Alice Walker & daughter write of their multiracial family
BERKELEY, California (AP) -- Alice Walker's life has been one headlong charge against racial barriers. She overcame her sharecroppers' childhood to emerge as a civil rights activist, and she challenged Southern law by marrying a white, Jewish lawyer.
Years of pain and struggle brought her joy and Pulitzer Prize-winning success, but not without scars. Her marriage crumbled under the strain of passion and politics, violence and racism. And she wasn't the only one left wounded -- her daughter, Rebecca, grew up angry and confused.
In a new, cathartic memoir, Alice Walker comes full circle, revealing details of her 10-year marriage and subsequent divorce from the man who nurtured her talent and celebrated her heritage.
And this January, readers can get a distinctly different glimpse at the same family in the writing debut of her daughter: "Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self."
Both works are achingly personal as they tell a tried-and-true love story -- meeting, marrying, creating a child -- against the racially charged backdrop of Mississippi in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
'Humor and affection joined us'
The 56-year-old Walker opens her new book, "The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart," with a note about her former husband, Mel Leventhal. She had spoken to him only rarely in 20 years.
"Humor and affection joined us, more than anything. And a bone-deep instinctive belief that we owed it to our ancestors and ourselves to live exactly the life we found on our paths," she writes. "It was a magical marriage."
The book, a series of essays she describes as "mostly fiction, but with a definite thread of having come out of a singular life," ends a 30-year cycle of writing, she explains. Walker talks about her family and career in an interview at her home on a Berkeley hillside, where rooms are decorated with Native American and African art and stacks of books on the floor reveal a range of tastes from a biography of slain rapper Tupac Shakur to an artful look at dreadlocks.
"Part of what I hadn't written about was my marriage," she says. "Writing about it has helped me a lot because there were some loose ends that needed to be tied off."
As a result, she now feels freer, she says. And her former husband has read "The Way Forward" and "loved it."
Exploring the pain of losing their love also helped her heal, she adds. "Whatever I'm writing about, there are people going through exactly that at that time," she says. "It can be a real medicine."
'A marker that links us tangibly'
At 30 years old, Rebecca Walker found she needed some medicine as well.
"I want to be closer to my mother, to have something run between us that cannot be denied," writes Rebecca, who took her mother's last name when she was a high school senior. "I want a marker that links us tangibly and forever as mother and daughter. That links me tangibly and forever with blackness."
Educated at Yale University, she's an activist who founded a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating young women's leadership skills. Rebecca Walker refused an interview request. She explained through her publicist that she wants her work to stand on its own, not be propped up by the fame of her award-winning mother.
Alice Walker, author of more than two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, most notably 1982's "The Color Purple," says she and her daughter are close friends, live near each other in Berkeley and see each other often. Rebecca also has a good relationship with Leventhal, Alice says.
She has read her daughter's book, but refuses to discuss it other than to say she enjoyed it and she understands her daughter's confusion and frustration about finding her place in the world.
Dressed in black from head to toe, Alice Walker seems at peace as she sits barefoot on a sofa. She has just returned from a weeklong Buddhist retreat in Marin County where no talking, writing or reading is allowed. She loves it.
"Silence is the best possible place for creativity," she says.
She has no qualms about how she raised Rebecca -- she stopped working when her daughter was born to give "her a full year of my undivided attention.
Rebecca Walker writes of life as the daughter of Alice Walker and a white father in "Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self" "It's hard for her to understand all that we were trying to do ... to correct centuries of violence and abuse," she explains.
Defending civil rights
Alice Walker met Leventhal in 1966 while registering voters door-to-door in Mississippi. They moved to New York City where he was attending law school, then married and returned to Mississippi, where he defended civil rights cases and she taught school.
"Part of the lure of our marriage was that it was illegal," says Alice Walker, who now is in a committed relationship with a woman. "When it became weakened by the sheer stress of living there, it ended."
Rebecca Walker accepts that she was brought into this world, in part, to make a statement, to prove a point at a time when the Black Power Movement was on the rise and interracial marriages were suspect. (Mississippi did not officially legalize interracial marriage until 1987.)
"Black on black love is the new recipe for revolution," she writes. "The only problem, of course, is me. My little copper-colored body that held so much promise and broke so many rules."
She was in the third grade when her parents separated, after her father's affair with a white, Jewish, woman.
"My parents sit me down and tell me they are not getting along, that me and Mama are going to move to another neighborhood and Daddy will come to pick me up on weekends. They might as well have told me we were moving to live with penguins on the North Pole," she writes.
