The Language of Composition: "In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens" by Alice Walker

They wandered or sat about the countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts, and drawing the mother of Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls.

To Toomer, they lay vacant and fallow as autumn fields, with harvest time never in sight...

Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer's lash?

Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasturelands?

The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over a period of centuries), who died with their real gifts stifled within them.

This sickly, frail black girl who required a servant of her own at times—her health was so precarious—and who, had she been white, would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and most of the men in the society of her day.

For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts [add “chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one's body by someone else, submission to an alien religion"], that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

Captured at seven, a slave of wealthy, doting whites who instilled in her the “savagery" of the Africa they “rescued" her from, one wonders if she was even able to remember her homeland as she had known it, or as it really was.

Captured at seven, a slave of wealthy, doting whites who instilled in her the “savagery" of the Africa they “rescued" her from, one wonders if she was even able to remember her homeland as she had known it, or as it really was.

No more snickering when your stiff, struggling, ambivalent lines are forced on us.

Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one's status in society, “the mule of the world," because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else—everyone else—refused to carry.

We have also been called “Matriarchs," “Superwomen," and “Mean and Evil..."

When we have pleaded for understanding, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in the farthest corner.

Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working class. [Change this to “slaves” and “the wives and daughters of sharecroppers.”]

She planted ambitious gardens—and still does—with over fifty different varieties of plants that bloom profusely from early March until late November.