Meridian

In the summer of 2019, I discovered Meridian (1976) in a used bookstore in Old City, a part of the Historic District in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sweat collecting on my forehead and in the small of my back, I was in the "W" section in the upper level of the store, looking for The Color Purple (1982), when I spotted the title on the spine of the book. I saw the word "meridian" and instantly thought geography. And, in a way, I was right.

Meridian is about geography. It is about being a Black woman in the South. It is about Black motherhood. Sacrifice. Growth. Strength. On that day in the bookstore, I had no idea how powerful of a story I was holding in my hands.

Small and old with stained yellow pages, my copy of Meridian was well-loved before it came into my possession. And as I read, I made my own marks of love on the pages. Circling unknown words, highlighting lines and dialogue that moved me and spoke to me. I have one rule when it comes to reading: write in every book.

Before Meridian, I had never read a novel by Alice Walker. I think that is part of the reason why this novel holds such great significance to me. Most everything I knew––and it was not much––about Walker was tied to The Color Purple. But that was not good enough for me. I wanted a piece of Walker that felt like my very own.

Reading Meridian brought me great joy. It was a challenging and gripping story that allowed me clarity during a hot and emotionally hazy time. I have dedicated almost a year of my life to this novel. To the protagonist, Meridian Hill. And still, every time I dig back into the story I find new meaning. I find reason to continue moving forward.

I am always amazed at the gifts life presents to me. I say that I discovered Meridian, but what I really mean is that I opened myself up to a feeling. A force that guided me to the novel. I am grateful to Walker, the bookstore in Philly, and the compulsion that drove me to pick the novel up off the shelf and carry it home with me.

Without that foundation in the natural world I would have found it exceedingly difficult to survive. - Alice Walker

Source: Byrd, Rudolph P, ed. 2010. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York, New York: The New Press.

Alice Walker is an internationally recognized activist, poet, and writer from the American South. She was a prominent voice in the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Feminist Movement. Walker's activism and meditative works focus largely on women's liberation, race, poverty, sexuality, misogyny, sexism, spirituality, religion.

Walker has published seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children's books, seven volumes of poetry, and numerous essays.

In 1983, Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple, making her the first Black woman to receive the prestigious award. The Color Purple was also awarded the 1983 National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted into a film of the same name.

Meridian is Walker's second novel. Some of her other notable works include The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), and The Temple of My Familiar (1989). Walker's books have sold over fifteen million copies around the world.

Walker runs a personal blog on her official website, which you can read by clicking the link below:

Walker has been silenced, scrutinized, banned, and censored but she has never stopped writing.

In a 1989 interview with Claudia Dreifus (2010), Walker states, "well, you can only be hurt by the criticism of the people you respect. And failing that: the people you know. And failing that: the people who understand your life. Or care about your worldview. When people don't fit any of those categories, it's hard to be really that concerned."

Part of this statement was in response to critiques of Walker's novel The Temple of my Familiar. The interview with Dreifus also focused on her other writing, including The Color Purple, which received backlash from both white and Black readers. First challenged in Oakland, California in 1984, The Color Purple was "removed from or retained by schools and libraries after serious debates" (Labrise 2012). Justifications for the banning included: sexual content and explicitness, lesbianism, violence and abuse.

Walker has dedicated a number of interviews to her experiences with censorship. In rejection of the white, male-dominated publishing world, Walker founded her own publishing company in 1984 called Wild Trees Press. She has also written a book that addresses the subject of censorship, Alice Walker Banned (1996).

Walker coined the term "womanist" to bring color to mainstream feminism. Womanist, or womanism, speaks to the experiences of feminist women of color. It rejects and calls out the anti-Blackness of the feminist movement.

Womanism is not separate from feminism. In a conversation with Marianne Schnall (2010) of feminist.com, Walker makes clear that womanist is feminist. But unlike feminism, womanism derives from Southern Black culture. You can read Walker's definition of a "womanist" below.

Set in the 1960s, Meridian follows the spiritual and emotional growth of Meridian Hill as she navigates life in the Jim Crow South.

The novel follows a non-linear format and is divided into three sections: "Meridian," "Truman Held," and "Ending." Within those sections, readers are presented with vignette-like chapters that move between different periods of Meridian's life.

In an interview with Claudia Tate (2010), Walker explains that in Meridian, "there's just a lot going on." Walker encourages readers to read the novel more than once, as it is difficult to digest and understand on first read.

