Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book - Interview

Ebony, May, 1992 by Charles Whitaker

Happy is a state Walker finds herself in often these days. At age 48, she has finally discovered the secret to the contentment that eluded her for so many years. "I'm as happy now as I was sad as a child," she says.

Born in Eatonton, Ga., the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers Minnie Tallulah and Willie Lee Walker, Walker was a quiet and sensitive child. "I was the last child," she says. '"And my mother didn't really want eight children, and she didn't really bite her tongue about saying that."

From a very early age, Walker displayed a love of reading and a talent for writing. In solitude, she composed poems in her head, but she rarely wrote her words or feelings down, fearing that her older, rambunctious brothers might find and destroy them. Even today, she plots her novels in visions that fill her head, then transfers almost finished prose to a legal pad. No multiple drafts or false starts. "When I'm ready to put it on paper that's pretty much the way it will be," she says.

Occasionally traumatized by her brothers (one of whom nearly blinded her at age 8, when he shot her in the right eye with a BB gun), the seeds of her decidedly female point of view were sown in a household in which boys were unfettered and girls were tied to domestic duties.

She escaped this world in 1961, going first to Spelman College and then to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

She later traveled to Mississippi, to work in voter registration drives. There, she encountered a young White lawyer named Melvyn Leventhal. They married in 1967, and had one daughter, Rebecca, 22, a senior at Yale University.

But the strain of being an interracial couple in the '60s era South (they were the only interracial married couple in Mississippi at the time) took its toll, and the Leventhals divorced in 1976. After a brief stint at Ms. Magazine, where she worked with her dose friend (and godmother of her daughter) Gloria Steinem, she moved to San Francisco, where she still has a home near Hillside Park.

For nearly a decade Walker has been "involved" with writer Robert Allen (The Port Chicago Mutiny), whom she met back in 1962 when they were students, she at Spelman and he at Morehouse. Though they are extremely dose ("We are very good and supportive friends who sometimes make love"), marriage is not in the offing.

"I don't believe in marriage," she says. "Its a patriarchal construct like all of these other horrible institutions. Besides, I also like being courted."

She also likes the independence of her life as she had now assembled it. Living most of the time on her bucolic 40-acre spread three hours outside of San Francisco, she enjoys the tranquility and natural beauty of the environs.

But even when puttering about in her lush garden, she is never far removed from the "womanist" (a term she coined to describe the Black women's issues that are at the heart of so much of her work) concerns about which she is compelled to write.

She is braced for the controversy that undoubtedly will ensue once Possessing The Secret of Joy hits bookstores this month. Nearly 10 years of withering commentary about The Color Purple have steeled her for the onslaught. "I wasn't woman enough to take this on say eight years ago," she says. "But after having so many copies of The Color Purple figuratively aimed at my head, I think I can take it now. The fact is, when you take on these taboos, you have to be ready and you have to be willing to suffer in order to help people see a really bad situation."