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Authors
Alice Walker (b. 1944)
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Walker’s novels are The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian(1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Her short-story collections are In Love and Trouble (1973), You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981), and The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000). Poetry collections are Once (1986), Five Poems (1972), Revolutionary Petunias (1973), Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (1969), Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984), Her Blue Body Everything We Know (1991), Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), and A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003). Her Collected Poems appeared in 2005. Walker’s literary essays are collected in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), Living by the Word (1988), and Anything We Love Can Be Saved (2000); she has also written Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (1987, with Pratibha Parmar) and The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult: A Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film The Color Purple Ten Years Later (1996). Her books for children include an illustrated version of To Hell with Dying (1988), Finding the Green Stone (1991), and a biography, Langston Hughes, American Poet (1974). Evelyn C. White’s Alice Walker: A Life (2004) is a comprehensive biography. Good samplings of scholarship on Walker fill two volumes: editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah’s Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993) and editor Lillie P. Howard’s Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond (1993). Alice Walker (2000) is Maria Lauret’s book-length study.
Alice Walker grew up in the rural South in the town of Eatonton, Georgia. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta and then Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Returning south after college, she joined the civil rights movement and worked against segregation and began teaching at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Not surprisingly, Walker's publications have been infused by her signature call for strength from African American women. Her many works include volumes of poetry, short-story collections such as In Love & Trouble (1973), and novels such as Meridian (1976) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Color Purple (1982).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Everyday Use (1973) is a comic short story from a time when many African Americans were reconsidering their complex heritage and experimenting with the expression of that heritage -- in political action, in dress, in the selection of names. Walker presents a clear conflict here between the traditional world of the narrator and the fast-changing style of one of her daughters.
1. How are Dee and Maggie different? Are they presented as stereotypes of the old-style and new-style African American woman? If not, how is each distinguished from that stereotype?
2. The conversation between Maggie and her mother eventually turns to quilts -- a longstanding family art. Dee calls them "priceless"; the narrator values "everyday use." Beyond or beneath this matter of quilts, what are they really debating about?
3. The narrator tells us that she is uneducated -- and the swept yard and other details suggest that she is living in rural Georgia. How would you describe the language in which this narrator tells her story and the language in which the mother and the daughters talk to one another? Compare this choice of language to the narration and dialogue in other stories by African American writers anthologized in NAAL. How would you describe the similarities and differences that you see, and how would you account for them?
