The World Has Changed (3 page)

The “small person” who produced the scrapbook, in which she would continue to make entries until 1962, would become the valedictorian of her class at Butler-Baker High School in Eatonton, Georgia, the only high school open to blacks. After her graduation in 1961, Walker would matriculate at Spelman College as a scholarship student. While at Spelman she would meet the scholar and feminist Beverly Guy-Sheftall as well as the scholar and activist Robert Allen, who was enrolled at Morehouse College. She also would become a student of the historians Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, and with their support and encouragement become involved in the civil rights movement. Much to her
disappointment, Walker found the culture of Spelman College more oppressive than liberating. She was a student at Spelman during an era when all students were subjected to the humiliation of pelvic examinations. According to scholar and Spelman alumna Beverly Guy Sheftall, the pelvic examination was administered during a student’s first and third years. The purpose of the pelvic examination was to determine if a student was pregnant. Or, put another way, the purpose of these carefully timed examinations was to police and regulate the sexuality of Spelman students. Walker herself submitted to such an examination. Her critique of the culture of Spelman College is on full display in her second novel,
Meridian
(1976), where the historically black Georgia women’s college emerges as Saxon College, an institution whose mission is to produce virgins and ladies rather than activists and leaders in the tradition of Harriet Tubman. The scholarship student from Putnam County had hoped to encounter a guardian at Spelman College, but instead, as she has observed, she encountered a guard. Walker found the culture of Spelman intolerable after the dismissal of Zinn by Albert Manley, then the president, for the historian’s involvement in the civil rights movement and his open support of Walker and other students involved in the demonstrations organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other civil rights organizations in the Atlanta University Center. After two difficult years at Spelman, Walker transferred to Sarah Lawrence College with the assistance of Lynd in December 1963.

Walker began her studies at Sarah Lawrence in January 1964. While racism was an aspect of the culture of this progressive New York women’s college, she nevertheless flourished in an environment that was particularly supportive of her aspiration to become a writer. Walker’s teachers at Sarah Lawrence were the poets Jane Cooper and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as the social philosopher Helen Lynd (the mother of Staughton Lynd). In “A Talk: Convocation, 1972,” she recalled the lessons they modeled as both teachers and women. Through Lynd, Walker “came to understand that even loneliness has its use, and that sadness is positively the wellspring of creativity.”
¹¹
Through Rukeyser, the daughter of sharecroppers learned the important lesson “that it
is
possible to live in this world on your own terms.”
¹²
In recalling Cooper’s singular attributes, Walker compares her to a “pine tree. Quiet, listening, true. Like the tree you adopt as your best friend when you’re seven. Only
dearer than that for having come through so many storms, and still willing to offer that listening and that peace.”
¹³
These teachers nurtured and supported Walker’s development as both artist and human being. Among them, Rukeyser would play a particularly important role as Walker would confront yet another painful, transforming experience while still a student at Sarah Lawrence.

The world changed again for Walker in the fall of 1965. Returning to Sarah Lawrence after a trip to Kenya and Uganda under the auspices of the Experiment in International Living, she discovered that she was pregnant. The father was David DeMoss, a white student enrolled at Bowdoin College whom Walker had met in 1963 while DeMoss was an exchange student at Morehouse College. At the high point of their relationship, Walker and DeMoss attended together the March on Washington in 1963. While their lives had taken them in different directions, they maintained what both regarded as an important friendship. In 1965, DeMoss was employed by the Peace Corps in Tanzania. He and Walker rendezvoused in Kampala, Uganda, where she conceived. The knowledge of her pregnancy turned Walker’s life upside down: it made it impossible for her to concentrate upon her studies at the beginning of a new academic year at Sarah Lawrence after her sojourn in East Africa. She informed DeMoss of the pregnancy by letter and of her decision to seek an abortion. Walker decided that if she could not secure an abortion that she would commit suicide. “It was me or it,” remembers the writer, who was twenty-one at the time. “One or the other of us was not going to survive.”
¹⁴
Pregnant in 1965, eight years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in
Roe v. Wade
in 1973, Walker was confronted with the terrible choice of an illegal abortion or suicide, for which she prepared with a degree of serenity: “And so, when all my efforts at finding an abortion failed, I planned to kill myself, or—as I thought of it then—to ‘give myself a little rest.’ ”
¹⁵
While DeMoss opposed the abortion, he respected Walker’s decision to seek one. He contributed all of his savings at the time to a fund Walker’s classmates at Sarah Lawrence had established to pay for the abortion, which took place in Manhattan in the fall of 1965.
¹⁶

