Alice Walker
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Alice Walker is a prolific writer of the twenty-first century who is both influential and an activist within the African-American community. Walker’s prior works have caused much debate within society. However, Walker kept writing the same sorts of literature while being criticized for what was being written by her. Through this controversy, Walker was still able to get past this time and publish many other pieces of work. One work that was published was, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” Within this essay, Alice Walker discuses these authors as well as quotes to show their significance within their place among society.
“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” argues for slave women and the generations of unprivileged women the only form of artistic expression available to them was their daily life. In the ordinary tasks of cooking, sewing, and growing food, tasks on which their survival depended, these women found a way to express the yearnings of the soul for hope and beauty, as well as the desire to be remembered. (Virtual Classroom) Unable to read and to write their own stories, these generations of mothers and grandmothers had their own life to live.
They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay. And when those frail whirlwinds fell, in scattered particles, upon the ground, no one mourned. Instead, men lit candles to celebrate emptiness that remained, as people do who enter a beautiful but vacant space to resurrect a God. (Walker 677)
Within Alice Walker’s essay, connections are made to other female African-American writers. However, there is an exception within the essay that Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” Jean Toomer, a black male, is a person who was both inspiring and intriguing. When reading the question to the prompt, a there was an immediate connection with Jean Toomer and “The Scholarship Boy.”Rodriguez’s essay is about a boy who isolated himself from his family to become a man who works hard and becomes someone on his own. However, Jean Toomer moves away from his family to find himself while the scholarship boy just isolates himself from his to study in the household.
Toomer was of mixed race and found that he did not like going to segregated schools as a child and just wanted to be known as an American. Although Toomer did not graduate from college, he moved away from his family in Washington D.C, moving to Georgia. In Rodriguez’s essay, the scholarship boy’s family did not understand why he wanted