Once Read online

  who spoke

  much

  of

  Lebanon

  and

  his father’s

  orchards

  it was

  near

  a castle

  near

  a river

  near

  the sun

  and

  warm

  &

  where he

  bent

  and kissed

  me

  on the swelling

  brown

  smelled for

  a short

  lingering

  time

  of

  apples.

  WARNING

  To love a man wholly

  love him

  feet first

  head down

  eyes cold

  closed

  in depression.

  It is too easy to love

  a surfer

  white eyes

  godliness &

  bronze

  in the bright sun.

  THE BLACK PRINCE

  Very proud

  he barely asked directions

  to a nearby

  hotel

  but no

  tired-eyed

  little village chief

  should spend his

  first night

  in chilly London

  alone.

  MEDICINE

  Grandma sleeps with

  my sick

  grand-

  pa so she

  can get him

  during the night

  medicine

  to stop

  the pain

  In

  the morning

  clumsily

  I

  wake

  them

  Her eyes

  look at me

  from under-

  neath

  his withered

  arm

  The

  medicine

  is all

  in

  her long

  un-

  braided

  hair.

  BALLAD OF THE BROWN GIRL

  i’ve got two

  hundred

  dollars

  the girl said

  on her head

  she wore a

  school cap

  —blue—

  & brown she

  looked no

  more than

  ten

  but a freshman in

  college?

  well, hard to tell—

  i’ll give you

  ‘three hundred’

  ‘fo’ hunna’

  ‘five wads of jack’

  but “mrs. whatsyourname …”

  the doctor says

  with impatiently tolerant

  eyes

  you should want

  it

  you know …

  talk it over with

  your folks

  you may be

  surprised.…

  the next morning

  her slender

  neck broken

  her note

  short and

  of cryptic

  collegiate

  make—

  just

  “Question—

  did ever brown

  daughter to black

  father a white

  baby

  take—?”

  SUICIDE

  First, suicide notes should be

  (not long) but written

  second,

  all suicide notes

  should be signed

  in blood

  by hand

  and to the point—

  that point being, perhaps,

  that there is none.

  Thirdly, if it is the thought

  of rest that

  fascinates

  laziness should be admitted

  in the clearest terms.

  Then, all things done

  ask those outraged

  consider their happiest

  summer

  & tell if the days it

  adds up to

  is one.

  EXCUSE

  Tonight it is the wine (or not the wine)

  or a letter from you (or not a letter from you)

  I sit

  listen to the complacency of the rain

  write a poem, kill myself there

  It brings less pain—

  Tonight it rains, tomorrow will be bright

  tomorrow I’ll say “yesterday was the same

  only the rain …

  and my shoes too tight.”

  TO DIE

  BEFORE ONE WAKES

  MUST BE GLAD

  to die before

  one wakes

  must be glad (to the same extent

  maybe

  that it is also

  sad)

  a slipping away

  in glee

  unobserved and

  free in the wide—

  area felt spatially,

  heart intact.

  to die before one

  wakes

  must be joyous

  full swing glorious

  (rebellion)

  (victory)

  unremarked triumph

  love letters untorn

  foetal fears

  unborn

  monsters given

  berth

  (love unseen, guiltily,

  as creation)

  (life “good”)

  to die before one

  wakes

  must be a dance

  (perhaps a jig)

  and visual-

  skipping tunes of

  color

  across smirking

  eyelids

  happy bluely …

  thought running gaily

  out and out.

  to die before

  one wakes

  must be

  nice

  (green little passions

  red dying

  into ice

  spinningly

  (like a circus)

  the blurred landscape

  of the runner’s

  hurried

  mile)

  one’s lips curving

  sweetly

  in one’s most subtle smile.

  EXERCISES ON THEMES FROM LIFE

  i

  Speaking of death and decay

  It hardly matters

  Which

  Since both are on the

  way, maybe—

  to being daffodils.

  ii

  It is not about that

  a poet I knew used

  to say

  speaking with haunted eyes

  of liking and disliking—

  Now I think

  uncannily

  of life.

  iii

  My nausea has nothing

  to do

  With the fact that

  you love me

  It is probably just

  something I ate

  at your mother’s.

  iv

  To keep up a

  passionate courtship

  with a tree

  one must be

  completely mad

  In the forest

  in the dark one night

  I lost my way.

  v

  If I were a patriot

  I would kiss the flag

  As it is,

  Let us just go.

  vi

  My father liked very much

  the hymns

  in church

  in the amen corner,

  on rainy days

  he would wake

  himself up

  to hear them.

  vii

  I like to see you try

  to worm yourself

  away from me

  first you plead
/>
  your age

  as if my young heart

  felt any of the tiredness

  in your bones …

  viii

  Making our bodies touch

  across your breezy bed

  how warm you are …

  cannot we save our little

  quarrel

  until tomorrow?

  ix

  My fear of burial

  is all tied up with

  how used I am

  to the spring …!

  A Biography of Alice Walker

  Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.

  Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.

  Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book, Once (1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.

  In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and her first story collection, In Love & Trouble (1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for Ms. magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.

