99 Fun Facts About Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born in which US state?

Georgia. She grew up in the farm town of Eatonton, the eighth and youngest child in her family, and later set The Color Purple in the same countryside.

How did the eight-year-old Alice Walker lose the sight in her right eye?

A brother's BB gun. It happened in a game of cowboys and Indians; teased about the scar, she withdrew into books and began writing poetry on her own.

Which radical professor, fired in 1963, mentored the young Alice Walker?

Howard Zinn. Her college dismissed him for siding with student protesters; Walker left that year too, and Zinn went on to write A People's History of the United States.

Alice Walker left home in 1961 on a state scholarship for which historically Black college?

Spelman. The scholarship came to her as class valedictorian, and as a student there she was invited to the home of Martin Luther King Jr.

Which one-word title did Alice Walker give her first book, a 1968 collection of poems?

Once. She wrote most of the poems in her final year at college, taking Japanese haiku as one of her models, and the book came out four years later.

Which poet gave the young Alice Walker an early break by publishing her story "To Hell with Dying" in 1967?

Langston Hughes. He picked the tale, in which children's love keeps an old guitar player from dying year after year, for his anthology The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers.

In Alice Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, what work traps Grange in debt?

Sharecropping. The harder Grange works the cotton, the more he owes the man who owns the land, so he abandons his family for the North before coming home again.

Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar made the 1993 film Warrior Marks to campaign against which practice?

Female genital cutting. Walker had just written a novel about it, and the pair went on to interview women who had undergone it; Parmar later filmed the portrait Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.

In 1973 Alice Walker went looking for the unmarked Florida grave of which writer and put up a headstone?

Zora Neale Hurston. Walker set the stone, reading "A Genius of the South", on the spot she judged to be the grave, and her 1975 essay about the search helped revive interest in Hurston's books.

Alice Walker worked as an editor at which magazine in the 1970s?

Ms. She was a contributing editor there, and used its pages to win new readers for Black women writers who had fallen out of print.

Alice Walker coined which term, meaning "a Black feminist or feminist of color"?

Womanist. She first used the word in a short story and set out a full definition in a 1983 book of essays, offering it as a wider alternative to a feminism that overlooked women of colour.

Which 1983 essay collection by Alice Walker sets out her own term for Black feminism?

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Walker looks for her creative inheritance in her mother's line, and the book gathers her account of hunting for a forgotten novelist's grave.

Alice Walker's 1976 novel Meridian centres on a young woman involved in which cause?

Civil rights. Walker knew the ground: she had registered Black voters in the South herself, and the novel's events closely follow her own years in the movement.

The Color Purple is written in which literary form?

Letters. Celie addresses hers to God because she has nobody else to tell, and later writes to the sister whose replies her husband has been hiding for years.

Besides the Pulitzer, which major US prize did The Color Purple win in 1983?

Both awards came the year after publication.

In The Color Purple, what does Harpo open after his wife Sofia walks out on him?

A juke joint. When Sofia comes back for a visit she gets into a fight there with Squeak, the girlfriend Harpo has taken up with since she left.

In The Color Purple, what is the name of Celie's younger sister?

Nettie. She escapes to work with a missionary couple overseas, and for years Celie believes her dead because Mister keeps back everything she sends home.

In The Color Purple, how does Shug Avery, Mister's mistress, make her living?

As a singer. She arrives at Mister's home ill, but it is his wife Celie who nurses her back to health, and the two women become lovers.

In The Color Purple, Sofia is jailed after hitting whom?

The mayor. He slaps her for answering "Hell no" when his wife asks her to be their maid, and after years in prison she is let out to do exactly that job.

What business does Celie start after leaving Mister in The Color Purple?

Making pants. What starts in Memphis as a hobby, sewing made-to-measure trousers, grows into her own company and her first real independence.

What is Mister's first name, which Celie eventually begins using, in The Color Purple?

