Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times

Alice Tallulah-Kate Walker (1944– ): On All Fronts

395 Alice Tallulah-Kate Walker (1944– ) On All Fronts Deborah g. Plant    In Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, author-activist Alice Walker extols the virtues of dance, its ability to release stress and teach balance—physical and metaphysical—and its transformative magic within and throughout African culture. Having perceived the healing effects of dance, Walker declared that she had learned to dance anew. At a family celebration designed to dance away the sorrows of those gathered, Walker observed the next generation of her family engaged in “a spirited line dance.” She confidently contemplated, “Though we have all encountered our share of grief and troubles, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat—no small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one. Throughout her career as a writer and revolutionary, Alice Walker has strived to use her art to portray the “grief and troubles,” as well as the beauty and spirit, of African Americans in all their complexity. In “Duties of the Black Revolutionary ,” Walker writes, “A man’s life can rarely be summed up in one word; even if that word is black or white. And it is the duty of the artist to present the man as he is.” For Walker, being a black revolutionary has meant being one with the people, and, at times, being the voice of the people as well as a voice for the people. Indeed, for Walker, art and politics are inextricable—her writing has always been a form of political as well as literary expression. In addition to being a writer, being a black revolutionary has also entailed assuming the role of teacher or educator. Walker has held several writer-in-residence and lecturer positions within the academy, teaching general courses on African American literature and courses specifically on black women writers. She is also credited with developing and teaching the first course on black women writers while at Smith College in 1973. Walker has wanted not only to cultivate her own liter- Alice tallulah-kate Walker Emory University Photo Video. Alice Tallulah-Kate Walker 397 ary and political voice but also to give voice to writers who have been excluded from the American literary canon and silenced or ignored within the African American literary canon. She realized that her own education “had left crucial areas empty, and had, in fact, contributed to a blind spot in my education that needed desperately to be cleared if I expected to be a whole woman, a full human being, a black woman full of self-awareness and pride.” Born in 1944 in Wards Chapel near Eatonton, in Putnam County, Georgia, the youngest of eight children in a family whose livelihood depended on sharecropping, Alice Malsenior Walker would come to know how challenging the world could be. Walker traces her paternal ancestral line through the early 1800s to May Poole, her great-great-great-great-grandmother. Sold on the auction block in Virginia, May Poole then “walked to Eatonton with a baby straddled on each hip.” Albert Walker, May Poole’s great-great-great-grandson and Walker’s great-grandfather, inherited land from his Scottish slaveholding father. However , with his cotton crop destroyed by boll weevils for several successive years, Albert Walker lost his land and social standing and became a tenant farmer to a local white family. His son, Henry Clay Walker (Alice Walker’s grandfather) assuaged his despair over the turn of fortune with drink and sport. Alice Walker’s mother, Minnie Tallulah (Lou) Grant (1912–93), was also from a family established in Putnam County, Georgia. Though Minnie Lou saw Henry Clay Walker’s son, Willie Lee, as a sober and hardworking young man, Willie Lee lived in the shadow cast by his father and was thus deemed unacceptable in the eyes of William Grant—Minnie Lou’s father—as a potential spouse for his daughter. Despite William Grant’s disapproval, Minnie Lou loved and conceived a child with Willie Lee. The couple married six months later, on June 1, 1930. The love, courage, and determination the couple shared would prove to be their mainstay in a Jim Crow South where white supremacy was the presumed order of the day. Longstanding racial division and enmity was exacerbated by the challenges ushered in during the Great Depression. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Walker eked out a living as sharecroppers for the same white family that had hired...