“And it was then that I knew that the healing / of all our wounds / is forgiveness / that permits a promise / of our return at the end”: These concluding lines of Alice Walker's third book of poetry, Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979), appropriately set the tone of the poet's voice and contain her essential message: a deep concern for all human beings, optimism and affirmation of life, the feeling of continuity, and a highly personal vision. To call her poems “hopeful strategies for recapturing one's humanity”¹ is, therefore, entirely apposite. The whole title poem includes another typical feature: Walker draws on a personal experience. “Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll see you / in the morning”² is the solemn and faithful promise of her mother at her father's death.

Alice Walker is better known as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist, although she has published three books of poetry: Once (1968), Revolutionary Petunias (1973),³ and Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning. A glance at her poetry in its entirety will provide some reasons for its rather tepid reception among critics. Walker's emphasis on concrete, precise images, everyday themes and personal tone are in marked contrast to the overwhelming dependence of much contemporary black poetry upon rhetorical brilliance and formal experimentation. Her short poems usually appear surrounded by blank space. Only in Once does Alice Walker play with the stanza arrangements by indenting some lines or building a snake form, e.g., in “What Ovid Taught Me.”The later poems are more complex, and elaborate, and often longer. Their surface simplicity, however, does not preclude sophistication. The poem “The Democratic Order” can easily be converted into prose: “My father (back blistered) beat me because I could not stop crying. He'd had enough ‘fun’ he said for one damn voting day.” This incident, which could be seen as part of a longer narrative, is transformed into an image with transcending meaning. No longer is it the isolated experience of a single black father's rage at a violent voting day and of a child's bewilderment. The poetic rendering of this episode implies the poet's matured understanding and an instance of self-revelation (the subtitle accordingly runs “Such Things in Twenty Years I Understood”).

In her poetry, Alice Walker talks about herself directly, without donning a mask to disguise her words; she does not need to muffle her voice as early black women writers, notably Phillis Wheatley, had to; she is not forced to wear “the mask that grins and lies.”⁴ The black woman poet is now confident of herself and of her audience. The ostensible purpose of her poetry is the celebration of life and of the black woman trying to come to terms with the American reality. Alice Walker described the process of composing poetry in relation to Once which was written at a difficult time of her life:

Since that time, it seems to me that all of my poems—and I write groups of poems rather than singles—are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair, and stand again in the sunlight. Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.⁵

To sit down and think of a poem is for her the most genuine way to get in touch with her real self. Conscious manipulation of thoughts never turns into good poetry. Walker says, “I realize that while I write poetry, I am so high as to feel invisible, and in that condition it is possible to write anything.”⁶ Knowing which poems did not grow out of sincere emotions, she expects to be haunted by them. Instinctively, she feels that her poems are most successful when she relies on personal experience. Her poetry, it can be argued consequently, is the best access to the personality of Alice Walker.

This may need some clarification. Alice Walker wrote almost all of the poems in Once when she was 21 years old (they were published later) and completed Revolutionary Petunias during her last years in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1974, at the age of thirty, she moved to New York. That year can be taken as the beginning of a new stage in her life. She says about the time she spent in Jackson: “I grew to adulthood in Mississippi.”⁷ It is no mere coincidence that her search for identity, her own growing into self-confidence should run parallel to the nation's search for new ways of living. With her move to New York, Alice Walker completes that process and, in the consequence, her poetry changes, too. In her interview with John O'Brien in 1973 and also in several autobiographical essays, she draws the connection between her life and specific poems. Among her poetic sources are, to name a few, her parents, her sister Molly, early love affairs, her travels to Africa, marriage, and childbirth. To a degree, one can justify, therefore, the equation of the poet with the persona in a number of poems.

Larry Neal's observation that in black literature one frequently comes across a “clash between the private and public aspects of literary performance”⁸ is certainly true of Alice Walker. Her fiction and essays are no doubt written for a public purpose; her poetry, on the contrary, decidedly emphasizes the private aspects, although all along she considers herself a poet with publication in mind. The latent dichotomy of publicity vs. privacy allows a grouping of her poems into three classes for the purpose of discussion. In the first of these, Walker is concerned with the historical experiences of black people and her own participation in them, always seen from an individualistic standpoint. This blending of the public and the private sides is symbolized in the two words “revolutionary” and “petunia.” The “revolutionary petunia” poems are definitely “black” and mostly Southern in context. Secondly, Walker writes very private love poetry which—because of the two dominant images—could be called “heart and soul” poems. The poet-persona is not so much black—as she is woman-centered. Thirdly, in Good Night, Willie Lee, she reveals a tendency towards more public poems. These “facing the way” poems, as I would like to name them, are often directly feminist in tone.

