The World Has Changed by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

presence of Du Bois, Hurston, Hughes, Toomer, Attaway, Wright, and others—and when they bite into their pillows at night these spirits comfort them. They are aware that the visions that created them were all toward a future where all people—and flowers too—can bloom. They require that in the midst of the bloodiest battles or revolution this thought not be forgotten.
    When I married my husband there was a law that said I could not. When we moved to Mississippi three years after the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, it was a punishable crime for a black person and a white person of opposite sex to inhabit the same house. But I felt then—as I do now—that in order to be able to live at all in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose. Otherwise, I’d just as soon leave. If society (black or white) says, “Then you must be isolated, an outcast”—then I will be a hermit. Friends and relatives may desert me, but the dead—Douglass, Du Bois, Hansberry, Toomer, and the rest—are a captive audience.... These feelings went into two poems, “Be Nobody’s Darling” and “While Love Is Unfashionable.”
     
    J.O.: There is one poem in Revolutionary Petunias which particularly interests me—“For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties.” Can you tell me about what went into the structuring of this rather long poem, and perhaps something about the background of it?
     
    A.W.: “For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties” is a pretty real poem. It really is about one of my sisters, a brilliant, studious girl who became one of those Negro Wonders—who collected scholarships like trading stamps and wandered all over the world. (Our hometown didn’t even
have a high school when she came along.) When she came to visit us in Georgia it was—at first—like having Christmas with us all during her vacation. She loved to read and tell stories; she taught me African songs and dances; she cooked fanciful dishes that looked like anything but plain old sharecropper food. I loved her so much it came as a great shock—and a shock I don’t expect to recover from—to learn she was ashamed of us. We were so poor, so dusty and sunburnt. We talked wrong. We didn’t know how to dress, or use the right eating utensils. And so, she drifted away, and I did not understand it. Only later, I realized that sometimes (perhaps), it becomes too painful to bear: seeing your home and family—shabby and seemingly without hope—through the eyes of your new friends and strangers. She had felt—for her own mental health—that the gap that separated us from the rest of the world was too wide for her to keep trying to bridge. She understood how delicate she was.
    I started out writing this poem in great anger; hurt, really. I thought I could write a magnificently vicious poem. Yet, even from the first draft, it did not turn out that way. Which is one of the great things about poetry. What you really feel, underneath everything else, will present itself. Your job is not to twist that feeling. So that although being with her now is too painful with memories for either of us to be comfortable, I still retain (as I hope she does) in memories beyond the bad ones, my picture of a sister I loved, “Who walked among the flowers and brought them inside the house, who smelled as good as they, and looked as bright.”
    This poem (and my sister received the first draft, which is hers alone, and the way I wish her to relate to the poem) went through fifty drafts (at least) and I worked on it, off and on, for five years. This has never happened before or since. I do not know what to say about the way it is constructed other than to say that as I wrote it the lines and words went, on the paper, to a place comparable to where they lived in my head.
    I suppose, actually, that my tremendous response to the poems of W.C. Williams, cummings, and Bashō convinced me that poetry is more