i love the way Janie Crawford
left her husbands
the one who wanted
to change her into a mule
and the other who tried to interest her
in being a queen
a woman unless she submits is neither a mule
nor a queen
though like a mule she may suffer
and like a queen pace
the floor

Without Alice Walker we may never have known Janie Crawford…or Zora Neale Hurston, for that matter. Born in rural Georgia in 1944, long before she earned acclaim for The Color Purple, Alice Walker was a lover of Black women…her mother, who planted daffodils and toiled in the red earth as a sharecropper, her grandmother who saved Alice from chores and nurtured her writing, Ms. Hurston – who had been buried in an unmarked grave in Eatonville, Florida…her work fading into obscurity, Mississippi women with thick arms and gold teeth whose hearts held righteous and valiant war stories against white-supremacy.

Her blindness in one eye might have enabled Alice to see in different ways and hear more intently. She developed a deep love for prose and poetry, earning a scholarship first to Spelman College and later transferring to Sarah Lawrence…only to return south to beckon Black women with little formal education to tell their own stories as they continued the work of Civil Rights resistance and community self-determination.

By 1982, Alice Walker had published her most famous work The Color Purple, adapted into a film in 1985 and produced as a Broadway musical by Oprah Winfrey. Readers are pulled in to novels that dance around the edges of history, futurism, and critique with offerings like Temple of My Familiar and The Third Life of Grange Copeland. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens first introduces the world to the many generations of Black women’s liberation praxis, which Walker calls womanism, later stating that “womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender.’

Beyond her writings, Alice Walker is a freedom fighter, advancing causes of justice from ending female genital mutilation to standing for the rights of Palestinans.
Alice Walker is unquestionably a divine Black woman!

#BlackWomenAreDivine
Offered by Melina Abdullah @docmellymel
Graphic by Megan Castillo @megann.jade