In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

In this essay, Walker repeats in greater detail a family story that she alludes to in her opening essay. This story is her mother’s humiliation at a flour distribution center in the small Georgia town in which she lived. Because her mother had dressed up to exchange vouchers for flour, the official—a white woman—refused to serve her, stating that she looked too prosperous to be on social welfare. Walker sees the story as an ultimately triumphant one, for the reason that her mother was able to lean on others in her community for flour: “In this small story is revealed the condition and strength of a people” (16).

Walker further states that this sense of community is an inheritance of the black Southern writer. Recalling her own rural Southern childhood, she writes that she is not nostalgic for poverty—her parents were sharecroppers—but for the sense of community and the closeness to the earth that her childhood nurtured in her. She recalls a “white Northern professor” (20) suggesting to her that her childhood was not an adequate one for becoming a poet, and she refutes him here:

Perhaps my Northern brothers will not believe me when I say that there is a great deal of positive material that I can draw from my ‘underprivileged’ background. But they have never lived, as I have, at the end of a long road in a house that was faced by the edge of the world on one side and nobody for miles on the other (20-21).

Walker also argues here with William Faulkner, taking issue with what she perceives to be his racist views. In her view, Faulkner wrote about race relations from a complacent rather than a revolutionary standpoint: “Unlike Tolstoy, Faulkner was not prepared to struggle to change the structure of the society he was born in […] When the provincial mind starts out and continues on a narrow and unprotesting course, ‘genius’ itself must run on a track” (20). 

This essay concerns Walker’s experience teaching at the Headstart Friends of the Children of Mississippi. This was a teacher-training program with no government funding, designed for the black children of Mississippi. Walker’s role was as a consultant and a mentor for these aspiring teachers, most of them poor and uneducated black women. In an effort to get these women to understand their own histories, so that they could then pass these histories on to the children that they taught, she had them write short testimonies about their experiences with racism in the South. The essay includes segments from these testimonies, many of which deal with Klan violence, as well as the less organized violence of bigoted townspeople. 

The essay also includes a segment from a memoir-in-progress by Mrs. Winston Hudson, the director of the Headstart program. The memoir, entitled The Autobiography of Mrs. Winston Hudson, a Black Woman of Mississippi, concerns Hudson’s struggle to desegregate her community and the Klan violence that she and her family faced as a result of these struggles. In the segment that is quoted in this essay, she recalls a time when she and her family fended off a Klan bombing. Her pregnant daughter, whose husband was in Vietnam, was staying with her at the time and nearly miscarried while forcing the Klan away from their home. Her husband returned home from the war wounded a few months later: “And I’ll let anyone decide within themselves how he feels about this country that his son will have to grow up in” (27).  

This is a transcript of a graduation speech that Walker delivered at Sarah Lawrence College, her own alma mater. The speech is directed towards young women and particularly black young women—Sarah Lawrence became a coeducational college in 1968—and urges them to believe in themselves and to learn to face down prejudice. Walker recalls her time editing the memoir of Mrs. Winston Hudson—detailed in “‘But Yet and Still the Cotton Gin Kept on Working…’”—and cites Hudson’s own struggles with racism. She suggests that racism remains a problem even at a progressive school like Sarah Lawrence, noting the scarcity of black writers on the reading curriculum: “I am discouraged when a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence says there is not enough literature by black women and men to make a full year’s course […] It is shocking to hear that the only black woman writer white and black academicians have heard of is Gwendolyn Brooks” (36).

Walker does, however, praise three formative teachers that she had while a student at Sarah Lawrence: her philosophy professor Helen Merrell Lynd, and the two poets and literature professors Muriel Rukeyser and Jane Cooper. She states that she learned from Lynd that even sadness and loneliness “have their use” (38); that Rukeyser taught her how to live bravely; and that Cooper taught her the value of listening and patience. At the end of her speech she reads out loud two original poems, entitled “Be Nobody’s Darling” and “Reassurance.” 

In this essay, Walker returns her childhood home after she becomes ill with lupus. Accompanied by her mother, the women visit the Georgia house of Flannery O’Connor, one of her favorite writers. O’Connor’s home is not far from Walker’s own childhood home, which is now in a state of neglect and abandonment. Walker contrasts her old house with the tended state of O’Connor’s empty house: “What I feel at the moment of knocking is fury that someone is paid to take care of her house, though no one lives in it, and that her house still, in fact, stands, while mine—which of course we never owned anyway—is slowly rotting into dust” (57).

What Walker values about O’Connor, apart from her artistry, is the detachment that sprang from her religious convictions. This detachment, Walker suggests, allowed O’Connor to treat her white characters in a stark and unsentimental fashion and not to presume about the inner lives of her black characters: “She destroyed the last vestiges of sentimentality in white Southern writing; she caused white women to look ridiculous on pedestals, and she approached her black characters—as a mature artist—with unusual humility and restraint” (59).

The essay represents Walker’s attempt to come to terms with both her admiration of O’Connor and her awareness of their different social statuses. She knows that while O’Connor was generally fair in her art, in her life she benefited from the racist structures of the South. Walker’s pilgrimage to O’Connor’s home—and to her own—represents her attempt to capture “the whole story”(49)—one that includes blacks and whites equally and that does justice to both sides of Southern history. 

