Excerpt: 'The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart' by Alice Walker

Random House/ Nonfiction/Memoir/ 224 pages
November 3, 2000/ Web posted at: 1:01 p.m. EST (1801 GMT)

"These are the stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce. I found myself unmoored, unmated, ungrounded in a way that challenged everything I'd ever thought about human relationships. Situated squarely in that terrifying paradise called freedom, precipitously out on so many emotional limbs, it was as if I had been born; and in fact I was being reborn as the woman I was to become."

So says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker about her new book, in which she gives us her stories based on her own experience. Imbued with Walker's wise philosophy and understanding of people, the spirit, sex and love, "The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart" begins with an autobiographical story of a marriage set in the violent and volatile Deep South during the early years of the civil rights movement.

EXCERPT

To My Young Husband: Memoir of a Marriage

Beloved,

A few days ago I went to see the little house on R. Street where we were so happy. Before traveling back to Mississippi I had not thought much about it. It seemed so far away, almost in another dimension. Whenever I did remember the house it was vibrant, filled with warmth and light, even though, as you know, a lot of my time there was served in rage, in anger, in hopelessness and despair. Days when the white white walls, cool against the brutal summer heat, were more bars than walls.

REVIEW
'The Way Forward' leaves you standing still



ALSO
Alice Walker, daughter write of their multiracial family




You do not talk to me now, a fate I could not have imagined twenty years ago. It is true we say the usual greetings, when we have to, over the phone: How are you? Have you heard from Our Child? But beyond that, really nothing. Nothing of the secrets, memories, good and bad, that we shared. Nothing of the laughter that used to creep up on us as we ate together late at night at the kitchen table--perhaps after one of your poker games--and then wash over us in a cackling wave. You were always helpless before anything that struck you as funny, and I reveled in the ease with which, urging each other on, sometimes in our own voices, more often in a welter of black and white Southern and Brooklyn and Yiddish accents--which always felt as if our grandparents were joking with each other--we'd crumple over our plates laughing, as tears came to our eyes. After tallying up your winnings--you usually did win--and taking a shower--as I chatted with you through the glass--you'd crawl wearily into bed. We'd roll toward each other's outstretched arms, still chuckling, and sleep the sleep of the deeply amused.

I went back with the woman I love now. She had never been South, never been to Mississippi, though her grandparents are buried in one of the towns you used to sue racists in. We took the Natchez Trace from Memphis, stopping several times at points of interest along the way. Halfway to Jackson we stopped at what appeared to be a large vacant house, with a dogtrot that intrigued us from the road. But when we walked inside two women were quietly quilting. One of them was bent over a large wooden frame that covered most of the floor, like the one my mother used to have; the other sat in a rocking chair stitching together one of the most beautiful crazy quilts I've ever seen. It reminded me of the quilt I made while we were married, the one made of scraps from my African dresses. The huge dresses, kaftans really, that I sewed myself and wore when I was pregnant with Our Child.

The house on R. Street looked so small I did not recognize it at first. It was nearly dark by the time we found it, and sitting in a curve as it does it always seemed to be seeking anonymity. The tree we planted when Our Child was born and which I expected to tower over me, as Our Child now does, is not there; one reason I did not recognize the house. When I couldn't decide whether the house I was staring at was the one we used to laugh so much in, I went next door and asked for the Belts. Mrs. Belt (Did I ever know her name and call her by it? Was it perhaps Mildred?) opened the door. She recognized me immediately. I told her I was looking for our house. She said: That's it. She was surrounded by grandchildren. The little girl we knew, riding her tricycle about the yard, has made her a grandmother many times over. Her hair is pressed and waved, and is completely gray. She has aged. Though I know I have also, this shocks me. Mr. Belt soon comes to the door. He is graying as well, and has shaved his head. He is stocky and assertive. Self-satisfied. He insists on hugging me, which, because we've never hugged before, feels strange. He offers to walk me next door, and does.

Its gate is the only thing left of the wooden fence we put up. The sweet gum tree that dominated the backyard and turned to red and gold in autumn is dying. It is little more than a trunk. The yard itself, which I've thought of all these years as big, is tiny. I remember our dogs: Myshkin, the fickle beloved, stolen, leaving us to search and search and weep and weep; and Andrew, the German shepherd with the soulful eyes and tender heart, whose big teeth frightened me after Our Child was born.

The carport is miniscule. I wonder if you remember the steaks we used to grill there in summer, because the house was too hot for cooking, and the chilled Lambrusco we bought by the case to drink each night with dinner.

The woman who lives there now, whose first act on buying the house was to rip out my writing desk, either isn't home or refuses to open the door. Not the same door we had, with its three panes at the top covered with plastic "stained glass." No, an even tackier, more flimsy door, with the number 1443 affixed to its bottom in black vinyl and gold adhesive.

