In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

In 1968, Alice Walker was researching voodoo for a short story. She had been reading everything she could find on the subject, but something was wrong with every book. The white writers who had documented voodoo treated it with condescension and exoticism, as though the people who practiced it were curiosities rather than human beings with a rich spiritual tradition. Then, buried in a footnote in one of these books, she found a reference to Zora Neale Hurston. Walker tracked down Hurston's work and began reading. What she found stopped her cold. Here was a black woman writer who approached black culture with dignity, with respect, with the kind of intimate knowledge that comes from belonging. Hurston did not stand outside the culture looking in; she was inside it, and her writing treated voodoo practitioners the same way she treated everyone else in her work—as complex, full people. For Walker, reading Hurston was like discovering a literary ancestor she had never known existed. It was the first time she had encountered a black female writer who treated her own people not as problems to be solved or victims to be pitied, but as the natural, unapologetic center of her own universe. And in that moment of recognition, something shifted. Walker realized that if Hurston could write this way, she could too. She had been given permission.

This is the central problem at the heart of Walker's collection of essays: the desperate need for models. Vincent van Gogh, writing from a mental institution near the end of his life, described suffering from an "absolute lack of models," and Walker recognized the same predicament in her own life as a black woman artist. The literature she had been taught in school was largely written by white men and women, and it did not reflect her experience. The accepted canon was not just indifferent to her—it was often actively hostile. Toni Morrison had said that she wrote the kind of books she wanted to read, and Walker took this idea further. She realized that as a black woman artist in a society where accepted literature was so often sexist and racist, she had to do the work of two people. She had to be her own model as well as the artist attending to that model. This was not a choice; it was a survival strategy.

Walker's own background was, by conventional standards, unpromising. She grew up poor in rural Georgia, the daughter of sharecroppers, at the end of a long road that faced "the edge of the world on one side and nobody for miles on the other." A white Northern professor once told her that this background was not adequate for becoming a poet. But Walker rejects this idea entirely. What the professor saw as deprivation, she sees as a source of strength. Her childhood gave her a sense of community and a closeness to the earth that she considers invaluable. She argues that black American literature is fundamentally different from white American literature in a crucial way: white writers tend to end their books on a note of resigned acceptance, while black writers, rooted in the tradition of slave narratives, write from a conviction that escape for the body and freedom for the soul go together. The struggle for a better destiny is not a theme; it is the foundation.

This philosophy has practical applications. While teaching at a Headstart program for aspiring black teachers in Mississippi, Walker realized that the women she was working with had no sense of the value of their own histories. They had lived through racism, poverty, and violence, but they had never been taught to see their own experiences as meaningful. So she had them write short testimonies about what they had endured. One of these women, the program's director, wrote about the night her family fought off a Klan bombing while her pregnant daughter, whose husband was serving in Vietnam, forced the attackers away from their home. The husband returned 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," she wrote. For Walker, this is what history looks like when it is told by the people who lived it.

But the search for models is complicated by the fact that some of the best writers came from the other side of the racial divide. Walker deeply admires Flannery O'Connor, a white Southern writer who treated her black characters with unusual humility and restraint. But when Walker visits O'Connor's well-preserved Georgia house while her own childhood home nearby is rotting into dust, she is filled with fury. Someone is paid to take care of O'Connor's empty house, while Walker's—which her family never even owned—is slowly disappearing. She wants to capture "the whole story," a history that includes both black and white perspectives equally, but the physical inequality of their houses makes this ambition feel almost naive.

The political awakening that made Walker's work possible came from Martin Luther King Jr. She first saw him on her family's new television set, and the experience was like a rebirth. "It was just six years ago that I began to be alive," she wrote. Before King, her mother had been addicted to soap operas featuring wealthy white characters, imagining herself in every scene with her braided hair turned blond and her dark skin made smooth and white. King's speeches gave Walker something her mother had never had: the feeling that she had claim to the land of her birth. He made it possible for black Southerners to choose to stay in the South rather than being driven away.

But revolution, Walker discovered, is never complete. When she visits Cuba with a group of African-American artists, she is fascinated by the possibilities of socialism. She meets a Cuban official who reminds her physically of her deceased father, and she imagines what her sharecropper father might have become under a fairer system. But she is also troubled by Cuba's treatment of homosexuals and by the fact that even revolutionary women still dye their hair blonde. The revolution is nowhere near finished.

Living in Mississippi as part of a mixed-race couple, Walker fell into a deep depression. She felt that her fiction writing was useless compared to direct political action. "Art was not enough," she thought, and her art in particular would change nothing. A Harvard-educated radical visited her and spoke aggressively of killing honkies, but he was too scared to walk the streets alone at night. Walker's despair was quieter and more genuine. She eventually realized that writing can record a reality deeper than what can be photographed. The consciousness of a people cannot be captured in a news report, but to some extent, it can be written.

This brings her to the central metaphor of the collection: the garden. Walker's mother was an accomplished gardener who turned whatever rocky soil she landed on into a blooming yard. Strangers would come to her house asking for cuttings from her flowers. This gardening was her way of ordering the universe, her art. But what about the generations of black women before her who had no access to gardens or paint or paper? The slave poet Phyllis Wheatley was so thoroughly oppressed that she wrote poems praising a "Goddess with golden hair"—admiring the very people who enslaved her. Walker sees the contemporary black female artist as expressing the thwarted dreams of these silenced ancestors. The quilts her grandmother made from scraps, the stories told late at night after a day of forced labor—these are the gardens of women who had no other materials.

The wounds within the black community are also deep. Colorism—the preference for lighter skin—is rooted in the plantation system, where lighter-skinned slaves were often given preferential treatment. Walker's high school friend Doreen was rejected by a lighter-skinned suitor because of her very dark skin, and she later married a West Indian man and submitted to a sexist culture she did not understand. Walker notes that many prominent black male leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Marcus Garvey, chose light-skinned wives, even while they affirmed blackness in the abstract. There is also a pressure on black women to be invincible. At a symposium, Walker burst into tears while discussing the prevalence of young female suicides, and the audience responded with incomprehension and chiding. Only the poet June Jordan had the warmth and irreverence to make her laugh through her tears.

The book ends with a deeply personal story. Walker was blinded in one eye as a child when her brother shot her with a BB gun. She felt freakish and self-conscious until surgery improved the eye's appearance. But it was her young daughter who finally allowed her to accept the damaged part of herself. Looking at Walker's blind eye, her daughter said, "Mama, there's a world in your eye." And Walker saw that it was possible to love it. She had a dream that night where she was dancing alone to Stevie Wonder, and another dancer joined her—a dancer who was also herself. They danced and kissed and held each other through the night. The other dancer had come through all right, as she had done.

This is the thread that ties Walker's essays together: the insistence on wholeness, on roundness, on refusing to be reduced to a single label or a single wound. The search for our mothers' gardens is the search for all the creativity that was never allowed to bloom, and the determination to let it flower now.