Alice's true adventures
Alice Walker: a Life is a candid and sweeping biography of the revolutionary author and activist whose landmark 1982 novel, The Color Purple, brought her the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a Black woman for fiction. Now author Evelyn C. White shares the story behind Walker's story
By Robin D. Stone
Essence
October 2004
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Evelyn C. White, a veteran journalist trained to be objective, will admit her bias as a biographer: She loves her subject. And it shows in Alice Walker: A Life (Norton, $29.95), her meticulous account of Alice Walker's emergence as a leading voice on Black women's art, politics and sexuality.
In this eagerly anticipated biography, White, a former newspaper reporter and author of Chain Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships(Seal Press), illuminates Walker's storied history: born the youngest of eight children into numbing poverty in 1944; blinded in her right eye by a BB gun at age 8 while playing cowboys and Indians with two brothers; fighting the integration battles on the back roads of Mississippi; enduring 40 years of published poetry and novels; and having that blockbuster book and movie.
White helps us see beyond the countless awards and outsized persona to the petite woman who still challenges us to recognize our humanity, especially the ugly parts we would rather not see. She reveals a woman who loves deeply, Black and White, male and female--and demands little except simply to write and to be.
ROBIN D. STONE: What made you want to write about Alice Walker?
EVELYN C. WHITE: It's what interests me about every
woman of African descent, starting with myself: I know there's a story
in there that has to do with vulnerability. It's a story that's so
rarely told. I've seen how Alice is perceived as this powerhouse goddess
who has never had a difficult moment. I wanted to show the moments
when I felt that her fragilities and her journey were not understood.
STONE: This work was nearly ten years in the making. What took so long?
WHITE: This book was supposed to take four years. After
I stopped beating myself up for missing the original deadline in 1999,
I understood that nobody expected me to be done in four years but me.