In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

These are excerpts from a 1973 interview with Walker, in which she discusses her life, beliefs, and work. The interview opens with her discussing a difficult period in her senior year of college, during which she was both pregnant and suicidal. Her college friends found her a doctor who would perform an abortion, and the lost period ultimately led to the production and then publication of her first book of poetry, Once. Walker states that ever since this formative period, the writing of poetry has always come for her out of a feeling of sadness and despair.

Walker also talks about her political commitments, which for her are linked to her art. She states that she “believe(s) in change: change personal and change in society” and that she has “experienced a revolution (unfinished, without question, but one whose new order is everywhere on view) in the South” (252). She recalls her involvement, as a student at Spellman College, with the SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a black civil rights movement in the 1960s) and remembers their first gathering, at Atlanta University: “Everyone was beautiful, because everyone […] was holding hands with the person standing next to them” (253). She talks about how she tries to integrate social and historical consciousness (or lack of it) into the characters in her novels. She speaks of her fictional characters as if they are real people: “So Grange Cope was expected to change. He was fortunate enough to be touched by love of something beyond himself. Brownfield did not change, because he was not prepared to give his life for anything, or to anything” (252-53).

Walker further discusses writers who have influenced her—Russian novelists and Japanese poets, as well as black American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Gwendolyn Brooks—and touches upon her religious beliefs. She states that she does not believe in “a God beyond nature” and that “in my poetry I seem to be for; in my fiction, against” (265). While her political commitments inform her work, she believes that no art is good or lasting unless it also has a sense of mystery. She believes in the spirituality of things, as well as people: “I believe in listening—to a person, the sea, the wind, the trees, but especially to young black women whose rocky road I am still traveling” (272). 

This is a letter of appreciation, regarding a meeting of the National Black Feminist Organization, which featured the politician Shirley Chisholm—the first women to run, in 1972, for the Democratic nomination for the President of the United States. Walker finds this gathering special both because it is enjoyable and because it is rare for her to find such consensus and community: “I realized at the National Black Feminist Organization conference that it had been much too long since I sat in a room full of black women and, unafraid of being made to feel peculiar, spoke about things that matter to me” (273).

Although this is a letter of appreciation, a sense of gravity and sorrow is implicit in it. Watching Shirley Chisholm speak at the conference, and the audience’s joyous response to her, Walker sees, “a rousing indication of our caring that we could not give to Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman or Mary McLeod Bethune” (273). In addition to the need to “secure from neglect and slander those women who have kept our image as black women clean and strong for us,” Walker also voices a need to provide young black people with less damaging role models and negative Hollywood portrayals of themselves: “Who will stop this slinging of mud on the character of the black woman? Who will encourage the tenderness that seeks to blossom in young black men?” (274-75).

Walker also points to divisions within the black community itself. She notes that the conference was not covered by any black magazines, and also that certain friends of hers did not attend the conference, due to minor political differences or fear of being judged. Nevertheless, despite the “mountain of work black women must do,” the conference leaves Walker with a sense of energy and optimism: “In any case, I met only other black women, my sisters, and valuable beyond measuring, every one of them” (275). 

This essay is a consideration of black lesbians and their oft contentious presence in both black and white communities. The essay looks at a journal issue entitled Conditions: Five. The Black Women’s Issue, which focuses predominantly on lesbians and includes poems by prominent black lesbian poets such as Audre Lorde, journal excerpts, and reviews of lesbian novels. Walker writes that reading the magazine is like seeing “women breaking chains with their bare hands” (281).  

The essay opens with four short scenes from Walker’s own life, which in different ways illustrate the frequent mutual incomprehension between straight women and lesbians, as well as the difficulty in carving out a life as a lesbian. In one scene, Walker recalls an argument that she had with a lesbian acquaintance who accused her of misrepresenting lesbians in her novels; in another, she remembers a white “separatist” in a class that she taught, who stated that she could not work with “black and third-world women” because such women were always “connected to some man” (279). The third scene concerns a lesbian acquaintance who complains to Walker about divisions in her own community—between gay women who have black partners and those who have white partners—and in the final scene, Walker remembers a straight female acquaintance who dismisses the Conjunctions issue as being “poorly put together”(280) and “full of lesbians” (281).

While Walker sees much mistrust of black lesbians among black straight women, she also sees black men as playing an important role in the censorship and suppression of lesbians. Recalling a young black male critic’s crude dismissal of Ann Allen Shockley’s study of lesbianism, Loving Her, Walker expresses amazement at “the use of patriarchal intimidation in this remark” (281). She ultimately sees the dismissiveness and censoriousness that black lesbians encounter as being part of a larger problem: the high and narrow expectations that exist for black women. She believes this is generally demonstrated, as opposed to the leniency that is often shown, at least in African-American communities, to black men: “While it is fine for black men to embrace other black men, black women, white women and white men in intimate relationships, the black women, to be accepted as a black woman, must prefer being alone to the risk of enjoying ‘the wrong choice’” (288). 

This essay concerns the problem of “colorism”(290). This can be defined as the prejudicial preference that is often shown to lighter-skinned black people, both among whites and within black communities. As the mother of a biracial daughter, Walker has conflicting feelings about this preference. She knows that it will make her daughter’s life easier than her own, yet she understands the valorizing of light-skinned blacks to be an implicit approval of the racist plantation system, during which plantation owners often raped and impregnated their female slaves.

