From In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens By Alice Walker

from In Search of Our Mothers’Gardensby Alice WalkerLITERARY FOCUS: PERSONAL ESSAYREVIEW SKILLSA personal essay is a short piece of nonfiction writing that explores a topicin a personal way. The topic can be anything at all that intereststhe writer; the best personal essays often show how the writer’s ownexperiences and emotional life connect with more universal concerns.Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell are noted for theirAs you read this essay,analyze the author’suse of metaphor, atype of figurativelanguage.FIGURATIVELANGUAGEWords or phrases thatdescribe one thing interms of another.personal essays.READING SKILLS: IDENTIFYING THE MAIN IDEAUse the SkillAs you read thisfamous essay, mark the beginning of each new topic. Whenyou have finished, go back andmake a list of all the topics youhave marked. Check to see ifthe writer has provided a onesentence generalization thatcovers all of the topics. If youcan’t find such a sentence, thenyou must look at all the topics,think about the essay’s title, andthen infer the main idea thatunifies the essay. Your statement of the main idea shouldbe broad enough to cover allthe topics in the essay.Jeff Reinking.Copyright by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.Unlike formal essays, personal essays are often casual and conversational.They may even ramble and get off the subject for a brief time. But a goodpersonal essay, no matter how informally it is written, is always focused onat least one main idea.Alice Walker.Literary SkillsUnderstand apersonal, orinformal, essay.ReadingSkillsIdentify themain idea.Review SkillsIdentifyfigurativelanguage.from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens319

fromAlice WalkerIn the late 1920s my mother ran away from home to marry myfather. Marriage, if not running away, was expected ofSkim the essay, and find thepage on which a poemappears. Then, count thenumber of footnotes in theessay that identify specificpeople. Jot down what youdiscover.seventeen-year-old girls. By the time she was twenty, she hadtwo children and was pregnant with a third. Five children later,I was born. And this is how I came to know my mother: Sheseemed a large, soft, loving-eyed woman who was rarely impatient in our home. Her quick, violent temper was on view onlya few times a year, when she battled with the white landlord whohad the misfortune to suggest to her that her children did not10need to go to school.She made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers’ oversummers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent the winterevenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds.Underline details thatdescribe the personality ofWalker’s mother (lines 5-8).During the “working” day, she labored beside—notbehind—my father in the fields. Her day began before sunup,and did not end until late at night. There was never a momentfor her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own privatePause at line 24. What doesWalker want to discover?thoughts; never a time free from interruption—by work or the20noisy inquiries of her many children. And yet, it is to mymother—and all our mothers who were not famous—that I wentin search of the secret of what has fed that muzzled and oftenmutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that the black woman hasinherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to this day.But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother havevibrant (v br nt) adj.: fullof energy.320Part 1time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit?From “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose byAlice Walker. Copyright 1974 by Alice Walker. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. Electronic formatby permission of Wendy Weil Agency, Inc.Collection 6: Contemporary LiteratureCopyright by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.alls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the

Copyright by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.NotesBrian Lanker.Go back and circle words andpassages in the first fourparagraphs (lines 1-26) thatshow how Walker’s motherwas “overworked.”from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens321

The answer is so simple that many of us have spent yearsdiscovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we shouldmedium (m d · m) n.:material for an artist.have looked high—and low.30For example: In the Smithsonian Institution inWashington, D.C., there hangs a quilt unlike any other in theworld. In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable fig-Pause at line 44. Why isWalker so impressed withthe quilt she saw in theSmithsonian?ures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is consideredrare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quiltmaking, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthlessrags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling. Below this quilt I saw a note thatsays it was made by “an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, ahundred years ago.”40If we could locate this “anonymous” black woman fromAlabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers—an artist who left her mark in the only materials she couldafford, and in the only medium her position in society allowedher to use.As Virginia Woolf 1 wrote further, in A Room of One’s Own:it must have existed among the working class. [Changethis to “slaves” and “the wives and daughters of shareNotice Walker’s bracketededitorial changes in Woolf’sessay, in lines 46-60. Whatdo Walker’s suggestedchanges reveal about herbeliefs?croppers.”] Now and again an Emily Brontë2 or a Robert50Burns3 [change this to “a Zora Hurston or a RichardWright”] blazes out and proves its presence. But certainlyit never got itself on to paper. When, however, one readsof a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils[or “Sainthood”4], of a wise woman selling herbs [our1. Virginia Woolf: English novelist and critic. In A Room of One’s Own(1929), Woolf says that, in order to write, a woman must have aroom of her own (privacy) and the means to support herself (money).2. Emily Brontë: English novelist and poet, best known for her novelWuthering Heights (1847).3. Robert Burns: eighteenth-century Scottish poet.4. “Sainthood”: In the early part of this essay, Walker talks aboutcertain black women in the South called Saints. Intensely spiritual,these women were driven to madness by their creativity, for whichthey could find no release.322Part 1Collection 6: Contemporary LiteratureCopyright by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as

