Alice Walker - Gathering Blossoms Under Fire : The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

The Journals of Alice Walker

Edited by Valerie Boyd

Fiction

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women

Meridian

The Color Purple

You Cant Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories

To Hell With Dying

The Temple of My Familiar

Finding the Green Stone

Possessing the Secret of Joy

The Complete Stories

By the Light of My Fathers Smile

The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

Poetry

Once

Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems

Good Night, Willie Lee, Ill See You in the Morning

Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful

Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems and Drawings

Collected Poems

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems

Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart

Nonfiction

In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose

Living by the Word

Warrior Marks

The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult

Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writers Activism

Pema Chdrn and Alice Walker in Conversation

Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

Overcoming Speechlessness

The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir

The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Be in Harms Way

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2022 by Alice Walker

Compilation and Introduction copyright 2022 by Valerie Boyd

While Love Is Unfashionable from REVOLUTIONARY PETUNIAS & OTHER POEMS by Alice Walker. Copyright 1973 and renewed 2001 by Alice Walker. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2022

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Interior design by Carly Loman

Jacket design by Jackie Seow

Front cover photo courtesy of the author

Back cover photo Scott Campbell

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Walker, Alice, 1944 author.

Title: Gathering blossoms under fire : the journals of Alice Walker 19652000 / edited by Valerie Boyd.

Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2022. Identifiers: LCCN 2021047979 (print) | LCCN 2021047980 (ebook) | ISBN 9781476773155 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781476773179 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Walker, Alice, 1944Diaries. | Authors, American20th CenturyDiaries. | African American women authorsDiaries. | Social reformersUnited StatesDiaries. | LCGFT: Diaries.

Classification: LCC PS3573.A425 Z46 2022 (print) | LCC PS3573.A425 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54 B 23/eng/20211015dcundefined

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047979

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047980

ISBN 978-1-4767-7315-5

ISBN 978-1-4767-7317-9 (ebook)

For Belvie, Joan, and Sue, my human angels, and for my brother Curtis, who was a child.

ALICE WALKER

WHILE LOVE IS UNFASHIONABLE

While love is unfashionable

let us live

unfashionably.

Seeing the world

a complex ball

in small hands;

love our blackest garment.

Let us be poor

in all but truth, and courage

handed down

by the old

spirits.

Let us be intimate with

ancestral ghosts

and music

of the undead.

While love is dangerous

let us walk bareheaded

beside the Great River.

Let us gather blossoms

under fire.

A LICE W ALKER

BY VALERIE BOYD

I am amazed at myself. Once more I am warming up to write, the twenty-four-year-old woman wrote in her journal. The date was July 18, 1968; the place was Jackson, Mississippi. How incredible in some ways it is to thirst for pen and paper, she continued, to need them, as if they were water.

That young woman was Alice Walker. And through her prodigious talentas a novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayistshe would go on to become one of the most celebrated authors in modern history.

On her epic journey from sharecroppers shack in rural Georgia to cultural icon, Walker has been a faithful diarist, chronicling her sprawling, complex life in more than sixty-five journals and notebooks spanning some fifty years. In 2007, she placed those journalsalong with hundreds of other documents and items from her personal archiveat Emory Universitys Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library in Atlanta. The journals, as well as certain business and financial files, are embargoed from the curious eyes of scholars, journalists, and fans until 2040.

Now, however, Walker has decided to publish a volume of selected entries from her journals. In Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, she offers a passionate, intimate record of her development as an artist, human rights activist, and intellectual. She also intimately exploresin real timeher thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world. The journal entries traverse an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., or the King, as she called him; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, partly to defy laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; the birth of her daughter; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the womens movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, in sometimes equal measure, for her work and her activism; burying her mother; and her estrangement from her own daughter. The personal, the political, and the spiritual are layered and intertwined in the revealing narrative that emerges from Walkers journals.

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire is organized by decadefrom the 1960s to the early days of the twenty-first century. In this way, the book shows us a woman becoming herself. Many women readersand readers of all genderswill find themselves reflected in these pages, as Walker chronicles every major life event imaginable: marriage and divorce; becoming a parent; teaching herself to write a novel; her road to financial stability; friends and lovers gained and lost; and finding Godor Great Spirit, as she calls the divinein herself and in nature.