Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth will air Sun., Feb. 9, on PBS' American Masters series. At the beginning of Pratibha Parmar's new feature-length documentary tribute to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet, Walker pays homage to her Great Great Great Grandmother, who walked, as a slave, from Virginia to Georgia with two babies in tow. Her ancestor lived to be 125, according to Walker, who retains her maiden name as a tribute to that walk, and to the woman's strong spirit.
As a child growing up in the South of the 1940s and 50s, Walker felt the sting of segregation. She recalls landowners who would hire entire families to work their farms, paying all of them a paltry salary that should have been paid to one worker, not five or six.
"Your children should be working my field," Walker recalls her mother being told.
"These children are my children," replied Mrs. Walker. "They're going to be educated." With the $17 she earned per week, Mrs. Walker bought Alice a typewriter.
Walker says that her mother never said, "I love you" until she was elderly. "But the love was apparent," she said with a tearful smile.
The film follows Walker through a childhood in which she was showered with love in a place where hate loomed just over the horizon. During the 1960s, she met Martin Luther King, Jr., through her involvement in the civil rights movement. She looks back upon that time in which social unrest changed the course of African American lives. The movement had white supporters, and Walker admits that she was among those who didn't want whites to be involved.
That changed when she met Melvin Leventhal, a white, Jewish lawyer who was involved in civil rights. Their courtship took place during demonstrations and civil disobedience actions, and they were the first mixed-race married couple to walk down the street together in Georgia.
Over the years, Walker had other relationships, with men and with women, including a high-profile 1980s romance with pop/folk singer Tracy Chapman. She says she's neither lesbian, straight nor bisexual, but curious. "If you're really alive, how can you be in one place the whole time?" she asks. "For me, that doesn't work."
In The Color Purple, the book that won her the Pulitzer, Walker dared to shine a light on topics that had not been discussed before, such as lesbianism and spousal abuse in the African American community. When Steven Spielberg's 1985 film version of the book was released, the film was harshly condemned and picketed by African Americans. News and talk-show footage from the period reveals the community's objections to the portrait that Walker had painted. More recently, it's been pointed out that Walker was attacked because she had the courage to tell the truth.
Nothing is held back in Parmar's film, and Walker courageously, if sometimes sadly, faces each issue head-on. Estranged from her daughter, who has publicly denounced her, Walker expresses her deep hope that she will one day meet her grandchild. Walker today continues writing and fighting for the rights of all oppressed peoples. Through it all, she never expresses rage, but rather tries to spread harmony and love even as she exposes injustice.
"All of Alice's writings urge us to think differently and critically about things we take for granted," said longtime activist Angela Davis. "And that can change the world."
At the end of the day, Walker finds peace in her garden. "A tree will never call you a nig--r," she said.
Next week, we'll have an interview with actress Margaret Avery, who played Shug in the film of The Color Purple, which screens at the Castro Theatre on Valentine's Day.