A womanist is, according to Alice Walker, a black feminist or feminist of color. A womanist loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.
It was the first definition of my spirituality that resonated in my soul like the ringing of a bell, it’s notes reverberating through muscle and bone.
I read pieces of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens in college, but, back then, I was still afraid of being branded a heretic if I believed in or sought the feminine face of the Divine. It would’ve earned me a different kind of scarlet letter in the conservative Church I’d been raised in, so I tucked Alice’s words away in my heart, where like seeds, they germinated in the dark.
Fast forward years later, and I found myself walking the city streets of downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, about to meet Alice Walker.
When I’d volunteered to help my friend Gareth out during the Movies and Meaning film festival, where Alice would be headlining as a speaker, I didn’t imagine I’d have the opportunity for time alone with her.
<insert fan girl squeal here>
Gareth had tasked me with picking up Alice from her hotel and walking with her the short distance to the lovely Kimo theater where the festival would shortly begin. As I neared the hotel, I could feel the butterflies alight in my stomach. I practiced what I would say, running lines like an actress before a play.
I knew Alice to be a giant—the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel, The Color Purple. When the film came out in 1985, it was barred from my childhood. Only later as an adult would I watch it, understanding the ways Alice had, against even some in the black community, taken a stand for black women’s experiences.
She tended the Civil Rights Movement by organizing, writing, marching, and perhaps most dangerously, by registering black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.
She was unapologetically black, unapologetically woman, unapologetically herself. Along with Toni Morrison, most black women in America I knew considered Alice Walker to be our unofficial queen. Especially, women like me, with writing aspirations of our own.
I saw Alice before she saw me. She stood waiting in the hotel lobby, bundled in a coat and hat to ward away the chill of spring.
As I approached her, I noticed her face was tight. Her eyes searched the crowd of hotel guests. She seemed nervous, ill at ease. Something about her seemed so vulnerable as she stood there alone, arms crossed in front of her chest. My own nervousness fell away.
“Hi, are you Alice?” I asked, knowing very well who she was. I held out my hand to shake hers. “I’m Jasmin with Movies and Meaning. I’ll walk over to the theater with you if you like.”
Immediately her face relaxed, and I knew it was more than just the relief of having someone show her where to go. Her arms fell to her side. She shook my hand and smiled. Then, she made a surprisingly intimate remark:
“Your eyes…” she paused, “they look happy. Are you happy?”
I took a moment before I responded. “Yes,” I told her, and I was startled to recognize that for the most part, it was the truth.
We made small talk on the way over to the theater, and as she shivered down into her coat, I mentioned I’d heard there was a chance of snow in the forecast.
Alice fixed me with a look – a very singular look – and said:
“Now Jasmin, don’t you tell me that,” as if I could control the weather.
I would come to know Alice was very particular about being warm. Which is, of course, a perfectly reasonable, human need.
Next year, when the festival was held in Asheville and Diana Wortham’s air conditioning was too cold for her, she took me by the arm, and we walked silently like that for a few moments before she said, “Now Jasmin, a person can’t think when it gets too cold.”
Once Alice left me, I practically assaulted the theatre staff, intent on warming us all up. It was an issue they couldn’t easily fix, they told me. The building, and the system, was old. But before I knew it, a technician had been called, and like magic, Alice’s wishes were granted.
Alice traveled with a squad, a formidable group of black women, whose laughter rolled like waves across the restaurant when we sat down to dinner.
Alice loved good food and good music, celebration and dancing.
When we chatted about motherhood and writing, she said with a wry smile, “Babies are so beguiling aren’t they? They smell good, and their skin is so soft. But, I knew,” and I sensed her resolve here, “that God had given me a gift in the writing. And it would be irresponsible of me not to use it.”
So she’d found a way to feed her creativity, even while her body created nourishment to feed her baby.
At a time in my life when I was knee-deep in the muck of society’s (and my own) expectations around my stereotypically Southern, black, womanhood, Alice showed me an embodied alternative.
It was okay to have needs. It was okay to take up space. It was okay to nourish not just babies, but also those tender shoots of creativity within me.
And it wasn’t just me Alice spoke to. So many black women, previously only valued for their labor, or their ability to play “mammy,” or their ability to stay strong under the direst of circumstances, shrugged off whatever heavy mantle rested on the shoulders, and found their liberation through Alice’s words and her way of being in the world.
Jasmin Pittman Morrell is a writer and editor living in Asheville, North Carolina with her husband and two daughters. She enjoys facilitating healing through creativity, imagination, and deep listening.