root workers], or even a very remarkable man who had amother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious JaneAusten. . . .5 Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon,Re-read lines 61-64. What isthe main idea of thissentence? Underline it.who wrote so many poems without signing them, was60often a woman. . . .And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more oftenthan not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed ofthe flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealedletter they could not plainly read.Re-read lines 65–76.What qualities of a personalessay do you notice in thispassage?And so it is, certainly, with my own mother. Unlike “Ma”Rainey’s6 songs, which retained their creator’s name even whileblasting forth from Bessie Smith’s7 mouth, no song or poem willbear my mother’s name. Yet so many of the stories that I write,that we all write, are my mother’s stories. Only recently did I70fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’sstories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that herstories—like her life—must be recorded. It is probably for thisCopyright by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.reason that so much of what I have written is about characterswhose counterparts in real life are so much older than I am.But the telling of these stories, which came from mymother’s lips as naturally as breathing, was not the only way mymother showed herself as an artist. For stories, too, were subject80to being distracted, to dying without conclusion. Dinners mustbe started, and cotton must be gathered before the big rains. Theartist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only aftermany years. This is what I finally noticed:5. Jane Austen: English novelist, best known for Pride and Prejudice(1813).6. “Ma” Rainey: nickname of Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett Rainey.She was the first great African American professional blues vocalistand is considered to be the mother of the blues.7. Bessie Smith: One of the greatest of blues singers, Smith washelped to professional status by Ma Rainey. She became known in herlifetime as “Empress of the Blues.”from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens323

Like Mem, a character in The Third Life of GrangeCopeland, 8 my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabbyhouse we were forced to live in. And not just your typical stragglyprofusely (pr · fyºs l ) adv.:in great quantities.country stand of zinnias, either. She planted ambitious gardens—and still does—with over fifty different varieties of plants thatconception (k n · sep n) n.:mental formation of ideas.bloom profusely from early March until late November. Before90she left home for the fields, she watered her flowers, chopped upthe grass, and laid out new beds. When she returned from theIn lines 84-94, Walkerdescribes her mother’screativity with her flowers.How do these details supportWalker’s topic that blackwomen have inherited a“vibrant, creative spirit”?fields she might divide clumps of bulbs, dig a cold pit,9 uprootand replant roses, or prune branches from her taller bushes ortrees—until night came and it was too dark to see.Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame asa grower of flowers spread over three counties. Because of hercreativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seenthrough a screen of blooms—sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias,forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena . . . and on and on.100And I remember people coming to my mother’s yardto be given cuttings from her flowers; I hear again the praiseshowered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, sheturned into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so origithis day people drive by our house in Georgia—perfectstrangers and imperfect strangers—and ask to stand or walkamong my mother’s art.Re-read lines 100-107. Howdo passersby react to themother’s garden? Why dothey have this reaction?I notice that it is only when my mother is working in herflowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invis110ible—except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in workher soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of herpersonal conception of Beauty.Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is alegacy of respect she leaves to me, for all that illuminates and8. The Third Life of Grange Copeland: Alice Walker’s first novel,published in 1970.9. cold pit: shallow pit, usually covered with glass, that is used forrooting plants or sheltering young plants from temperaturevariations in the spring.324Part 1Collection 6: Contemporary LiteratureCopyright by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.nal in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to