In Search of our Mothers' Gardens
by Alice Walker
In the late 1920s my mother ran away from home to marry my father. Marriage, if
not running away, was expected of seventeen-year-old girls. By the time she was
twenty, she had two children and was pregnant with a third. Five children later,
I was born. And this is how I came to know my mother: She seemed a large, soft,
loving-eyed woman who was rarely impatient in our home. Her quick, violent
temper was on view only a few times a year, when she battled with the white
landlord who had the misfortune to suggest to her that her children did not need
to go to school.
She made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers’ overalls. She made all the
towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits.
She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds.
During the “working” day, she labored beside—not behind—my father in the fields.
Her day began before sunup, and did not end until late at night. There was never
a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts;
never a time free from interruption—by work or the noisy inquiries of her many
children. And yet, it is to my mother—and all our mothers who were not
famous—that I went in search of the secret of what has fed that muzzled and
often mutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the black woman has
inherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to this day.
But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about
feeding the creative spirit?
The answer is so simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have
constantly looked high, when we should have looked high—and low.
For example: In the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., there hangs a
quilt unlike any other in the world. In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and
identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is considered
rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quilt-making, and
though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work
of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling. Below this quilt
I saw a note that says it was made by “an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a
hundred years ago.” If we could locate this “anonymous” black woman from
Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers—an artist who left her
mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position
in society allowed her to use.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously,
handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped
to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
And so it is, certainly, with my own mother. Unlike “Ma” Rainey’s songs, which
retained their creator’s name even while blasting forth from Bessie Smith’s
mouth, no song or poem will bear my mother’s name. Yet so many of the stories
that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories. Only recently did I
fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of
her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the
manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge
that her stories—like her life—must be recorded. It is probably for this reason
that so much of what I have written is about characters whose counterparts in
real life are so much older than I am.
But the telling of these stories, which came from my mother’s lips as naturally
as breathing, was not the only way my mother showed herself as an artist. For
stories, too, were subject to being distracted, to dying without conclusion.
Dinners must be started, and cotton must be gathered before the big rains. The
artist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only after many years. This
is what I finally noticed:
Like Mem, a character in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, my mother adorned
with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in. And not just your
typical straggly country stand of zinnias, either. She planted ambitious
gardens—and still does—with over fifty different varieties of plants that bloom
profusely from early March until late November. Before she left home for the
fields, she watered her flowers, chopped up the grass, and laid out new beds.
When she returned from the fields she might divide clumps of bulbs, dig a cold
pit, uproot and replant roses, or prune branches from her taller bushes or
trees—until night came and it was too dark to see.
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers
spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my
memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms—sunflowers, petunias,
roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena . . . and on and on.
And I remember people coming to my mother’s yard to be given cuttings from her
flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she
landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so
original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this
day people drive by our house in Georgia—perfect strangers and imperfect
strangers—and ask to stand or walk among my mother’s art.
I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is
radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye.
She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image
of her personal conception of Beauty.
Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she
leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She has handed down
respect for the possibilities—and the will to grasp them.
For her, so hindered and intruded upon in so many ways, being an artist has
still been a daily part of her life. This ability to hold on, even in very
simple ways, is work black women have done for a very long time.
This poem is not enough, but it is something, for the woman who literally
covered the holes in our walls with sunflowers:
They were women then
My mama’s generation
Husky of voice—Stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged Generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Kitchens
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
Must know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves.
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength—in search
of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
And perhaps in Africa over two hundred years ago, there was just such a mother;
perhaps she painted vivid and daring decorations in oranges and yellows and
greens on the walls of her hut; perhaps she sang—in a voice like Roberta
Flack’s—sweetly over the compounds of her village; perhaps she wove the most
stunning mats or told the most ingenious stories of all the village
storytellers. Perhaps she was herself a poet—though only her daughter’s name is
signed to the poems that we know.
Perhaps Phillis Wheatley’s mother was also an artist.
Perhaps in more than Phillis Wheatley’s biological life is her mother’s
signature made clear.