Black life in the South and her own involvement in it serve as the common denominators of the “revolutionary petunia” poems. The poet's experiences and impressions are treated as representative of the collective history of the American South. Thus, the very personal poem about her own birth as the eighth child of a sharecropper's family in Eatonton, Ga., is at the same time a depiction of the economic progress, albeit slow, of the Southern black family. Whereas the midwife picked out a pig for her brother's birth, she received cash for Walker's own delivery because, as her mother proudly recalls, “‘We wasn't so country then’.” A Southerner by birth and inclination, though no longer by residence, Alice Walker knows that growing up in the South gave her life a sense of purpose that she would not like to do without. Although the history of the South forced her to fight for even the option to stay there or leave it, she values the vitalizing energy of its life. She once summarized her debt to the region by calling it

a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, and an abiding love of justice. We inherit a great deal of responsibility as well, for we must give voice to centuries not only of silent bitterness and hate but also of neighborly kindness and sustaining love.

Walker's interest in the South is not restricted to the time after slavery was introduced: Just as her concern for her racial roots extends to Africa, so her compassion for the Southern earth extends to the remnants of the original Indian population. The ancient burial mound “Eagle Rock”—it also features in the novel Meridian—symbolizes for her oneness with nature, communication with one's body, and peace:

I used to stop and
Linger there
Within the cleanswept tower stair
Rock Eagle pinesounds
Rush of stillness
Lifting up my hair

Sensitive to the long suffering and eventual defeat of the Indians, the poet laments the exploitation of the sacred place as a mass tourist attraction:

The people come on tours.
And on surrounding National
Forest lakes the air rings
With cries
The silenced make.

Walker's love of the South as a region is, however, most strongly inspired by her love of its black inhabitants. As a child she learned to trust other black people completely; she felt protected within this community. For this reason, she has dedicated many poems, especially in the first part of Revolutionary Petunias, to the people she grew up with. She cherishes the memory of the old men at the funerals “More awkward / With the flowers / Than with the widow”; the uncles with “broken teeth / And billy club stars” who bring tidings from the north, and are “Always good / For a nickle / Sometimes a dime” for the children. She treasures the old people in their little gardens, the Sunday School teachers, the old women in church singing of Jesus, their good friend. Most of all, Alice Walker pays homage to women like her mother: supporters of their families, helpful friends to their daughters, important role-models. Alice Walker begins the often quoted poem which is part of her essay “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” with the words, “They were women then / My mama's generation / Husky of voice—Stout of / Step. …” She admires these “Headragged generals” because “they knew what we / Must know / Without knowing a page of it / Themselves.” Characteristically, Walker avoids stereotypes and refrains from romanticizing or exalting them. She knows this kind of woman was “A hard / worker, with rough, moist hands” whose life consisted of everlasting toil. She characterizes the chores of her grandmother when she was a young woman:

Come to seven children.
To aprons and sweat.
Came to quilt making.
Came to canning and vegetable gardens
big as fields.
Came to fields to plow.
Cotton to chop.
Potatoes to dig.

The realization that she is part of a tradition of women who have tried to assert themselves, even while their creative needs never found public recognition, helps the poet to define herself.

A very immediate and striking influence on her life—again it proves the parallel between collective and personal history—is Walker's sister Molly, from whom she learned that Eatonton, Georgia, did not mean “the world,” that she should know things beyond the Southern life. The story of Molly revealed to her the difficulties—the civil rights movement had not yet fully begun—in being satisfied with Southern life once you had left for other, freer regions. Alice suffered when she found out that her admired sister Molly was ashamed of her family's backwoods behavior. Her now well-known poem to her sister, which went through numerous drafts, was intended to be vicious and even to hurt. Yet in the end it offered understanding for that young woman for whom “the gap that separated us from the rest of the world was too wide … to keep trying to bridge.”⁹ While in the fifties, Molly did not find it possible to develop her personality and remain in the South, Alice, in the sixties, struggled to effect the changes that would allow the Southern black person to do both at the same time.

