Back to Writings
Reading from The Way Forward Is
With a Broken Heart
* Disclaimer *
In this excerpt from her latest collection, The Way Forward Is With a Broken
Heart, Alice Walker recalls a literary gathering in the late 1960's when she and
her husband, a young Jewish lawyer, encountered Langston Hughes
How were we to know Langston would die so shortly after we refused him a ride
with us? I remember introducing you to him as if he were my father. I was so
proud. He was so seemingly at home in any world. The huge Central Park West
apartment we were in, for instance, with its windows overlooking the Natural
History Museum. How young we were! Sometimes, when I think of our youth, the
image that sums it up is the back of your neck, just after you'd "taken a
haircut" and your brown shiny hair was shaved close to the back of your head and
abruptly, bluntly terminated, leaving your neck extremely vulnerable and pale.
For some reason, I was moved by this; it always made me think of you as someone
who would, and did indeed, stick his neck out. Langston liked you from the
start.
I was too shy to notice anyone or even to hazard a thought about the politics of
the gathering. Writers and poets and agents and editors, I know now. Some
famous, some not. But what was fame to me? It seemed too far away even to
contemplate. It was winter; I was, as always, longing for a father. How odd life
is: Now, one of my brothers is very ill. He tells me, when I visit him in the
hospital, that the father I 'always wanted was the one he actually had. He
remembers my father organizing in our community to build the first consolidated
school for Blacks in the county, which was burned to the ground by Whites. Then
starting again, humbly, asking a local White man--who might indeed have been one
of those who torched the first school--to let the community rent an old falling
down shed of his, until a second school could be built. He tells me my father
traveled to other counties looking for teachers, because our county was so poor
and Black people kept in such ignorance there were no teachers to be chosen
among us. It was my father who found the woman who would become my first-grade
teacher My brother's words are both fire and balm to my heart. Now, in my fifth
decade, I know what it is to be deeply exhausted from the struggle to "uplift"
the race. To see the tender faces of our children turned stupid with
disappointment and the ravages of poverty and disgrace. To think of the labor of
Sisyphus to get his boulder to the top of the hill as the only fit symbol for
our struggle. I am thankful that, when I went North to college, one of my
teachers introduced me to the work of Camus. Sisyphus, he said, transcends the
humiliation of his endless task because he just keeps pushing the boulder up the
hill, knowing it will fall down again, but pushing it anyway, and forever.
We had the little red bug then, and you were teaching me to drive it, at two or
three o'clock in the morning, when there was less traffic on the streets of New
York. I loved those early morning hours: Sometimes we would go swimming. We'd
have the university's pool all to ourselves, in the middle of the night, and you
taught me the breaststroke (so graceful!) and the sidestroke, and sometimes
after swimming we'd go out in your car
Finding Langston. (The
Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart) (Excerpt)
Author: Alice Walker
Issue: Dec, 2000
Page Created by:
Alison Joy Burroughs