BRATTLEBORO — Alice Walker's great-great-great-great grandmother, “walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Ga. with two babies on her hips,” we learn early on in Pratibha Parmar's 2013 documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.
“She lived to be 125 years old,” the writer says. “It is in memory of this walk that I choose to keep, and to embrace, my maiden name Walker.”
Her surname - and that sojourn of her grandmother's - are apt metaphors for the extraordinary journey of Alice Walker's own life.
The daughter of two impoverished sharecroppers (her mother earned $17 a month in the 1950s working as a maid), Walker attended Spelman College on a full scholarship before transferring to Sarah Lawrence, where she published her first book of poetry.
Walker married Melvyn Levanthal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer, when she was 23 and they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi.
Determined to live in the South, the couple was eventually overwhelmed by racism and fled to New York City, where Walker became an editor at Ms. Magazine and played a prominent role in the civil rights movement.
In 1982, she published the critically acclaimed The Color Purple. Despite the book's commercial success, Walker came under attack, as the film was picketed by African Americans who objected to its depictions of black-on-black violence. She was not cowed.
Walker went on to start a publishing company and write numerous other works, including The Temple of My Familiar and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. Her life as a political activist in some ways has been even more dramatic, with missions to Congo, Rwanda, and Palestine.
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Despite Walker's flamboyant persona and the controversy her life has engendered, the real motive force of the documentary are Walker's words.
“Ironically, Mississippi was great for me as a writer,” she said of the dark years she spent battling death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. “To stand with the people helped me to write out of a deeper awareness.”
The grainy archival footage that Parmar weaves throughout the narrative turns vibrant as color photos of Walker and her then-husband light up the screen. “Our love,” she said, “made us bullet-proof.”
Although the union was short-lived (the couple divorced after nine years), Walker's fond memories of her marriage stand in stark contrast to the acerbic words she has for her detractors.
“People really had a problem in my disinterest in submission. And then had a problem with my intellect, and with my choice of lovers,” she says - the latter an allusion not only to her white husband but to her various lesbian relationships.
Walker speaks movingly of having witnessed Martin Luther King being arrested: “I had never seen that kind of acceptance of consequences, of really radical determination to change a situation by sacrificing whatever you had to. It went very deeply into my spirit. It was like finally seeing a part of myself that I hadn't seen expressed.”
Despite the roller-coaster ride of her life, one comes away from the film feeling she would not trade it for anything.
“No one could wish for a more advantageous heritage than that bequeathed to the black writer in the South,” she says. “We must give voice not only to centuries of silent bitterness but also of neighborly kindness and sustaining love.”
For Walker, everything is redeemed through the artistic act.
“Creation is really a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can be very sad,” she says. “Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you did it the way only you could do it. That's what makes us us.”