Back-and-forth life
It was a back-and-forth life. She called her father's new wife, "Mom," and let her pack her lunches and sew name tags in her clothes for summer camp. She took ballet classes and read Nancy Drew and "The Diary of Anne Frank."
With her mother, discussions of racism, sexism and transcendental meditation were the routine. Sweet Honey in the Rock practiced in the house. She often was on her own -- doing laundry alone since fifth grade, cleaning the house, taking care of herself while her mother spent a writing week in the country.
Confusion led Rebecca to counseling, where she engineered a rare family therapy session about five years ago, bringing her parents together to address her questions.
"For years Our Child has been the only visible, public evidence of our years together. She sits tall and poised," Alice writes of the session. "Twenty-five and used to making her own way in the world. Her only obstacle, she feels, is a certain ignorance about who her parents really are."
Rebecca Walker leaves that episode out of her book, choosing instead to focus on her growing-up years, her efforts to fit in at predominantly white schools, her difficulties shuttling every two years between her mother in San Francisco and father in Washington, D.C.
She was an angry teen-ager, stifling her emotions through smiles and silence.
"I don't complain. That is part of the deal," she writes.
"In interviews, my mother talks about how she and I are more like sisters than mother and daughter. I am game, letting her sit in my lap for a photo for the New York Times, playing the grown-up to my mother's child for the camera. I feel strong when she says those things, like I am much older and wiser than I really am. It's just that the strength doesn't allow for weakness. Being my mother's sister doesn't allow me to be her daughter."
Her search for herself and her connection to her blackness, her whiteness, her separateness culminates shortly after high school graduation, one of the few events her parents attended together.
"As they sit, leaden and stiff in their respective corners, I cannot. Every seat I choose seems too close to one of them, and I jump up for fear I might be perceived as taking one side over the other. Instead I flit around the living room trying to build a bridge of memory between. I ask question after question, hoping to jog their collective memory of the time I was born and we lived our life together as a family," she writes.
Rebecca finally seems comfortable in her own skin when she describes a trip to England with her mother and bonding with her father when his mother died.
"It all comes to this," writes Rebecca Walker, who dedicates her first novel to both her parents.
"I stand with those who stand with me. I am tired of claiming for claiming sake, hiding behind masks of culture, creed, religion. My blood is made from water and so it is bloodwater that I am made of. ... I exist somewhere between black and white, family and friend."
Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Years of pain and struggle brought her joy and Pulitzer Prize-winning success, but not without scars. Her marriage crumbled under the strain of passion and politics, violence and racism. And she wasn't the only one left wounded -- her daughter, Rebecca, grew up angry and confused.
In a new, cathartic memoir, Alice Walker comes full circle, revealing details of her 10-year marriage and subsequent divorce from the man who nurtured her talent and celebrated her heritage.
And this January, readers can get a distinctly different glimpse at the same family in the writing debut of her daughter: "Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self."
Both works are achingly personal as they tell a tried-and-true love story -- meeting, marrying, creating a child -- against the racially charged backdrop of Mississippi in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
'Humor and affection joined us'
The 56-year-old Walker opens her new book, "The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart," with a note about her former husband, Mel Leventhal. She had spoken to him only rarely in 20 years.
"Humor and affection joined us, more than anything. And a bone-deep instinctive belief that we owed it to our ancestors and ourselves to live exactly the life we found on our paths," she writes. "It was a magical marriage."
The book, a series of essays she describes as "mostly fiction, but with a definite thread of having come out of a singular life," ends a 30-year cycle of writing, she explains. Walker talks about her family and career in an interview at her home on a Berkeley hillside, where rooms are decorated with Native American and African art and stacks of books on the floor reveal a range of tastes from a biography of slain rapper Tupac Shakur to an artful look at dreadlocks.
"Part of what I hadn't written about was my marriage," she says. "Writing about it has helped me a lot because there were some loose ends that needed to be tied off."
As a result, she now feels freer, she says. And her former husband has read "The Way Forward" and "loved it."
Exploring the pain of losing their love also helped her heal, she adds. "Whatever I'm writing about, there are people going through exactly that at that time," she says. "It can be a real medicine."
'A marker that links us tangibly'
At 30 years old, Rebecca Walker found she needed some medicine as well.
"I want to be closer to my mother, to have something run between us that cannot be denied," writes Rebecca, who took her mother's last name when she was a high school senior. "I want a marker that links us tangibly and forever as mother and daughter. That links me tangibly and forever with blackness."
