DIARIES
Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker
edited by Valerie Boyd.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, $34.99

Something shifted when Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple won the American Book Award in 1983. Her acceptance speech catches it: “I accept this award for my novel, in the name of the folk, like my parents, who have never written or read a novel; the folk of this country, robbed of education, health and happiness, and forced to labour for the benefit of the oppressor classes, and the folk all over the world…” She goes on to say “we must use all our anger and all our love…”

Anger. Love. Hold on to those words. On the evidence of these journals, they encapsulate her life. From the beginning, she has a rage not just to live but a need to be seen doing it. Living was a political act. That takes courage. And art.

In 2007, Walker placed more than 65 notebooks and journals in the Rare Book Library at Emory University, Atlanta. Walker, an assiduous/obsessive diarist, put an embargo on everything until 2040. By then, she’ll be 96. These 537 pages have been selected to reveal “an intimate record of her development as an artist, human rights activist and intellectual.” She has also released some passages that reveal her, in the words of her fastidious editor Valerie Boyd, as “woman, writer, an African American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world”. The title Gathering Blossoms Under Fire is from one of her poems.

Walker’s personal life and her writing life cannot be separated. There are drafts of poems, speeches, commentaries on people she meets, friends and enemies. Envy and jealousy are big hitters in her circles. And then there is her family. She could outdo Dickens for a demanding family. But, like him, she keeps on giving because, like him, she feels responsible for them. And for the world. Change and reform drive Walker.

Walker wanted beauty, but she also wants to move her reader elsewhere. The early, necessarily high-minded diarising of a driven young woman are the entries that will eventually become the controversial The Color Purple. This, and the Spielberg film adaptation, established Walker as one of the most high-profile women in America. Black women had written novels before but none had won prizes, none had such cinematic interpretation. The journals chart the genesis of this complicated novel, starting with Walker’s own family history.

Her parents were sharecroppers in Georgia, they lived in various “horrible shacks”, and the family stories of neglect and abuse as well as love and fortitude were more complicated than most. Or perhaps for black families they were not. Walker’s was always bounding ahead and she had been published before, but with The Color Purple, her accurate ear for language, an original imagination and a political/feminist consciousness collided and cohered. She had found her voice and it had a unique intimacy.

The first entry is from June 1965, when Walker, 21 and a student at the prestigious, mainly white Sarah Lawrence College in New York, is thinking about becoming involved in the civil rights campaign in the South. Four years later, she is deeply involved. Her credentials are impeccable. She also keeps an eye of how she is thinking and what she could be writing, observes that Tom Wolfe’s dialogue is “wooden” (hooray!) and how to discipline herself with “patience and precision” so that she can turn a blank page into something worth reading.