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

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

Walker's exploration of materialism culminates in Gracie Mae's visit to Traynor's house in 1968, where we see for the first time his home environment. Walker captures the vastness of Traynor's material wealth in her humorous and exaggerated description of Gracie Mae's experience of the journey to visit him, which makes use of personification as well as hyperbole: When they finally get to the kitchen, the first thing Gracie Mae notices "is that, altogether, there are five stoves. He looks about to introduce me to one" (16). By projecting Gracie Mae's response to Traynor's mountain castle, Walker intensifies her examination of the contrasts between their lifestyles, as well as her probing of the spiritual reality behind Traynor's appearance of material well-being. By exaggerating and personifying Traynor's material wealth, and juxtaposing these images with images in which Traynor appears objectified, Walker caricatures an inversion between person and object which dramatizes the contrast between Traynor's material wealth and spiritual destitution, and the discrepancies between appearance and reality. We see how "too much" and "too big" can be oppressive and alienating, obstructing and obscuring one's relationship to oneself and to others. Ironically, Traynor's too much room (five floors, a whole mountain) results in too little space for himself.

Walker's articulation of the opposition between appearances and reality and dramatization of the contrasts between Gracie Mae and Traynor reach a peak in the final interaction when the two appear together on The Johnny Carson Show (1968). Contrasts occur on several levels at once: (1) how Gracie Mae and Traynor look and their attitudes toward how they look, (2) their performances of "their" song and their approaches to singing, and (3) the audience's responses to their performances and their reactions to the audience response.

Traynor is all corseted down, trying to appear thin, while Gracie Mae, having failed to lose weight, has "had ... a very big dress made" (18). Traynor's approach is to try to hide this aspect of his physical reality, while Gracie Mae acknowledges it and works with it, bringing style to it. It is as if Traynor is trying to appear as he did in 1956. Second, in her juxtaposition of their performances, Walker captures the vast differences between their approaches to singing and attitudes toward it. Describing her own performance, Gracie Mae says:

... I sound - wonderful. Being able to sing good ain't all about having a good singing voice a'tall. A good singing voice helps. But when you come up in the Hard Shell Baptist church like I did you understand early that the fellow that sings is the singer. Them that waits for programs and arrangements and letters from home is just good voices occupying body space.... I am singing my own song, my own way. And I give it all I've got and enjoy every minute of it. (18)

Describing Traynor's performance, she says:

... he sings it just the way he always did. My voice, my tone, my inflection, everything. But he forgets a couple of lines. (18-19)