5 ideas
Walker's mother, a Georgia sharecropper's wife who worked the fields beside her husband from dawn and then sewed, canned and cooked for the family, still grew spectacular flower gardens that strangers stopped to see and ask for cuttings from. Walker recognizes that her mother was an artist whose medium was the only one her circumstances allowed. In the garden, and only there, she had full creative authority, ordering the universe in her own image of beauty.
When a group has been denied access to recognized art forms, its creative genius does not vanish but moves into media that are not labeled as art, such as quilts, gardens, songs, cooking and storytelling. To find the artistic heritage of the oppressed you must search the domestic and the anonymous, like the Alabama quilt of the Crucifixion made by 'an anonymous Black woman' now hanging in the Smithsonian. Absence from the canon is evidence of suppression, not of an absence of talent.
Black grandmothers and great-grandmothers held creative spirit that had no legal or practical outlet under slavery and its aftermath. Walker argues that this blocked genius did not simply sit dormant. It turned destructive, producing the 'Saints' who were driven to madness, stillness or early death. The cost of oppression includes wasted, unexpressed art, not only material deprivation.
Walker coins 'womanist' from the Black folk expression 'You acting womanish,' meaning outrageous, audacious, willful behavior and wanting to know more than is 'good' for you. A womanist is a Black feminist or feminist of color who loves women's culture yet is 'committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.' She treats this as a deeper, stronger shade of feminism: 'womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.'
Walker takes up Virginia Woolf's figure of the gifted woman with 'contrary instincts' and applies it to Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet in 18th-century Boston who wrote verse praising her captors and a 'goddess' with 'golden hair.' Walker refuses to mock her. She reads Wheatley's divided voice as the price of an artist who owned not even herself, and honors her for keeping alive 'the notion of song' despite everything.