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.