The World Has Changed (38 page)

 

M.J.: What—I can’t answer this myself either. What do you think is being overlooked now? You know, thirty, forty years ago, quilts were being overlooked. What are we taking for granted now?

 

A.W.: You know, that’s something for everyone here to think about. I would have to ponder it. I would have to ponder it for a while, and
really
look at the culture, and look at my friends. I have many artist friends. What are they creating? I have a friend who not only paints huge beautiful paintings but she realized that she had never seen a frame that she liked. And so now when she paints these amazing paintings, she also makes the frame and paints the frame so that you get the whole thing at once.

 

M.J.: It’s very beautiful. Whenever I teach that very troubled and troubling book
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, I always ask myself, “What are we missing, what are we as ignorant about as Harriet Beecher Stowe was?” I mean, she grasped many things, but she could not grasp that, say, black people had a civilization; they had to become good Christians. And I think, “All right, what are we going to look as foolish about, you know, twenty, forty, a hundred years from now? Will it be animals? Will it be nature?” Yes, I’m sure.

 

A.W.: I think it will definitely be animals, other animals, because we’re animals, too. But I think that very soon, everyone, even if they don’t change their eating habits, everyone will have to acknowledge that animals feel, and that they think, and that they are perfectly aware of what’s happening to them, and that they are constantly trying to communicate
this to us, sometimes through illness, so I think that in the same way that two hundred years ago, people looking at us, you know, our ancestors out there slaving away, and the ministers were saying that we didn’t have souls, so it was okay to just basically grind us into the ground, in that same way, I think, people will see that the way that human beings abuse other animals, and the way that human beings think of them solely as food, I mean, I think that people will just think that that’s really just unbelievable. And in fact, at least I hope this is what happens, because it’s also true it could go the other way, where we just become beings who just
devour
mindlessly whatever there is, you know, people, we devour animals, the planet, and nobody stops.

 

M.J.: Well, warfare is a form of devouring.

 

A.W.: Uh-huh.

 

M.J.: People, it seems to me—my experience of you is as one of the first black feminists publicly to be called that [whom] I could, not only that I read, but that I spoke to in person and interviewed. I do remember, in those days, people would ask every woman of color who was also a feminist, “Well, how do you experience the balance of racism and sexism? Does one matter more? Did one affect you more? And I want to ask this differently, I want to actually ask you what you
remember
as your first experience of racial and sexual—it could be powerlessness, it could be self-doubt, it could be a sense that contempt was coming from outside or suddenly had sprung up inside you.

 

A.W.: Well, on the racial issue, I think that I noticed, from a very early age, that white people, when they came into the vicinity of my parents’ basically shack, caused a certain
coldness
to just descend on the whole area, and it seemed to petrify my parents, so I noticed that they actually behaved in a different way, and this was extremely frightening to a small child. The other racial incident that was very marked for me was the reality that my mother, who I needed to be at home with me, had to go to work for these other people, white people, with white children, and that that meant that I was left unprotected at home, and this was a
terrible
situation. It was so—and it’s so global, I mean this is what happens when a mother has to go somewhere else to tend other people’s children
and her own children are unprotected, and this is something that we should really work on very hard to stop, because our children need us, and we need to be with them, and it’s a bind because usually our governments don’t give adequate support to mothers, to parenting. In fact, every child that is born should know that it is going to be well taken care of, fed, clothed, housed, and educated, at the very minimum, and that its mother can be with it.

 

M.J.: And that it was wanted.

 

A.W.: And that it was wanted, yes. Now, the other question, about sexism.

 

M.J.: Yes.

 

A.W.: Well, I have to say that my father, who had started out, according to my mother—I wasn’t there, early in their marriage—but he actually was a very tender parent, very tender with his children; he liked to bathe them and nurture them, much more than she did, this is what she says, but by the time I was a child, he had become very narrow and so he actually thought that there were certain areas of work for men and for women. For instance, he would not let his sons sweep a floor or wash a dish, because this was women’s work. Needless to say, we fought. [laughter] Because it was absurd, you know; we grew up with men and women doing everything. My mother milked cows, my mother worked in the fields, and so it made me very sad for him, in addition to being very angry with him, that he started to narrow his perspective about women.

 

M.J.: And you perceived that as soon as the first chore.

 

A.W.: Exactly. I certainly did. I was not happy.

 

M.J.: Did your brothers lord it over you?

 

A.W.: Of course, of course they did, of course they did.

 

M.J.: Yes, how could a brother not?

 

A.W.: “Yeah, well, we don’t have to do that. Yeah, we made a mess in the kitchen, but we don’t have to clean it up, we’re boys.” I wish I knew where the rat poison was. [laughter] Those are the kinds of things that really go very deep when you are oppressed. It
is
a kind of oppression, and you actually see that they are preparing you to be oppressed in the bigger culture and in the world, which I
really
don’t like.

 

M.J.: That’s the thing. As soon as you take the small things for granted, you’re prepared to take the larger things for granted.

 

A.W.: Exactly.

 

M.J.: Now, let me add the third element to the trinity, as I now call it, which is class. What was your first visceral experience of that?

 

A.W.: Well, we were poor, although we didn’t really think of ourselves as poor, because we had—as my sister loves to say, “We had plenty food.” [laughter] “How can you be poor if you have plenty food?” But we were, and the way you know that you’re poor is if you can’t afford health care. That’s really it. If you cannot see a dentist, if you cannot, you know, go when you have an appendicitis attack, well, you’re poor. I really
got
it when our cousins, who lived in Macon, [which is] a bigger town than Eatonton, would come and visit, and they had cars, and they could go to the dentist, and they could have health care, and I couldn’t understand it, because we
worked
. We worked
so
hard. We had these huge fields to, you know, clear, and plant, and poison cotton; I remember being out there five years old with my little dipstick and my bucket. You have to do that to kill the boll weevils. See, you didn’t even know about this.

