Black Milk

Writer-Mothers and Their Children

Alice Walker is one of the leading and most outspoken figures among contemporary American women writers. She has an international following and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. The youngest of eight children, she was born in Georgia to a family of farmers. Her childhood was not a privileged one. Yet her mother was determined to give her children the same opportunities that white children had and did everything in her power to make sure they had a good education. Alice started school at the age of four. When she was eight years old she suffered an eye injury that was to have a profound impact on the course of her life and, perhaps, her writing. Though she forgave the brother who caused her a permanent loss of sight in her right eye, she became timid and withdrawn in the face of the teasing and bullying of other children. From those days on she retained a fondness for solitude and a passion for storytelling, weaving together both oral and written traditions.

In the turbulent early 1960s in the South, Walker followed her heart and married a white lawyer. At a time of rampant racism and xenophobia, they were the only interracial couple in the circles in which they moved. They had one daughter, Rebecca. Becoming a mother was a significant turning point in Alice Walker’s life. She felt more fully connected not only with her own mother but also, perhaps, with mothers around the world-those whom she would never meet. Later on, in an essay called “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” she wrote, “For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release.” Elsewhere she said that her novels carried the kind of thoughts and feelings that she felt her ancestors wanted to pass on to the new generations.

The marriage ended in divorce, after which Walker refused to walk down the aisle again. Her views on matrimony and domestic life have been critical ever since. In an essay entitled “A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children,” Walker questions the conventional ideas about art and creativity in the Western world. She says the dominant culture draws a boundary between the duties of child rearing and the area of creativity. She sees the institution of marriage as a patriarchal construct unsuitable for an independent, free-spirited writer like herself. She playfully adds, “Besides, I like being courted.”

Her most acclaimed novel, The Color Purple, vividly testifies that Walker is an author who deals head-on with misogyny and racism. Throughout her life she has worked for a better world where there would be equality and freedom regardless of sex, class or race. In her youth she was active in the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Interestingly, she has resisted the term feminism, criticizing it for being indifferent to the problems of women of color. Instead she suggested using a term she coined: womanism. She said womanist was to feminist as purple was to lavender.

More recently she has taken up criticizing the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq, drawing the attention of the media to Iraqi mothers and children. She has also traveled to Gaza, meeting with NGOs and the people of Palestine and Israel, bridging cultural differences. She has always been openly political.

In the last few years Alice Walker’s private life has been brought to the fore due to a controversy that rose between the writer and her daughter. Rebecca has made several disparaging remarks about her mother, accusing her of forgetting her own child while trying to save the children of others. She says that as a child and teenager she was constantly neglected while her activist mother was running from one event to another. She did not have an easy youth, using drugs and having affairs with both men and women by the age of thirteen. A year later, she became pregnant. She wrote extensively about her ups and downs in her autobiography, Black, White and Jewish. After giving birth to a son she wrote a second memoir about the experience and how she came to choose motherhood after a period of hesitation and doubt. Rebecca believes feminism has deceived many women and has even betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness.

It is a complicated story. One that has two very different sides, like all mother-daughter stories tend to have. For me, it is interesting to see how such a successful, outspoken writer and empathetic mother like Alice Walker could become so estranged from her daughter. Did she experience an existential clash between her life as a mother and her life as an author? Is this a personal story, incited by specific circumstances, that rests between the two of them? Or does it indicate something more universal that can happen to anyone at any time?

Inasmuch as I love reading Toni Morrison, I must say I also love listening to her. She has an androgynous raspy voice, as if speaking to us from beyond invisible barriers, beyond the ghosts of past generations. She is the kind of person to whom you could listen attentively even if she were reciting a recipe for pumpkin pie. You would sit spellbound, just the same.

The critic Barbara Christian calls the kind of realism found in Morrison’s work “fantastic earthy realism.” Morrison doesn’t introduce the past in one swoop; she delivers it in bits and pieces, expecting us to work along with her. She wants the readers to be actively engaged in constructing the story, rather than sitting by passively. The past for her is a mesmerizing jigsaw puzzle that is painful to put together, but it must be done. She writes with rage and melancholy, but also with compassion and love. In one of her most acclaimed books, Beloved, which tells the riveting tale of the fugitive slave Sethe, motherhood is examined against the background of slavery. At the end of the novel, Sethe murders her own baby daughter rather than see her become a slave and suffer like she has.

Morrison’s women are brave and epic, yet there is nothing overtly heroic about them. It is this combination of the extraordinary with the ordinary in her fictional characters that makes her work remarkable. The kind of motherhood she depicts is based on an elated love that is, at its heart, transformative and healing. Nevertheless, mother and child do not live in a social vacuum, and a woman’s performance as a mother is not immune to the ills and sins of the world in which she tries to survive.

Morrison married young to an architecture student. It wasn’t an easy marriage, and after having two sons the couple split. She worked as a book editor to support her family. This was the time when she started writing her acclaimed novel The Bluest Eye. It was difficult for her to write after work-she felt she was not very bright or witty or inventive after the sun went down. Her habit of getting up very early, formed when her children were young, became her choice. In interviews about that period she admits with modesty that she found it difficult to call herself a writer, preferring instead to say “I am a mother who writes” or “I am an editor who writes.”

Her sons once said that they did not particularly enjoy growing up with a mother who wrote for a living. When asked about the reason for this, Morrison gives a candid and wise answer: “Who does? I wouldn’t. Writers are not there.” Morrison says writers like, need and value vagueness. Yet the same vagueness that is crucial for literature and creativity can be burdensome for the children of writers.

Morrison is a writer before everything else. She says her friends understand this and accept her the way she is. Real friends do. Sometimes she even needs to give priority to her writing over her children. There is a wonderful memory she shares that I find very moving. When she was working on Song of Solomon, she told her younger son-who was ten years old at the time-that this would not be a fun summer for him because she would be working all the time. She asked him to please bear with her, which he reluctantly but kindly did. Morrison says her son still calls that period of their life “a terrible summer.”

Both Alice Walker and Toni Morrison value the richness found in oral storytelling, which has been passed down from grandmothers to granddaughters. Whenever they face great obstacles they are inspired by the many courageous women of earlier generations, and they inspire us to care about untold stories and silenced subjects, past and present. Although motherhood is precious for both, in their fiction they refrain from depicting it as a sacred identity. They talk openly about the conflicts of motherhood, including the hardships they have personally experienced. Numerous defeats, weaknesses and losses shape the women in their stories; sometimes they carry hearts so bruised that it hurts to read about them. Yet these female characters are fighters. They are survivors. It is their passionate struggles-not the losing or winning-that make them who they are.

A Crystal Heart