I am disappointed because I do want to see inside, and I want my lover to see it too. I want to show her the living room, where our red couches sat. The moon lamp. The low table made from a wooden door on which I kept flowers, leaves, Georgia field straw, in a gray crockery vase. The walls on which hung our Levy's bread poster: The little black boy and "You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's." The white-and-black SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) poster of the large woman holding the small child, and the red-and-white one with the old man holding the hand of a small girl that helped me write about the bond between grandfather and granddaughter that is at the heart of my first novel. There by the kitchen door was the very funny Ernst lithograph, a somber Charles White drawing across from it.


In Tupelo where I lectured I saw an old friend who remembered the house better than I did. She remembered the smallness of the kitchen (which I'd never thought of as small) and how the round "captain's table" we bought was wedged in a corner. She recalled the polished brown wood. Even the daisy-dotted placemats. The big yellow, brown-eyed daisy stuck to the brown refrigerator door.

I wanted to see the nondescript bathroom. If I looked into the mirror would I see the serious face I had then? The deeply sun-browned skin? The bushy hair? The grief that steadily undermined the gains in levity, after each of the assassinations of little known and unsung heroes; after the assassination of Dr. King?

I wanted to see Our Child's room. From the porch I could see her yellow shutters, unchanged since we left. Yellow, to let her know right away that life can be cheerful and bright. I wanted to see our room. Its giant bed occupying most of the floor, in frank admission that bed was important to us and that whenever possible, especially after air-conditioning, that is where we stayed. Not making love only, but making a universe. Sleeping, eating, reading and writing books, listening to music, cuddling, talking on the phone, watching Mary Tyler Moore, playing with Our Child. Our rifle a silent sentry in the corner. The old friend whom I saw in Tupelo still lives in Jackson. When we met two decades ago she had just come home from a college in the North where she taught literature. She'd decided to come back to Jackson, now that opportunities were opening up, thanks to you and so many others who gave some of their lives and sometimes all of their life, for this to happen. She hoped to marry her childhood sweetheart, raise a family, study law. Now she tells me she hates law. That it stifles her creativity and cuts her off from community and the life of the young. I tell her what I have recently heard of you. That, according to Our Child, you are now writing plays, and that this makes you happy. That you left civil rights law, at which you were brilliant, and are now quite successful in the corporate world. Though the writing of the plays makes me wonder if perhaps you too have found something missing in your chosen profession?

She remembers us, she says, as two of the happiest, most in love people she'd ever seen. It didn't seem possible that we would ever part.

It is only days later, when I am back in California, that I realize she herself played a role in our drifting apart. This summer she has promised to come visit me, up in the country in Mendocino--where everyone my age has a secret, sorrowful past of loving and suffering during the Sixties time of war--and I will tell her what it was.

Maybe you remember her? Her name is F. It was she who placed a certain novel by a forgotten black woman novelist into my hands. I fell in love with both the novel and the novelist, who had died in obscurity while I was still reading the long-dead white writers, mostly male, pushed on everyone entering junior high. F.'s gift changed my life. I became obsessed, crazed with devotion. Passionate. All of this, especially the passion and devotion, I wanted to share with you. You and I had always shared literature. Do you remember how, on our very first night alone together, in a motel room in Greenwood, Mississippi, we read the Bible to each other? And how we felt a special affinity with the poet who wrote "The Song of Solomon?" We'd barely met, and shared the room more out of fear than desire. It was a motel and an area that had not been "cleared." Desegregated. We'd been spotted by hostile whites earlier in the day in the dining room. The next day, after our sleepless night, they would attempt to chase us out of town, perhaps run us off the road, but local black men courageously intervened.

Over the years we shared Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. Orwell. Langston Hughes. Sean O'Faolain. Ellison. But you would not read the thin paperback novel by this black woman I loved. It was as if you drew a line, in this curious territory. I will love you completely, you seemed to say, except for this. But sharing this book with you seemed everything.

I wonder if you've read it, even now.

Our Child was conceived. Grew up. Went to a large Eastern university. Read the book. She found it there on the required reading list, where I and others labored for a decade to make sure it would be. She tells me now she read it before she even left home, when she was in her early teens. She says I presented it to her with a quiet intensity, and with a special look in my eyes. She says we used to read passages from it while we cooked dinner for each other, and that she used to join me as I laughed and sometimes cried.

What can one say at this late date, my young husband? Except what was surely surmised at the beginning of time. Life is a mystery. Also, love does not accept barriers of any kind. Not even that of Time itself. So that in the small house that seemed so large during the years of happiness we gave each other, I remain Yours,
Tatala

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpted from "The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart" by Alice Walker. Copyright© 2000 by Alice Walker. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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.