Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc. 1970.
We collect books not so much as objects but as mementos of a particular time in our lives, a philosophy that opened our eyes, a history we do not want to forget. Alice Walker wrote her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in a room of her own in Jackson, Mississippi as a way to honor her family’s determination to build lives of dignity. Around the time of publication of The Third Life, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye were also released. Morrison and Walker would go on to win the Pulitzer while Angelou would be nominated.
Alice Walker came to Mississippi in 1966 to support the freedom movement. She collected depositions from Greenwood sharecroppers thrown off the land for attempting to vote. She discovered the poetry of Margaret Walker and eventually covered Dr. Walker’s leave of absence from Jackson State University. She also taught literature and writing at Tougaloo College and wrote a second novel, Meridian, from her home in Jackson. She fell in love, she married, she had a child. Walker’s marriage to Mel Leventhal was the first legal interracial marriage in Mississippi. While Walker worked, Leventhal risked his life as a lawyer deconstructing Jim Crow. In 2008, Walker reflected on her time in Mississippi at the Third Annual Gathering of Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement in conjunction with Jackson State University:
“I saw the best of human beings in Mississippi. They were black and they were white. They were young and they were old. They were women and they were men. They were children who sacrificed childhood so that future generations might enjoy it. Mississippi, in its vanguard position of struggle in the Southern black freedom movement, was a fierce, challenging, loving, rageful mother and father to my spirit. My debt for what I learned of human courage and possibility can never be paid with less than my understanding that I must never, given our people’s beauty, endurance, trust in each other, and grace, give up.”
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