"You Just Can't Keep a Good Woman Down": Alice Walker sings the blues

African American Review, Summer, 1996 by Maria V. Johnson

As in the blues, Walker's use of opposition and contrast occurs within a framework of core materials which are repeated and varied. A standard blues piece consists of a series of stanzas each of which follows a basic harmonic structure (I IV I V I) and text form (AAB) which is repeated and varied as a piece progresses to give it a large-scale shape. Within this structure there are core elements - pitches, contours, images, phrases, lines of text, chords - which are varied using core means - embellishment, vibrato, syncopation, timbrai nuance - to create unlimited possibilities for rendering the same stanza, song, or structure. Similarly, Walker's "Nineteen Fifty-five" is a series of interactions; as the interaction unit is repeated, the form of the interaction varies (visits, television performances, letters). The story is also a sequence of diary entries distinguished by date. Diary entries provide structural frames in which the various forms of interaction are set (see figure on p. 226). Moreover, behind the interaction unit there is a core relationship - that between Gracie Mae and Traynor - as well as a core song - which connects the two even before they have met. In subsequent visits, correspondence, and performances, this core "tune" is repeated and embellished as Traynor discovers pieces of the song's meaning, as core images (projected by Traynor and Gracie Mae) are elaborated, and as new "takes" on the core oppositions are made.

As in the blues, it is by exposing core materials - themes, characters, relationships, oppositions - again and again in varied forms, in interaction after interaction, that Walker brings her readers to a deeper understanding of their significance. As in the blues, Walker's story takes shape in a way which both indulges in and transcends the repetitions at the core of its formal structure.

The story culminates with Gracie Mae and Traynor's joint appearance on The Johnny Carson Show. Structurally ingenious, this "final" performance provides a forum for elements of music, image, and social dynamics to come together. This social/musical interaction provides an ideal stage for Alice Walker to dramatize the core oppositions of the story and the contrasting aesthetic values, perspectives, and personalities of two vastly different individuals and cultures. It is important to the structural development of Walker's story that both Gracie Mae and Traynor sing "their" song on the same stage, and especially significant that they do not sing it together, but rather each in turn. This juxtaposition of performances is both essential to Walker's dramatic illumination of contrast, and also symbolic of the walls that separate and divide the two individuals and cultures.

As in the blues, Walker uses "personification" as a structural vehicle to explore a wide range of issues and experiences of struggle and conflict. As I would argue that the blues personifies struggle by projecting issues of struggle vis-a-vis relationship dynamics and articulating responses to relationships, Walker uses the relationship between two characters - their interactions and responses - as a vehicle to [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] explore the differences and conflicts between two cultures. Moreover, by juxtaposing the aesthetic approaches of Gracie Mae and Traynor - the process of signifying or "repetition with a difference" with that of imitation or direct repetition - Walker examines implications of these cultural differences and the barriers to developing relationships across differences in the context of a racist and patriarchal society.