Rest in Peace

Alice Walker had to defend herself from fierce attacks after she wrote “The Color Purple.” Mostly these came from folks who didn’t like the fact that she was writing about a black man (she just called him “Mr.”) abusing a black woman. I think it probably was difficult work to do, since it would very likely be used as fuel for racism.

But she explained, in her book of essays, “Living by the Word” that she carefully portrayed Mr.’s father as “light skinned” in both the book and the movie. Her point was that Mr.’s father was the son of a slave and a slave owner – a son of both the oppressed and the oppressor. All of this came from deep in Alice’s soul where she battled for years to accept her own white great-great-grandfather, who had raped a girl of 11 and she bore him a son, her great grandfather.

Here are Alice’s words in the essay:

We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. We are the slaver and the enslaved. We are the oppressor and the oppressed. We are the women and we are the men. We are the children. The ancestors, black and white, who suffered during slavery – and I’ve come to believe they all did; you need only check your own soul to imagine how – grieve, I believe, when a black man oppresses women, and when a black woman or man mistreats a child. They’ve paid those dues. Surely they bought our gentleness toward each other with their pain.

And here’s a poem she wrote about it all:

for two who
slipped away
almost
entirely:
my “part” Cherokee
great-grandmother
Tallulah
(Grandmama Lula)
on my mother’s side
about whom
only one
agreed-upon
thing
is known:
her hair was so long
she could sit on it:

And my white (Anglo-Irish)
great-great-grandfather
on my father’s side
nameless
(Walker, perhaps?)
whose only remembered act
is that he raped
a child;
my great-great-grandmother,
who bore his son,
my great-grandfather,
when she was eleven.

Rest in peace.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest in peace.
In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest in peace, in me.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest. In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest. In peace
in me
the meaning of our lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest.

All of this speaks powerfully to me as I try to reconcile myself from the other side of this divide. I come from a family of means who have been in the thick of all that is wrong with our imperialist, warmongering, theocratic and racist culture. I want to find a way to say to my grandfather:

Rest. In peace
in me
The meaing of our lives
is still unfolding.

I want to find a way to heal that part of him that is also part of me.