73 pages • 2 hours read
Alice WalkerIn Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Key Figures
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston appears frequently in these essays, both as subject and side note, and is clearly a formative figure for Walker. Walker admires her not only for her fiction writing—she considers her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, to be an underrated 20th century classic—but for her work as an anthropologist and her independent and irreverent spirit. Walker explains that she first encountered her writing while working on a short story that involved voodoo practitioners; the existing studies that she found, mostly by white men, all struck her as simplistic and condescending. Only Hurston’s work seemed to treat the subject with both the respect and the fondness that it deserved.
Hurston is important to Walker as a role model, but also for her connection to the South (she grew up in an all-black community in Eatonville, Florida, the subject of much of her writing). Much as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also did for Walker, Hurston’s writing served to return the South to her. Walker writes of showing Hurston’s work to exiled Southern relatives in Boston, and how it caused them to recognize themselves and their ancestors:
For what Zora’s work did was this: it gave them back all the stories they had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed (told to us years ago by our parents and grandparents—not one of whom could not tell a story to make you weep, or laugh) and showed how marvelous, indeed priceless, they were (85).
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an important influence for Walker, as well as a connection to home. At the same time that he made Walker aware of her oppression, and pointed her in the direction of political activism, he also made her feel that there was a place for her in the South: “And when he spoke of ‘letting freedom ring’ across the ‘green hills of Alabama and the red hills of Georgia’ I saw again what he was always uniquely able to make me see: that I, in fact, had claim to the land of my birth” (160).
Walker writes about her first encounter with King and his ideas as a rebirth: “It was six years ago that I began to be alive” (122). She first sees him on television, having previously seen only her mother’s soap operas, all of them featuring wealthy, white characters: “Like a good omen for the future, the face of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the first black face I saw on our new television screen” (134).
Walker is influenced by King’s activism but also by his pacifist strategies, strategies that she recognizes to be far more difficult and draining than violent revolutionary action. In her essay “Recording the Seasons,” Walker writes about a period of depression that she experienced while living in Mississippi: “The burden of a nonviolent, pacifist philosophy in a violent, nonpacifist society caused me to feel, almost always, as if I had not done enough” (225).
King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, whom Walker interviews, speaks of pacifism as a challenging long game: “People who think nonviolence is easy don’t realize that it’s a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one’s own welfare” (155).
Alice Walker’s Father
Alice Walker’s father appears in these essays as a loving father and an intelligent and capable man, limited by his poverty and his lack of education. In her essay “Brothers and Sisters,” Walker recalls the sexism inherent in her upbringing and the different behavioral standards that were handed down to her and her older brothers. She remembers how feminism allowed her to see, for the first time, that this sexism was not only her father’s fault:
It was not until I became a student of women’s liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father […] I was relieved to know his sexist behavior was not something uniquely his own, but, rather, an imitation of the behavior of the society around us (330).
In her essay on socialism in Cuba, “My Father’s Country is the Poor,” Walker also writes about needing distance from her father in order to see him more clearly and forgivingly. She writes about how this distance began when she went away to college, therefore taking a path that her father had never taken: “When I left my hometown in Georgia at seventeen and went off to college, it was virtually the end of my always tenuous relationship with my father” (216). Yet while Walker is in Cuba, she begins to have dreams about her father and sees his doppelganger in a Cuban official, who to her has a pride and a purposefulness that her father often lacked. This again allows her to see her father in his social context and to imagine what he might have become under a fairer system.
Alice Walker’s Mother
Alice Walker’s mother appears in these essays as a figure both exalted and down-to-earth. In Walker’s titular essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” she is as much a symbol as she is an individual. While the “gardens” of the essay’s title refers to Walker’s mother’s uncommon gift for gardening, it is also a metaphor, referring to the buried creativity of an older generation of black women. Likewise, while Walker’s mother is literally her mother, she is also intended to stand in for mothers generally:
And yet, it is to my mother—and all our mothers who were not famous—that I went in search of the secret of what has fed that muzzled and often mutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the black woman has inherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to this day (239).
In other essays, Walker’s mother appears as a source of downright levity, and as very much of an individual. In her essay “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience,” Walker recalls her mother being refused service at a Red Cross flour distribution center and the grim yet feisty way that she repeated this story to Walker years later: “Then she added thoughtfully, ‘And that old woman that turned me off so short got down so bad in the end that she was walking on two sticks’” (16). Walker’s mother also appears, as a traveling companion and a frequent source of one-liners, in Walker’s essay about Flannery O’ Connor, “Beyond the Peacock.” Walker’s mother accompanies Walker first to a visit to their old house in Georgia—now abandoned and mostly destroyed—and then to O’Connor’s empty but tended house not far away. Walker’s mother regards both places with an equal even-handedness. Looking at the shell of her old house, she recalls: “It was right here that I got my first washing machine!” (45) Looking at the peacocks in O’Connor’s yard, she observes—in response to Walker’s observation—“Peacocks are inspiring”—that “Yes, and they’ll eat up every bloom you have, if you don’t watch out” (59). Walker allows these deflating commonsense words to be the last words in the essay.
Related Titles
By Alice Walker