Albert. Celie uses the name only after he has changed his ways, and when he proposes that they marry again "in the spirit as well as in the flesh", she turns him down.

In three decades from 1990, The Color Purple made the American Library Association's 100 books most often what?

Challenged. Schools and libraries have repeatedly been asked to take it off shelves and reading lists over its explicit content; it stood 17th on the list for the 1990s and again for the 2000s.

Which 1992 Alice Walker novel follows Tashi from The Color Purple?

Possessing the Secret of Joy. Tashi, from Walker's invented Olinka people, is now living in America, where the novel follows her through years of trauma and psychiatric treatment.

Who directed the 1985 film of The Color Purple?

Steven Spielberg. Walker was wary of him at first, then stayed on the production as a consultant, though her own screenplay was set aside for one by Menno Meyjes.

Who played Celie in the 1985 film of The Color Purple?

Whoopi Goldberg. Then a stand-up performer with almost no film experience, she had written to Alice Walker asking to be considered if the book was ever filmed.

Who both co-produced the 1985 film of The Color Purple and composed its score?

Quincy Jones. In his first film as a producer he personally picked its director, despite doubts over whether his choice could tell a Black woman's story.

Which talk-show host first appeared on screen as Sofia in The Color Purple in 1985?

Oprah Winfrey. The part won her an Oscar nomination, and she stayed with the story for decades, producing both the Broadway musical and the 2023 film.

Which film beat 1985's The Color Purple to Best Picture?

Out of Africa. It won seven Oscars, while The Color Purple's eleven nominations, which had controversially left out its own director, brought no wins, a shut-out that tied a record.

Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple after moving west in the late 1970s to which state?

California. She settled in a small town in the north of the state while she searched for the right voice for the novel, and she made the region her home.

Who played Mister in the 1985 film of The Color Purple?

Danny Glover. His violent husband was at the centre of the row that met the film, with some critics calling its picture of Black men unjustly harsh.

Alice Walker's 1996 book The Same River Twice looks back on which experience?

Seeing her novel filmed. Written ten years after The Color Purple reached cinemas, it answers the film's harshest critics and prints the screenplay of her own that was turned down.

In 2010 Alice Walker travelled to Iceland to accept a peace grant named partly after which musician?

John Lennon. Yoko Ono's LennonOno Grant for Peace was presented in Reykjavik, and by Walker's own account she gave the award to a Kenyan orphanage for children who had lost parents to AIDS.

Where did The Color Purple musical have its 2004 world premiere?

Atlanta. The Alliance Theatre launched it in the story's home state, and its leading lady went on to Broadway with the show and won a Tony Award.

Who originated Celie in the Broadway musical The Color Purple?

LaChanze. She had led the cast since its first staging a year earlier, and the part won her the 2006 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical over Patti LuPone and Chita Rivera.

Which American Idol winner took over as Celie in Broadway's The Color Purple in 2007?

Fantasia Barrino. Sixteen years after stepping into the part on stage she played it again in the 2023 film, her feature-film debut.

Who won the 2016 Tony for Best Actress as Celie in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple?

Cynthia Erivo. The British actress had first played the part in London, and the Broadway production built around her also won the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical.

Which star made her Broadway debut as Shug Avery in the 2015 revival of The Color Purple?

Jennifer Hudson. The Oscar winner had never acted on Broadway before, and the cast album she recorded with the company brought her a Grammy Award.

Who played Mister in the 2023 film of The Color Purple?

Colman Domingo. As in the novel, his Mister ends the story a changed man, and Celie, who has long since left him, agrees to stay his friend.

Who received an Oscar nomination for playing Sofia in the 2023 Color Purple?

Danielle Brooks. She had already played Sofia on Broadway, and the nomination made her the second actor recognised by the Academy for that role.

Who played Shug in the 2023 film of The Color Purple?