From these women of an earlier generation, and of her own, Alice Walker learned about the beauties of birth, the duties to the dead, familial love and support. No doubt her early experiences provided her with the sincerity and energy to engage actively in the civil rights struggle. Whereas Walker gives a rather factual record of revolutionary work in her essays, some of her novels and short stories, she provides fragmentory but enlightening glimpses of emotions and atmosphere in her poetry. Thus, the people who refuse to join the movement are described as

Fat chested pigeons
resplendent of prodigious riches
reaped in body weight
taking bewildered pecks
at eagles
as though muck
were God.

Again the individual, personal, “petunia” side of the public cause most captures her imagination. The title poem in Once consists of scattered incidents combined into a poetic picture of the revolutionary mood. Walker favors the stanza about the young black man who wanted to crash all barriers at once by swimming nude at a white beach. To her, this stanza belongs to a series of poems “full of playfulness and whimsicality, an attraction to world families and the cosmic sea—full of a lot of naked people longing to swim free.” To a large extent, the success of these poems resides in the use of telling, revelatory details. “Sammy Lou of Rue” is a forceful, evocative poem becaues it catches the spirit of the time: Sammy Lou becomes a folk heroine when she revenges her husband's murder and kills the white man “using a cultivator's hoe / with verve and skill.” She is, however, a conventional, religious black woman, not a deliberate, radical revolutionary. On her way to the electric chair she leaves only a single message:

“Don't yall forgit to water
my purple petunias.”

This one sentence contains the essence of Alice Walker's vision: a revolutionary without a love for the everyday is not a whole person. It is obvious that she found the material again in family history. On a journey, her mother once picked up a purple petunia in a deserted yard and kept it for years. She offered her daughter a blooming branch on the day her daughter was born. Inspired by that symbol of beauty and endurance, Alice Walker named her book after it: “In a way,” she says, “the whole book is a celebration of people who will not cram themselves into any ideological or racial mold. They are all shouting Stop! I want to get that petunia!”¹⁰

The South, then, signifies for Walker a measure of humanity and of the importance of a life in which dreams bridge past and present. In “View from Rosehill Cemetery: Vicksburg” Walker evokes its spirit:

Here we are not quick to disavow
the pull of field and wood
and stream;
we are not quick to turn
upon our dreams.

In later years, Walker has to acknowledge that the spirit of a black community united for a common goal was in danger of dissolution. She cannot conceal her disappointment at the lack of solidarity and trust she sometimes encountered among black people. In the section “Crucifixions” of Revolutionary Petunias, several poems bewail the lamentable fact:

Be the first at the crucifixion
Stand me (and them and her and him)
where once we each together
stood.

“Black Mail” is an appropriate title for that poem.

No doubt, Alice Walker's “revolutionary petunia”poems have black people, black life, and black experience at their care. They really are

Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes.
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self.

In contrast to this “Song of Color,” her love poetry is obviously more woman- than black-centered. This is not to say that gender predominates over race; of course, the experiences of “black” women are the bases of the poems, but the problems of womanhood are now emphasized. Sometimes love in extreme situations is depicted, as in “Johann,” which sketches the possibility of loving a blond German. In several poems, race causes disappointment or misgivings in love (or leads to suicide because of “incorrect” racial relations). Yet, extraordinary love affairs are not the only problematic ones, the male-female relationship in general is likely to raise frustration. One poem runs:

To love a man wholly
love him
feet first
                    head down
                    eyes cold
                    closed
in depression.

To juxtapose this view, a more conventional love poem features a simple, uncomplicated image.

Here we lie
You and I—
Your mind, unaccountable,
My mind simply
Stopped—
Like a clock struck
By the treachery
Of time.

Outright statements without embellishments characterize Alice Walker's love poems. In Once, many of them are related to poems considering suicide as a solution for unhappy love. In an interview, Walker confesses that she wrote them after she wanted to commit suicide because of a pregnancy. She says, “… I felt I understood the part played in suicide by circumstances and fatigue. I also began to understand how alone woman is, because of her body.”¹¹ One exemplary stanza is the following:

to die before one
wakes
must be joyous
full swing glorious
(rebellion)
(victory)
unremarked triumph.

Affirmation of life is, however, the persistent image in these early love poems; then and later (there are several suicide poems in Revolutionary Petunias and Good Night, Willie Lee) it is the alternative to suicidal thoughts. Characteristically she concludes Once in an optimistic tone:

My fear of burial
is all tied up with
how used I am
to the spring … !

