Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement

   became increasingly aware that I was holding myself responsible for the
   condition of black people in America. Unable to murder the oppressors, I
   sat in a book-lined study and wrote.... I felt Art was not enough and that
   my art, in particular, would probably change nothing. And yet I felt it was
   the privilege of my life to observe and `save' for the future some
   extraordinary lives. (Gardens 226-27).

Young blacks like Walker participated in the Civil Rights Movement precisely because they held themselves responsible for changing the condition of black people in America. That feeling of responsibility did not go away when the Civil Rights Movement ended. Violence seemed to many young people at the time, including Walker, the only way to bring about change. Yet Walker's feeling of connection to her people, her love for them, and her feeling that it was important to "save" their lives "for the future" seems to have saved her life, as it saves Meridian's in the novel. In writing Meridian Walker accepts her role as an artist who is not a revolutionary but who has a place in the future, who "saves" lives "for the future." She adds her voice to "the song of the people" and transforms it, not only by remembering and honoring the past, but by passing on to those who come after her the experience of her generation in the Civil Rights Movement, inspiring them to continue the struggle. In this way her art can bring about change.

In Meridian Walker "saves" and celebrates the lives of many African American women. She portrays, with love and humor, women Meridian meets doing voter registration work. There is, for example, Mrs. Mabel Turner, who greets Meridian and Lynne, "`Y'all must be them outside `taters. Jooz an runnin' dogs. Y'all hongry?'" and explains, "`I wants to feed y'all real good, `cause I don't believe in votin'.'" (101-02).

Walker also makes the slaw,, past of African Americans and their resistance to slavery a source of pride. She traces Meridian's foremothers back several generations through her mother. One was a slave who slowly starved to death to keep her children and to feed them; another was a slave artist who bought her family's freedom with her portion of her earnings from the paintings she created to decorate people's barns. And Walker brings alive the African past of slaves in the story of the slave woman Louvinie, a storyteller. The slave artist and the slave storyteller represent Walker's concern with the creativity of African American women and its suppression: the slave artist's signature is "a small contorted face" (123); the storyteller's tongue is cut out. Walker published "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," the essay in which she explores this subject at length, in 1974, while she was writing Meridian.

Both Dubey, in Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, and Joan S. Korenman, in "African-American Women Writers, Black Nationalism, and the Matrilineal Heritage," have shown how African American women writers, in their novels (Dubey) and short stories (Korenman) have attempted to save their "matrilineal heritage" from black nationalist men who would deny the African American slave past and look to Africa to affirm their identity. In Meridian, Walker's saving of lives of African American women, past and present, and her concern with the suppression of their creativity are part of the attempt of African American women writers to affirm their "matrilineal heritage."