 

[laughter]

 

M.J.: No, I didn’t, but I’m a city girl.

 

A.W.: Well, somebody back there was not.

 

[laughter]

 

M.J.: I can sing Ma Rainey’s “Boll Weevil Blues.”

 

[laughter]

 

A.W.: Well, it didn’t last that long for me either, because that whole system was changing, and it was changing basically because the landowners, I know, the people who had grabbed all the land, had basically worn it
out
with cotton; it was a monocrop, they planted cotton until it just—the same was true of, you know, many places in the world, like Hawaii, for instance, where you can go fly over Hawaii and see all these huge plantations where there used to be pineapples, but they planted pineapples there until
nothing
will come up. So that is why eventually sharecropping, that whole system, collapsed.

 

M.J.: A land driver, like a soul driver. An antidote.

 

A.W.: No, the thing is, these roses don’t have any scent, and that’s a big problem. [laughter] And this is something that we should actually refuse. We should start refusing plants that don’t have their essence, you know? [applause] I mean, the same way that you refuse to be with people who don’t have an essence. [laughter] You know? Don’t waste your time. [laughter]

 

M.J.: It’s true.

 

A.W.: So this looks—it’s got the red, and it’s got the green, and it’s the little spot of color, but this rose has no life, this rose has no essence.

 

M.J.: It’s an accessory.

 

A.W.: It is, and this is—if we’re not careful, this is what we will be, this is exactly what we will be.

 

M.J.: Or fruit with no taste, there is that.

 

A.W.: You know, GMO’ed food, you know, engineered food, we have to keep our souls, our grits, that just—ineffable thing that makes us
us
. You know, we don’t need to all look alike and be the same size, you know; this brave new world, isn’t it a nightmare?

 

[laughter]

 

M.J.: Yes, yes it is. I’m abandoning any notion of transition. [laughter] This is going to be a collage conversation, and that’s just fine. Oh God, yes, yes yes yes. But you know what? Alice’s first book of poetry, or first or second, was called
Revolutionary Petunias
, so you were already there. Now, you started off as a poet.

 

A.W.: I did, yes.

 

M.J.: How come—why start as a poet and what drove you toward prose?

 

A.W.: I love the succinctness of poetry. In fact, my early poetry, actually my very early poetry, was kind of long-winded, but I soon understood that that was not necessary, partly because I became enamored of the Buddhist Japanese haiku poets, Bashō and Issa, you know, poets like that. I liked the idea that you could say something, you could write a poem, and it would be almost like a snapshot of something. One of my very favorite poems is “Sitting quietly, doing nothing / Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” Now, isn’t that just
it
? [laughter] I mean, doesn’t that just make you want to just, you know, abandon all the strife and stress of trying to get somewhere, you know, “Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself”? Do you remember that? How do we forget that? How do we forget that that is actually also what is happening, and that the
rushing
that we do—I came down—well, first of all, we got here last night, we checked into a hotel that was just a
nightmare.
It was so noisy. It was just impossible. So I got up early this morning, checked myself into a different hotel, went to bed, but even so, coming down to here, I noticed so many people, all of them moving very fast, and you know, it is just not necessary.

 

[laughter]

 

A.W.: Well, you notice, I lived in Brooklyn, not in Manhattan. Yeah, I did, I have lived in New York many times, and I enjoyed it very much. But even when I lived here, I worried a bit about the
speed
of things, because there is nowhere really to go other than where you are. It was
much slower, I had a rose garden, I had roses that were hundred-year-old roses, and they smelled great, and right around the roses I planted collard greens, and they
also
smelled great.

 

M.J.: Now, did the smells mingle?

 

A.W.: Does it matter? [laughter]

 

M.J.: It would be interesting if they did.

 

A.W.: Yes, of course they did.

 

M.J.: Yeah, no, I like that idea.

 

A.W.: Good. That’s the thing, you know, more things go together than you would ever imagine.

 

M.J.: There we go. There we go. Now what about living—could you live anyplace but in California now, within the U.S.?

 

A.W.: I don’t think so; I really like Northern California, not Southern, but Northern, and I like it because it reminds me a lot of Georgia.

 

M.J.: Now, I’m going to wander back to your writing life. Okay?

 

A.W.: All right.

 

M.J.: Your first novel,
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
, which came out—Alice, really, you know, is—basically your whole career arcs the movement right from civil rights into the women’s movement in 1970, and that was when the first little controversies began that would then—and you can roll your eyes, I don’t blame you—that would then get larger. But the first controversy, as I recall, had to do with that old question of intragroup and self-censorship, meaning, if you belong—well, bluntly put, you got
some
criticism, which would recur, for depicting several generations of black men in torment, in various emotional and social ways, and that torment was taken out on themselves and on the women in their lives. It marked, it seems to me, it really split that world
open, and—let me put it properly, because it’s something I’m obsessed with, because it so hits you internally.

If you belong to an oppressed group, you are constantly aware of being stared at, and watched, and judged. Therefore, though you may be criticizing each other constantly, and though you may be criticizing the oppressor, there is a great deal of anxiety about when any kind of criticism of the group is
published
so that the outside world can see it. I experience this. The visceral feeling is “It will be turned against us,” that’s what one always grew up hearing. That’s what I think was happening. How do you—and it climaxed with
The Color Purple
, and then it—I’m not going to worry about “climaxed,” I’m just not—