black, unacceptable in white society, she sets out to free herself from the life that so cruelly imprisons her.

The dawn of Meridian’s awareness and subsequent freedom comes with her participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Prior to this time, Meridian had been a passive observer, much of the time caught up in fantasy in order to escape her pitiful existence. With the emergence of the Civil Rights effort and her ensuing wholehearted involvement in it, she begins to face reality for the first time. As a result, she begins to make choices for herself based on reality. She begins to change.

Meridian falls in love with Truman Held, a handsome, pretentious, self-centered young black man who is somewhat active in the movement. An intelligent young artist, Truman is nonetheless in many ways insensitive and superficial. He is unable to see the incongruousness of his preoccupation with spouting French phrases while wearing African dashikis and chasing northern white girls. His participation in the voter registration drive is prompted mainly by his desire to be considered au courant, rather than by any sense of commitment. Confounded by his own egotism, he underrates Meridian’s love for him and fails to comprehend the real meaning of the Civil Rights effort. Whenever life appears to be coming too close, Truman “escapes” to New York, where the black man is allegedly free, and where he can lose himself in his art, the only world where he is in control.

Out of confusion and underlying anger at the injustices of the real world, Truman strikes out at women. He treats the white woman as a bitch-goddess, a scapegoat who has the sins of her race heaped high upon her head. Her punishment at his hands is sex without love or compassion. The black woman is praised. She is celebrated in poetry, sculpture, and paint. She is art, but seen in this light she is not human. Thus her punishment is more insidious.

It is only after his stormy marriage to Lynne, a liberal, white, middle-class exchange student from New York, and the death of their five-year-old daughter, who dies as the result of a brutal attack, that Truman moves toward some semblance of a mature understanding of himself and his life. He finds himself drawn back to Meridian time and again as if she were a magnet. This attraction is partly based on his awareness of Meridian’s contempt for him; but more important, he half consciously knows that with her help and a sincere involvement on his part in the blacks’ struggle he can find himself and indeed become a “true man.” He travels through Southern communities with Meridian witnessing the personal torment in the lives of the people there. He begins to grasp what getting people to vote really means. He sees them act in the face of brutality, terror, even death in order to remake their lives for the better, in order to uphold their human dignity. Truman’s newfound awareness causes him to decide to stay in the South. With that decision comes the promise of a new life for him.

For all of its hopefulness, Meridian is not a fairy tale; Alice Walker understands human nature too well for that. She knows the inherent human resistance to change which grows out of fear of the unknown or the misunderstood. Her novel grapples with probably the most devastating fear of all—the fear of facing the truth and living with it. It is this fear that overwhelms Lynne. She has lost everything: Truman, her daughter, her parents, and her place in white society. Through agonizing experiences, she has learned the truth about blacks and whites in America. Her idealism has been torn from her and discarded like so much trash. But Lynne cannot live with the truth that, as she sees it, hovers like doom all around her. So she arms herself with the remains of old, tired myths and fantasies such as choosing to see the South and its blacks as art: a pastoral scene with warm dark bodies against a lush green landscape. Her most damning fantasy, however, is the one that reveals her belief in the white goddess myth. Lynne refuses to relinquish her belief that as a white woman her body has special power over black men. She knows that this power is shabby and demeaning, but she holds desperately to it. She is unable to give it up even if it means a chance for something better; she cannot envision something better. Power is superiority. If Lynne is meant to symbolize white society, the symbol holds dreadful implications.

It is difficult to detect flaws in this inspiring novel. That is not to say that it is a perfect work, but simply that it is so genuine in its expression that its weaknesses, whatever they are, are greatly overshadowed by its beauty and emotional power. A feminist note can be detected from time to time, but the note is subtle and true and never mars the beauty of the novel’s motif.