This essay considers the writer Jean Toomer through a review of his collected writings, The Wayward and the Seeking. Many of these writings are autobiographical, and through them Walker comes to understand Toomer as a racial opportunist, embracing his blackness when it was convenient for him to do so and renouncing it when it became a burden. Toomer came from a mixed-race background and could generally “pass” as white. His most famous and influential novel, Cane, concerned the lives of black Southerners, and in selling the book, Toomer emphasized the black side of his own history. However, he refused to identify himself as black when it came time to promote the book. He eventually married a wealthy white woman and moved with her to a Quaker community in rural Pennsylvania.

Walker believes Cane was Toomer’s best work and that the book represented the best part of him. She believes that we should continue to value Cane—which influenced a number of black writers—while renouncing Toomer’s hypocrisy and indecision: “Cane was for Toomer a double ‘swan song.’ He meant it to memorialize a culture he thought was dying, whose folk spirit he considered beautiful, but he was also saying goodbye to the ‘Negro’ he felt dying in himself” (65). 

This essay is a review of the novel Second Class Citizen by Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta. While Walker finds the style of the novel plain and unremarkable, she considers it to be an important book for its frank and unusual depiction of the role of motherhood in the life of the female artist. The novel, which is semi-autobiographical, concerns an intellectually ambitious Nigerian woman who moves with her husband and children to London, where she must contend with open racism and sexism. She must also cope with the raising of her five children. She ultimately transcends her circumstances not by pushing her children away, but rather by integrating them into her writing: she decides that she will write a novel, not for herself, but for the adults that they will become.

The narrator, whose name is Adah, eventually leaves her husband and completes her novel, all while working in a local library. Walker sees her—and Emecheta’s—story as one that “causes a rethinking of traditional Western ideas about how art is produced”(69). She suggests that “[o]ur culture separates the duties of raising children from those of creative work” (69-70), an attitude that is perhaps to everyone’s detriment. 

This essay is a review of Jean McMahon Humez’s Gifts of Power. The book is a biography of the 19th century minister and mystic Rebecca Cox Jackson. Walker traces Jackson’s trajectory from a poor, illiterate girl in Philadelphia with an older minister brother to a spiritual leader in her own right. Jackson believed in divine visions and overcame her illiteracy by calling on the will of God to learn how to read the Bible. She later left her husband—also involved in her family’s African Methodist church—to found a black Quaker community of her own. She lived with a younger woman, Rebecca Perot, until Perot’s death; the two may or may not have had a romantic relationship.

Walker finds Jackson an inspiring and ahead-of-her-time figure in her self-directedness and in the gnostic nature of her beliefs; she calls Humez’s biography, “an extraordinary document” (78). She takes issue, however, with Humez’s speculations that Jackson might have been a lesbian in another age, stating that “lesbian” is a word that does not have its roots in black culture and that it is not a suitably rich or inclusive word for a relationship like Jackson’s and Perot’s. Walker prefers the term “womanist,” by which she means “whole” or “round” women: “[W]omen who love other women, yes, but women who also have concern, in a culture that oppresses all black people […] for their fathers, brothers, and sons, no matter how they feel about them as males” (81).  

This essay is an appreciation of Zora Neale Hurston, whom Walker regards as a role model. She recalls coming upon her book Of Mules and Men as a college student and being delighted by its portrayal of black southerners. Hurston’s portrayal gave Walker’s own family history back to herself: “For what Zora’s book did was this: it gave [my family] back all the stories they had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed […] and showed them how marvelous, and, indeed, priceless, they are” (85).

Hurston is an important figure to Walker for her style and spirit, as much as for her writing. Walker notes that she was ahead of her time in her sexual independence and also in her proudly African style of dress. At a time when most other black American writers were modeling themselves on European intellectuals, Hurston was more focused on “Africa, Haiti, Jamaica, and—for a little racial diversity (Indians)—Honduras” (85). She frequently wrapped a scarf around her head, a style that, as Walker notes, would become popular among black women in the 1960s.

The essay is a “cautionary tale” on account of Hurston’s troubles later in life. She suffered from health problems and ran out of money. She essentially died poor and alone and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her problems also shrunk her spirit, according to Walker, and caused her to produce work that was conventional and timid compared to her earlier work. Nevertheless, Walker wishes to celebrate the best part of Hurston’s example. She sees her spirit as having been more akin to a musician’s than to a writer’s and imagines her in an “unholy trinity” (91) with the singers Billy Holiday and Bessie Smith, also gifted and irreverent women. 

In this essay, Walker travels to Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, along with her friend Charlotte, a white Southern graduate student who is interested in Hurston’s life and work. Attempting to find Hurston’s grave and Walker posing as Hurston’s “illegitimate”(109) niece, the two of them interview various locals. They are met with contradictory and confusing information; while most all of the townspeople whom they talk to remember Hurston or know who she is, their memories of her differ.

While Walker never does find the exact location of Hurston’s grave, she does emerge with a fuller picture of Eatonville, an all-black community. Hurston did not support integration, a view that is shared by Mrs. Moseley, the first local whom Walker and Charlotte interview. They also talk to a mortuary director, a headstone seller, a friend of Hurston’s named Dr. Benton, and Hurston’s neighbor near the end of her life. This neighbor—a nondescript elderly black man—tells Walker that Hurston did not get along with her family, even while having moved back to her hometown, and that her family did not attend her funeral.

Walker initially sees her pilgrimage as absurd and hopeless; later, she considers it to have been simply sad, a sadness that she hopes will be instructive: “It is only later, when the pain is not so direct a threat to one’s own existence, that what was learned in that moment of comical lunacy is understood […] perhaps they are also times when greater disciplines are born” (116).