By Evelyn C. White–
As the official biographer of Alice Walker, I spent nearly a decade researching the art and activism of a writer whose signature work, The Color Purple (1982), has sold more than five million copies and been translated into more than thirty languages. Moreover, The Color Purple has been adapted for two Hollywood movies and multiple stage productions in the U.S. and abroad.
Set in segregated Georgia, the release traces the life of Celie Johnson, a Black, sexually exploited teenager who, in an effort to understand her plight, writes letters to God.
In my exploration of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel’s reach (and Alice’s ascent as the first Black author to claim the award for fiction), I conducted scores of interviews with figures from her personal and professional life.
Among them: Alice’s first-grade teacher in her rural birthplace, Eatonton, Georgia; the Japanese translator of The Color Purple, in Tokyo; admirers of Alice’s books in Cuba; an HIV positive woman from Uganda who, at a health conference in Brazil, told me (with tears in her eyes) that Alice’s stance against female genital mutilation gave her hope.
I traveled to Kenya where Alice had crafted some of the poems in her debut release, Once (1968). Continuing, I connected with her “rainbow coalition” of lovers. I snacked on cashews with her brother Bill and later accompanied Alice to his funeral in Boston. I helped Alice’s sister Ruth find dry ice when a blackout in Atlanta imperiled the hams she’d stockpiled in her freezers.
During a trip to probe Alice’s support of traditional Hawaiian healers, I was chased by wild moa kāne (roosters) on Molokai. In Berkeley, I savored Thai coconut soup with one of Alice’s literary peers (herself a celebrated Black poet, now deceased).
This brings me to my late 1990s sojourn (accompanied by my partner, Joanne) at the Garden of the Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida. For it was at the cemetery that Alice had purchased, in 1973, a headstone for the then unkempt, unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). Among other works, the writer published the now famed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
But when Alice, then age 29, made her pilgrimage to Hurston’s gravesite, all of her books were out of print and her achievements largely forgotten; an offense that Alice lamented in her piece “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” first published in Ms. magazine, in 1975 (later reprinted as “Looking for Zora” in Alice’s 1983 essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens).
And thus did Alice, almost single-handedly, resurrect the life and legacy of a woman who’d once declared: “I do not attempt to solve any problems [in my novels]. I know I cannot straighten out with a few pen-strokes what God and men took centuries to mess up.”
Former “San Francisco Chronicle” reporter Evelyn C. White is the author of “Alice Walker: A Life.”
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