I’m a major fan of both the book and film versions of The Color Purple1 so I was glad to learn that Alice Walker, the book’s author in case anybody doesn’t know (also a major feminist, New Age
poetess, goddess worshiper, super liberal and not a girlfriend of Ashton Kutcher [though she was the bride in one of the first interracial/interfaith marriages in Mississippi]), was scheduled to speak on campus. This was last Thursday and she was the keynote speech of a symposium offered through our Women’s Studies program (which is headquartered in Manly Hall -hence I refer to the Women’s Studies students and faculty as “The Manly Women” (which shouldn’t be taken too literally; some of them are in fact neither).
She did something that I thought was very cool before her talk. The Queer-Straight Alliance (QSA) here was very irked two weeks ago when they learned that state legislator Gerald Allen is attempting to sponsor a bill that would prevent tax funded libraries and institutions from purchasing books and other media that “promote a homosexual lifestyle”. *2 I was also very irked when they learned this two weeks ago as Allen’s proposal “came out” several months ago and has been featured on front pages from Tuscaloosa to Manchester (England England, across the Atlantic Sea…) ever since, but be that as it may they planned a protest on the steps of the library where I work from 2-4 last Thursday.
The protest drew quite a supportive crowd. (I unfortunately couldn’t attend due to a work commitment so this is from other but reliable sources.) Among other things, students read from works that would be banned under this bill (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the sonnets of Shakespeare, Plato’s Symposium, etc.). Alice Walker read about the protest in the student newspaper while in her hotel room
about 3:40 p.m.; she immediately got into her car, drove to the library, parked illegally and delivered a few words in the last few minutes of the assembly to, of course, a huge ovation. She also read a short passage from a copy of The Color Purple that a student loaned her.
In her speech she mentioned “If I were still married, today would be my 38th
Anniversary. When I married, on St. Patrick’s Day 1967, I broke the law, because my husband was white and Jewish and in Mississippi it was illegal for a black woman to marry a white man, and for a Christian to marry a Jew was almost as bad.” She mentioned the parallels she feels between gays today and blacks 38 years ago.
Quite cool, especially being delivered on steps no black student marched up for half of their existence, directly across the street from a magnificent mansion built by slave labor, diagonally across from where George Wallace made his famous stand on one side and from a mound that once held the original library (burned by Union troops during the last month of the Civil War) on another side, a few miles away from the largest city in North America 1,000 years ago- Dios, but the social palimpsest that is an old small Southern city is bloody but at the same time awesome.
So 3 ½ hours later, the auditorium was jammed and had been for an
hour. Students and others were sitting in the aisles, standing against the walls and even listening from the foyer with the auditorium doors open. For reasons known only to the seven nearsighted gods of the West Baltimore Transit Authority and the University of Alabama College of Arts of Sciences, it was decided that Walker needed five (5) consecutive people to introduce her. (God Himself only
needed one [1] person to introduce Him when he was telling a pharaoh to give his employees some overdue annual leave time, but then God wasn’t trying to get tenure or justify a five-figure expenditure for a one-hour lecture.)
The first introducer was a Dean of some form with the stage presence, voice, charisma and vocal vitality of a mortally wounded Trekkie who started with the words “Alice Walker” and ended with “Thank You” and filled the eight minutes in
between with droned sentences that were forgotten long before they were uttered. Next up was a Vice President from Stillman College, who though representing a primarily black institution nevertheless supplied four minutes of white noise while two thousand audience members mentally balanced their check books. Next up was a Lit professor who won friends by introducing himself as “an old white man that nobody came here to listen to” and making his introduction as brief as a Mafia execution- we liked him. Next up was a Manly she-professor who spoke at length about the importance of Alice Walker’s novels, evidently feeling she was far better qualified to do so than Walker herself. (Walker may have written The Color Purple but certainly hadn’t published in refereed journals about it). As near as we could tell from her eight minutes on the stage, her opinions of Walker’s poetry and fiction was generally “I’m fer it”. Finally up was a history graduate student invited because she is the president of whichever black sorority Alice Walker belongs to.
The history student decided to spice up the introductions by canting them in the tone and rhythms of a black Baptist minister (this isn’t my take- she said this was what she was doing). She instructed us to respond to her statements by yelling out “Preach it Sister Alice!” and we did so enthusiastically the first three or eight times. By the end it was less like the response of the spirit filled congregation of a black Baptist church on a hot Sunday morning than the response of the medication filled residents of a Home for Aged Episcopalians on a rainy Tuesday night, but if our counting was correct she was the last introducer. *3 Alice Walker meanwhile was still backstage, having conceived, written and edited The Color Purple 2: Celie Goes West since the introductions started.
