The World Has Changed (11 page)

 

J.O.: There is one poem in
Revolutionary Petunias
which particularly interests me—“For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties.” Can you tell me about what went into the structuring of this rather long poem, and perhaps something about the background of it?

 

A.W.: “For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties” is a pretty real poem. It really is about one of my sisters, a brilliant, studious girl who became one of those Negro Wonders—who collected scholarships like trading stamps and wandered all over the world. (Our hometown didn’t even
have a high school when she came along.) When she came to visit us in Georgia it was—at first—like having Christmas with us all during her vacation. She loved to read and tell stories; she taught me African songs and dances; she cooked fanciful dishes that looked like anything but plain old sharecropper food. I loved her so much it came as a great shock—and a shock I don’t expect to recover from—to learn she was ashamed of us. We were so poor, so dusty and sunburnt. We talked wrong. We didn’t know how to dress, or use the right eating utensils. And so, she drifted away, and I did not understand it. Only later, I realized that sometimes (perhaps), it becomes too painful to bear: seeing your home and family—shabby and seemingly without hope—through the eyes of your new friends and strangers. She had felt—for her own mental health—that the gap that separated us from the rest of the world was too wide for her to keep trying to bridge. She understood how delicate she was.

I started out writing this poem in great anger; hurt, really. I thought I could write a magnificently vicious poem. Yet, even from the first draft, it did not turn out that way. Which is one of the great things about poetry. What you really feel, underneath everything else, will present itself. Your job is not to twist that feeling. So that although being with her now is too painful with memories for either of us to be comfortable, I still retain (as I hope she does) in memories beyond the bad ones, my picture of a sister I loved, “Who walked among the flowers and brought them inside the house, who smelled as good as they, and looked as bright.”

This poem (and my sister received the first draft, which is hers alone, and the way I wish her to relate to the poem) went through fifty drafts (at least) and I worked on it, off and on, for five years. This has never happened before or since. I do not know what to say about the way it is constructed other than to say that as I wrote it the lines and words went, on the paper, to a place comparable to where they lived in my head.

I suppose, actually, that my tremendous response to the poems of W.C. Williams, cummings, and Bashō convinced me that poetry is more like music—in my case, improvisational jazz, where each person blows the note that she hears—than like a cathedral, with every stone in a specific, predetermined place. Whether lines are long or short depends on what the poem itself requires. Like people, some poems are fat and some are thin. Personally, I prefer the short thin ones, which are always
like painting the eye in a tiger (as Muriel Rukeyser once explained it). You wait until the energy and vision are just right, then you write the poem. If you try to write it before it is ready to be written you find yourself adding stripes instead of eyes. Too many stripes and the tiger herself disappears. You will paint a photograph (which is what is wrong with “Burial”) instead of creating a new way of seeing.

The poems that fail will always haunt you. I am haunted by “Ballad of the Brown Girl” and “Johann” in
Once
, and I expect to be haunted by “Nothing Is Right” in
Revolutionary Petunias
. The first two are dishonest, and the third is trite.

The poem “The Girl Who Died #2” was written after I learned of the suicide of a student at the college I attended. I learned, from the dead girl’s rather guilty-sounding “brothers and sisters,” that she had been hounded constantly because she was so “incorrect,” she thought she could be a black hippie. To top that, they tried to make her feel like a traitor because she refused to limit her interest to black men. Anyway, she was a beautiful girl. I was shown a photograph of her by one of her few black friends. She was a little brown-skinned girl from Texas, away from home for the first time, trying to live a life she could live with. She tried to kill herself two or three times before, but I guess the brothers and sisters didn’t think it “correct” to respond with love or attention, since everybody knows it is “incorrect” to even think of suicide if you are a black person. And, of course, black people do not commit suicide. Only colored people and Negroes commit suicide. (See “The Old Warrior Terror”: warriors, you know, always die on the battlefield). I said, when I saw the photograph, that I wished I had been there for her to talk to. When the school invited me to join their board of trustees, it was her face that convinced me. I know nothing about boards and never really trusted them; but I can listen to problems pretty well.... I believe in listening—to a person, the sea, the wind, the trees, but especially to young black women whose rocky road I am still traveling.

CLAUDIA TATE: Critics have frequently commented about the nonlinear structure of
Meridian
. Did you have a particular form or symbolic structure in mind when you wrote this novel?

 

ALICE WALKER: All I was thinking of when I wrote
Meridian
, in terms of structure, was that I wanted one that would continue to be interesting to me. The chronological structure in
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
was interesting as a onetime shot, since I had never before written a novel. So when I wrote
Meridian
, I realized that the chronological sequence is not one that permits me the kind of freedom I need in order to create. And I wanted to do something like a crazy quilt, or like
Cane
[by Jean Toomer]—if you want to be literary—something that works on the mind in different patterns. As for the metaphors and symbols, I suppose, like most writers, I didn’t really think of them; they just sort of happened.

You know, there’s a lot of difference between a crazy quilt and a patchwork quilt. A patchwork quilt is exactly what the name implies—a quilt made of patches. A crazy quilt, on the other hand, only
looks
crazy. It is not “patched”; it is planned. A patchwork quilt would perhaps be a good metaphor for capitalism; a crazy quilt is perhaps a metaphor for socialism. A crazy-quilt story is one that can jump back and forth in time, work on many different levels, and one that can include myth. It is generally much more evocative of metaphor and symbolism than a novel that is chronological in structure, or one devoted, more or less, to rigorous realism, as is
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland
is a very realistic novel. I wanted it to be absolutely visual. I wanted the reader to be able to sit down, pick up that book, and see a little of Georgia from the early twenties through the sixties—the trees, the hills, the dirt, the sky—to feel it, to feel the
pain and the struggle of the family, and the growth of the little girl Ruth. I wanted all of that to be very real. I didn’t want there to be any evasion on the part of the reader. I didn’t want the reader to say, “Now, I think she didn’t mean this.” I wanted him or her to say, “She has to mean this. This is a mean man: she
means
him to be a mean man.” I had a lot of criticism, of course, about Brownfield, and my response is that I know many Brownfields, and it’s a shame that I know so many.