Educated at Yale University, she's an activist who founded a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating young women's leadership skills. Rebecca Walker refused an interview request. She explained through her publicist that she wants her work to stand on its own, not be propped up by the fame of her award-winning mother.
Alice Walker, author of more than two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, most notably 1982's "The Color Purple," says she and her daughter are close friends, live near each other in Berkeley and see each other often. Rebecca also has a good relationship with Leventhal, Alice says.
She has read her daughter's book, but refuses to discuss it other than to say she enjoyed it and she understands her daughter's confusion and frustration about finding her place in the world.
Dressed in black from head to toe, Alice Walker seems at peace as she sits barefoot on a sofa. She has just returned from a weeklong Buddhist retreat in Marin County where no talking, writing or reading is allowed. She loves it.
"Silence is the best possible place for creativity," she says.
She has no qualms about how she raised Rebecca -- she stopped working when her daughter was born to give "her a full year of my undivided attention.
Rebecca Walker writes of life as the daughter of Alice Walker and a white father in "Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self" "It's hard for her to understand all that we were trying to do ... to correct centuries of violence and abuse," she explains.
Defending civil rights
Alice Walker met Leventhal in 1966 while registering voters door-to-door in Mississippi. They moved to New York City where he was attending law school, then married and returned to Mississippi, where he defended civil rights cases and she taught school.
"Part of the lure of our marriage was that it was illegal," says Alice Walker, who now is in a committed relationship with a woman. "When it became weakened by the sheer stress of living there, it ended."
Rebecca Walker accepts that she was brought into this world, in part, to make a statement, to prove a point at a time when the Black Power Movement was on the rise and interracial marriages were suspect. (Mississippi did not officially legalize interracial marriage until 1987.)
"Black on black love is the new recipe for revolution," she writes. "The only problem, of course, is me. My little copper-colored body that held so much promise and broke so many rules."
She was in the third grade when her parents separated, after her father's affair with a white, Jewish, woman.
"My parents sit me down and tell me they are not getting along, that me and Mama are going to move to another neighborhood and Daddy will come to pick me up on weekends. They might as well have told me we were moving to live with penguins on the North Pole," she writes.
Back-and-forth life
It was a back-and-forth life. She called her father's new wife, "Mom," and let her pack her lunches and sew name tags in her clothes for summer camp. She took ballet classes and read Nancy Drew and "The Diary of Anne Frank."
With her mother, discussions of racism, sexism and transcendental meditation were the routine. Sweet Honey in the Rock practiced in the house. She often was on her own -- doing laundry alone since fifth grade, cleaning the house, taking care of herself while her mother spent a writing week in the country.
Confusion led Rebecca to counseling, where she engineered a rare family therapy session about five years ago, bringing her parents together to address her questions.
"For years Our Child has been the only visible, public evidence of our years together. She sits tall and poised," Alice writes of the session. "Twenty-five and used to making her own way in the world. Her only obstacle, she feels, is a certain ignorance about who her parents really are."
Rebecca Walker leaves that episode out of her book, choosing instead to focus on her growing-up years, her efforts to fit in at predominantly white schools, her difficulties shuttling every two years between her mother in San Francisco and father in Washington, D.C.
She was an angry teen-ager, stifling her emotions through smiles and silence.
"I don't complain. That is part of the deal," she writes.
"In interviews, my mother talks about how she and I are more like sisters than mother and daughter. I am game, letting her sit in my lap for a photo for the New York Times, playing the grown-up to my mother's child for the camera. I feel strong when she says those things, like I am much older and wiser than I really am. It's just that the strength doesn't allow for weakness. Being my mother's sister doesn't allow me to be her daughter."
Her search for herself and her connection to her blackness, her whiteness, her separateness culminates shortly after high school graduation, one of the few events her parents attended together.
"As they sit, leaden and stiff in their respective corners, I cannot. Every seat I choose seems too close to one of them, and I jump up for fear I might be perceived as taking one side over the other. Instead I flit around the living room trying to build a bridge of memory between. I ask question after question, hoping to jog their collective memory of the time I was born and we lived our life together as a family," she writes.
Rebecca finally seems comfortable in her own skin when she describes a trip to England with her mother and bonding with her father when his mother died.
"It all comes to this," writes Rebecca Walker, who dedicates her first novel to both her parents.
"I stand with those who stand with me. I am tired of claiming for claiming sake, hiding behind masks of culture, creed, religion. My blood is made from water and so it is bloodwater that I am made of. ... I exist somewhere between black and white, family and friend."
Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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