The abortion behind her, Walker felt as if her life had been returned to her. As with the loss of vision in her right eye, she emerged from the trauma of this event through the cultivation of a strong inner vision. And at this later stage in her life, this inner vision assumed a particular
shape and heft through the act of writing. Days after the abortion, Walker began writing a series of poems that she shared with Rukeyser. She wrote the poems from a place of deep silence and relief, one after another, far into the night, and at dawn she would leave them under the door of Rukeyser’s office. The poet and teacher circulated the poems to publishers with the assistance of Monica McCall, her literary agent and her companion.
¹⁷
This was done without Walker’s knowledge. Some years later, these poems would be published in
Once
(1968), Walker’s first volume of poetry, which she dedicated to Howard Zinn. Of this debut volume, which arose out of a courageous effort to regain and reorder her life after an unwanted pregnancy and an illegal abortion, Walker has observed: “I had need to write them, but I didn’t care if they ever got published. That was irrelevant to me.”
¹⁸
In her final year at Sarah Lawrence, Walker wrote not only the works that would constitute her first volume of poems, but she also wrote such short stories as “To Hell with Dying,” “Flowers,” and “Suicide of an American Girl.” With the encouragement of Rukeyser, the poet Langston Hughes selected “To Hell with Dying” for inclusion in his book
The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers
(1967). The story would subsequently be reprinted in
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women
(1973), and then some time later it would have its own special life as a book for juvenile readers in 1988. Written in one of her many spiral notebooks and tucked between lecture notes, “Flowers” would be published in
In Love and Trouble
. “Suicide of an American Girl,” a short story that generated much discussion and admiration at Sarah Lawrence, remains unpublished.
¹⁹
These early works of poetry and fiction, written while Walker was still an undergraduate, foreshadowed the emergence of an original and powerful voice in American letters.

While writing poetry and fiction, Walker also completed her honors thesis, entitled “Albert Camus: The Development of His Philosophical Position as Reflected in His Novels and Plays” under the direction of her beloved don Helen Lynd.
²⁰
Throughout the twenty-eight-page thesis Lynd wrote in the margins such questions as this one: “What is the difference between an idea, and a ‘philosophical idea’?” Certainly, the objective here was to introduce a greater degree of clarity and precision in the analysis of an exceptional student who came to her through her son. In a very legible longhand, Lynd provides in her summary a balanced assessment of Walker’s examination of Camus’s treatment of the
relationship between innocence and evil, between one’s present condition and one’s potentiality, and between the recognition of the absurd and rebellion, questions that would assume a particular significance in the future writings of her honor student: “I think that you got a great deal from doing this paper and I got a great deal from reading it. You combine very well the pertinent analysis of detail and the major trends in his thought. I like particularly the way you use recognition of the absurd as a basis for human solidarity and a preparation for rebellion. A
good
paper.”
²¹

Having fulfilled the last requirement of her studies, which spanned English, French, philosophy, and creative writing, Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1966. After graduation, she worked as a caseworker at New York City’s Department of Welfare. Not long after her appointment, Walker was awarded a Merrill Fellowship and also was named a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar.
²²
Drawn to the possibility of traveling to Senegal and the opportunity to improve her French with funds from the Merrill Fellowship, yet also riveted by the upheavals in her native South born of the civil rights movement, Walker accepted an internship at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson, Mississippi. There she was under the very able supervision of Marian Wright Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and future founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. During her tenure at the Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson, Walker would seek to bring about progressive social change in Mississippi through the taking of depositions from blacks in nearby Greenwood who had been evicted from their homes for attempting to register to vote.
²³
Soon after her arrival in Jackson the world would change again for Walker, for she met there a “struggling young Jewish law student” who became her husband.
²⁴

