In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

This short essay concerns the anti-nuclear war movement and is ultimately an exhortation to people of color to join the movement, rather than to give in to feelings of anger and helplessness about a disaster that they had no part in creating. Walker opens the essay with a lengthy and elaborate curse that she clarifies was collected by Zora Neale Hurston, in her capacity as an anthropologist. She then states that “I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse” and that her curse (which involves ruined farmlands and widespread sickness) is moreover coming to pass:

Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium-mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman […] seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge that her curse seems close to bringing it about (340).

Walker states that she understands this hope for revenge to be “at the heart of many People of Color’s resistance to the present antinuclear movement” (340) and that she empathizes with this feeling. However, she implores people of color to be on the side of “justice” rather than revenge, and to think of their love for the earth itself: “If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white men away from them” (341). 

This essay is a consideration of the book Nuclear Madness, by the pediatrician and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott. It is also, as its subtitle suggests, a call to action, and like the previous essay it particularly focuses on people of color: “As individuals we must join others. No time to quibble about survival being a ‘white issue’” (345).

Caldicott’s book discusses her own personal experience with the threat of nuclear war and reveals how nuclear weapons kept proliferating over the years under the Pentagon and the Kremlin, while the average American was distracted by other problems, such as the Vietnam War:

What this means is that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. literally have more bombs than they know what to do with: so they have targeted every city in the Northern Hemisphere with a population of at least twenty-five thousand with the number of bombs formerly set aside to wipe out whole countries (344).

In addition to the looming threat of nuclear war, Caldicott’s book deals with the immediate threat of nuclear waste; she has been traveling around the world and campaigning to call people’s attention to this threat.

Walker states that she has more confidence in individuals than in authority figures and urges people to band together for change even if it involves personal discomfort for them: “Join up with folks you don’t even like, if you have to, so that we may all live to fight each other again” (346). 

This is a letter written in response to an article by Letty Cottin Pogrebin that appeared in Ms., entitled “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement.” Walker writes that while she has always been sympathetic to Jewish people—and feels that as an African-American woman she has in common with them a keen sense of social injustice—she does not approve of Israel’s actions in Palestine; nor does she support the idea that expressing disapproval is the same thing as anti-Semitism: “[People] are against [the war on Palestine] not because they hate Jews (though some of them may) but because they recognize and condone imperialistic behavior” (352).

Walker states that this is a debate that she has had with her (now ex) husband, himself a Jewish man: “When I tried to talk to my husband about the Palestinians, however (all the Palestinians, not just those in camps or those in the PLO), he simply shut down” (350). She writes about the dangers of “uncritical loyalty,” recalling the silence of some black women around the domination of black men in the black liberation movement: “This was psychically crippling to a generation of black women (and black people in general) and we say, Never again” (353). At the same time, she sympathizes with Cottin Pogrebin for being under the same complicated pressures that she herself is under—those of being a woman in a marginalized group: “And yes, I suspect Jewish feminists will have to identify as Jews within feminism with as much discomfort as they identify as feminists within Judaism; every other woman of an oppressed group has always experienced this double bind” (354). 

This is an essay about Walker’s process of writing her novel The Color Purple, a novel that ultimately won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and was made into both a movie and a musical. Walker writes about the restlessness and the financial difficulties that she experienced in writing the novel, as well as her bereft feelings once her novel was finished and her characters had “left” her. Having begun the novel in New York City, she found that her characters would not “speak” to her in New York City, nor in San Francisco once she moved there. Only once she found a place in rural Northern California did her characters begin to express themselves: “And no wonder: it looked a lot like the town in Georgia most of them were from, only it was more beautiful and the local swimming hole was not segregated” (357).

Walker’s daughter—who has been staying with her father, from whom Walker is now divorced—comes to stay with her during the writing of her book. While Walker is initially worried that her daughter’s presence will be disruptive, both to her and to her characters, her daughter proves a stabilizing influence instead, whose adventures in school even come to inform the plot of the book. She then leaves for summer camp, and Walker finishes the book on the day that she leaves. 

This is an essay about Walker’s blind right eye, the result of a childhood accident (one of her brothers shot her with a BB gun). It is about how she came to terms with her partial blindness, which as a child and then a young woman made her feel freakish and self-conscious. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, she withdrew and did poorly in school, even while her family now repeatedly insists to her that she “did not change” (366). A surgery that got rid of the white “glob” (364) in her afflicted eye helped to restore her confidence, and she went on to become an academically and socially successful high school student, earning the title of both valedictorian and homecoming queen.

This essay includes a poem called “On Sight,” about the beauty of the desert and Walker’s gratitude in being able to see it. The title of the essay refers to a happy dream that Walker had, following her young daughter’s remark that her blind eye looked like a “world” (370). She dreams that she is dancing alone to Stevie Wonder, and is joined by another dancer, who is also her: “We dance and kiss and hold each other through the night. The other dancer has obviously come through all right, as I have done” (370). 

This is an essay about the role of motherhood in the female artist’s life. It begins with an excerpt from a speech that Walker delivered on Muriel Rukeyser Day at Sarah Lawrence College, where Rukeyser, a poet, once taught. In her speech, Walker praises Rukeyser as a teacher for her refusal to acknowledge divisions between things, including children and art: “She taught no separations where there are, in fact, none—which so much of the instruction in the world is expressly for. If the world contains War, it also contains The Child. It the world contains Hunger, Nuclear Reactors, Fascists, it also contains The Child” (372). 

Walker recalls her own experience with early motherhood, and how she learned to perceive her young daughter, Rebecca, as an ally rather than a burden. This involved not listening to a lot of conflicting received opinions—which Walker calls “Women’s Folly”—about both the ill-advisedness of having children if one is an artist and the advisability of having more than one child so that they can “keep each other company” (374). Walker remembers being motivated to get pregnant largely so that her husband would not have to be drafted for the Vietnam War. She also recalls her difficult years as a single mother teaching in New England, while Rebecca was still young—years when she was both getting accustomed to motherhood and having to adjust to a frequently hostile and racist environment. 

Walker ultimately realizes that in an often harsh and unfair world, her daughter is a comfort. The essay ends with a poem in the form of a letter to herself, which she states that she once had hanging over her writing desk. It compares the situation of famous childless female writers such as Virginia Woolf and George Eliot to her own situation with Rebecca: “Dear Alice/Virginia had madness/George Eliot had ostracism […] You have Rebecca—who is/so much more delightful” (392-93).