Alice Walker’s Womanist Maternal

WOMEN'S STUDIES 2017, VOL. 46, NO. 3, 221–233 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2017.1285768 Alice Walker’s Womanist Maternal Cheryl R. Hopson Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green The truest most enduring impulse I have is simply to write. —Alice Walker (from “Duties of a Black Revolutionary Artist”)1 Alice Walker has written that she learned the value of truth when a child and by way of her father, a man who seemed to esteem the truth above all else, especially when spoken by his youngest child and daughter, “baby Alice” (In Search 385). Later, from reading the work of Malcolm X, Walker learned further “that the truth … simply because it is truth always has an element of delight [and] … is the organ of what is right” (qtd. in White 143). For Walker, a self-identified “Black revolutionary artist,”2 telling and honoring the truth carries the possibility of transformation and delight (In Search 130). This essay examines the practice of truth and truth-telling as advanced in Walker’s 1979 essay “One Child of One’s Own: A Meaningful Digression within the Work(s),” included in her first essay collection, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose.3 “One Child of One’s Own” was first given as a speech to honor Walker’s former professor and mentor, the late Jewish poet Muriel Rukeyser, a woman who taught Walker “that it was possible to be passionate about writing and to live in the world on my own terms,” as well as “the inseparability of art and a/the child” (In Search 362). For Walker, Rukeyser was proof that it was possible to be both an artist and a mother. In her choice of title, Walker invokes the late British novelist and feminist icon Virginia Woolf’s pioneering essay A Room of One’s Own. Woolf famously argues in her work that in order to create art that is lasting, women must have “a room of [their] own”—that is, a physically excluded space in which they can write and think. Woolf continues that women writers who have produced literary masterpieces were, without exception, childless (see chapter 4 of A Room of One’s Own). She also argues that “genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people … nor the working classes” (48). As a Black feminist writer born to CONTACT Cheryl R. Hopson [email protected] Department of Diversity and Community Studies, Western Kentucky University, 1906 College Heights Blvd #21066, Bowling Green, KY 42101, USA. 1 Included in the collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 130–38. 2 Throughout this essay I will be capitalizing “Black” according to Walker’s self-styling as a “Black revolutionary artist.” 3 Joshunda Sanders asserts in Bitch Magazine that “Walker and her work have remained impervious to traditional notions of what female writers in America can create in the world,” and continues that Walker’s “legacy as a womanist cannot be over-stated” (55–56). © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 222 C. R. HOPSON sharecroppers, and as the mother of a daughter, Walker seems to bristle at Woolf’s ideas about “literary women” (In Search 368). In “One Child of One’s Own,” an essay published fifty years after Woolf’s, Walker amends the British writer’s statement by asserting her own way of being a literary woman. “One Child of One’s Own” is groundbreaking: in the essay, Walker jettisons a status quo of contemporary Black motherhood to offer her own thoughts about and experiences of motherhood and mothering, women’s creativity and autonomy, and feminism as a self-named womanist artist at a particular time in US and Black feminist history.4 In doing so she demonstrates the sagacity of the second-wave feminist adage “the personal is political,” while also expressing the ways in which the political is deeply personal. And, significantly, Walker articulates two characteristic elements of her “womanist maternal”: (1) a customary discursive practice of truthtelling and (2) a belief in truth as an expression of maternal love.5 Covering the years between 1968 and 1979, “One Child of One’s Own” draws on Walker’s experiences as a womanist artist, mother, and daughter in an effort to break Black maternal silences, in particular concerning the act of motherhood, and mothering a child or children. Walker is part of a generation of Black feminists who broke the perceived and experienced silences of previous generations of Black women—namely their mothers—and insisted on writing their truths as heterosexual and lesbian mothers, daughters, lovers, and feminists. Walker’s essay is a critical intervening work on par with Frances Beale’s Black feminist canonical essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” In “Double Jeopardy,” Beale famously argues that Black women are triply oppressed by racism, sexism, and classism, and that when they are “defined by those other than ourselves, the qualities ascribed to us are not in our interests, but rather reflect the nature of the roles which we are intended to play”—the roles of mother, child-bearer, and caretaker (108). Walker wrote this essay when she was thirty-five years old and a newly single parent. In the text, she constructs motherhood as affective, bodily, and a creative endeavor on par with writing a novel; she foregrounds the intersectional dimensions of Black mothering, which, according to sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, “occurs