Walker’s style is graceful and poetic. Even when she is describing scenes of mutilation and extreme suffering, she does so with exceptional sensitivity. She is an intensely concerned writer, and her serious tone reflects this concern. However, there are traces of humor that paradoxically give the reader some respite from the pain being revealed, yet, at the same time, underline that pain. Walker also makes use of satire and irony which she applies liberally, although not exclusively, to her male characters. Her use of irony serves to point out our fallacious beliefs about ourselves and others. In her advocacy of change, Walker employs a style that is satiric but sympathetic, poetic and poignant, graceful yet wrenching.

The title of the novel refers to the central character, but more than that, it points to the character as symbol. Meridian, as her name suggests, attracts and guides. The reader is drawn to her because there is much about his own spiritual plight that he shares with her; she symbolizes the individual’s struggle to make sense out of his existence. In a sense, Meridian is an existential heroine. While we may face somewhat reluctantly our own feelings of isolation, unworthiness, and guilt as Meridian does, it is most gratifying to be able to witness her victory over them. We share in this victory and take heart. Alice Walker gives us a haunting depiction of what it means to create oneself out of time, effort, and pain in order to emerge triumphant in the knowledge of who one is and what it takes to truly live.

Meridian is the center of this short novel, which opens in 1968 in Chicokema, a small town in Georgia, where she is working to encourage black people to register to vote in her attempt to continue the Civil Rights movement into the 1970’s. She has spent the 1960’s working in various small towns in the deep South. She has gone to New York City but did not join the group there because, even though she was willing to give her own life, she could not honestly bring herself to say that she could kill for the cause. At the beginning of the novel, which is near the end of the story, she is in bad health, is losing her hair, and has no possessions except a sleeping bag, the clothes on her back, and a few letters that she tacks on the wall in the vacant houses she appropriates. She always wears a visored cap of the sort worn by motormen on trains. The narrative does not progress in chronological order, but although it is told out of sequence in short chapters relating to different past events, it is not difficult to establish the pattern of Meridian’s life.

When she was growing up, Meridian was never told anything about what to expect from men or from sex. It is not surprising that she becomes pregnant and has to drop out of high school. She resents having to stay at home while her husband Eddie continues to play basketball and to work in a restaurant after school. She has no love for Eddie or Eddie, Jr., and it is not until after Eddie has left her in April of 1960 that she becomes aware of the past and present of the larger world when she watches the television coverage of the bombing of a nearby house.

Meridian then takes the initiative for the first time in her life, going to a house where she has seen some freedom fighters at work and volunteering her services. There she meets the arrogant Truman Held, who uses French phrases for effect and becomes a part of her life for the next decade. After Meridian works with this enthusiastic group for a year, her new friends encourage her to take advantage of the opportunity to attend Saxon College in Atlanta. She starts a new life, keeping secret her past as wife and mother. At Saxon, she does well academically but has a difficult time with the strict rules and the devotion of the administration to making her and the other students into ladies. She joins the Atlanta Movement and then finds it almost impossible to study while others are being beaten and jailed.

She adopts the Wild Child, a pregnant thirteen-year-old who lives out of garbage cans, but is unable to care for her in her dormitory or even to conduct her funeral in the campus chapel when she is hit by a car. Meridian moves to the nearby ghetto, supports herself by working for a lecherous old professor, and fights for freedom with Truman, with whom she is in love. Truman enjoys Meridian’s company and her intellectual conversation but dates white exchange students from northern schools. Meridian knows that he admires the flash of her face across a picket line but that he does not want a woman who wants to claim her own life and would have preferred her as she had been as Eddie’s wife. The one time Meridian and Truman have sex, she becomes pregnant, but she has an abortion and never tells Truman. By the time she graduates from Saxon, she is having “blue spells,” does not eat, and starts losing her hair.

Truman marries Lynne, a white Jew from New York City, and they become freedom fighters in Mississippi. Lynne is devoted to Truman and the cause, yet she is hated by both blacks and whites. She is very brave, but her confidence is finally shattered when Truman’s friends rape her repeatedly with his approval. Truman recognizes that he feels hemmed in by Lynne’s intelligence and her presence. At every opportunity, he runs away from Lynne to exist in Meridian’s presence for a few days; Meridian remains aloof and indifferent to him even when he is with her.

