Revolutionary Petunias Read online

  and other too comprehensible

  things.

  Thief

  I wish to own only the warmth

  of your skin

  the sound your thoughts make

  reverberating off the coldness

  of my loss

  to love you purely

  as I love trees and

  the quiet sheens and

  colors

  of my house

  my heart is full

  of charity

  of fair play

  although on other

  occasions

  it has been acknowledged

  I am a thief.

  Will

  It does not impress me that I have

  a mind.

  Chance amuses me.

  Coincidence makes me laugh

  out loud.

  Fate weighs me down

  too heavy.

  When I can’t bear not seeing

  you another second,

  I send out my

  will;

  when it brings us face to

  face,

  there’s an invisible power

  I respect!

  Rage

  In me there is a rage to defy

  the order of the stars

  despite their pretty patterns.

  To see if Gods who hold forth now

  on human thrones

  can will away my lust

  to dare

  and press to order the anarchy

  I would serve.

  The silence between your words

  rams into me

  like a sword.

  Storm

  Throughout the storm and party

  you chose to act the child

  a two-year-old as distant as

  the moon.

  But our thunder and lightning God

  obscured the age,

  revealed the play,

  and distinctly your age-old glance

  shook the room.

  What the Finger Writes

  Your name scrawled on a bit of paper moves me.

  And I should beware.

  Take my dreaming self beyond the reach

  of your cheery letters,

  written laboriously with

  stubby pencils and grubby

  nails.

  : What the finger writes the soul can read :

  All life was spirit once

  a disembodied groping across

  the void;

  toward the unknown otherness

  the flesh is weak and slow

  with luck I shall not live there

  anymore.

  Forbidden Things

  They say you are not for me,

  and I try, in my resolved but

  barely turning brain,

  to know “they” do not matter,

  these relics of past disasters

  in march against the rebellion

  of our time.

  They will fail;

  as all the others have:

  for our fate will not be this:

  to smile and salute the pain,

  to limp behind their steel boot

  of happiness,

  grieving for forbidden things.

  No Fixed Place

  Go where you will.

  Take the long lashes

  that guard your eyes

  and sweep a path

  across this earth;

  but see if it is not true

  that voluptuous blood,

  though held to the tinkling

  quiet of a choked back

  stream,

  will yet rush out

  to aid shy love,

  and flood out the brain

  to make a clean

  and sacred place

  for itself;

  though there is no fixed place

  on earth for man

  or woman.

  It will not help

  that you believe

  in miracles.

  New Face

  I have learned not to worry about love;

  but to honor its coming

  with all my heart.

  To examine the dark mysteries

  of the blood

  with headless heed and

  swirl,

  to know the rush of feelings

  swift and flowing

  as water.

  The source appears to be

  some inexhaustible

  spring

  within our twin and triple

  selves;

  the new face I turn up

  to you

  no one else on earth

  has ever

  seen.

  The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom

  And for ourselves, the intrinsic

  “Purpose” is to reach, and to remember,

  and to declare our commitment to all

  the living, without deceit, and without

  fear, and without reservation. We do

  what we can. And by doing it, we keep

  ourselves trusting, which is to say,

  vulnerable, and more than that,

  what can anyone ask?

  —June Jordan, in a personal letter, 1970

  While Love Is Unfashionable

  for Mel

  While love is unfashionable

  let us live

  unfashionably.

  Seeing the world

  a complex ball

  in small hands;

  love our blackest garment.

  Let us be poor

  in all but truth, and courage

  handed down

  by the old

  spirits.

  Let us be intimate with

  ancestral ghosts

  and music

  of the undead.

  While love is dangerous

  let us walk bareheaded

  beside the Great River.

  Let us gather blossoms

  under fire.

  Beyond What

  We reach for destinies beyond

  what we have come to know

  and in the romantic hush

  of promises

  perceive each

  the other’s life

  as known mystery.

  Shared. But inviolate.

  No melting. No squeezing

  into One.

  We swing our eyes around

  as well as side to side

  to see the world.

  To choose, renounce,

  this, or that—

  call it a council between equals

  call it love.

  The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom

  Rebellious. Living.

  Against the Elemental Crush.

  A Song of Color

  Blooming

  For Deserving Eyes.

  Blooming Gloriously

  For its Self.

  Revolutionary Petunia.

  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 o
f 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 conditions 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, with
out the express written permission of the publisher.

  Some of these poems previously appeared in Freedomways, Harper’s, Essence, and Black World.

  copyright © 1971, 1972, 1973 by Alice Walker

  cover design by Milan Bozic

  978-1-4532-2402-1

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY ALICE WALKER

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

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