In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

This is a transcript of a speech that Walker presented to the Black Students’ Association at Sarah Lawrence College in 1970. Walker begins the speech by recalling her own time at Sarah Lawrence as an undergraduate, and how she appreciated the freedom of the school. She relates how she only later came to realize that her education there was one-sided. While she admired and loved many of her literature teachers there, she believes they did not expose her to enough black writers: “I began to feel that subtly and without intent or malice, I had been miseducated” (132). 

Walker states that she is now in “another college,” one that she has founded herself and that will “never end” (132). It is a college with a more inclusive curriculum, at which both the very old and the very young are welcome. She tells her audience that in order to be black revolutionary artists, they must help the young with remedial work at times and also learn to listen to their elders. She reminds them that “[t]he dull, frustrating work with our people is the work of the black revolutionary artist” (135) and also cautions them against overly simplistic and dogmatic views. She states how telling them that they should not hate all white people out of hand: “I am impressed with people who claim they can see every person and event in strict terms of black and white, but generally their work is not […] either black or white, but a dull, uniform gray” (137). 

This is a review of a novel by Florence Engel Randall, entitled The Almost Year. It is a combination of a ghost story and a realistic novel, which concerns an underprivileged young black woman’s year at the home of a wealthy white suburban family. While the family members are well-intentioned, they fail to connect to the girl. The girl then begins to see spirits in the family’s household, which remind her of her own awkward presence there. This plot twist inspires both the girl and the family to let down their barriers.

Walker finds the novel to be a realistically “warm” portrayal of a difficult human dynamic, and also to be “remarkably free of cant” (139). However, she finally sees it as a conventional and limited effort, in that it does not allow for permanent social change, only for provisional moments of warmth between people of different social classes: “What one yearns for (and indeed must have if we are to share this earth as unashamed friends) is a […] family that is radically involved in changing society, not merely giving succor to its oppressed” (141). 

This is the transcript of a 1972 speech that Walker delivered in a Jackson, Mississippi restaurant, which up until recently had refused to serve people of color. In the speech, Walker discusses King’s legacy and what it meant to her. The word “choice” in the speech’s title refers to what Walker sees as one of King’s greatest legacies—he made it possible for Southern black people like herself to remain in or return to the South, if they wished to do so. Walker states that before King, it was standard for black Southern people to leave their homeland, being driven away—despite their attachment to the land—by poverty, racism, and heartbreak. King, through his “acts” and “books,” restored black people’s sense of connection to their land and furnished them with enough pride to claim it: “He gave us back our heritage” (145). 

This is an interview with Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. The interview takes place in King’s Atlanta house. Walker recalls having interviewed her many years ago, when her husband was still alive, also at the Atlanta house. She was a student at Spelman College at the time, one of a group of students who were on their way to the World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. King herself was about to leave for a peace conference in Geneva (147).

Walker finds the older, widowed King to be more guarded: “The first thing I noticed was that her eyes have changed. They are reserved, almost cool, and she is tense; perhaps because she has been written about so often and because she is bored with it” (149). She nevertheless finds her to be impressively forceful and determined. King remains involved in political campaigning and also frequently sings in “Freedom concerts” (154), as a part of her campaigning. She directs the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center, working from the basement of her house, where she is aided by Mrs. Farris, King Jr’s sister.

Walker and King discuss feminism, social justice, and the role of nonviolence. The disengagement of many black women with the feminist movement frustrates Walker, and she asks King for her thoughts on this. King states that she can understand why black women might not want to concentrate only on women when they feel that their entire people need saving; however, she also believes that “[t]he black woman has a special role to play” (152). Regarding nonviolence, she maintains that “[i]t is very difficult to get people beyond the point of seeing nonviolence as something you do in marches and demonstrations. It is harder to get people to the point of organizing to bring pressure to bear on changing society” (155).  

In this essay, Walker recalls her participation, as a college student, in the March on Washington, where she heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. She contrasts the view of him that she had in Washington—as a powerful, charismatic speaker—with an earlier impression that she had of him when she saw him speak at Atlanta University: “It was a surprise […] to find at the March on Washington that the same voice that had seemed ponderous and uninspired in a small lecture hall was now as electrifying in its tone as it was in its message” (159).

Walker recalls how King inspired her, and other exiled Southern African-Americans like her, to return to the South and to reclaim her Southern heritage. She remembers how, growing up poor and black in Georgia, she had often felt like “an exile in [her] own town”(162), even while she felt a connection to the landscape. As a young aspiring writer, she had always most loved and admired writers whose writing showed a connection to their landscapes and their histories. Returning to the South allowed her to continue in this tradition of writing. 

Walker speculates over what has changed for African-Americans, 10 years after the March. She finds that some changes have been positive: for instance, there is more prosperity among black people, more black people are choosing to live in the South, and figures such as Charles Evers are running for office in Mississippi. Moreover, public spaces that were closed to African-Americans when Walker was a young girl are now desegregated, and Walker is heartened by the ease she sees among young black people in formerly all-white spaces, such as swimming pools and restaurants.

More negatively, Walker is dismayed by the narrowness and materialism that she sees among prosperous black suburbanites:

I think Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be dismayed by the lack of radicalism in the new black middle class, and discouraged to know that a majority of the black people helped most by the Movement of the sixties has abandoned itself to the pursuit of cars, expensive furniture, large houses, and the finest Scotch (168).

She also sees a different sort of narrowness among black radicals, many of whom regard women as subservient. 

