Alice walker short stories

February  2025

 
True beauty cannot be disappeared. ~aw.                         Welcome Home, Leonard Peltier.

 
In communion with Leonard Peltier’s release from half a century of radically unjust imprisonment, I listened to MY LIFE IS MY SUNDANCE, his moving, informative, and spiritually powerful autobiography.  It is an excellent way for those unfamiliar with the Indigenous struggle in the United States to grasp some of the hidden complexities undergirding the American myth of freedom and equality.  Be warned: it is intense.  Truly learning about “America” can be a frightening experience.  But what other medicine is there that is as likely to cure us of major historical distortions?  My Life Is My Sacrifice, might well have been the title of Leonard Peltier’s book, but what is it that the Sundance teaches?  That yes, the suffering is sometimes intolerable here on earth, but there is  perhaps, behind the curtain of lived “reality,” a spirit world.  It is this world that the ritual of Sundance connects us to.  Knowing in our temporary earth spirit that this is so, permits us to endure.  Though I have attempted to participate fully in a traditional sweat, though not in a Sundance, I confess that, ultimately, I could not bear the heat. However, I was invited by a different medicine into the world that does indeed exist concurrently with this one that humans assume they know.  The best news:  American injustice to those who honor Mother Earth is only one of infinite realities. ~aw

I have been praying to hear your voice. ~aw

The Trunk:  Unpacking Our Sorrows

Movies As Medicine

This fuzzy photo does not do justice to these extraordinary actors, Gong Yu and Seo Hyun-ji, in THE TRUNK, a film/series on Netflix out of South Korea, a country that has an unusually  high level of misogyn

Alice Walker
The Flowers

Alice Walker is the author of the powerful novel Color Purple, which became one of my favorite movies, but she also wrote a short story titled The Flowers.

The Flowers
By Alice Walker

“It seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from hen house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these. The air held a keenness that made her nose twitch. The harvesting of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws.

“Myop carried a short, knobby stick. She struck out at random at chickens she liked, and worked out the beat of a song on the fence around the pigpen. She felt light and good in the warm sun. She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment,

“Turning her back on the rusty boards of her family’s sharecropper cabin, Myop walked along the fence till it ran into the stream made by the spring. Around the spring, where the family got drinking water, silver ferns and wildflowers grew. Along the shallow banks pigs rooted. Myop watched the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water that silently rose and slid away down the stream.

“She had explored the woods behind the house many times. Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves. Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes. She found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweet suds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds.

“By twelve o’clock, her arms laden with sprigs of her findings, she was a mile or more from home. She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts. It seemed gloomy in the little cove in

American author and activist (born 1944)

For other people named Alice Walker, see Alice Walker (disambiguation).

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple. Over the span of her career, Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.

Walker, born in rural Georgia, overcame challenges such as childhood injury and segregation to become a valedictorian and eventually graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. She began her writing career with her first book of poetry, Once, and later wrote novels, including her best-known work, The Color Purple. As an activist, Walker participated in the Civil Rights Movement, advocated for women of color through the term "womanism," and has been involved in animal advocacy and pacifism. Additionally, she has taken a strong stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel.

Walker has faced multiple accusations of antisemitism due to her praise for British conspiracy theoristDavid Icke and his works, which contain antisemitic conspiracy theories, along with criticisms of her own writings.

Early life

Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, a rural farming town, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant. Both of Walker's parents were sharecroppers, though her mother also worked as a seamstress to earn extra money. Walker, the youngest of eight children, was first enrolled in school when she was just four years old at East Putnam Consolidated.

As an eight-year-old, Walker sustained an injury to her right eye after one