in specific historical situations framed by interlocking structures of race, class, and gender,” and sexuality (45). A central defining feature of Walker’s life is the creation of art. Significantly, Walker’s creative work doubles as economic labor. Motherhood, however, and a/the child or children are regarded as “meaningful, some might say necessary” digressions within the work (In Search 362). As Walker might put it, a child is 4 Walker’s term for “a Black feminist or feminist of color” (In Search xi–xii). Her work should be read in concert with Black women writers/thinkers such as Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Sherley Anne Williams; and Black feminist writers Toni Cade Bambara’s anthology The Black Woman, Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn, The Cancer Journals, and Sister, Outsider, as well as alongside the writings of Bernice Johnson Reagon. 5 WOMEN’S STUDIES 223 not separate from or central to the work, but a piece of the work. Walker resists writing motherhood or mothering as experiences that satisfy a woman’s every wish and desire, and/or fulfills her purpose as a human being. Neither does she construct them as relationships of maternal subordination to one’s child/ children. In focusing on the creative work and de-centering a/the child, Walker insists on Black mothers’ “right to the fullness of a life” (Christian 247, emphasis in original).6 In doing so, she also joins in “efforts by Black women to define and value their own experiences of motherhood” (Collins 46).7 The years between 1967 and 1979, the decade-plus in which the essay “One Child of One’s Own” reflects back on, were a rich, albeit challenging, period for Walker. 1967 was also the year Walker married her Jewish sweetheart, an NYU law student become Civil Rights attorney, Melvyn Leventhal, and relocated with Leventhal to Jackson, Mississippi. Walker gave birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter, Rebecca (née Leventhal) Walker in November of 1969, and days before completing her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, published in 1970. Walker and Leventhal later divorced in 1976, and Walker established residence in northern California. It was also during the years that “One Child of One’s Own” reflects back on that Walker published a novel on the modern civil rights movement, Meridian (1976), three poetry collections, including Revolutionary Petunias (1973), the short story collection, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973); as well as a reader on Zora Neale Hurston, a children’s book on Langston Hughes, and a number of significant essays and reviews later reprinted in Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). Walker also served as a contributing editor at Ms. magazine from 1974–1978. Significantly, it was the creative and critical work Walker produced during this prolific though difficult period in her life that would serve to establish her as a leading figure within American, African American, and World letters, and as a leading figure within American, Black, and world feminisms. Tilling the garden In “One Child of One’s Own,” Walker presents herself as what motherhood scholar Andrea O’Reilly would term an “outlaw from the institution of 6 Here I am borrowing phrasing from the late Black feminist literary scholar Barbara Christian who writes in Black Feminist Criticism that Alice Walker insists that “mothers have a right to a fullness of life and that sacrifices should be a means to more life rather than an end in itself” (247). 7 For comparison, see, for example, Toni Cade Bambara’s anthology The Black Woman, Audre Lorde’s essay collection Sister, Outsider, Barbara Smith’s anthology Home Girls, Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class, bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and Mary Ann Weathers’s essay “An Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as a Revolutionary Force,” included in Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Words of Fire and the anthology Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought. 224 C. R. HOPSON motherhood” (172). In her phrasing, O’Reilly makes obvious reference to the late poet and theorist Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as institution (i.e., as one under the control of men), in which “the mother … is perceived and understood only in terms of her maternal identity” and “women’s experience of mothering,” which is “female-defined and centered and potentially empowering for women” (O’Reilly 2). In her classic text on motherhood Of Woman Born (1976), Rich posits two meanings of maternity, the first being “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children,” and the second being “… the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control” (13). Rich continues that “[m]ost women in history have become mothers without choice” (13). According to O’Reilly, women who are “outlaws” understand motherhood to be a relational dynamic aligned with the needs and expectations of men, under the control of men, and in accordance with the patriarchal perception of women primarily as mothers and child-bearers. Outlaws from the institution of motherhood, in their awareness of motherhood as institution, practice what O’Reilly refers to as “mothering,” which is woman-centered, affirming, authentic, and powerful. Through their way of mothering, then, outlaws from the