This is a review of a collection of poems by Langston Hughes, edited by Faith Berry. The poems share themes of revolution and protest, and Walker notes that Hughes was little-appreciated as a poet of social change. She discusses Hughes’s interest in communism and his visits to Russia, which he wrote about in his essay, “The Soviet Union and Color.” He felt that communism solved the problem of racism, along with other societal problems, and that Russia as a society was more advanced than the United States.

Hughes later came to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy because of his rumored communist activities and was forced to testify before the House. Walker speculates that this may have been one reason why Hughes later abandoned themes of revolution in his poetry. She also speculates that Hughes, as an artist, may have been alienated by the dogmatism of political thought, as well as by the violence of radical political action: “Several people he knew in Russia were purged or imprisoned or killed. This experience was bound to have an impact on a man who, since childhood, was incapable of violence: it made him physically sick” (176). This essay includes two short poems by Hughes, one entitled “God to Hungry Child” and the other entitled “Tired.” 

This is a short review of a movie titled Countdown at Kusini. The movie was produced by an all-black female collective called Delta Sigma Theta; according to Walker, it is “the largest black sorority in the world” (179). The movie is set in Nigeria and concerns a visiting musician who joins an anti-colonial uprising.

Walker finds the movie flawed in some of its casting choices, but despite its difficult subject matter, it is nevertheless worthy and inspiring:

[I]t is basically an upbeat, joyous film, with incredible vistas of Africa […] and African ceremonies, music, and customs. One leaves the theater ready to join the next revolutionary battle, not in dejection over how much there is to be done, but in awe of the possibilities for change once an oppressed people decides to rise (180). 

This is a descriptive personal essay, concerning Walker’s visit to the South (Atlanta, Georgia and Jackson, Mississippi), although she is now living in Brooklyn. The title refers to “lulls” in political activity, and Walker’s focus is on the lives of people she knows in the South—family, neighbors, teachers, and former boyfriends—and the degree to which politics has altered or not altered these lives. Many of the people to whom she talks—for example, her childhood friend Joe Harris—have themselves lived up North and disliked it to the point where they returned home. Other people, such as her daughter’s old kindergarten teacher Mrs. Cornelius, have remained in the South and seem content with their lives and their roles in the community.

Walker finds a sense of community among African-Americans in the South that she sees less among African-Americans up North, even in her own closely knit Brooklyn neighborhood. Her old Jackson neighbor Lorene is horrified when Walker tells her that, living in Brooklyn, she has learned not to trust other black people: “The bond of black kinship—so sturdy, so resilient—has finally been broken in the cities of the North” (194). The final part of the essay takes place in Boston, where Walker also spent some time growing up, and where she still has family. She talks to a Georgian transplant there named Martha, who is horrified and disappointed by the state of Boston's public schools and by the violence and poverty of Boston’s black neighborhoods. Walker concludes this essay on a note of sorrowful yearning: “I wonder if America will ever have a place for poor people. It appears they are doomed to be eternal transients” (198).  

This essay concerns a trip to Cuba that Walker made as a young woman, along with a group of African-American artists. The editors of a magazine called The Black Scholar sponsored them, while the Cuban Institute for Friendship among Peoples hosted them. The essay is interspersed with segments from memoirs by Fidel Castro, Ernesto Cardenal, and Angela Davis, as well as with poems and journal entries by Walker herself.  

Walker writes of having been fascinated by the possibilities of socialism and social revolution since attending a youth peace conference in Helsinki, where she saw a Cuban delegation speak. In Havana, she meets with the exiled Black Panther leader Huey Long, who is living in a hotel with his wife and children, and who is homesick for the States. She also meets with Pablo Diaz: the spokesperson for the Cuban Institute for Friendship, and a man who reminds her physically of her deceased father. She sorrowfully recalls how she and her father became estranged once she moved away from home to attend college and speculates that Pablo Diaz—a man whom she finds articulate, forceful, and happy in his role in life—is what her father might have become had he had more opportunities for social and economic advancement. Such opportunities were denied him in the racist, capitalist society in which he lived.

Walker’s visit to Cuba leaves her feeling generally positive about the practical benefits of socialism, while also noting confusing and awkward differences between Cuban and American attitudes. She notes that the students whom she meets in Cuba, although multi-racial, seem to identify primarily as Cubans. There is therefore a mutual incomprehension between them and Walker’s all-black tour group, who define themselves more by their race than by their nationality. Also, while supporting the aims of socialism, Walker is bothered by Cuban socialists’ exclusion of homosexuals, which is explained to her as a need to support families and the building of families. Ultimately, Walker sees the Cuban socialist revolution as—like most revolutions—“by no means complete” (210).  

This is a short essay concerning the seven years that Walker and her husband spent in Jackson, Mississippi—a both rich and challenging time. Walker recalls the opposition that she and her husband—a white Jewish integrationist lawyer—faced there, as a racially mixed couple. She remembers the isolation and frustration that she felt as a new mother attempting to be a writer and the estrangement that she felt both from her racist neighbors and from “the scholarly type of revolutionary” (226) who visited her and her husband from Boston.

Walker locates her depression at that time as an uncertainty about the usefulness of her fiction writing, in this contentious climate: “In short, I could see that I felt Art was not enough and that my art, in particular, would change nothing” (226). Yet she finally makes peace with the quietness and inwardness of art, as opposed to dramatic revolutionary action. She believes that art can be helpful during moments of quiet despair about social change, when little progress seems to have been made: “And yet, there is a reality deeper than what we see, and the consciousness of a people cannot be photographed. But to some extent, it can be written” (228).