The novel privileges the idea that in African American experience the individual has a responsibility to the group, whether the group is family or the larger black community. In working with this idea, Walker charts the toll on individual lives when kinship or the communal self is absent or seriously undervalued.

The history of the Copeland family is a record of the difficulties African Americans face in keeping the notion of kinship alive in a racist world. Walker’s narration of the effects of the sharecropping system, a metaphor for America’s overarching racism and discrimination, on Grange and Margaret reveals that kinship has a precarious future. If black people do not struggle to maintain it, awful events can happen to them, events more terrible than racism itself.

Grange responds to his lack of power to combat racism by taking his frustration and anger out on his wife and child. Margaret responds to the same environment and to Grange’s treatment of her by neglecting Brownfield. Brownfield, in turn, responds to this parental neglect by becoming even more cruel than his father. Thinking that no one loves him, he cannot love himself. He reasons that the only thing he has to give people, whether family or friends, is hate. Brownfield, as an adult entrapped in the same sharecropping system, treats his family with more venom than Grange had treated his. Walker suggests that with each generation the bonds of kinship are potentially lessened and more damage to black people may occur.

In New York City, Grange begins to understand that what he did to his family was wrong. When he returns to rural Georgia, he does so to atone for his previous sins against the tribe, his family. To underscore the idea that the bonds of kinship must not be transgressed, Walker prevents the new Grange from having any positive effect on Brownfield. In other words, Grange and Margaret’s neglect of Brownfield and the damage it caused was permanent. Grange might still be able to make up for his past mistakes with Ruth, and that is what he does.

In Ruth’s story, Walker notes the good that can come from a lived kinship. Grange takes part in Ruth’s growing up, sharing her frustrations and joys, never letting her forget that she is deeply loved. He also expands her knowledge of black history and culture so that she will have a base to help her deal with racial discrimination. He teaches Ruth how to use a gun and how to drive a car, and he encourages her to read so that she can become self-sufficient, strong, and resourceful. At the novel’s end, Grange says: “Survival was not everything. He had survived. But to survive whole was what he wanted for Ruth.”

The Third Life of Grange Copeland shows that the survival of black people depends as much on tribal love and responsibility. Although this theme informs the novel, Walker is sensitive to the fact that black women apparently suffer more when kinship is absent than do men, particularly in her examination of the destroyed and wasted lives of Margaret, Mem, and Josie Copeland.