Walker goes on to compare Meridian to the work of one of her favorite artists, Romare Bearden. Bearden, whose career began with scenes of the American South, specializes in mixed-media collages. In this sense, Meridian is a sort of collage, an assemblage of Meridian's various life experiences and perspectives.

But, more specifically, Meridian is what Walker refers to as a "crazy quilt"––not to be mistaken with a patchwork quilt. Walker makes the distinction in the quote below.

A patchwork quilt is exactly what the name implies –a quilt made of patches. A crazy quilt, on the other hand, only looks crazy. It is not "patched"; it is planned. A patchwork quilt would perhaps be a good metaphor for capitalism; a crazy quilt is perhaps a metaphor for socialism. A crazy-quilt story is one that can jump back and forth in time, work on many different levels, and one that can include myth. It is generally much more evocative of metaphor and symbolism than a novel that is chronological in structure...

Source: Byrd, Rudolph P, ed. 2010. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York, New York: The New Press.

While Meridian grapples with, and ultimately rejects, killing for the Revolution, she makes clear through action that she is dedicated to the Movement. Throughout the story, Meridian puts her life and body on the frontline in an effort to raise consciousness and advance the state of her people.

The following themes are explored in the novel:

• Interconnectedness of Black and Indigenous peoples
• Spiritual and emotional growth
• Spiritual collectivity
• Christianity/religion
• Black motherhood
• Black women's sexuality
• Black women's objectification
• Systemic racism and oppression
• Non-violent civil disobedience and resistance to white supremacy

Set in the state of Georgia during Jim Crow, Meridian is characterized as a "spiritual biography of the Civil Rights Movement." As such, much of Walker's own life is reflected in the pages of the novel.

In these next map slides, you will travel through Georgia, New York, and Mississippi. You will see how Walker's lived experiences influenced the setting and story of Meridian.

Great literature is help for humans. It is medicine of the highest order. In a more aware culture, writers would be considered priests. And, in fact, I have approached writing in a distinctly priestess frame of mind. - Walker

Source: "Alice Walker: Writing What's Right" (Guernica 2012)  https://www.guernicamag.com/alice-walker-writing-whats-right/ 

While auditing poet and writer Margaret Walker's class at Jackson State University, Walker was introduced to the work of renowned writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.

Walker picked up and read one of Hurston's novels, Mules and Men (1935), while writing a story on voodoo. From that point forward, Walker was taken by Hurston and delved into her writing and life.

In 1973, Walker took a pilgrimage to Fort Pierce, Florida with her friend Grace Hunt to search for Hurston's grave. Walker pretended to be Hurston's niece in order to gain help from the local community. Once Walker reached the cemetery, she started to call out Hurston's name. After stepping in what seemed like a hole, she discovered Hurston's unmarked grave. Walker had a tombstone erected and today, Hurston's final resting place serves as a marker on the city of Fort Pierce's "Zora Neale Hurston Dust Tracks Heritage Trail."

Credited with the rediscovery of Hurston, Walker feels closely connected to the late writer. She credits Jean Toomer and Hurston as her greatest sources of inspiration. Below, you can listen to an NPR interview with Walker on her relationship with Hurston.

