THE Journey

Feminist activist, scholar, and writer Salamishah Tillet has read and reflected on most of Alice Walker's work, and last year released In Search of The Color Purple, a tribute to the enduring power and influence of the epistolary novel. Here, Tillet considers Walker's just-released Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965-2000, in this, the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Color Purple.

- Salamishah Tillet

SOMETIME IN 1980, a 36-year-old Alice Walker posed this question in her journal: "My God, what do black women writers want?"

Walker's answer was emphatic, as she wrote in her dark blue spiral notebook: "We want freedom. Freedom to be ourselves. To write the unwritable. To say the unsayable. To think the unthinkable." Boldly concluding, "To dare to engage the world in a conversation it has not had before."

As a Black woman writer who has read almost every novel, poem, essay, or short story Walker has ever published, I found this entry in the new book Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 19652000, remarkable for its ambition and radical honesty.

Writing this three years before receiving the National Book Award and making history by becoming the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Color Purple, Walker had envisioned freedom personal, professional, and political—that was unimaginable to generations of Black writers, and to Black women generally, before her. By doing so, she made a new blueprint for herself, and for those of us who have turned to her ideas and words as inspiration, even if we did not have access to her innermost thoughts until now.