Taraji P. Henson. It was her second Shug: her breakthrough film part, in Hustle & Flow, was a character with the same nickname, and this one won her an NAACP Image Award.

In Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use", what does Mama give Maggie instead of Dee?

The quilts. Dee wants to display them as art, so her mother snatches them back and hands them to Maggie, who will put them to everyday use.

In Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use", Dee changes her name to what?

Wangero. She says she will no longer carry a name handed down from the people who oppressed her family, but her mother points out that Dee came from her aunt and her grandmother.

Where did Alice Walker marry lawyer Melvyn Leventhal in 1967?

New York City. Their marriage was still illegal across much of the South, yet they then moved to Mississippi and became its first legally married interracial couple.

Which leading feminist is godmother to Alice Walker's daughter, the writer Rebecca Walker?

Gloria Steinem. Rebecca grew up to write about feminism across the generations herself, and helped found the Third Wave Foundation to fund young women activists.

Which university in the state where she was born has held Alice Walker's archive since 2007?

Emory. It was not on her original list, but after touring several university libraries she chose the one where she felt at ease; the archive includes journals begun in her teens.

In 1984 Alice Walker and fellow writer Robert Allen co-founded what kind of business?

A publishing house. Walker told a playwright she did not publish plays and asked for stories instead, then brought out the dozen she wrote; the press itself was short-lived.

Alice Walker and fellow author Maxine Hong Kingston were arrested outside the White House while protesting against what?

The Iraq War. The rally was held on International Women's Day in March 2003, days before the invasion began, and Walker later wrote an essay about her arrest.

In 2010 Alice Walker went to Cape Town to give a lecture named after which anti-apartheid activist?

Steve Biko. She gave the eleventh annual lecture in the Black Consciousness leader's memory at the University of Cape Town, and met his sons while she was there.

In The Color Purple, where does Shug say you anger God by walking past the color purple without noticing it?

In a field. Shug's point is that God wants the world's beauty admired, and after their talk Celie rethinks her idea of God and finds the nerve to walk out on her husband.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', Mama daydreams of meeting Dee on a TV show hosted by which late-night star?

Johnny Carson struggles to keep pace with her wit in the daydream, where Mama is thinner and prettier, a fantasy she drops as nothing like her real life.

In 'Everyday Use' by Alice Walker, what left Maggie scarred on her arms and legs and painfully shy?

A house fire destroyed the family's first home when the sisters were children. Dee, who had never liked the place, stood and watched it go.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', what does Mama at first mistake for the name of Dee's long-haired companion?

His Muslim greeting, which Mama hears as 'Asalamalakim', becomes her name for him until he says to call him Hakim-a-barber, itself her best guess at what he told her.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', what does Dee plan to do with the two family quilts she asks for?

Hang them on a wall is Dee's plan, treating them as folk art to show off, though she had turned one down as out of fashion when she left for college.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', Dee says she dropped her birth name because it came from which people?

Her oppressors are, in Dee's view, the white people the name came from. Mama counters that it is an old family name.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', Dee takes the top of which household object at dinner to use as a centrepiece?

The butter churn is still in use, with milk in it, when Dee asks for its top as an ornament, the first sign of why she has really come home.

From which narrative point of view is Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', a tale of two very different sisters, told?

First person: Mama tells it all herself, so readers see Dee only through her mother's eyes and never hear Dee's side from the inside.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', the quilts hold a scrap of the uniform Great Grandpa Ezra wore in which war?

The Civil War uniform sits beside scraps of clothes worn by generations of the family, which is why Mama and Maggie see people, not patterns, in the stitching.

In 'Everyday Use', Alice Walker gives Dee and Hakim-a-barber the hair, dress and new names of which 1960s movement?

Black Power was reshaping the struggle for equality as Walker wrote, and her story asks whether its African names and styles honour a family's past or skip over it.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', Mama reminds Dee that her birth name was handed down from which relative?