  With the 1982 release of her third novel, The Color Purple, Walker earned a reputation as one of America’s premier authors. The book would go on to sell fifteen million copies and be adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film by director Steven Spielberg. After the publication of The Color Purple, Walker had a tremendously prolific decade. She produced a number of acclaimed novels, including You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), as well as the poetry collections Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) and Her Blue Body Everything We Know (1991). During this time Walker also began to distinguish herself as an essayist and nonfiction writer with collections on race, feminism, and culture, including In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and Living by the Word (1988). Another collection of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, was released in 2010, followed by her memoir, The Chicken Chronicles, in the spring of 2011.

  Currently, Walker lives in Northern California, and spends much of her time traveling, teaching, and working for human rights and civil liberties in the United States and abroad. She continues to write and publish along with her many other activities.

  Alice’s parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, in the 1930s. Willie Lee was brave and hardworking, and Minnie Lou was strong, thoughtful, and kind—and just as hardworking as her husband. Alice remembers her mother as a strong-willed woman who never allowed herself or her children to be cowed by anyone. Alice cherished both of her parents “for all they were able to do to bring up eight children, under incredibly harsh conditions, to instill in us a sense of the importance of education, for instance, the love of beauty, the respect for hard work, and the freedom to be whoever you are.”

  Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston during her days in New York City. Hurston, who fell into obscurity after her death, had a profound influence on Walker. Indeed, Walker’s 1975 essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” played a crucial role in resurrecting Hurston’s reputation as a major figure in American literature. Walker paid further tribute to her “literary aunt” when she purchased a headstone for Hurston’s grave, which had gone unmarked for over a decade. The inscription on the tombstone reads, “A Genius of the South.”

  Alice (front) in Kenya in 1965. She traveled there to help build the school pictured in the background as part of the Experiment in International Living Program. It was here that Walker first witnessed the practice of female genital mutilation, a practice that she has since worked to eradicate.

  Walker with her former husband, Melvyn Leventhal, a Brooklyn native. The couple met in Mississippi and bonded over their mutual involvement in the struggle for civil rights—he as a budding litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, she as one of the organization’s workers responsible for taking depositions from disenfranchised black voters. Despite disapproval from their respective families, Alice and Melvyn wed in New York City in 1967. They then returned to Mississippi, where they were often subjected to threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually the pressures of living in the violent, segregated state, coupled with their divergent career paths, caused the pair to drift apart. They divorced amicably in 1976.

  Alice and Melvyn with their daughter, Rebecca, who would also grow up to become a writer, in 1970. Alice had just published her debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which garnered significant praise and prompted these perceptive words from critic Kay Bourne: “Most poignant is the relating of the lives of black women, who were ready and strong and trusted, only to so often be abused by the conditions of their oppressed lives and the misdirected anger of their men.” Alice characterized it as “an incredibly difficult novel to write,” since it forced her to confront the violence African Americans inflicted on each other in the face of white oppression.

  Alice and her partner of thirteen years, Robert L. Allen, a noted scholar of American history, pose for a portrait. The picture was taken at a celebration the couple hosted after the publication of I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, an anthology of Zora Neale Hurston’s writings that Alice edited.

  Walker being taken into custody at a 1980s demonstration against weapons shipments sent from Concord, California, to Central and South America. Her shirt reads: “Remember Port Chicago.” This is a reference to an explosion that killed hundreds of sailors stationed in Concord during World War II—most of them black—while they were loading munitions onto a cargo vessel. Walker has remained a dedicated political activist since the 1960s, when she returned to the South after graduating from Sarah Lawrence to help register black voters. Recently, she was arrested with fellow California-based author Maxine Hong Kingston in Washington, DC, during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “My activism—cultural, political, spiritual—is rooted in my love of nature and my delight in human beings,” Walker explains.

  Walker with celebrated historian Howard Zinn, who taught one of her classes at Spelman College, in the 1960s. Walker developed a lifelong friendship with Zinn and considered him one of her mentors. The two shared a passion for political activism and a desire to shed light on the con
ditions of the oppressed. “I was Howard’s student for only a semester,” she says, “but in fact, I have learned from him all my life. His way with resistance—steady, persistent, impersonal, often with humor—is a teaching I cherish.”

  A photograph of Walker taken in 2007 at a ceremony for her dog, Marley, and her cat, Surprise. “Marley appeared,” she says, but “Surprise slept through it!”

  Walker at her country home in Northern California, where she has lived since the early 1980s. “What attracted me to this part of the world—Northern California—is really the resemblance to Georgia that it has,” she once told an interviewer. “This has been a very good place for me,” she went on, “a very good place for dreaming.”

  Walker writing on the front porch of her California home. She has lived in many different places throughout the world—including Africa, Hawaii, and Mexico—and finding a place to write has always been a matter of utmost importance for her. She once said that “books and houses” are what she “longed for most as a child.” Years after her tenant farming childhood, Walker is happy to have a place she can truly call home.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  copyright © 1968 by Alice Walker

  cover design by Connie Gabbert

  978-1-4532-2401-4

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY ALICE WALKER

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