Best known for her prize-winning novel The Color Purple (1983), Alice Walker is also a notable poet and essayist. In the opening paragraphs of the narrative essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self," Walker mingles the point of view of her childhood self with that of the adult who is recalling the experience.
from "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self"*
by Alice Walker
It is a bright summer day in 1947. My father, a fat, funny man with beautiful eyes and a subversive wit, is trying to decide which of his eight children he will take with him to the county fair. My mother, of course, will not go. She is knocked out from getting most of us ready: I hold my neck stiff against the pressure of her knuckles as she hastily completes the braiding and the beribboning of my hair.
My father is the driver for the rich old white lady up the road. Her name is Miss Mey. She owns all the land for miles around, as well as the house in which we live. All I remember about her is that she once offered to pay my mother thirty-five cents for cleaning her house, raking up piles of her magnolia leaves, and washing her family's clothes, and that my mother--she of no money, eight children, and a chronic earache--refused it. But I do not think of this in 1947. I am two-and-a-half years old. I want to go everywhere my daddy goes. I am excited at the prospect of riding in a car. Someone has told me fairs are fun. That there is room in the car for only three of us doesn't faze me at all. Whirling happily in my starchy frock, showing off my biscuit-polished patent-leather shoes and lavender socks, tossing my head in a way that makes my ribbons bounce, I stand, hands on hips, before my father. "Take me, Daddy," I say with assurance; "I'm the prettiest!"
Later, it does not surprise me to find myself in Miss Mey's shiny black car, sharing the back seat with the other lucky ones. Does not surprise me that I thoroughly enjoy the fair. At home that night I tell the unlucky ones all I can remember about the merry-go-round, the man who eats live chickens, and the teddy bears, until they say: that's enough, baby Alice. Shut up now, and go to sleep.
Selected Works by Alice Walker
- Everyday Use, short stories (1973)
- Meridian, novel (1976)
- The Color Purple, novel (1983)
- In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, essays (1983)
- Living by the Word, nonfiction (1988)
- The Temple of My Familiar, novel (1989)
- Possessing the Secret of Joy, novel (1992)
* The essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self" appears in Alice Walker's first collection of nonfiction, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, first published by Harcourt Brace in 1983, reprinted by Harvest Books in 2003.