An aunt, Dicie, bore the name first, and the family traces it back further still, so Dee is discarding a family name in order to find her roots.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', who raised the money that sent Dee away to school?

Mama and her church funded the education that carried Dee away, and Mama remembers it turning her daughter hurtfully condescending toward the family.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', which traditional foods does Hakim-a-barber decline at Mama's table?

Pork and collard greens are staples of the Black Southern table, so turning them down sets him apart from the family, while Dee eats with relish.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', Dee compares Maggie's memory for family history to that of which animal?

An elephant never forgets, and Dee means it as a put-down, but Maggie's recall of who made each family object is exactly the knowledge Dee lacks.

After Dee drives off at the end of Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', where do Mama and Maggie sit until bedtime?

In the yard, tidied specially for the visit, the two sit on for hours enjoying the evening; Mama treats the space as an extra room of her home.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', which heavy farm job does Mama pride herself on doing as well as a man?

Butchering hogs and cattle for the winter's meat is work Mama does with her own rough hands, the opposite of the slim, witty self she imagines on television.

Alice Walker's short story 'Everyday Use' first appeared in the April issue of which long-running American monthly?

Harper's Magazine, the oldest monthly still running in the United States, carried the story in 1973 before Walker gathered it into a book.

Which book, Alice Walker's first volume of short stories, includes 'Everyday Use' among its thirteen tales?

In Love & Trouble follows Black women pushing against narrow ideas of who they can be, and it gave one of Walker's most widely studied stories a lasting place in 1973.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', Dee leaves her rural home to attend school in which Southern city?

Augusta is where Dee was sent to school, the first step in the education that leaves her a visitor in her own mother's home.

In Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use', shy Maggie is engaged to marry which local man?

John Thomas is the man Maggie will soon leave home to marry, a quiet sign that the shy sister can form bonds her dazzling sister cannot.

Alice Walker's poem 'Women' is a tribute to the tough, resolute women of whose generation?

Her mother's generation is the subject, and above all her mother herself, who worked as a domestic servant and was a gifted gardener.

In Alice Walker's poem 'Women', which military rank does the speaker give the women she honours?

Generals is the rank Walker gives to domestic workers, lifting their daily struggle for their children to the standing of wartime command.

In Alice Walker's poem 'Women', what do the women cross dangerous ground to win for their children?

Books and desks stand for the schooling these women fought to open up, even though they had been given no formal education of their own.

Alice Walker's poem 'Women' is written in which poetic form?

Free verse lets Walker break a phrase wherever she likes, so that one word can stand alone on a line with the force of a small surprise.

Alice Walker's poem 'Women' splits its phrases across short lines; what is the French-derived name for this device?

Enjambment keeps the poem marching: with almost no punctuation to halt it, each line tips into the next like the women's steady advance.

In Alice Walker's poem 'Women', which household chore do the same hands that fight also carry out?

Ironing shirts points to the domestic work open to Black women of that era, and Walker sets it beside their fists on purpose.

In Alice Walker's poem 'Women', what hidden danger lies in the ground the women lead others across?

Land mines turn the women's march into a battlefield crossing, the poem's way of saying how much they risked for the next generation.

In Alice Walker's poem 'Women', what do the women batter down to reach places once closed to them?

Doors give way to the women's pounding, Walker's image for demanding attention and entry, and the reason she says they had fists as well as hands.

How are the short, jagged lines of Alice Walker's poem 'Women' arranged on the page?

A single stanza carries the whole poem, a long narrow column whose unbroken run mirrors the women's determined march forward.

Which English novelist's essay A Room of One's Own does Alice Walker rework in 'In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens'?

Virginia Woolf argued that a gifted woman of Shakespeare's day would have been driven mad; Walker asks what, then, became of a gifted woman born into slavery.

To which enslaved Boston poet of the 1700s does Alice Walker pay tribute in 'In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens'?