Finally the last “Preach it Sister Alice!” is murmured and Alice Walker walked onstage to a standing ovation (as much from gratitude for driving the introducers back into academic anonymity as for her literary fame). She’s a small slim woman of medium complexion, her famous dreads and African robes now given way to more subtle but still proudly and elegantly ethnic styling. She has a very soft and elegant educated voice (she does not over enunciate as so many first-generation intellectuals do) and began by speaking about the Gerald Allen proposal. She called upon the state to
“Do not go backward, Alabama. You’re on the move; you don’t have to
go backward. You all know all that was back there was an incredible
amount of pain and an incredible amount of confusion…There’s no future
back there.” (more here).
This got, and deservedly so, a huge round of applause. And she continued (the rest of her comments are paraphrased to the best of my recollection; I have not knowingly embellished or altered them):
“If the taxpayers should not have to pay for ‘dirty books’, then I think I should not have to pay taxes for the military to bomb people who never attacked us.”
This gets strong applause but noticeably less than before.
“We should take the money we use to buy planes and bombs and tanks and
give it all to education.”
Still strong applause, though lesser. I think a few are in agreement with me as I sit thinking “If we’d just do that we’d have the best educated populace ever to be completely conquered in one week by Guatemala”, but even so.
“And don’t automatically believe what you are told. The people of Iraq were never
our enemies, anymore than the people of Cuba are. I have been to Cuba, I have carried medical supplies to Cuba, let me tell you- the revolution is still going on. I have met Fidel Castro, he is not what you are told he is. He is not a tyrant, but a progressive leader.”
About half as much applause as before. Personally I’m wondering two
trains of thought:
1- How did this get from “Gerald Allen is a dumbass” to “Fidel Castro
is a righteous dude” in one step?
2- If Fidel is so progressive and Cuba so wonderful, then why aren’t
the inner-tubes floating FROM Florida? Why have so many members of
Castro’s own family and former supporters refugeed? Today you stood
on the steps of the library of a university segregated for the vast
majority of its history and openly criticized the totalitarian
proposals of a government official and you got applause- what do you
suppose would have happened had a Cuban author stood on the steps of
the library of the Universidad de Cienfuegos and demanded an end to
the state’s censorship and intellectual restrictions?
But c’est la vie… get it out of your system now and get on to The
Color Purple and friends.
And she did. The rest of the lecture was very good. She discussed the roles of race and gender and religion in culture and religion and literature (making very good points but few that hadn’t occurred to most of the people in there who had thought much on the subject). She told a couple of interesting anecdotes, discussed for about five minutes why she was upset with the movie version of The Color Purple and how upset she was by people who claimed she hated black men when the book and movie came out. She closed by reading some of her poems (all of which dealing with U.S. foreign policy, support of same and how one shouldn’t). She received a standing ovation, walked to the edge of the stage, sat in a comfortable chair and an African American Studies professor invited the audience members to ask questions.
A microphone stand was placed on each aisle but, amazingly for such a full house, nobody seemed to particularly want to ask questions. On the far aisle from me there was nobody in line, while in the aisle I was on the only person was a plump grandmotherly lady attired in various shades of purple and bright red shoes (though bareheaded- she looked like a Red Hat lady who had been drummed out ala the opening credits of BRANDED and sent to roam the Earth alone in her quest for parking at Picadilly Cafeteria.) Her “question”:
“Good evenin’ Miz Walker. This is a great honor. I just wanted to tell ya that this outfit I got on is brand new and I wore it jest for you cause of what you said in your wonderful movie, that God gits pissed off when you don’t like the color purple.”
An already inbred woman impregnated by her brother on the banks of Love Canal who spends her entire pregnancy guzzling thalidomide and working at the Propecia factory might could deliver something more mangled but she’d need a blind midwife. The comment from the book is quite different (I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.)
Alice Walker looked a bit perplexed, but nodded her head graciously in a “you may go” gesture. The only other person in line to ask a question was a young boy who asked “What did you think of the movie version of Color Purple?”, which Walker had just mentioned for five minutes during her lecture and to which she responded “I just mentioned that for five minutes during my lecture” and then suggested he read her book The Same River Twice which is completely dedicated to the
question. After this nobody was in line.