institution of motherhood reject the notion of the necessary subordination of women to their roles as mothers, and to the needs, wants, and desires of a child. Rather, these women mother from a place of self-love and self-affirmation that is modeled for and extends to the child/children. Walker has stated that In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, the collection that includes “One Child of One’s Own,” is her legacy to her daughter, Rebecca, whom she hoped would find in the collection information about, and insight into “even [her] missteps” as her mother (qtd. in White 370). A plan of life In “One Child of One’s Own,” Walker makes three interconnected arguments, the first being that society is poorly arranged for children and is antagonistic toward mothers, Black and poor mothers in particular. Her second argument disputes the idea of a compulsory motherhood and for “a plan of life” for women artists who desire to become mothers that allows for one child and no more (In Search 362). Having one child allows the mother freedom to move around, but having more than one child makes her a “sitting-duck” (In Search 362). In proposing her plan, Walker writes, “For those of us who both love and fear The Child—because of the work we do—but who would be lovers only, if we could, I propose and defend a plan of life that encourages one child of one’s own, which I consider a meaningful—some might say necessary—digression within the WOMEN’S STUDIES 225 work(s)” (In Search 362; emphasis in original). Her strategy suggests ontology for the woman artist that neither begins nor ends with the birth of a child. Walker also argues for a reconsideration of the Black mother-daughter relationship, where mother and daughter co-exist in a friendship-based and dialogic sisterhood that allows for and anticipates the continuous development of both. In such a relationship, mother and daughter function as defending sisters against any and all forces that deny the fullness of their existence. This is a personal vision of what the mother-daughter relationship can be for Walker and her daughter. In conceiving of herself and her daughter as sisters, she seeks to liberate herself in thought and practice from a mother-child relational dynamic in which she alone, as the mother, is responsible for the nurturance, guidance, and emotional and psychological support of her daughter. Instead, and as “sisters,” mother and daughter are enjoined in a Black and Black-identified sisterhood that neither necessitates nor anticipates the sacrifice of mother or daughter.8 On becoming a mother In “One Child of One’s Own” Walker gives three reasons for having a baby—curiosity, boredom, and the need to circumvent the US military draft. Between the years 1968 and 1969, Walker was under tremendous pressure to conceive a child at twenty-four and twenty-five years old and thereby rescue her then husband from the draft. Melvyn Leventhal was himself twenty-five at the time. Walker writes in the essay that she and Leventhal had three options: the “first, conscientious objector status … was immediately denied us”; the second option was to flee to Canada, “which did not thrill me but which I would gladly have done rather than have Mel go to prison,” and the third was “to make … a ‘family man’” of Leventhal (In Search 366). The couple chose the third option, which required Walker to become pregnant (In Search 366). She writes in “One Child” of worrying what would become of the couple in the event that she could not conceive a child before Leventhal’s twenty-sixth birthday, the age that would have rendered him ineligible for the draft. In a journal entry included in the essay dated July 1968, a fuming and fretful Walker wonders what will become of her husband and herself in the event that she is unable to become pregnant in time. Walker writes, “… if the draft calls before I am certified pregnant, what will we do? Go to Canada? Mel hates running as much as I do, which is why we’re in Mississippi. I hate this country, but that includes being made to leave it” (In Search 367; emphasis in original). In another journal entry dated January 2, 1969, 8 For a point of reference see Astrid Henry’s Not My Mother’s Sister, a work in which Henry argues against Second Wave feminists mothers’ conception of daughters as figurative sisters. 226 C. R. HOPSON there is the hope that Leventhal will reach his twenty-sixth birthday before the draft and—although Walker never states this directly—perhaps even before she is officially pregnant. She writes, “Only two and a half months until Mel is 26. If we can make it without having to ‘flee’ the country, we will be thankful” (In Search 366; emphasis in original). Walker’s desperation and fury are palpable in both journal entries. Also apparent is the felt influence of external forces such as the US government and legal system on Walker’s choice to become a mother. As Walker made strides to make a family man out of her husband, she also labored over her first novel and fought to stave off depression and suicidal tendencies. On her good days, she taught, worked on her book, wrote “a simple history book for use in black child-care centers in Jackson,” recorded the autobiographies of local black women, and quilted (In Search 367). At the time, Walker was living with her Jewish husband in Jackson, Mississippi, where the couple had moved shortly after their marriage in 1967 to help