Phillis Wheatley brought out a book of poems in 1773 while still enslaved, and Walker defends her against later readers who mocked her divided loyalties.

'Choice', in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, honours which leader whose example sent her back South?

Martin Luther King Jr. gave Black Southerners back a sense of home, Walker argues, and her admiration for him led her to return and work there.

Which vocalist, nicknamed Lady Day, does Alice Walker cite in 'In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens'?

Billie Holiday is listed with Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin as Walker asks readers to imagine such voices silenced for life, as her grandmothers' gifts were.

Alice Walker opens 'In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens' by quoting Cane, a book by which Harlem Renaissance writer?

Jean Toomer saw Black Southern women as saints, their spirits worn down by loveless lives; Walker starts from his portrait to argue they were artists denied any outlet.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens includes 'Beyond the Peacock', Alice Walker's essay on which Southern writer?

Flannery O'Connor raised around a hundred peafowl on her farm, Andalusia, and worked the birds into her stories, hence the one in Walker's title.

Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens also takes on antisemitism and which Cold War danger?

Nuclear weapons are the target of 'Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do', one of the closing pieces in a book that ranges far beyond literature.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens reviews the writings of Rebecca Jackson, a Black eldress in which religious sect?

The Shakers made Rebecca Jackson a minister, and in 1859 she founded a Shaker community in Philadelphia made up largely of Black women.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens won Alice Walker which prize for writing on the South, as her poems had earlier?

Lillian Smith Book Award judges honour writing that exposes racial and social injustice in the South; Walker won in 1973 for Revolutionary Petunias and again in 1984.

In Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', what does Myop's foot get caught in as she turns to head home?

A man's skull traps her heel, and as she pulls free she sees the rest of his remains, left lying in the woods for years.

In Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', which kind of tree stands over the spot where Myop's walk comes to a halt?

An oak stands over the clearing, and what Myop notices in its branches explains what she has just found beneath it.

In Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', what rotted object does Myop notice ringed around a wild pink rose?

A noose, frayed almost to nothing, turns the story in an instant from a child's ramble through the woods into the record of a lynching.

At the end of Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', what does Myop do with the armful of blooms she has gathered?

Lays them down is all she does, carefully rather than in fright, a gesture read as quiet reverence for what she has found.

The closing sentence of Alice Walker's short story 'The Flowers' announces the end of which season?

Summer is declared over in the story's final words, a line that says far more about Myop than it does about the weather.

Critics note that Myop, the name of the girl in Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', echoes a word for which condition?

Short-sightedness, or myopia, suits a child who sees only the bright morning in front of her until a wider, darker world comes into focus.

At under 600 words, Alice Walker's 'The Flowers' is often classed as which very short form of story?

Flash fiction packs a whole arc into a page or two, and Walker needs only nine paragraphs to take Myop from skipping to standing still.

In Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', what colour are the strange blooms Myop gathers after leaving her usual path?

Blue flowers she does not recognise fill her arms once she has left her usual trail, before the woods begin to feel wrong.

Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', which follows a girl's walk in the woods, is usually read as being about the loss of what?

Innocence ends for Myop in one morning: she sets out singing and finishes it knowing what has been done to people like her.

In Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', what does Myop carry and tap along the fence in time with her song?

A stick beats out the rhythm as she skips past the family's pigpen and henhouse, the carefree opening that the rest of the story undoes.

In Alice Walker's poem 'Women', what do the women wear on their heads as they lead others forward?

Rags knotted round the head were the working dress of Black domestic labourers, and the poem turns them into a mark of command.

In Alice Walker's 'The Flowers', Myop knows the woods from the trips she makes there each autumn to gather what?

Nuts are what she usually comes for, with her mother beside her; this time she is alone and wanders off the path they normally take.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens cites which novelist's remark that she writes the books she wants to read?

Toni Morrison's remark becomes Walker's creed in the opening essay: where no model exists, a writer has to become her own.