• "This curiosity was the way she was, sometimes, with whites. Mostly they did not seem quite real to her. They seemed very stupid the way they attempted to beat down everybody in their path and then know nothing about it. She saw them sometimes as hordes of elephants, crushing everything underfoot, stolid and heavy and yet––unlike the elephant––forgetting." (Walker 1976:112)
• "Both girls had lived and studied enough to know they despised capitalism; they perceived it had done well in America because it had rested directly on their fathers’ and mothers’ backs." (Walker 1976:118)
• "But Truman, alas, did not want a general beside him. He did not want a woman who tried, however, encumbered by guilts and fears and remorse, to claim her own life. She knew Truman would have liked her better as she had been as Eddie’s wife, for all that he admired the flash of her face across a picket line––an attractive woman, but asleep." (Walker 1976:110)
• "To join this group she must make a declaration of her willingness to die for the Revolution, which she had done. She must also answer the question ‘Will you kill for the Revolution?’ with a positive Yes. This, however, her tongue could not manage." (Walker 1976:27)
• "'But the land already belonged to them,' her father said, 'I was just holding it. The rows of my cabbages and tomatoes run right up along the biggest coil of the Sacred Serpent. That mound is full of dead Indians. Our food is made healthy from the iron and calcium from their bones. Course, since it’s a cemetery, we shouldn’t own it anyhow.'" (Walker 1976:54)
• "She was a dot, a speck in creation, alone and hidden. She had contact with no other living thing; instead she was surrounded by the dead. At first this frightened her, being so utterly small...But she remembered Feather Mae and stood patiently, willing the fear away…" (Walker 1976:58)
• "Sometimes, lying on her bed, not hungry, not cold, not worried...she [Meridian] felt as if a warm, strong light bore her up and that she was a beloved part of the universe; that she was innocent even as rocks are innocent, and unpolluted as the first waters." (Walker 1976: 119)
• "Like them, she could summon whatever energy a task that had to be performed required, and like them, this ability seemed to her something her ancestors had passed on from the days of slavery when there had been no such thing as a sick slave, only a 'malingering' one. Like the luckless small farmers around her who tended their crops 'around the weather'––sitting out the days of rain, rushing out to plant or chop or harvest when the sun came out––she lived 'around' her illness. Like them, it seemed pointless to her to complain." (Walker 1976:145)
• "'Besides, revolution would not begin, do you think, with an act of murder––wars might begin in that way––but with teaching'" (Walker 1976:188)
• "'You can't understand. Your life is so...there's something wrong with your life, you know. It's so, so, prescribed. Like you drew a circle around it and only walk as far as the edge. Why did you come back down here? What are you looking for? These people will always be the same. You can't change them. Nothing will.'" (Walker 1976:152)
• "This, then, was probably what sex meant to her; not pleasure, but a sanctuary in which her mind was freed of any consideration for all the other males in the universe who might want anything of her. It was resting from pursuit." (Walker 1976:62)

If you haven't yet read Meridian, consider forming or joining a reading club and engaging with the novel with a group of trusted friends. Use the questions below to help get the conversation started.

Based on your reading of Meridian and Alice Walker's definition of a womanist, what differences do you see between womanism and feminism? What are some womanist and feminist themes you noticed in the novel?

Religion and spirituality are central to many Black social movements. What is Meridian's relationship with church like? How does Meridian's spirituality influence her activism? How does spirituality influence other aspects of her life?

Women who speak up and out against oppression often face sexist and violent criticism, harassment, and censorship. How are Meridian's life experiences similar to those of Walker's? 

What does the phrase "spiritual biography" mean to you? Why do you think Meridian is described as "a spiritual biography of The Civil Rights Movement?"

How does Meridian navigate and resist the social and geographic segregation enforced under Jim Crow? How do we see her body, mind, soul transform throughout the novel?

How do constructions of Black motherhood, heterosexual relations, and women’s sexuality in Meridian reflect the historical legacy of abuse and forced reproduction endured by enslaved Black women under the system of slavery?

How do the Sacred Serpent mound and Sojourner tree allow Meridian to expose the flaws in dominant discourse on Black and Indigenous histories?

The writing of my poetry is never consciously planned, although I become aware that there are certain emotions I would like to explore. Perhaps my unconscious begins working on poems from these emotions long before I am aware of it. I have learned to wait patiently (sometimes refusing good lines, images, when they come to me, for fear they are not lasting), until a poem is ready to present itself--all of itself, if possible. - Alice Walker

Source: Byrd, Rudolph P, ed. 2010. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York, New York: The New Press.

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• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
• Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown
• Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams
• Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia Butler
• Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler
• Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015) edited by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha
• The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kang
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• The Bone People (1984) by Keri Hulme
• Sula (1973) by Toni Morrison
• Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
• Salvage the Bones (2011) by Jesmyn Ward
• Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015) edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer
• Brown Girl, Brownstones (2009) by Paule Marshall
• Nervous Conditions (2004) by Tsitsi Dangarembga
• Her Body and Other Parties (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado

What people fail to understand is that the real pleasure of life is in what is unique. The world has such incredible variety; why not join it, be that different thing, that other expression, since that is what you are anyway, and love it? - Walker

Source: Byrd, Rudolph P, ed. 2010. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York, New York: The New Press.

Many thanks to my advisor and friend Professor Giovanna Di Chiro for introducing me to the field of Ecofeminisms and for encouraging me to be true to myself, always.

Thank you to Professor Nicole Wagner for bringing me into the world of mapping.