desegregate the state.9 On her bad days, Walker was depressed, anxious, and enraged over the United States’s involvement in the Vietnam War. She writes also in “One Child” of being in “a state of apprehension over the annual amount of rainfall in Vancouver [and] the slow rate of ‘progress’ in Mississippi” (In Search 367). As Walker tells it, when she did not write she “thought of making bombs and throwing them. Of shooting racists. Of doing away—as painlessly and neatly as possible … with myself” (In Search 369). More than anything else, the act of writing rescued Walker from the abyss of depression, suicide, and possible homicide. Walker became pregnant with her daughter in February of 1969, “just fifteen days,” as she writes, before Leventhal’s twenty-sixth birthday (In Search 367; emphasis in original). Rebecca was born on November 17, 1969, three days after Walker completed work on her first novel; she was twenty-five years old.10 Leventhal’s work as a civil rights attorney required that he travel a great deal throughout Mississippi, frequently leaving his wife home alone with their newborn daughter. The demands of caring for an infant compounded Walker’s isolation, and living in Mississippi began taking its toll on her psychological health. In her biography of the author, Evelyn C. White observes, “Alice wrote with the threat of a firebomb being tossed into her home at any minute” and “more often than not … was … left to contend with the threatening phone calls or hate-filled letter [from the Klu Klux Klan] that always seemed to arrive just as she was polishing a paragraph or trying to nurse a hungry and agitated 9 Mississippi was one of sixteen states where interracial marriage between African Americans and whites remained illegal as late as 1967. 10 Rebecca was born in Jackson’s newly desegregated hospital. In The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Walker writes of her sense at the time of Rebecca’s birth that she, her then husband and their “neither black nor white child,” were a major offense to hospital staffers—“We were what they had been taught was an impossibility, as unlikely as a two-headed calf: a happy interracial couple, married … having a child, whom we obviously cherished, together” (34–35). WOMEN’S STUDIES 227 Rebecca” (184). Walker tells White that she was “often overwhelmed … [and felt] torn between [her] desire to do justice to [her] art and the demands of [her] marriage in a place where the tree of freedom was constantly being watered with blood” (qtd. in White 182). To say that Walker’s early days and years as a new mother were challenging is an understatement. The internal fears Walker faced as a Black woman writer—and as a woman from a poor rural Southern background in particular—coupled with external threats from the Klan, made the experience of new motherhood and parenting more terrifying and onerous than a delight. She writes in “One Child” of feeling constricted rather than enlarged by the experience. Still, it both interesting and telling that of the three reasons Walker gives for having a baby, she writes of feeling redeemed by the first, curiosity—for in her words “curiosity … justifies itself” and is her “natural state” (In Search 366). It is curiosity, adds Walker, that has led her “headlong into every worthwhile experience” she has ever had (In Search 366). But Walker’s use of the word “redeemed” in the context of becoming a mother suggests a feeling that she has somehow sinned against herself. After all, this was a woman who just five years prior—and after a horrifying experience of an unwanted pregnancy and subsequent illegal termination—determined to “reclaim her life and focus on her writing” (White 119). Perhaps the act of abortion led to Walker’s understanding of “what living under other people’s politics can force us to do” (Living By the Word 11–12). Yet just a few years following her determination to reclaim and to refocus, Walker was again forced to make a life-altering choice in an effort to save herself, her husband, and the life and family they were creating together. While Rebecca’s birth proved a happy occasion for the Walker/Leventhal household, Walker felt conflicted about her new role. Scholar Susan Maushart writes in The Mask of Motherhood (1999) that “[a]lmost inevitably, the bearing of children precipitates an identity crisis for women” (xix). Maushart continues that the “initial trauma of transition” is followed by the “painful process of reevaluating life choices [and], of bringing to consciousness our most deeply embedded assumptions about the way things ought to be” (xix). The crisis/shift in consciousness Maushart outlines becomes evident in the following passage from “One Child,” in which Walker writes, For me, there has been conflict, struggle, occasional defeat—not only in affirming the life of my own child (children) at all costs, but also in seeing in that affirmation a fond acceptance and confirmation of myself in a world that would deny me the untrampled blossoming of my own existence. (In Search 362) Walker writes truthfully of her struggle to affirm her child and of her occasional failure or inability to do so. She considers her predicament to be 228 C. R. HOPSON “political in the deepest sense,” and thus proposes her “plan of life” as a possible remedy (In Search 362). It is telling that in the mother-child relationship Walker constructs in “One Child,” two