behind, but as the book progresses she focuses far more on what she has than on what she thinks she wants. Once she learns to trust that inner source of happiness, she’s free to be the Anne everyone loves—dreamy, impractical, fresh, and eternally unique. It’s not surprising that this Anne, who boldly flavors cake with anodyne liniment and tells off the town busybody, reflects the most appealing qualities of her creator. But Anne’s embrace of her own self, her fearless pursuit of her own happiness, is as much a cautionary tale as an inspirational one. Like the girl who falls off the kitchen roof and breaks her ankle due to her fear of unpopularity, a heroine is better served when she opts for internal pleasure rather than appeasing others. And like Anne, we’d do well to cultivate happiness on the inside in the hopes that we’ll start to see it all around. Yes, there is something to be said for happiness. Just ask Maud:
“One of the reviews says ‘the book radiates happiness and optimism,’ “ she wrote in her journal in 1908, shortly after the publication of
READ THIS BOOK:
• When someone repeatedly misspells your name or implies that they’d rather interact with a man
• When life gives you wrinkled yoga pants instead of puffed sleeves
• At three in the morning when you can’t stop coughing and are propped up in bed, drowsy and discontented
ANNE’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Betsy Ray in Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series
• Ramona in
• Flora Poste in
Chapter 4
Dignity
Celie in
by Alice Walker
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
ALICE WALKER
What’s a heroine to do when her very existence is threatened and denied? If she’s anything like Alice Walker, she fights back. That Alice, the future author of
Sharecropping, that oppressive system of rock-bottom wages and backbreaking labor, was still alive and well in the rural South, where working black families earned a fraction of the salaries made by even unskilled whites. So, too, was Jim Crow segregation. Alice’s childhood world was one where blacks and whites could not dine in the same restaurant. Her family had to enter the movie theater from a separate entrance and sit far overhead in the sweaty, stifling balcony. And she had to witness the indignities that her fellow blacks suffered on an unremitting basis.
The Walkers had barely survived the Great Depression. Her father Willie Lee worked the fields, sometimes barely scraping up $300 in one year. Often, his year’s work would be completely canceled out by the unfairly inflated prices of rent and dry goods that the property owner insisted on. To make ends meet, Alice’s mother Minnie went out as a maid and worked in the fields herself, her labors interrupted but not halted by the long succession of children she bore. When Alice, the baby, was born, Minnie was unable to take any kind of leave. As soon as she could stand again, she was back in the fields.
Indignity, poverty, and hard times didn’t affect Minnie’s unshakable sense of self… or Willie’s insistence on strict gender roles. While the sons of the family were encouraged to sow their wild oats, the girls were constantly watched and subjected to a higher standard of conduct. Blacks, too, were expected to comport themselves so well that they were unassailable, an impossible task in a culture so imbued with white good, black bad sentiment. Still, stubborn Minnie refused to bow down to the whites in Eatonton, Georgia. When she was verbally abused by a woman who thought she was too well dressed to receive relief, Minnie stood her ground and insisted on receiving the flour that was her due. She was kicked out of the aid office, but the incident was characteristic of Minnie’s innate sense of justice and her insistence on humane treatment.
Alice read and wrote early, excelling in school and showing every sign of promise by 1952. But tragedy struck that year. During a rambunctious game of Cowboys and Indians, the eight-year-old was shot in the eye with a BB by one of her brothers. Ashamed and scared of the repercussions, the boys initially insisted she lie about the wound and say it was no big deal. By the time her parents realized it was severe, they could not find a car with which to transport her to the nearest doctor. They nursed Alice at home, springing for treatment only after her father borrowed $250, an astronomical sum for the family, from his boss to pay for a doctor’s visit. The prejudiced doctor prescribed some eye drops, pocketed the money, and sent Alice home to “heal.” Her recovery was agonizing and dangerous. By the time the pain subsided, she was completely blind in her right eye. Worse than partial blindness was the huge cataract that remained, an ugly reminder she saw every time she looked in the mirror.
Alice’s appearance wasn’t all that changed. Her personality, once sassy and bright, became subdued and internal. She was made fun of at school and even lived with her grandparents temporarily to escape the ridicule of her classmates. Bewildered and hurt, she resented that her brothers had not been punished in any way for their part in what she saw as a hideous disfigurement. Her brothers’ betrayal was made even more intense by the gag rule her family seemed to have imposed on any talk about Alice’s injury. She was left to feel out her way in silence. It’s no wonder that books, poetry, and writing became her solace during this time.
In 1958, her older brother intervened. Bill, who had moved with his wife to Boston to seek better work, invited fourteen-year-old Alice to visit him and took her to a doctor who removed the unsightly cataract. Her self- confidence restored along with her eyesight, Alice returned home and went on to excel in school. She rose to academic and social success, graduating as the school valedictorian with a scholarship to prim Spelman College in 1961. But though Alice met her influential mentor, Howard Zinn, at Spelman and became engaged in the civil rights movement, it was ultimately too prissy, polite, and constrained for her liking. She transferred to Sarah Lawrence in New York, beginning her tutelage in feminist ideologies and social activism in earnest.
During the 1960s, it seemed as if the entire country was learning how to work together toward social ends. As the chaotic, sometimes violent forces of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and protest against the war in Vietnam converged, Alice found herself surrounded by radical thinkers, people who taught her that change had to start at home. When she graduated, she took a position as a welfare administrator. Alice Walker was ready to practice what she preached.
When the opportunity to work for the NAACP’s Defense Legal Fund in Mississippi presented itself, she jumped at the chance. Mississippi was a hotbed for racial discrimination and Jim Crow. It was the last place she expected to meet and fall in love with a white Jewish lawyer named Mel Leventhal. They married in New York in 1967 and immediately took a risky chance, moving to Jackson, Mississippi, as civil rights workers. Interracial marriage wasn’t just unrecognized in Mississippi; it was illegal. Alice’s family was shocked, both by their independent daughter’s choice to marry and by the young couple’s audacity. Mel’s mother responded by cutting her son out of her life entirely. But the young couple, passionately involved in their work, shook off threats, doubts, and physical intimidation and moved to Jackson anyway. It would take more than a few bullies to beat them.
During her time doing civil rights work in Mississippi, Alice learned the true extent of Jim Crow’s decimation of black dignity, especially that of females who had almost no legal protection and who were disregarded and