After Lynne becomes pregnant with Truman’s child, she returns to New York. Truman follows her there and takes his own apartment, where he sees other women and paints, working night and day on the century’s definitive African American masterpieces. Meridian comes to New York to comfort both of them when their young daughter, Camara, dies after having been brutally attacked.

Lynne loses her desire to live after the death of her child and becomes fat and unkempt. She continues to depend on Meridian as her only friend until Meridian has come to terms with herself and her guilt, recovered from her mysterious illness, and left Truman to live her own life and accomplish her own mission. Truman returns to Lynne and tells her that he still loves her and wants to provide for her and to be her friend and brother.

Meridian’s own healing and release take place toward the end of the 1960’s. In her search for herself, Meridian has begun to go to church. One Sunday, the service is centered on a broken and sorrowful father who stands before the congregation on the anniversary of his murdered son’s death. She feels his pain and joins wholeheartedly in the service that commemorates his loss. She realizes in a moment of epiphany that the church, with its music and ritual, represents the ways of transformation that the people know, and she sees that the people want to take their own growth and transformation as far as they can. She now realizes that she wants to be a part of their transformation and knows for certain that she would kill before she would allow anyone to murder that man’s son again. She knows that it is her mission to continue to sing the songs that the people need to hear. She realizes that it is the song of the people, transformed by the experiences of each generation, that holds the people together. If any part of that song is lost, the people suffer and are without soul. She wants to keep that song alive.

For a while, she and Truman continue to work together with the people in the community, taking care of their physical and emotional needs and encouraging them to vote. The two of them go to the prison to visit a thirteen-year-old girl who has killed her child. The experience affects Meridian profoundly and helps her to come to terms with her own guilt and to accept her mission. Weeping, moaning, and writing poetry, Meridian sleeps with Truman’s arms around her. He mothers her and cares for her while her soul heals. Meridian leaves; the new part of her has grown out of the old. She leaves with him her visored cap, her sleeping bag, and the agonies of her soul.

Meridian’s struggle to re-create herself and to find her own identity and her own mission is like the struggles of her own mother, of Lynne, of most women, of black people in America, and of all oppressed people who attempt to break free. Meridian must deal with the circumstances of her own life and the agonies of her own soul in her own unique way. Her mother had worked and sacrificed in order to become a teacher, and then her frail independence had given way to the pressures of motherhood until she felt that she was being buried alive and became abstracted and devoted her life to making paper flowers and prayer pillows. As a child, Meridian could not understand her mother’s sorrow, and she took on herself the guilt of having stolen her serenity and shattered her emerging self. The novel outlines Meridian’s successful struggles to lay aside the burden of her guilt and to preserve her own emerging self in spite of many hindrances and limitations imposed from within and without. She is an inspiration to all women in her striving for selfhood, independence of spirit, and inner peace.

The problems of Lynne’s marriage, the loss of her daughter, and the loss of her own self-respect are those of any woman who leaves the niche in society into which she is born, defies the wishes of her parents and her heritage to fight for a cause, and ignores the discouragement of opposing opinions and individuals. In a broader sense, the struggles between her and Truman parallel the struggle between the whites and the blacks, which inspired the Civil Rights movement. Their continuing love and mutual forgiveness makes it possible for them to continue to support each other and live “as brethren” in spite of the many destructive influences on their relationship.

It is particularly meaningful to have a black woman’s perspective from within the Civil Rights movement. Alice Walker was involved in the movement in many of the same ways that Meridian is. In the 1960’s, Alice Walker was married to Mel Leventhal, who, like Lynne, was white and Jewish. He is the father of her daughter Rebecca. Walker has thanked both Mel and Rebecca for their support during the writing of the book. Although Maya Angelou’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement was different from Alice Walker’s in many ways, it is interesting to compare the perspective that Angelou expresses in her autobiographical novels Gather Together in My Name (1974) and Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976).