The essay opens first with a letter from Walker to an unnamed friend, who has a lighter complexion than she does. Walker tells her friend that she understands her bemusement at the issue of colorism, and shares it to a certain extent. She tells her friend that she has never been so aware of colorism as since she has had a biracial daughter, and also tells a story about her high school friend Doreen, who was rejected by her lighter-skinned suitor due to her very dark skin. Doreen went on to marry a West Indian man and to submit to a “sexist, patriarchal, provincial culture she didn’t understand” (292-93), while her former suitor himself married a white, Finnish women, with whom he had a child and who he later divorced.

In the body of the essay, Walker discusses three novels written by black women in the 19th century—Iola LeRoy, Or Shadows Uplifted by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Meyda by Emma Dunham Kelly; and Contending Forces by Pauline E. Hopkins—all of which have idealized light-skinned heroines, while portraying darker-skinned blacks in a crude and condescending light. She compares these novels to the straightforward treatment of colorism that she sees in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. This latter novel also features a light-skinned black heroine (Janie Crawford), who is however portrayed as a conflicted human being rather than a symbol, and whose life is complicated by her privilege. Writing about Janie’s beating at the hands of Tea Cake—her third husband, who has darker skin than she does—Walker speculates that the idealization of light-skinned black women is in large part sexual, and that such women are seen, unlike darker-skinned women, as delicate and submissive.

Walker also notes the number of prominent black male leaders throughout history—including Frederick Douglas and Marcus Garvey—who have had lighter-skinned wives:

A look at the photographs of the women chosen by our male leaders is, in many ways, chilling if you are a black-skinned woman […] Because it is apparent that though they may have consciously affirmed blackness in the abstract and for others, for themselves light remained right(302-03).

In order to begin to resolve the problem of colorism, she sees a need in the black community to question white-imposed “fantasy” and to “cleave to reality, to what we know, we feel, we think of life. Trusting our own experience and our own lives; embracing the dark self and the light” (312).  

This essay addresses a lack of support and empathy that Walker sees in the black community for black women who are trapped in abusive relationships. Walker sees this lack of empathy as springing from the pressure on black women to be strong and resilient, a pressure that is both societally and internally imposed. She sees this pressure in turn as springing from a cultural habit of privileging community over individuals: “A rigidity has set in; the same vital instinct to ‘preserve the race and culture’ from dilution through intermarriage […] causes a narrowing of the range of choice” (315).

The essay opens with a short anecdote about Walker’s old school friend Cassie Mae Terrill, whom Walker adored for her spirit and energy and who later married an abusive man. Walker then recalls an upsetting confrontation that she had as an adult, while speaking at the Radcliffe Symposium. While the women at the symposium responded emotionally and enthusiastically to her reading of her essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” she received little understanding when she later raised the topic of the prevalence of young female suicides. This lack of comprehension caused her to burst into tears, a display of emotion that was also greeted with general incomprehension, and even with some chiding. Walker did, however, receive support from one of her fellow panelists, the poet June Jordan, whose warmth and irreverence caused her to start laughing through her tears: “I had to giggle. And the giggle and the tears and the holding and the sanctioning of responsibility to those we love and those who have loved us is what I know will see us through” (319).  

This is a letter to the editors of The Black Scholar, in response to an article by Dr. Robert Staples entitled “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists.” Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman is a work of feminist sociology by Michelle Wallace. In his article, Staples derogates both her work and the work of the poet and playwright Ntozake Shangé. In a preface to her letter, Walker explains that the letter was never printed because the editors deemed it to be “personal” and “hysterical” (320).

Walker accuses Staples of being reactionary and instructs him to look and listen, rather than immediately going on the defensive: “Instead of arguing, at once, about whether there is or is not sexism in the black community (and how could our community possibly be different from every other in that respect), look around you” (321). Having said this, she also allows that the Wallace book is imperfect, although not for the reasons that Staples believes that it is. First acknowledging that “[o]ne of [her] great weaknesses […] is a deep reluctance to criticize other black women,” Walker then goes on to fault the Wallace book for what she sees as its reductive view of the “superwomen” (322) image of black women. She notes that she herself has tried hard to counter this image in her own work, and also divulges that she saw an early version of the book and suggested to Wallace that she remove the offending passages in exchange for her own endorsement.

Nevertheless, Walker finally supports the Wallace book as “an expression of one black woman’s reality” and recognizes its worth: “And I persist in believing that all such expressions (preferably stopping short of self-contempt and contempt for others) are valuable and will, in the long run, do us more good than harm” (325). 

In this short personal essay, Walker recalls the inherent sexism in her poor rural Southern upbringing: a sexism that in different ways adversely affected both her brothers and her sisters. She remembers that her five brothers were allowed to watch animals mating on their farm and were also encouraged to go out on the town and meet women. However, she and her two sisters were rarely allowed to go out on their own and were also kept in ignorance about the mechanics of sex. She believes that this double standard destroyed the life of her older sister, in particular, who was less sheltered than Walker and her other sister from the influence of their parents. Walker’s older sister ended up marrying an abusive man, in an attempt to escape this influence; most of Walker’s brothers, on the other hand, ended up fathering children whom they then refused to acknowledge or support. Walker also writes in a footnote to the essay that some of these brothers have since taken responsibility for their children.

Walker describes the one sibling to whom she is now close as her brother Jamie, who is much older than she is and whom she consequently only met as an adult, at their father’s funeral. Jamie—whom Walker has long understood to be her mother’s favorite son—has managed to settle down with a family of his own. Walker writes of how important feminism has been in giving her a wider framework for understanding and forgiving her father: “I was relieved to know that his sexist behavior was not something uniquely his own, but, rather, an imitation of the behavior of the society all around us” (330).