I will not ignore people like Brownfield. I want you to know I know they exist. I want to tell you about them, and there is no way you are going to avoid them. You are going to have to deal with them. I wish people would do that rather than tell me that this is not the right image. You know, they say this man Brownfield is too mean; nobody’s this mean.

 

C.T.: Brownfield’s meanness is balanced against Grange’s third life of compassion and understanding. So the statement is not entirely negative.

 

A.W.: The people who criticize me about Brownfield rarely even talk about Grange. Loyle Hairston is the only black male critic who understood the balance between Grange and Brownfield. Frankly, I think it’s because he has read a lot. I’m not convinced that many of the reviewers have read very much literature, and as a result they seem to think you don’t put in negative characters, period. But I think Loyle’s background in Russian literature, which I like very much—where you get “meanies” and “goodies” and everything—helped him to deal with that book. But it didn’t help him at all when it came to
Meridian
. I know because he told me that he just didn’t understand it and would have to read it again. And I said, “Sure, go right ahead.”

When you asked about critical response to
Meridian
, I must in all honest humility say I don’t know of any critics who could do it justice because I can’t think of anyone. The reviews I’ve seen have taken little parts of the book, never treating it in its entirety. For example, there was a wonderful review by Greil Marcus in the
New Yorker
, but he concentrated totally on the influence of Camus on the work. His whole thing was guilt and expiation. Somebody else talked about the strictly social and political issues of the sixties. Someone else talked about the Indians! And somebody else talked about the invention of legend in the first section where the women’s tongue is buried under the tree and the tree grows miraculously and all that.

Oh yes, then there are the people, mostly Jewish “girls,” who get to the part about Lynn. And every Jewish “girl” I meet under fifty is Lynn or thinks she is. And they claim a) Lynn’s a stereotype, or b) she’s just like them. And then there’s the whole dilemma about black men and what their responsibility is to black women and vice versa. Some Spelman students even called me up and said, “We’ve been all over the campus looking for the tree. Where is it?” So I said, “Where is there a reviewer who can put it all together?”
^a

But anyway, the first novel is easy for the critics to deal with. It’s real. The realism is there even though people do not want to accept Brownfield as a real character. But with
Meridian
, there’s just a lot going on. And when people tell me they just read it once, I do have to smile because I just don’t see how you can read it once and understand anything.

So, what I feel about
Meridian
is that I knew while I was writing it, it remained interesting to me, and that is very important because often when you write things, they’re no longer interesting to you halfway through. Then the best thing to do is to throw them away because they don’t hold up. But
Meridian
’s structure is interesting, and it’s really very carefully done. It’s like the work of one of my favorite artists, Romare Bearden. In some ways
Meridian
is like a collage.

Another reason I think nobody has been able to deal with
Meridian
as a total work is the whole sublayer of Indian consciousness, which as I get older becomes more and more pronounced in my life. I know this sounds very strange, but I had been working very hard, but not consciously really, to let into myself all of what being in America means, and not to exclude any part of it. That’s something I’ve been working on, on a subconscious level. I’ve also been trying to rid my consciousness and my unconscious of the notion of God as a white-haired, British man with big feet and a beard. You know, someone who resembles Charlton Heston. As a subjected people that image has almost been imprinted on our minds, even when we think it hasn’t. It’s there because of the whole concept of God as a person. Because if God is a person, he has to look like someone. But if he’s
not
a person, if she’s not a person, if
it’s
not a person . . . Or, if it is a person, then everybody is it, and that’s all
right. But what I’ve been replacing that original oppressive image with is everything there is, so you get the desert, the trees; you get the birds, the dirt; you get everything. And that’s all God.

I don’t know how to explain this really, but sometimes it’s like when you hear voices. Well, I don’t really hear voices, you’ll be happy to know. But sometimes I have something like visitations and I know they come from what is Indian in me, and I don’t necessarily mean Indian blood because I’m not getting back to that; you know my grandmother was such-and-such, although I’m sure the Cherokees were very thick with black folks in Georgia, until they got run out. But anyway, I had this visitation, and it was about smoking grass, which I had been smoking, and he said, “It’s okay to smoke grass to help you temporarily forget or ease your problems, but you must go through a time when you engage with your problems without the smoke; otherwise, they will not be worked out, but only become layer on layer, like crisscross webs.”

I like that. I like these visitations popping into my mind. I don’t know any Indians. When I was in the desert, not long ago, I saw Indians. But I don’t know them except on a level of longing. In Georgia there are so many remnants of their presence that there is a real kinship with these people who were forced off the land that was theirs.

 

C.T.: How did you go about characterizing
Meridian
?

 

A.W.: I think it started when I became aware that the very brave and amazing people whom I knew in the civil rights movement were often incredibly flawed, and in a way, it was these flaws that both propelled them and “struck” them. I mean they were often stricken because of their flaws which at the same time kept them going. I was fascinated by the way you hardly ever saw their flaws. And yet, they were there, hidden. The image you got on television showed their remarkable control, their sense of wholeness and beauty. In short, they were heroic. It’s just that the other side of that control was the cost of their heroism, which I think as black people, as Americans, we don’t tend to want to look at because the cost is so painful.