Free The World Has Changed by Alice Walker

this minute, there’s some poor woman making strong horse tea for a child because she’s too poor to get a doctor. Now that may not be the case in California; it may not even be in Georgia or Mississippi; it might be in India. But somewhere it is current. This is what I started to understand while I was in Mississippi. So I made up the story about the woman who tried to save her baby because the doctor wouldn’t come. You know that the baby died and most of the people around the mother, the white people especially, could not even comprehend that she suffered, that she suffered as any mother would suffer.
    “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff” in In Love and Trouble is also based on one of my mother’s stories about a time during the Depression when she went to a local commissary to get food and was refused. I carried the germ for that story of hers with me for years and years, just waiting for an opportunity to use it where it would do the most good.
    I wrote “The Child Who Favored Daughter” [from In Love and Trouble ] in 1966, after my first summer in Mississippi. I wrote it out of trying to understand how a black father would feel about a daughter who fell in love with a white man. Now, this was very apropos because I had just come out of a long engagement with a young man who was white, and my father never accepted him. I did not take his nonacceptance lightly. I knew I needed to understand the depth of his antagonism.
After all, I was twenty or so, and couldn’t quite understand his feelings since history is taught in the slapdash fashion that it is taught. I needed to comprehend what was going on with him and what would go on with any black man of his generation brought up in the South, having children in the South, whose child fell in love with someone who is “the enemy.”
    I had been writing the story for, oh, I guess, almost six months and I took it with me to Mississippi. Ironically, it was over that story, in a sense, that I met the man I did, in fact, marry. We met in the movement in Mississippi, and I was dragging around this notebook, saying, “I’m a writer.” Most people think when you say you’re a writer, and especially when you’re twenty, that you can’t be serious. Well, I read the story to him and he was convinced.
    “To Hell with Dying” [from In Love and Trouble ] was the first story I wrote and it was also my first published story. I wrote that story when I was still at Sarah Lawrence. It is my most autobiographical story. But again, the way autobiography works for a writer is different from what you’d think of as being autobiographical. It’s autobiographical though, in fact, none of it happened. The love happened.
    The story is created out of a longing. There was this man I really loved, not in the romantic sense, but I loved, cared about him, and he died while I was away at school. I didn’t have any money to go home for the funeral. So the story was my tribute. It was what I could give. Referring to your question about audience, this story really wasn’t about having an audience at all. All the audience I gave a damn about was dead. He was the audience. I would have been happy if he had known this was what I was thinking about when I couldn’t go to his funeral.

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    “Moving Towards Coexistence”: An Interview with Ellen Bring from The Animals’ Agenda (1988)
    ELLEN BRING: In your book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens , you wrote about connections, about seeing a larger perspective in a diverse world. What, for you, is the common thread, the unifying theme that connects movements for animal liberation, women’s liberation, civil rights, and others?
     
    ALICE WALKER: I think we all suffer oppression. We all suffer from a lack of having others perceive us as being basically the same, in having the same feelings, and the same dreams and desires. I remember when I gave a benefit for Winnie Mandela, I was thinking at the time that there were two things really important to