Admirers of The Color Purple will find in these stories more evidenceof Walker’s power to depict black women—women who varygreatly in background yet are bound together by what they share incommon.Taken as a whole, their stories form an enlightening,disturbing view of life in the South.

In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women

Georgia   Alice Walker was a no-brainer for me, as the writer to represent the state of Georgia on my road trip, but Ms. Walker and I have always had issues.  She's a genius, as a writer, an almost peerless technician of words, but, like Annie Proulx, she too often writes of dark, violent worlds that I blessedly don't inhabit and thankfully don't understand. I come back to her, again and again, as a writer who is hungry and jealous of her skills, but I don't like to stay in her worlds long.  In this collection Ms. Walker offers us 13 brief worlds in 13 brief stories. “Lucky 13!” you might be inclined to think, but you'd be a fool if you did. “Lucky” isn't a word you would use to describe a single character in this mess. Ain't nobody lucky in these stories.  I did something here, with my reading response, that I've never done with a short story collection before. I gave myself a writing assignment, to find one sentence in each story of Ms. Walker's and challenged myself to make a short story out of these thirteen unrelated fragments.   So, here's my imagination mixed with Alice Walker's words. Let's call this weird hybrid story:   Fragments  Her husband's hand is like the clasp of an iron gate. (And you know how sick he makes me now when he grins). If her husband laughed at her high heels as she teetered and minced off to church on Sunday mornings, with her hair greased and curled and her new dress bunching up at the top of her girdle, she pretended his eyes were approving.  If he cannot frighten her into chastity with his voice he will threaten her with the gun .   She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt.   [She] had been married already five years and had four small children and a husband with a wandering eye. She was angular and lean and the color of poor gray Georgia earth, beaten by king cotton and the extreme weather.  Her dark dirty eyes clinging to his face with such hungry desperation made him nervous . In the South, in a hate-filled state complete with magnolias, tornadoes and broken-tongued field hands, they had settled down to raise a family of their own.  In this way will the wife of a loveless, barren, hopeless Western marriage broadcast the joys of an enlightened religion to an imitative people?  [Alas]. . . summer is over.  When she passes him at the door his heart flutters like old newspapers in a gutter disturbed by a falling gust of wind.  He was like a piece of rare and delicate china which was always being saved from breaking and which finally fell .

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In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women

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