Well, I couldn’t let this happen, so I went to the microphone. “Miss Walker, I’ve been to Eatonton many times in the past two years and, for those in the audience who are unfamiliar, it has the world’s only Uncle Remus Museum {staffed by elderly white female docents} and a Brer Rabbit statue at its courthouse . As an intelligent and intellectually curious African American growing up before the late Civil Rights era, did living in a town that venerated Joel Chandler Harris have any influence on you?”
She starts to answer, then looks pensive, then starts again, then says “I’m going to stand up to answer that one because believe it or not I’ve never been asked it in quite that way.”
She stands up, tells briefly to those who don’t know who Joel Chandler Harris was and about “Song of the South” occasionally playing in theaters when she was a child, and then says “I felt robbed and very angry. He stole our culture. My own grandparents, who had grown up with the same stories, didn’t tell them anymore and it was because of him. He was a thief, and I decided that if he could make money telling our stories then so could I.” (Large round of applause.) “To
this day I still get angry when white artists cash in on African American styles… folk art, blues, rap…”
A question that I wanted to ask, but I was for some reason getting angry looks from a couple of Manly professors, was “So how do you feel about Leontyne Price, who used her considerable talent to win fame and fortune in a ‘white’ genre? And isn’t it possible that even if he did ‘rob’ the style then Harris (who grew up far from silver spoon in mouth- illegitimate, half-Irish, living on the charity of a plantation
master, as close really as anybody in white culture could be to the slaves) he also preserved them? Many black children have heard these tales that evolved from African fables ONLY because Harris wrote them down, and though crude by modern standards the Uncle Remus character most definitely preserved the source of the tales as that of Africans enslaved in America.” But what I said was
“Thank you”.
She asked me if I liked Eatonton and I told her that I didn’t think I would want to live there for any extended period of time, to which she remarked “But I am sure you would make it better just by your presence.” I don’t know if she was being complimentary or patronizing, but either way I keyed her car. (Well, I think it was
hers- it was purple and the license plate read CELIE 3— okay, not really… I just stole the antenna.)
Anyway, I would have asked another question (such as “you were the daughter of black Christian sharecroppers in Georgia and your husband was a Jewish New Yorker from a very rich and well educated family, which difference was the hardest to adjust to in your marriage?”), but somehow the line had gone from non-existent to a whole Birkenstock (that’s the collective term for “Manly women”, just like a “leap of leopards” or “exaltation of larks”) behind me. There were a couple of decent questions but most were, in my humble opinion, “mundane and pointless”- “Are you still against female circumcision?” (no dear, she changed her mind last Wednesday), “What do you say to critics who accuse you of being against black men” (another question she’d addressed at length already), “What do you think of Condoleeza Rice?” (her answer was “I’m not even sure I can grasp the concept of her” followed by applause and some commentary, the jist of which was “I’m agin’ her”) and “Is your daughter planning to follow in your footsteps” (her response to which began by talking about her daughter’s book and including the line “she seems to write best when she’s bashing me”). A girl who had evidently been insulted by Ms. Walker’s comments on religion seemed moreso when asked to read “all the parts of the Bible, not just those that make you feel good” but “only keep the good”.
After this was a long procession to have books autographed. I had bought a book of her poetry and for some reason when I got to her table rather than sign in the front as she had others she turned to a particular poem (about bombing brown children) and signed that. Again, I’m not sure if this was a compliment or a “you need to read this you raping white devil”, but either way her signature is illegible.
So, mundanely and pointlessly I must share that I think Alice Walker is an incredibly talented writer who has some views I sharply disagree with it and an inconsistent philosophy. And I like peanut butter.
1- I’m always amazed by how many people can’t stand this movie, particularly those who list Stephen Spielberg’s involvement as a reason. Sorry, but it’s a classic even if it was a commercial success.
2- What’s particularly annoying is the way so many Alabama colleges and universities, including my own, are just lying down and taking this without fury. The reason is that historically Allen has been one of the staunchest supporters of funding to state institutions in the legislature and they don’t want to offend him as an ally, but I think he’s just proven his price is way too high. (Whether he’s just a pandering braying ass or whether he actually believes what he says is not even important; he needs to go.)
3- Word of advice if not supplication: if you are ever chosen to introduce a keynote speaker, or if you are ever invited to speak at a high school graduation or a college commencement, or if you are asked to preach a wedding (particularly an outdoors one on a hot day), or anything similar to any of the preceding, and you are not world famous in your own right, please remember: *THEY’RE NOT THERE TO HEAR YOU! THEY’RE NOT LISTENING! KEEP IT BRIEF (AND INTERESTING IF YOU CAN, BUT BRIEF IS MORE IMPORTANT)! *