In Revolutionary Petunias, five years later, the expectations youthful love raised have mellowed. The attitude towards love is no longer always positive; sometimes resignation tinges the tone of a poem. Consider the following advice in “Expect Nothing”: “Tame wild disappointment / With caress unmoved and cold. / Make it a parka / For Your Soul”; and: “But expect nothing. / Live frugally / On surprise.” Or listen to the near sarcasm in “Be Nobody's Darling”:

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradiction
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.

Despite her continuing fascination with the mysteries of love (“Your eyes are widely open flowers. / Only their centers are darkly clenched / To conceal Mysteries”) she cannot disregard its affiliation with violence and wounds: “… and his fingers peeled / the coolness off / her mind / his flower eyes crushed her / till / she bled.” On the whole, however, one encounters a matured persona who values love even when it is unfashionable, as Walker once writes in a poem to her husband. A self-confident, relaxed attitude claims more and more importance.

I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.

The tone of the love poems in Good Night, Willie Lee is at first similar to that of Revolutionary Petunias. It starts with “I love a man who is not worth / my love”; it contains the lines “I thought love could be controlled. / It cannot”; or:

My hand shakes before this killing.
My stomach sits jumpy in my chest.
My chest is the Grand Canyon
sprawled empty
over the world.

Whereas in the earlier poems, the words “heart” and “soul” appeared only occasionally, they recur constantly in Good Night. Walker's most original lines contains these two words: “Your soul shines / like the sides of a fish”; “until the end / he called me possessive / and held his soul / so tightly / it shrank / to fit his hand”; “Never offer your heart / to someone who eats hearts”; “My heart—which I feel / freezing a bit each day to this man.” Heart and soul as the symbols of the capabilities of love show how completely a person can be numbed and possessed by it and how difficult it is to get accustomed to its waning or subsiding. Yet, the poet succeeds in overcoming adversities as a whole person. One poem may clarify her firm self-confidence:

He said: I want you to be happy.
He said: I love you so.
Then he was gone.
For two days I was happy.
For two days, he loved me so.
After that, I was on my own.

The strength of the matured poet derives in large part from the new maternal love towards her daughter. This love is free of possessiveness, full of forgiveness, aware of future parting:

Even as I hold you
I am letting go.

Notwithstanding many beautiful lines and deep emotional sincerity, Walker's numerous love poems can sound repetitive and too self-centered when read one after another. As a reader, one would like to leave out several stanzas or poems and concentrate instead, after careful selection, on individual lines or poems. By disregarding undecipherably personal allusions, one is rewarded with the insight into a genuine black female core.

With her celebration of black life, the South, the spirit of community and, most of all, of black womanhood, Alice Walker forms part of a tradition of black women writers. Her “They were women then / My mama's generation,” for example, resembles Margaret Walker's “Lineage”; in many poems Gwendolyn Brooks, like Alice Walker, sings for the common black people (“The Birth in a Narrow Room,” “The Bean Eaters,” “The Mother”). Her sisterhood with Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, or Mari Evans is also undeniable; they all share the praise of black womanhood as a common theme. Erlene Stetson, the editor of Black Sister. Poetry by Black Women, 1746-1980,¹² cites Alice Walker's flower imagery as part of a tradition. On the other hand, Alice Walker is not included in Stephen Henderson's anthology Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973),¹³ in which he collects poems with an emphasis on formal innovation, and radical or politically conscious themes which all derive from the black oral tradition. If such an anthology were made today, perhaps it would contain some poems of Good Night, Willie Lee, namely her “facing the way”poems.

By the time of publication of Good Night, Willie Lee in 1979, Alice Walker's poetry points towards a more radical vision of black life, a more public-oriented voice. Possibly, her growing public spirit has two sources: in 1970, she wrote in an article on the “Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist” that “(t)he real revolutionary is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff.” Following that credo, she wrote about the private, personal side of the revolutionary movement (cf. also the novel Meridian) while still considering herself a real revolutionary. However, after living seven years in Jackson, Mississippi, as an active civil rights participant, Walker suddenly realized that she was by nature not a violent or radical person. She felt guilty about that self-revelation: “The burden of a nonviolent, pacifist philosophy in a violent, nonpacifist society caused me to feel, almost always, as if I had not done enough.” Now, she even “cringe(s) at the inappropriateness” of being referred to as an “activist” or “a ‘veteran' of the Civil Rights Movement.” Walker's haunting doubts about her position as a black person in the seventies have resulted in a number of poems which are more radical and provoking than the earlier civil rights poems. Sometimes it seems as if she wanted to compensate the lack of personal radicalism by writing about it; probably she now feels like the protagonist in Meridian; she has to keep up the song of the people at a time when the real revolutionaries are left to struggle on their own. This self-conflict is best expressed in the poem “facing the way,” which deals with the problem of giving up one's comfort to the service of the poor. The atmosphere is one of guilt about pursuing and loving art instead of dedicating one's energy and spending one's money in helping the poor:

