NEW
Library Project
Volume 3, Number 2 - Spring 2005
On the Bookshelf
by Anndee Hochman
Alice
Walker: A Life, by Evelyn C. White. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.
When Alice Walker left her hometown of Eatonton,
Georgia, in 1961—on a “rehabilitation” scholarship awarded because
of her impaired vision—her mother gave her a suitcase, a sewing machine
and a typewriter. For Walker’s mother, who earned less than $20 a week
as a maid, those gifts represented huge sacrifice and pride. For Walker,
they became emblems: of travel, survival and a writing career that would
bind literature to the life of her family, her people and the world.
Walker (whose stories “Beauty: When the Other
Dancer Is the Self,” “Everyday Use” and others are part of the
People and Stories bibliography) emerges in White’s meticulously
researched and soulful biography as a woman who, even as a child,
understood the transformational effect of words: she didn’t “lose”
herself in books, but instead found strength and possibility in them. Her
own writing—whether about abortion and racism, essays about the genital
mutilation of African women or the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple—always reflected Walker’s view of the world as
a place rife with injustice, suffering and
the redemptive power of love.
Through voluminous interviews with friends,
colleagues and family members, an unstinting examination of Walker’s
writing and many talks with Walker herself, White has written a memorable
portrait of a woman whose life proves that words can indeed change worlds.