seemingly opposing emotions predominate: fear and love. For Walker, fear disrupts their relationship while love connects her to her daughter. Walker suggests that fear of her child was fostered as much by society’s teaching and arrangement as it was by her chosen profession of creative writing. She writes of the pressure to choose between mothering and writing, with the suggestion being that with One child it is possible to simultaneously affirm oneself and one’s work, as well as one’s child, for the most part. What this requires, however, is a new way of seeing and approaching motherhood, mothering, and the mother-child relationship. On fear Walker confesses in “One Child of One’s Own” that she was “terrified of having children” (In Search 362). She connects her fears to three “mistakes” in her thinking: she thought she would have children, and not one child (In Search 363). Second to this, she saw her child as an additional obstacle to her work, rather than the racist, sexist, classist, and misogynistic society that subjugates and victimizes both mother and daughter, Finally, Walker thought that “none of the benefits of having a child would accrue to my writing” (In Search 363). She connects her third logical mistake to having “bought the prevailing sexist directive: you have to have balls (be a man) to write” (In Search 363). After the birth of her daughter, however, her perspective began to shift. Humbled by the experience of giving birth and the pain associated with creating new life, Walker comes to consider childbirth as perhaps one of the last remaining miracles of life. She writes in “One Child” of being changed forever, from “a woman whose ‘womb’ had been … her head—that is to say, certain small seeds had gone in, and rather different if not larger or better ‘creations’ had come out—to a woman who … had two wombs! No. To a woman who had written books, conceived in her head, and who had also engendered at least one human being in her body” (In Search 368). As a new mother, childbirth is an act of courage that surpasses “ballsdom” for Walker (In Search 368). Walker connects her early fears about mothering a/the child to what she refers to in “One Child” as “women’s folly” and “literary women’s folly,” writing: “In the vast general store of ‘literary Women’s Folly’ I discovered these warnings: ‘Most women who wrote in the past were childless’—Tillie Olson. Childless and white, I mentally added,” and “‘Those lady Poets must not have babies, man’, John Berryman,” and “‘Women have not created as fully as men because once she has a child a woman cannot give herself to her work the way a man can.’” (In Search 368) WOMEN’S STUDIES 229 Walker responds that what remains missing from all the warnings is the fundamental “conviction that women have the ability to plan their lives for periods longer than nine months, and … the courage to believe that experience, and the expression of that experience, may simply be different, unique even, rather than ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’” (In Search 369). But again, this is Walker writing in 1979, almost a decade after giving birth and publishing her first novel. Ten years before, she was worried to distraction that becoming a mother would mean she was done for as a writer. Her essay suggests that it takes time and experience for her perspective on motherhood to shift. It also takes time to change how she views the presence of her daughter in her life, from seeing her daughter as an additional impediment to understanding that both she and Rebecca are vulnerable to and victims of an antagonistic society. Walker continues in “One Child” that it is women’s folly, the often discouraging and misguided advice and information with which women provide other women, and mothers in particular, that makes women feel constricted rather than enlarged by their experiences as mothers. Instead, she argues that women’s wisdom should be the replacement; that is, women sharing the truth of their experiences as mothers, daughters, and as women; for women, it is wisdom that will enhance—rather than diminish— their experiences as mothers (In Search 363). To make her argument against “women’s folly” and in favor of “women’s wisdom,” Walker turns to her relationship with her own mother, Minnie Lou Walker (In Search 363). Walker includes in “One Child” an ostensibly private conversation between herself and her mother that occurred shortly after the birth of Walker’s daughter. She writes that her mother advised her to have another baby soon so that Rebecca would have a playmate, which would also allow Walker to be “done with” pregnancy and childbirth. She writes of being appalled at her mother’s advice, which she regards as uncharacteristically conformist, as: “Such advice does not come from what [Minnie Lou] recalls of her own experience … [but rather] from a pool of such misguidance women have collected over the millennia to help themselves feel less foolish for having more than one child” (In Search 363–64; emphasis in original). Walker continues that, “the rebellious, generally pithy advice that comes from a woman’s own experience more often resembles my mother’s automatic response to any woman she meets who pines for children but has been serenely blessed with none: ‘If the Lord sets you free, be free indeed’” (In Search 364; emphasis in original). In her italicized comments on her mother’s proffered wisdom, Walker