it is shameful how hard it is for me to give
them up!
to cease this cowardly addiction
to art that transcends time
beauty that nourishes a ravenous spirit
but drags on the mind whose sale would patch
a roof
heat the cold rooms of children, replace an eye.
feed a life.

Having successfully published essays, novels, short stories, and poems Alice Walker is sure that the purpose of her life is to write; nevertheless, she cannot escape the conflict of “facing the way,” of being torn between verbal concessions and active engagement.

The second source for this new trend towards the public is her growing feminism, or “womanism” as she prefers to call it. The womanist content of her most recent novel The Color Purple has its precedent in several poems. As a typical example consider the following stanza:

I find my own
small person
a standing self
against the world
an equality of wills
I finally understand.

More than before, Walker hails the individuality of the contemporary black woman who has finally achieved the right to write, to think, to do what she wants.

In Good Night, Willie Lee, Alice Walker definitely contributes to what Henderson defines as a unifying theme of black poetry: “the idea of Liberation.”¹⁴ In “Early Losses: a requiem,” Walker depicts the woman's side of slavery and captures a woman's emotions, thus blending the public, personal, and feminist aspects of her voice. “Omunu,” the magic word that symbolizes Africa, the past, freedom, happiness for the slave mother has lost its meaning for the child sold away from the mother:

A sound like a small wind
finding the door of a
hollow reed
my mother's farewell
glocked up from the back
of her throat
the sound itself is all

Other poems, “facing the way,” “The Abduction of Saints,” “Light Baggage” or “January 10, 1973” (“i sit for hours staring at my own right hand / wondering if it would help me shoot the judge / who called us chimpanzees from behind the bench”), pay tribute to the leaders and the cause of the black revolution and to prominent black women writers. In contrast to Once and earlier poems, they are not written in an individualistic, personal, impressionistic vein; but neither are they the kind of experimental oral-aural poetry as Sarah Webster Fabio's “Tribute to Duke,” Sonia Sanchez' “A Coltrane poem,” or Carolyn Rogers' “Poem to Malcolm” for which indigenous black musical forms such as gospel songs, sermons, blues, ballads, chants, hollers have provided the stylistic features of rhythm, improvisation, and repetition. Alice Walker reveals a deep affinity to American blues, gospel or jazz singers: Shug Avery in The Color Purple is the prominent example; the short story “Nineteen Fifty-Five” deals with a singer. Yet in her poetry, black music is only occasionally alluded to, structurally, no poem tries to capture the timber of black music or, a second recurring feature in contemporary black poetry, black street talk. It has to be emphasized that to qualify Alice Walker's poetry as “personal” does not connote “a female/feminine devaluation or dismissal of her work.” In that sense, it was applied to the black female poets during the Harlem Renaissance. As Gloria Hull says, their “aracial or quietly racial works in traditional forms”¹⁵ did not gain public recognition. Today, Alice Walker's largely “personal” poems are representative of a major trend in black women's poetry that stretches back to Phillis Wheatley and comprises most contemporary black women poets.

