The World Has Changed by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online

Sadie Mae Johnson.
    But the most “incorrect” thing about Sammy Lou is that she loves flowers. Even on her way to the electric chair she reminds her children to water them. This is crucial, for I have heard it said by one of our cultural visionaries that whenever you hear a black person talking about the beauties of nature, that person is not a black person at all, but a Negro. This is meant as a put-down, and it is. It puts down all of the black folks in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana—in fact, it covers just about everybody’s mama. Sammy Lou, of course, is so “incorrect” she does not even know how ridiculous she is for loving to see flowers blooming around her unbearably ugly gray house. To be “correct” she
should consider it her duty to let ugliness reign. Which is what “incorrect” people like Sammy Lou refuse to do.
    Actually, the poem was to claim (as Toomer claimed the people he wrote about in Cane , who, as you know, were all as “incorrect” as possible) the most incorrect black person I could, and to honor her as my own—on a level with, if not above, the most venerated saints of the black revolution. It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness, stand.
    Although Sammy Lou is more a rebel than a revolutionary (since you need more than one for a revolution) I named the poem “Revolutionary Petunias” because she is not—when you view her kind of person historically—isolated. She is part of an ongoing revolution. Any black revolution, instead of calling her “incorrect,” will have to honor her single act of rebellion.
    Another reason I named it “Revolutionary Petunias” is that I like petunias and like to raise them because you just put them in any kind of soil and they bloom their heads off—exactly, it seemed to me, like black people tend to do. (Look at the blues and jazz musicians, the blind singers from places like Turnip, Mississippi, the poets and writers and all-around blooming people you know, who—from all visible evidence—achieved their blooming by eating the air for bread and drinking muddy water for hope.) Then I thought, too, of the petunias my mother gave me when my daughter was born, and of the story (almost a parable) she told me about them. Thirty-seven years ago, my mother and father were coming home from somewhere in their wagon—my mother was pregnant with one of my older brothers at the time—and they passed a deserted house where one lavender petunia was left, just blooming away in the yard (probably to keep itself company)—and my mother said, “Stop! Let me go and get that petunia bush.” And my father, grumbling, stopped, and she got it, and they went home, and she set it out in a big stump in the yard. It never wilted, just bloomed and bloomed. Every time the family moved (say twelve times) she took her petunia—and thirty-seven years later she brought me a piece of that same petunia bush. It had never died. Each winter it lay dormant and dead-looking, but each spring it came back, more lively than before.
    What underscored the importance of this story for me is this: modern petunias do not live forever. They die each winter and the next spring you have to buy new ones.

    In a way, the whole book is a celebration of people who will not cram themselves into any ideological or racial mold. They are all shouting, “Stop! I want to go get that petunia!”
    Because of this they are made to suffer. They are told that they do not belong, that they are not wanted, that their art is not needed, that nobody who is “correct” could love what they love. Their answer is resistance, without much commentary, just a steady knowing that they stand at a point where—with one slip of the character—they might be lost, and the bloom they are after wither in the winter of self-contempt. They do not measure themselves against black people or white people; if anything, they learn to walk and talk in the