makes explicit her ideas about compulsory motherhood—it is foolish and conformist. For Walker, when her mother speaks the truth of her experiences (as reflected in her statement “[i]f the Lord sets you free, be free indeed”), Minnie Lou Walker jettisons a status quo to articulate her reality as a Black woman and as a mother of eight children, and it is a 230 C. R. HOPSON maternal truth that aligns with Walker’s experience of being her mother’s daughter. Walker writes of her mother, “I remember a woman struggling” (In Search 364). As the youngest of Minnie Lou’s eight children, Walker was an early audience for her mother’s stories and an early witness to her mother’s life. In her now canonical essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” the title essay of her first collection, Walker characterizes her mother as a woman who labored continuously, both within and outside the home, to provide and care for her children. She writes that Minnie Lou Walker “made all the clothes” her family wore, “all the towels and sheets” they used (328). Walker continues that her mother “spent her summer canning vegetable and fruits … and her winter evening making quilts enough to cover all our beds” (328). Minnie Loue Walker worked both outside of the home in the fields with her husband “beside” and “not behind” her husband, and her “day began before sunup and did not end until late at night” (238). Never once did she have a moment to herself, suggests her youngest daughter in the essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” during which she was undisturbed by the thoughts or needs of others, including her husband and children. This is in part because while both Walker’s parents were sharecroppers during the day, Walker’s mother also worked for more than forty years away from the home as a domestic. Walker celebrates her mother as an artist in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” and she also characterizes her mother as an artist whose gifts at gardening and storytelling were constantly disrupted by her children, and she demonstrates the unceasing labor required of Minnie Lou Walker to care and provide for her family. Still, as Walker writes in “One Child,” Minnie Lou Walker persisted in her efforts to persuade her daughter to have another child soon after Rebecca’s birth, stating: “‘Why … ‘until my fifth child I was like a young girl. I could pick up and go anywhere I wanted to’” (In Search 364). Walker responds that her mother was “a young girl … still under twenty-five when her fifth child was born, my age when I became pregnant with Rebecca” (In Search 364). Walker writes that she is not easily “seduced” by her mother’s remembering of what was for her a painful past and so she rejects the rather charming and tranquil image of mothering five children, and all before the age of twentyfive, her mother conjures in her attempts to sway her youngest daughter. Walker’s inclusion of the conversation between herself and her mother demonstrates Minnie Lou Walker’s perhaps unwitting perpetuation of and capitulation to women’s folly. It as well serves to buttress Walker’s argument throughout “One Child” that when women tell the truth of their experiences as mothers they not only challenge and disrupt conformist ideas and practices, but also refuse collusion in the suppression of their own experiences and resist passing on misinformation and outright lies to their daughters. WOMEN’S STUDIES 231 “Dear Alice,” In the concluding section of “One Child,” Walker speaks of studying a selfmade sign that hangs above her writing desk. The sign, which might be read as an encouraging note-to-self, considers specific ontological challenges famous women writers of the past faced. The note reads, “Dear Alice, Virginia Woolf had madness, George Eliot had ostracism … Jane Austen had no privacy and no love life. The Bronte sisters never went anywhere and died young and dependent on their father. Zora Hurston … had no money and poor health. You have Rebecca—who is much more delightful and less distracting than any of the calamities above” (In Search 368). It is significant that Walker not only includes her sign in her essay, but that she also refuses to sanitize it. The sign reflects a truth of Walker’s experience of motherhood and mothering, and that truth is that something about the experiences was, in Walker’s estimation, calamitous. Walker’s use of the word “calamities” in relation to her daughter might prove startling for some, but it does bring home a key point of her essay: Walker’s belief that a child, however meaningful, necessary, and loved, is for the womanist artist a digression, which is to say a “less distracting” delightful and brief departure from the creative work (In Search 383). For the writer, Rebecca proves to be much more delightful and far less of a distraction than the possibilities of early death, poor health, poverty, a loveless life, ostracism, and the madness Walker’s literary foremothers had to face. Truth hurts? Walker did not escape criticism for expressing her maternal truth in “One Child.” Critics continue to respond to Walker’s truthful account of her struggle to see her daughter less as an obstacle to her life and more as a victim of a racist, sexist, and misogynistic society.11 More than a decade after the publication of “One Child of One’s Own,” Walker responded to the criticism in writing: Someone has said that if I