Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book - Interview

But Walker, despite her small stature, is no pushover and has always expressed herself bluntly in print. "All my feelings are dear," she says. "I don't hide things. I feel the way I feel, and if you don't like it, tough."

Her forthrightness has made her a controversial figure, particularly in the Black community. Most of that controversy swirls around The Color Purple. It is the story of Celie, a simple Southern woman--abused first by her father and then by the man to whom her father eventually marries her off--whose confidence and self-awareness are awakened under the guidance of a freespirited cabaret singer.

Though The Color Purple has garnered a truckload of prizes and made Walker a financially secure woman (it's been translated into 22 languages and has sold over 4 million copies), it has remained a sore spot for many Black Americans, particularly males.

Most objected to the depiction of Mister, Celie's malevolent husband. In the absence of another sympathetic Black male character, Mister, in the eyes of some critics, seemed to represent the whole of Black American manhood.

While Walker was dismayed that Mister was interpreted as a composite of all Black men, she was most disheartened by what she views as Black Americas denial of the existence of any form of spousal or child abuse.

"I think the most chilling thing to me about the response to The Color Purple was that people said 'this doesn't happen,"' she says. "They said this was totally an anomaly. This is all Alice's problem. But what was really upsetting was the total lack of empathy for the woman. Not one person said that even if this happened every blue moon--which we know it does not--and it only happens to a very few women or children, we ought to look at this because we don't want those women or children to be suffering. Nobody said that. And I think thats an indictment of us."

But even the furor generated by the book did not prepare her for the call to arms that sounded once film and music producer/composer Quincy Jones and director Stephen Spielberg released their big-budget film treatment which starred Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Clover and Oprah Winfrey (among others).

Even Walker was less than enthusiastic about the film on first viewing. "The first time I saw it," she recalls, "I was in this theater with about two other people, and it looked funny. It sounded funny, and I thought everybody was a cartoon. So I went to the premier thinking, 'This is a very brave thing to do since you think this is a terrible film.' But you know, there in that theater, with hundreds of other people, it was a wonderful film. I really enjoyed it. It's not the book, but the fact is Quincy Jones and Stephen Spielberg did their best. They loved it and they worked really hard."

Though she did not have final approval of the script, Walker did extract many concessions from the filmmakers. Among them was the agreement that half of the production crew had to be Black and female. "Honey, I held those people up as much as I could in terms of what they had to do to make this film sensitively," she says. Although it's not perfect, when you look at what we have as a people in terms of films that relate to us, its better than what has been made by many of the people who were complaining about it. So now, years later, I'm really happy that it was made."