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L. Adam Mekler
English 101
Prof. Mekler
October 26, 2015
Searching for Meaning in Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”
Alice Walker’s process in her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” is a bit
paradoxical. On one hand, from the very first words on the page—the title of the essay—Walker
establishes a close connection with her implied readers, African American women, and
introduces a challenge of sorts: How do we find our mothers’ gardens? Of course, the symbolic
importance of that concept will not be revealed until later in the essay, after the reader has
engaged in a process of discovery as spelled out by the author. In this regard, Walker obscures
the fact that she has already, to some extent, completed this process and reached conclusions that
she will now share with her audience. Nevertheless, her willingness to walk her audience through
the process she has already completed confirms one of the central tenets of her essay: it is only
through recognizing the commonality of experiences for African American women across
distances of time and space that the African American female-as-artist can be truly appreciated,
even by herself. More specifically, her use of the first person plural subjective pronoun (“we”) at
key points in her essay allows her to establish this communal tone and thus to put into practice
the methodology she espouses.
The first two uses of the pronoun “we” set the stage for the more specific explanation of
the process by which African American women artists can understand their identity. After she
describes the practice of keeping Black slaves illiterate, she offers a pair of balanced conditional
clauses. With the first, she raises a rather bleak possibility: “[I]f this were the end of the story,
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we would have reason to cry out” in lamentation for the generations of women who “[h]ave
perished in the wilderness” (403). Of course, Walker asserts, this possibility has not been
realized: African American women have survived. With the second use of a conditional clause in
this part of her essay, Walker presents her challenge: “[I]f we ask ourselves why, and search for
and find the answer,” she explains, “we will know beyond all efforts to erase it from our minds,
just exactly who, and of what, we black American women are” (403). While on the surface this
task seems rather simple, exploring the reasons for African American women’s survival is an act
of subversion and revolt. American culture, Walker explains, is rife with people who wish to
deny the strength, beauty, and power of the Black women. Every endeavor to explore one’s
identity has historically been met with attempts to deny that very self. In this way, Walker’s task
become more challenging, but her use of the pronoun “we” provides the key for success:
solidarity with each other and coordination of effort.
Having set the stage in this way, Walker moves into her demonstration of the specific
steps to developing the understanding of identity she celebrates. The first step involves
examining the examples of the few African American female artists who managed to forge a
place for themselves. “What,” she asks, “are we to make of Phillis Wheatley?” (404).
Juxtaposing the figure of this slave girl against later writers—Nella Larsen and Zora Neale
Hurston—whose works “we” have read, Walker explains why these women succeeded in
expressing themselves when they didn’t actually have the financial security that the white British
writer Virginia Woolf asserted was required for literary success. The key, Walker suggests, is not
found in the title of Woolf’s essay—“A Room of One’s Own”—but rather in another term Woolf
uses, “contrary instincts.” In essence, Walker suggests, Wheatley and her successors were so
conflicted in their impulses—the need to express and the need to survive—that they found
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themselves creating works that didn’t accurately reflect their own experiences and those of other
African American women. That Walker doesn’t elaborate further on Larsen’s and Hurston’s
works other than to call Hurston’s autobiography “oddly false-sounding” indicates the closeness
she feels to her audience. “We” hear the false tones, Walker suggest, when “we” read their
works. Her audience, she is confident, knows exactly what she means.
Having more firmly established this connection to her audience in this way, Walker
confidently instructs that audience how to take the next step. “[W]e must fearlessly pull out of
ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some of our greatgrandmothers were not allowed to know” (405). These great-grandmothers, in Walker’s eyes,
have more accurately expressed themselves than even successfully published authors were able
to do. How is this possible? “The answer is so simple that many of us have spent years
discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high—and low”
(406). More traditional forms of artistic expression—the poems and novels written by the artists
Walker mentions—are important, of course, but they are not the only available venues—and are
often not actually available at all. By changing the way “we” look at art, Walker makes clear, we
will be able to change the way “we” look at ourselves as artists and women. These uses of the
first person plural soften the criticism that may be seen in Walker’s implication that African
American women have allowed themselves to get caught up in mainstream standards of artistic
success. Walker is right there with her audience. She has made the same mistakes, but now she
has been able to recognize what she has been doing and has changed her perspective.
If her audience can engage in that same process, Walker says, they will come to
appreciate the beauty and power of the works of art to be found in the everyday. Thus, her final
use of the “we”—and significantly, her last use of a conditional “if” clause—operates on
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numerous levels. “If we could locate this ‘anonymous’ black woman from Alabama [who made a
quilt hanging in the Smithsonian], she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers—an artist
who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in
society allowed her to use” (407). Although Walker implies that finding this woman is
impossible, the rest of the essay in fact proves just the opposite. “We” find her every time we
look at our own mothers and grandmothers whose creativity came out in more mundane ways—
in gardens, in the arrangement of furniture, or perhaps in the clothes or hairstyles they created
during what little free time their lives provided them.
Ultimately, then, Walker’s essay is both biographical and instructional. By repeatedly
establishing clear connections between herself and her audience through the use of first person
plural subjective pronouns, Walker both asserts and exemplifies the importance of collective
efforts to the establishment of African American female artistic identity. Even forty years later,
Walker’s approach still serves as an important model for Black women confronting obstacles to
their artistic expression.