In the Looking Glass

Some 25 Years After 'The Color Purple,' Alice Walker Reflects, and Sees a Rainbow

Alice Walker spent the summer on her farm in Mendocino, Calif., with her "kids" -- a dog named Marley and a cat called Surprise. She went swimming every day. She gardened; she enjoyed fresh peaches and home-grown potatoes.

A few weeks ago, back in her home town of Berkeley, she joined the choir at East Bay Church of Religious Science (where, it should be noted, she promptly started agitating to change the word "Lord" to "spirit" in hymns). She is learning to play drums -- she has two, one West African, one Native American. For Thanksgiving, she has rented a hall, and she's going to throw a dance.

"I'm basically shifting in my life," she says. "Shifting to much less travel, much more contemplation."

At the moment, though, this somewhat reluctant literary lioness has emerged for a multi-city book tour, temporarily suspending that notion of "less travel" to promote a new collection of meditations, "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness."

There is still activism in her, still fight, but it comes in a more self-reflective and overtly spiritual package. At 62, Walker grounds her life in meditation and yoga, and she writes about things like "the root of the peace cradling me" and "the ecstatic nature of impersonal love" that bonds her with the Iraqi women and children who so concern her.

But she can still energize a crowd. Speaking at Politics and Prose on Wednesday night, she went on a political tear, denouncing both parties, denouncing the Bush administration, denouncing the war. From all corners of the room came echoes of "uh-huh" and "that's right," punctuated with clapping and laughter.

"America is not free," she told her audience, " . . . and everyone knows it and can see it!"

That conclusion got a standing ovation from a crowd that spilled down the aisles, the turnout so much larger than expected that the store sold all 161 copies of the book in stock and had to start taking back orders. Disappointed would-be purchasers started buying up the notable works of Walker's past -- such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Color Purple" (1982) or the best-selling "Possessing the Secret of Joy" (1992), which was once widely banned because of its subject matter (genital mutilation among some African cultures).

These days, Walker's topics are not nearly as controversial as those that marked her rise to prominence as an envelope-pushing, polarizing voice: incest, the abuse of women and children, rape. What informs and influences her work -- what drove her to publish this current book -- is her lifelong opposition to war and her belief that the "current political situation is so gruesome," she says in an interview before her signing. Her rallying cries -- in both the interview and her public talk -- are for universal health care, high-quality education for all children, and better pay for teachers.

"Alice Walker has always been candid and outspoken in her writing, and sometimes ahead of her time," says Valerie Boyd, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia who has written a biography of author Zora Neale Hurston (one of Walker's inspirations) and has closely followed Walker's work.

"The kinds of work she's been doing more recently have been more introspective. They're more reflective of her own spiritual search and spiritual development. Even in this book, she's talking about antiwar things that many of us can agree on, but she's talking about them in a spiritual way that might still be 'out there' for a lot of readers," Boyd says.

Walker hasn't had a bestseller since 1999 (and that book, "By the Light of My Father's Smile: A Novel," made the limelight for only a few weeks and had uneven reviews). Her last big critical and commercial success was "Possessing the Secret of Joy."

"It wouldn't occur to me to worry about that," she says in her hotel suite at the Willard Intercontinental. "The way I see my work . . . if you look at a mango tree, you expect mangoes from it. And I feel that way about myself. I expect from myself, as a writer, to write exactly what is natural to me. It is sometimes a problem for other people. . . . I wish that each gift could be received with the joy and the delight that I create it. But I don't wait around, hoping and wanting and wishing. I'm usually on to making something else."

"We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For" consists of essays, several taken from speeches Walker has given over the years. She writes about attending the funeral of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She writes about the impact of war on one of her brothers, who fought in Korea. She writes about how she acquired her dog, Marley. In her final chapter, she describes being arrested and jailed for participating in an antiwar protest in Washington in 2003.

She also writes about the public reaction to her earlier works, particularly "The Color Purple" and "Possessing the Secret of Joy." Walker famously has said that she didn't know such a thing as a Pulitzer Prize for fiction existed before she won it, but she also acknowledges that the rewards -- namely, financial security and the money to buy her beloved farm -- were welcome. The controversy, the censorship, the personal attacks: Those, she admits, were difficult.

"And why has controversy about my work been so consistent," she writes, "that whenever I publish a novel I am tempted to attach a note to the reader warning that the book might be too much (or too something) for them?"

These days, though, the world appears to be catching up with Walker. When "The Color Purple" debuted on Broadway last December, the kiss between the two female lead characters that was so disturbing to some readers almost 25 years ago was met with audience applause, according to Boyd, who attended. When Nagueyalti Warren -- a professor at Emory University who teaches a class based on Walker's work -- assigns "Possessing the Secret of Joy," she finds her students are not shocked by the subject matter, because it's something they are already aware of.

"I think many people were fairly late -- maybe because of all the controversy -- understanding my work as spiritual work," Walker says. "They were, for many, many years, talking about -- and these were right things to talk about -- the abuse of women and children and rape and incest and violence." Dellena Cunningham, who attended Wednesday night's signing, admits she got "stuck" trying to read Walker's difficult 1990 novel, "The Temple of My Familiar," and, like many Walker fans, has "stopped slavishly going to get everything she wrote."

Still, Cunningham made the trip to Politics and Prose -- partly because she heard this latest book was good and, largely, because Walker still is, and always will be, a rock star whose works have influenced generations.

"I thought it might be my only opportunity to see her in person," Cunningham says.

Will there ever be another "Color Purple" in Walker's future? Her next project is a children's book titled "Why War Is Never a Good Idea." After that, maybe her only writing for a while will be in her personal journals, maybe not. "I'm a writer," she says, "who will wait on what needs to be expressed, and I trust that it will come.

"If I decided to write a novel, who knows where it would come from? It could be very challenging, and it might need a little label," she says a few minutes later, referring to the "reader warning" she writes of in h er current book.

Then her eyebrows rise, and she starts to chuckle.

"I don't know why it would need a little label. At the moment, I can't think of any bases that I've left uncovered. But you never know."