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| The great Alice Walker |
PBS recently aired a
fascinating documentary on the writer Alice Walker who rose literally from a
hardscrabble existence to reverence as writer and activist. I have always been
a fan of her clear prose and rich characters, and I was reminded that I had
never read Meridian, her second
novel, which is now available for e-readers, as are all her works.
While The Color Purple, The Temple
of My Familiar, and Possessing the
Secret of Joy are novels worthy of their accolades and readership, I found
this early work especially interesting as I felt I was taking Walker's journey
to activism with her.
As an aside, when Possessing the Secret of Joy came out, I decided not to read it, the thought of a novel about clitoral mutilation just too hard to bear, but my daughters, who knew I liked great fiction, bought it for me for Mother's Day, so of course, like all the art on the fridge, I had to comply. The great surprise: one of the most fantastic books I've read and yes, deeply embedded with joy despite the subject.
When you re-read a great writer,
you nestle into their prose as if you've just run into an old
friend. Walker never manipulates her reader, she just tells it like it is. Taking
place largely during the sixties, a young woman is thrust into the harsh
realities of sex and racism too soon to make sense of it, at first. Living in a
small southern black community, she encounters civil rights fighters in black
and white, and discovers the depth of the divide between the races, while also
discovering her own desire to make a difference.
However the path to change for
Meridian, like her people, is fraught with obstacles, not the least of which is
her own community, filled with an assortment of unusual and fascinating characters.
"The majority of black
townspeople were sympathetic to the Movement from the first, and told Meridian
she was doing a good thing... Her mother however was not sympathetic... God
separated the sheeps from the goats, and the blacks from the whites."
Meridian is the embodiment of truth. She suffers physically for her own
and others' sins: a lightning rod for the storms around her. She struggles to
forgive and to be forgiven. She longs for what she cannot describe. The man in
her life, Truman, who also evolves over the decade, abandons her after a heated
affair for a long-term relationship with a white woman, Lynne, whom he also
ultimately abandons in the hopes of rekindling his relationship with Meridian, who by
then has found her voice and her mission.
Lynne, like many whites and Jews who supported
the civil rights movement, is one of the more terrific characters, for me,
as Walker digs deep into her psyche, revealing her motives for activism: a
woman who suffers for the oppression perpetrated by her people. Like Germans who sheltered
Jews during WWII, were they compassionate or were they compensating for the
sins of their nations? Walker also deftly portrays the mixed feelings among towards the whites who invaded their movement and some, like Lynne, who took their men as well.
"By being white, Lynne was
guilty of whiteness. Then the question was, is it possible to be guilty of
color?"
In my own novel, "Colors of
the Wheel" I explore contemporary challenges of race, and novels like Meridian that reflect on the civil
rights movement confirm that much has changed, and too much hasn't.
