For nearly half a century, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker has touched millions around the world with her words.
But she insists that she is just like everyone else, a claim that doesn’t sound quite as far-fetched when she notes that at the moment, she’s trying to figure out Google Meets on her laptop. Her Yorkie, Eddie, and her grandson’s Chinese rescue, Mushu, yip away in the background. Bears have recently invaded Walker’s garden orchard in Mendocino County’s rural Philo, and smoke from the Caldor Fire has “The Color Purple” author concerned about the state of our planet.
Walker, 77, has just debuted her sixth children’s book, the big-hearted “Sweet People Are Everywhere” (Tra Publishing). The story about globalism and humanity is based on a free verse poem from Walker’s 2018 bilingual poetry collection, “Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart.”
Next year, Simon & Schuster will publish five decades of her journals as “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire.” Edited by Valerie Boyd, it’s an intimate look at everything from marching during the Civil Rights Movement to defying laws that barred her interracial marriage to a Jewish lawyer.
Q In the last line of “Sweet People Are Everywhere,” you tell the reader, “We are lost if we can no longer experience how sweet human beings can be.” What do you mean?
A In a way, this poem, which was written for children, is similar to my 2007 poem, “Why War Is Never a Good Idea.” It is our duty as the adults of the world to teach the young that they can be friends with all people.
Q You have a deep relationship with nature. What role has it played in your writing life?
A Everything. I was just talking about this with the (International Council of) Thirteen Grandmothers of Indigenous People. (Grandmother) Flordemayo was telling me about wanting to know how much of her physical inheritance is from her indigenous heritage by doing a genetic test. I feel so connected and embedded with nature itself that I don’t feel a need to do that. It has taken me all these years to put it into words. I wish everyone could feel this way, because if you did, you couldn’t harm anything. We’re not going anywhere. We are just becoming and becoming — and the necessity to protect our planet is real.
Q You have an elaborate garden. What is your favorite thing to grow?
A My favorite thing that I couldn’t live without are collard greens. Black people in the South, where I’m from, couldn’t imagine living without them. As for cooking them the traditional way — forget it. They overcook them in the South. Now I just pick them, wash and saute them in the pan with garlic, olive oil and salt. I add an egg from my chickens. That’s my breakfast.
Q What’s the meaning behind the “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire” title?
A It’s from a poem that I wrote for my husband while we were living in Mississippi. We were married illegally. We had a big garden, and we were always conscious that our love, which was the biggest flower, was under threat. That’s where a lot of the world is now. There is so much trouble in the world that you have to gather your blossoms under all kinds of circumstances.
Q How did you come to work with Valerie Boyd? Was it difficult to share your private journals?
A She wrote “Wrapped in Rainbows,” the biography of Zora Neale Hurston, which endeared her to me forever. We’ve had a wonderful time. If you think of yourself as a very special and totally unique person, it will be harder, but I honestly feel that my life isn’t any different than anyone else’s. Many people have married someone they loved, divorced someone they loved, raised a child, buried a mother. (Something I wrote) may have resonance in the lives of others, if they can go there.
Q Was there an entry you had forgotten or that surprised you when you rediscovered it?
A Everything. I have the worst memory. Writers don’t often have that kind of memory of what you wore and what you said. We are busy writing something from another world. I understand deeply that all of us have certain similarities. We seem to be hard-wired to react in certain situations to the same thing.
I really feel, too, a responsibility — to younger women especially but also younger men — to be an elder. We’ve lost that to a large degree. But you must learn to grab elders where you find them. I really believe that.
5 BOOK PICKS FROM WALKER
“Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem: A Memoir” by Daniel Day
“Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America” by Linda Lawrence Hunt
“Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine” by Kelley Fanto Deetz
“The Deeper the Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home” by Michael Tubbs