write about the birth of my child and am not rhapsodic, this will hurt the child. Holding my daughter close to me, however, all I can promise her is not to lie. All I can claim to offer her truly is the example of my life. This is what I know. One’s experience, in fact, is all one ever truly owns. (Anything We Love Can Be Saved 66–67) 11 For context, see Walker’s collection Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997) and Rebecca Walker’s memoir, Baby Love. Alice Walker does not name names in Anything We Love Can Be Saved. For my part I will say that by critics I mean those individuals both academic and lay person with whom I have engaged in conversations about my work on the Walkers. When I share that I work on Alice Walker and Rebecca Walker both independent of one another, and as one example of a Black feminist/womanist mother/daughter writing pair I pursue in my research and scholarship, the criticism of A.W.’s mothering I find is a persistent thread—a critical one that is informing and generative. I see it from some of my undergraduate students as well, and especially when I teach Rebecca Walker’s memoir Black, White & Jewish or Alice Walker’s essay “One Child of One’s Own.” 232 C. R. HOPSON But as Walker well knows, there is pain in rejecting the status quo, as she does with “One Child,” and part of that pain for Walker is in the misrepresentation of her expression of maternal love as arrogance and disregard. For Walker to reject the status quo of maternal silence is for her to render herself vulnerable to the misunderstandings or miscomprehensions of others. Walker pays a price for her public discursive maternal truths—Rebecca publicly, discursively rakes her over the coals her own writings, and she loses access to her one and only biological grandchild, Tenzin (née Walker) Rangdrol.12 Still, and as “One Child” testifies, Walker will not pass on to her daughter—nor to her readers—the lies and untruths she experienced as her mother’s daughter. Walker’s refusal is both her gift and her legacy to Rebecca and also to Rebecca’s son, Tenzin. Walker continues in the collection Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997) that “If the essay is painful to [Rebecca], I believe nonetheless it is better than a lie. Surely better than the lies I was told—‘for my own good’—only to sniff them out eventually and become entangled in them” (67). Walker adds, “We are, as women writers with children, in that marvelous spot of danger in which there is great risk but, as well, great possibilities for change” (67). Walker’s commitment to the truth and to truth-telling demonstrates her refusal to leave her daughter ignorant and vulnerable to lies she endured about motherhood and mothering. Significantly, it manifests Walker’s willingness to jettison the propriety and silence of a previous generation of Black mothers who were for various reasons uncommunicative with their daughters about motherhood, mothering, sex, and procreation. If Walker’s mother pretended that all of her babies grew out of stumps in a tree, and feigned forgetfulness about the difficulties and pain of birthing and caring for eight children, then Walker would communicate to her daughter as well as to her reading public the special challenges and pleasures she faced as a womanist artist and as a mother born and reared in the Jim Crow South to sharecropper parents. The truth-telling Walker engages in in “One Child of One’s Own” reflects her bold unwillingness as a Black feminist artist and mother to silence, distort, or suppress her experiences of and ideas about motherhood and mothering. Although not without risk, this practice of truth-telling is compelling, revolutionary, and a central, defining characteristic of Walker’s womanist maternal. Works cited Beale, Frances. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara, Washington Square Press, 2005, pp. 109–22. Christian, Barbara. “An Angle of Seeing: Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood and Alice Walker’s Meridian.” Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Pergamon, 1985, pp. 211–52. 12 See Rebecca Walker’s Baby Love. WOMEN’S STUDIES 233 Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000. Maushart, Susan. The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It. Penguin, 2000. O’Reilly, Andrea. “Mothering Against Motherhood and the Possibility of Empowered Maternity for Mothers and Their Children.” From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, edited by O’Reilly, State U of New York P, 2004, pp. 159–74. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Norton, 1976. Sanders, Joshunda. “What Greater Gift: Alice Walker’s Legacy Continues to Bloom.” Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Popular Culture, Fall 2013, pp. 55–57. Academic Search Complete. Walker. Alice. Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism. Ballantine, 1997. ———. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1983. ———. Living By the Word. Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1988. ———. The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart. Ballantine, 2000. Walker, Rebecca. Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. Riverhead, 2007. White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. Norton, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt Brace, 1929. Copyright of Women's Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.