Despite her many beautiful and successful single poems, Alice Walker's poetry as a whole fails to convince the critics that she is better a poet than fiction writer. Statements like “She is at her best a storyteller” or “Walker's most notable accomplishment … has been in fiction” abound.¹⁶ Reviewers tend to take a generally, though not enthusiastically, positive line of criticism. The poems in Once for example, are characterized as “pencil sketches which are all graven outline: no shaded areas, no embellishments. Wit and tenderness combine into humanity”¹⁷; those of Revolutionary Petunias are “poems of extraordinary grace, wisdom, and strength,” admired for “richness of detail and a convicting concreteness.”¹⁸ Another scholar lauds Walker's “loving sense of the individual in history,” and praises her for “(i)gnoring proscriptive calls for black art radically to reorder the Western cultural aesthetic.”¹⁹ Yet another critic laments Walker's “linguistic mediocrity” in Good Night, Willie Lee which sometimes “sinks to the level of a kind of wisdom-poetry” or becomes a “sad jumble of banalities”; yet this same critic also stresses that, “The majority … of her rather preachy love poems are self-critical, fair-minded, bent on a reasonable blend of compassion and independence.”²⁰

Generally, it seems that the critics appreciate Walker's originality of approach, as well as the vividness of her diction with its precise wording and subtly pleasing sounds. The careful structuring of Revolutionary Petunias its division into five parts, with each part the sequence of the former, is also praised. Walker's poetry is often regarded, however, as not so important as her fiction because it does not capture the reader's imagination as much as her novels or short stories do. As a prose writer, Alice Walker has even become something of a cult-figure for black women's literature after the publication of The Color Purple in 1983. Yet, no doubt, Walker considers herself a poet, too. Poems appear at strategic points in many essays, novels, and short stories: one prominent poem in Meridian, for example, encapsulates the protagonist's main concerns in a few lines. Many essays use poems to clarify a point; Walker often quotes them at public lectures.

Again, as with Walker's love poetry, one feels that the average reader might like to leave out a few lines or stanzas. To be precise in my criticism: Why does such a good poem as “Once” include a stanza with the banal lines “In the morning / there was / a man in grey / but the sky was blue”; and why does the poem end with the detailed description of a small black girl waving the American flag “gingerly / with / the very / tips / of her / fingers?” The penultimate stanza would have been more forceful and evocative: in a few words it recounts the death of a little black girl, an episode that subtly depicts the cruelties of the time without any bland flag-waving. In more than one poem, one is disappointed with the last line that one expects to summarize or conclude the poem with a note that reaches beyond. The last line of “Excuse,” the last stanza of “Never Offer Your Heart,” “At First,” and “facing the way”—to cite the most obvious examples—had better been left out. On the whole, Once is a book in which the poetry sometimes possesses an unevenness that was balanced out in the following two books. Despite some small flaws, Good Night, Willie Lee is a skillful, successful book that one treasures highly. The poem dedicated to the heroine of a Zora Neale Hurston novel epitomizes the central creed of all of Walker's poetry: celebrating the lives of black women:

i love the way Janie Crawford
left her husbands the one who wanted
to change her into a mule
and the other who tried to interest her
in being a queen
a woman unless she submits is neither a mule
nor a queen
though like a mule she may suffer
and like a queen pace
the floor

Notes

1. Jerry W. Ward, review of Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems by Alice Walker, College Language Association Journal 17 (1973), p. 128.

2. Alice Walker, Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning, New York: Dial Press, 1979, p. 53.

3. Alice Walker, Once, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968; Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

4. This is the first line of Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poem “We Wear the Mask.”

5. John O'Brien, “Alice Walker,” in Interviews with Black Writers, New York: Liveright, 1973, p. 191.

6. Ibid., p. 192.

7. Alice Walker, “Recording the Seasons,” in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, p. 224.

8. Larry Neal, “The Black Contribution to American Letters: Part II. The Writer as Activist—1960 and After,” in Mabel M. Smythe (ed.), The Black American Reference Book, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976, p. 767.

9. O'Brien, Interviews with Black Writers, p. 210.

10. O'Brien, Interviews, p. 208.

11. O'Brien, Interviews, p. 189.

12. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

13. Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Reference, New York: Morrow, 1973.

14. Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry, p. 18.

15. Both quotes from Gloria T. Hull, “Afro-American Women Poets: A Bio-Critical Survey,” in Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar (eds.), Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, Bloomington: Indian Univ. Press, 1979, p. 174.

16. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1980, p. 182 and O'Brien, Interviews, p. 186.

17. Lisel Mueller, review of Once, Poetry, 117 (1970/71), p. 328.

18. Jerry Ward, review of Revolutionary Petunias, College Language Association Journal 17 (1973), p. 127.

19. Duncan Kenworthy, “Contemporary Poetry: Six Touchstones,” The American Scholar 42 (Summer 1973), p. 522.

20. Alan Williamson, review of Good Night, Willie Lee, Poetry 135 (1979/80), p. 353-354.