The “struggling young Jewish law student” was Melvyn R. Leventhal, a native of Brooklyn, New York, who was enrolled in the law school of New York University. Walker met Leventhal only hours after her arrival in Mississippi at Steven’s Kitchen, “a black owned, soul food restaurant in downtown Jackson where civil rights workers routinely gathered to fill their stomachs and replenish their spirits after battling Jim Crow.”
²⁵
At the time of their meeting in June 1966, Leventhal had completed his second year of law school and was an intern at Jackson’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he reported to Edelman.
Walker says, “I was introduced to Mel when I arrived at the restaurant and I remember thinking he was cute, [but] at the same time, I was very mistrusting of white people in the Movement. I believed what SNCC had been saying about how whites needed to be in their own communities doing civil rights work. I agreed that they were often a detriment in the struggle because of the way blacks in the South had been conditioned to automatically defer to whites.”
²⁶
Walker eventually overcame her mistrust of Leventhal after observing his commitment to social justice through his defiance of white supremacy, often at the risk of his own life. In due course, they moved from being colleagues to friends, and finally to lovers.

At the end of their summer internships in 1966, Walker and Leventhal, now deeply in love, decided to return to New York in order for him to complete his final year of law school at NYU. They established a life together in a one-room apartment in Greenwhich Village above Washington Square Park. Leventhal gave himself over completely to the study of law; Walker turned her attention to writing the earliest drafts of
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
. In the winter of 1967, she accepted a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Missing Wangari (the leopard clan), the name given to Walker by the Kikuyu during her sojourn in Kenya the year before in the summer of 1965, the Jewish boy who had attended public school and a yeshiva in Brooklyn writes to his future bride with the following salutation in a letter of February 2, 1967: “Dear Alice Wangari Lucky Stiff! Back to Uncle Sam for any communication from you. . . . Nothing in my life has dimension without you present. I miss you and love you—I will play cards tonight at Mike’s and win a fortune so that we can spend the rest of our lives in the woods of New Hampshire talking to trees and birds and not shoveling snow.... More soon sweetheart. In the meantime—do all of the writing and laughing and observing for both of us. Mel.”
²⁷
Leventhal writes again to Wangari on February 3: “Shalom: I LOVE YOU (Run your fingers over the back of the page and tell me: how does love feel?)”
²⁸
Reporting his bad luck at cards the night before, he writes: “Nothing else to say except that we lost at cards last night so I guess we cannot spend the rest of our lives in New Hampshire.” Bereft at 33 Washington Square West, in Jesuitical fashion the law student deploys the trees in the neighborhood as both evidence and analogue for his own forlorn state: “The trees outside of our window are asking for you and I don’t know what to
tell them. They ask: ‘aren’t we as good as any other trees, that she should travel a long distance?’ I must think of something to tell them for if I don’t I will not be able to look at them with smiling eyes.” Anxious for word from Wangari and ever supportive of her calling to become a writer, he closes his passionate epistle thusly: “Write soon—I suspect that you have already completed a major piece of fiction? a poem? Nothing? Love Mel.”
²⁹

The following month, Walker and Leventhal would marry in a civil ceremony in New York City Family Court on March 17, 1967, three months before the Supreme Court would outlaw state bans on interracial marriage in
Loving v. Virginia
.
³⁰
Not everyone was pleased, including Carole Darden, a friend of Walker who attended the ceremony. Mrs. Miriam Leventhal, the groom’s mother, dismissed her daughter-in-law as a
schvartze
and in her racism and rage sat shivah.
³¹
In love and in trouble but nevertheless undeterred, Leventhal wrote to Edelman in Jackson seeking her guidance when the newlyweds decided to return to Mississippi to continue their lives together as well as their important work at the Legal Defense and Educational Fund. After a cheerful acknowledgment of the groom’s happy state—“You still sound blissful! which is lovely”—Edelman turns to the serious matter of advising an idealistic interracial couple who have decided to establish a household in a state that has become a national symbol of white supremacy and where, predictably, interracial marriage is illegal. In offering advice, Edelman was also doubtless drawing upon her own experience as a member of an interracial couple living in the Magnolia State; the first African American woman admitted to the bar in Mississippi delivered her advice in the crisp form of a legal brief: