Oppression Oppresses

“Meridian,” by Alice Walker, 1976

Alice Walker grew up near the smallish middle Georgia town of Eatonton with her sharecropper parents, then went to college on a scholarship at Atlanta’s Spelman College.  She had some personal troubles there, then became a feminist, (or what she called a ‘womanist’ – a feminist of color) civil rights and political activist.  Her life and Meridian’s life seem a bit intertwined. 

Personal Civil Rights Fiction

Meridian is an African American girl who lives a confused rural life before discovering the 1960s Civil Rights movement in her small town, as it tries to sign up people to vote.  She then gets a scholarship to go to Atlanta’s Saxon College and continues working in the Civil Rights movement in her own way.  During the book she has a child that she abandons, is sexually molested by a series of older men, is beaten by police and thrown in jail for demonstrations, has an abortion in college, thinks of suicide and starts to go a bit crazy.  No wonder.

Meridian only feels safe in the coil of an Indian burial mound on her father’s lost farm, or under the massive old ‘Sojourner’ tree at Saxon, which is later destroyed.  Both connect her to the native American past and the slavery past.  She ends up weirdly oblivious to danger – assaults, cops, guns, cars.  As she gets older, she sometimes stiffens and collapses in the street.  She returns to a small rural community and lives in a bare-bones little house with help from the local African-American community.  There Meridian continues to help people register to vote, tries to integrate the swimming pool, opposes the intentional and deadly flooding of a poor African American neighborhood and stands up for the darker kids in town.

On a personal level, the book is a constant triangle – Meridian herself, a light-skinned African American man named Truman and his blonde Jewish wife, Lynne.  On a political level, Meridian believes that the rich white people have to be eliminated.  Some of the students at Saxon, like her, read Marx and like socialism.  She does not believe in martyrdom and she is generally an atheist.

The book deals with several themes.  Do you have to be willing to kill someone to be a ‘revolutionary?’  The sad attraction some darker skinned men have for light-colored blondes, and visa versa.  Guilty light-skinned women.  Killing babies.  The beneficial changes in African-American religion wrought by Martin Luther King.  The beginnings of ‘black nationalism.’  The enduring power of dark-skinned mothers.  How to get cynical, non-political people to vote. 

This book has no essential plot.  It wanders from thing to thing, poetically taking in life in Georgia and a bit of New York.  Much of it is inside the heads of the characters or conflicts between them, dealing with their lives on a personal level.   This book is not my mug of coffee, but it might be your cup of tea.  It seems to be a disjointed rumination on various ideas and experiences Walker had between 1968 and 1976. 

Walker’s best novel, “The Color Purple,” was published in 1982.  Her first novel published in 1970, ‘The Third Life of Grace Copeland,’ was about violence within the African-American community in the South, based on a true event in Eatonville.  The second to the last novel dealt with more personal Southern stories (‘The Temple of My Familiar’), similar to the stories of Zora Neale Thurston, a writer she identified with.  The last book involved female genital mutilation in Africa (‘Possessing the Secret of Joy’).  In 1983 she developed the term 'colorism' to describe the prejudice against dark skin tones even in the African American community.  'Colorism' is world-wide, of course.

Examined together, all of her novels are not afraid to deal with problems among the African American community, not just the strengths.  The books do not put everything on the dominant racist system.  Or as I put it: ‘Oppression oppresses.’  Alice Walker knows this.

Other reviews on this theme, below.  Use blog search box, upper left:  “The Souls of Black Folk,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “A Time to Kill,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Atheist in the Attic.”

And I bought it at Normal Books, Athens Georgia

The Cultural Marxist

April 9, 2019