‘Nineteen Fifty-five’ by Alice Walker

Two weird white men come to Gracie May Still’s house. She’s a singer, and they buy the rights to one of her songs. Later, she sees one of the men, Traynor, singing the song on TV, and he’s “looking half asleep from the neck up, but kind of awake in a nasty way from the waist down”. She has an uncanny feeling: “If I’da closed my eyes, it could have been me. He had followed every turning of my voice, side streets, avenues, red lights, train crossings and all.”

Traynor’s version of the song is a global mega-smash, but after a couple of years he returns to Gracie May’s house to confess that he doesn’t know what the lyrics mean. The story follows Traynor’s Elvis-ish career over the decades, his letters and visits to Gracie May, his artistic incomprehension and his increasingly soul-less, machine-like vibe. “It was dark but seems like I could tell his eyes weren’t right. It was like something was sitting there talking to me but not necessarily with a person behind it.”

Collected in You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down, The Women’s Press, 1982

‘Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self’ by Alice Walker

By the time my husband and I had separated, I was doing a PhD and immersing myself in reading memoir and personal essays, and one of my early inspirations was this short personal essay.

It’s not about alcoholism but it is about self realisation and self forgiveness after a lifetime of constantly ‘looking down’ after a terrible accident when Alice lost sight in one eye. And it’s a beautiful example of the playfulness of creative nonfiction, when she throws a poem right at its centre.

First published in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983

‘The Flowers’ by Alice Walker

In this very short coming-of-age tale, noticing flowers and picking them, and laying them down are an integral part of the action of the protagonist, in as much as the flowers symbolise the loss of innocence. Myop, a ten year old is on a walk when “she found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweet suds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds.” As she continues, she finds a “wild pink rose. As she picked it to add to her bundle she noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the rose’s root. It was the rotted remains of a noose, a bit of shredding plowline, now blending benignly into the soil.” The story, in its brevity and concise detail leaves the reader feeling as uprooted as Myop herself.

First published in Love and Trouble; The stories of Black Women, New York, Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1973. Also in the Collected Stories, W&N, 2005