Writing Saves Lives

Next semester, I’m teaching Alice Walker’s The Color Purple alongside a couple of her essays, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Ernest Gaines’ Of Love and Dust, and other works. Preparing for the class, I recently read Walker’s 1976 essay “Saving the Life That is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life.” Walker wrote the essay in the mid-1970s, at a moment when Black studies programs were increasing across the nation and when she had already published The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Morrison had published her debut novel The Bluest Eye. Even at this moment, Walker pointed out the need for literature and artistic models, specifically African American women models for authors such as her and Morrison.

Walker details how she came to learn about Zora Neale Hurston and her work. Hurston’s now-canonical 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was out of print, and Walker did not know about Hurston until she started doing research for her short story “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff.” Walker wanted to incorporate voodoo into her story, but she did not have the knowledge to do so properly. So, she began to research anthropologist and encountered white and racist perspectives. She writes, “There were Botkin and Puckett and others, all white, most racist. How was I to believe anything they wrote, since at least one of them, Puckett, was capable of wondering, in his book, if ‘The Negro’ had a large…