid., 64–65.

70
Alice Walker to Rudolph P. Byrd, correspondence, August 28, 2009.

71
Ibid.

72
Ibid.

73
Anything We Love Can Be Saved
, xxii.

74
Ibid., xxiii.

75
Ibid.

76
Alice Walker,
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult
(New York: Scribner, 1996), 38.

77
This phrase is based upon a statement written by Peggy and Bill Lykes of Tucker, Georgia, who recorded their impressions of the exhibition “A Keeping of Records: The Art and Life of Alice Walker” in the comment book located in the Schatten Gallery of the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University. There the Lykeses wrote: “Alice Walker continues to change the world, heart by heart.” Commemorating the opening of the Alice Walker archive to the public, “A Keeping of Records” opened on April 23, 2009, and closed on September 28, 2009.

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