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1. ANTHONY LIOI
An End to Cosmic Loneliness:
Alice Walker's Essays as
Abolitionist Enchantment
Often I was in some lonesome wilderness, suffer-
ing strange things and agonies...cosmic loneliness
was my shadow. Nothing and nobody around me re-
ally touched me. It is one of the blessings of this world
thatfew people see visions and dream dreams.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
These lines from Hurston's autobiography are often read as the
words of a genius in exile from her people. Be that as it may, they are
certainly a diagnosis of modernity's disenchantment, if we believe
Max Weber, the German sociologist who was Hurston's older contem-
porary. The philosopher Peter Dews glosses Weberian disenchantment
as "the collapse of belief in a cosmic order whose immanent meaning
guides human endeavour" (1), and as the inheritor of many collapsed
orders—West African cultures in diaspora, the American South after
slavery, European intellectual life after World War I—Hurston had
many reasons to feel lost in the cosmos. Disenchantment is preemi-
nently a condition of separation and loss. Though Alice Walker has been
understood as one of Hurston's advocates and heirs, her response to
disenchantment, to the cosmic loneliness of modernity, remains unex-
plored. As a remedy to these troubles, I want to explore Alice Walker's
essays as instruments of abolitionist enchantment, a reconstruction of
contemporary world-order after the disenchantment of slavery. I seek
to explain how Walker connects womanism and environmentalism,
how this effort is related generically to her literary precursors, and
what the implications of this work may be for theories of modernity.
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15.1 (Winter 2008)
Copyright © 2008 by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

2. 12 I S L E
This task is made more difficult by the paucity of work on Walker's
essays, and on the African American essay in general. Nonetheless,
I proceed under the assumptions articulated by Gerald Early in the
introduction to his anthology, Speech and Power: "We cannot fully
understand black American literature, the black writer, or the course
of black culture as an intellectual construct during the 20th
century
without coming to grips with the meaning and function of the essay
in the hands of the black American" (x). I would add that we cannot
fully understand the American environmental essay without coming
to grips with Alice Walker
My investigation takes place under the aegis of African American
literary studies and ecocriticism, critical traditions that have had little to
do with one another thus far, but should collaborate toward an account
of American nature and its relationship to African American history,
philosophy, and culture. Americanist ecocriticism has had a good deal
to say about race, but little to say about African American literature.1
This lacuna formed because of ecocriticism's origins in the study of
Western American literature, where issues of race and ethnicity gath-
ered around Anglo-American, Chicano/a, and American Indian tradi-
tions.2
While it is easy to find ecocritical treatments of Ana Castillo's
So Farfrom God or Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, there has yet to be
an ecocritical account of Jean Toomer's Cane or Ann Petry's The Street.
This problem should be addressed as ecocriticism expands its purview
and puts more methodological emphasis on the Environmental Justice
Movement, which privileges race and class as categories of analysis.3
The background in African American literary studies is more complex.
On the one hand, my argument is presaged by Paul Gilroy's The Black
Atlantic (1993), which taught American scholars to see our literature
in light of a diasporic "counterculture of modernity" involving North
America, Africa, and Europe as a single matrix (1-40). This essay is an
extension of Gilroy's "attempts to rethink modernity via the history
of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemi-
sphere" (17). I want Alice Walker to inform an understanding of Max
Weber as much as the other way around. Furthermore, there already
exists a critical tradition which speaks of black women's literature as
"conjuration," a reference to diasporic African folk religion. The most
significant examples of this critical trope are Conjuring: Black Women,
Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985), edited by Marjorie Pryse and
Hortense J. Spillers, and Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s Workings of the Spirit:
The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (1993). These sources are
indispensable, but limited by an assumption of a metaphorical relation-
ship between writing and conjuration. Though Marjorie Pryse avers
that "Black women have long possessed 'magical' powers and told

3. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 13
their daughters stories" (3), she is quick to elide magic into narrative,
to see Alice Walker's claims for the author as "medium" as a figure of
speech. Houston Baker is careful to surround the discourse of magic
with French poststructuralist philosophy and anthropology before he
claims to be "warmed" by the idea of conjure (101). I will have more
to say about the understandable caution that critics have exercised in
associating black women and magic, but it is clear that Spillers, Pryse,
and Baker are alive to what we might call, after Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., the dilemma of the Signifying Monkey. In a disenchanted, racist
academy, one speaks of the workings of the Spirit at one's peril. My
own approach will be more direct: the claim that Walker's essays are
instruments of enchantment is meant as deixis, not figuration. The es-
says enact a semiotic enchantment, a renovation of the world of signs,
as a foundation for material and political enchantment. Her essays are
not like an enchantment; they are an enchantment.
The essay itself, as a form, is part of the problem. Its place in liter-
ary studies is one of perpetual neglect, and Walker's essays have been
neglected relative to her work in other genres.4
While this fact reflects
the general bias of literary studies toward fiction, the marginality of the
essays constitutes a serious gap in critical attention. In her assessment
of aesthetics and ideology in African American literature, "On Freedom
and the Will to Adorn," Cheryl Wall goes so far as to "make the case
that Walker, despite her reputation as a novelist, short story writer, and
poet, has done her best work in the essay" (290-91).5
However one evalu-
ates the rest of her corpus, Walker ranks among the finest Anglophone
essayists of the twentieth century, fit to stand with Virginia Woolf and
Ralph Ellison. She sits squarely in the heritage of Michel de Montaigne,6
using an intimate tone, an address to the reader as friend, to explore
personal, often bodily experience, opening a space for rumination on
political, ethical, and theological issues. As Graham Good says in The
Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay, the genre is based on a dialectic
of microcosm and macrocosm, "the moment where the self finds a
pattern in the world, and the world finds a pattern in the self" (22).
Though it might be argued that many kinds of writing operate in this
way, the Montaignian essay is founded on a very particular version of
the self/world relationship. In "Of giving the lie," Montaigne claims
that he has made a book that is consubstantial ["consubstantiel"] with
its writer (504). This theological term comes from the Nicene Creed,
and translates the Greek homoousios, meaning "of the same substance,"
describing the metaphysical relationship of the Father and the Son
in classical Trinitarian theology. The Montaignian essay seeks not to
imitate the writer's thought (mimesis), but to incarnate the writer in text
just as the Word became flesh according to the Gospel of John. Return-

4. 14 I S L E
ing to Good's insight that the essay creates a reciprocal order in world
and writer, it should not be surprising that many of Walker's essays are
concerned with the disordering of the world via environmental crisis. If
essayistic activity incarnates self-and-world order, a disordering of the
world should echo in a disordering of the essayist. This is precisely the
pattern found in the essays that are my principal concern: "In Search
of Our Mothers' Gardens," "Am I Blue?," and "Everything Is a Human
Being." Though I am not the first to notice Walker's environmentalist
inclinations, explorations of this pattern have been limited to her po-
etry and fiction.7
This limitation applies to African Americanists and
ecocritics alike. Apparently, there is something about Walker's green
essayism that confounds even a state-of-the-art critical apparatus.
I believe the issue goes well beyond its most obvious manifestation:
that too many associate environmentalism with the Anglo-American
middle-class and black women writers with identitarian concerns.
Though this error is endemic to the popular media and the academy, it
will not concern me here, except as a symptom of a larger problem. That
problem is the disenchantment of the world, identifed by Max Weber
as central to the culture of modernity. In his 1917 oration "Science as a
Vocation," Weber sketched the development of Western culture as a lin-
ear progression from a state of enchantment, in which humanity (read:
the Greeks)8
depended on the agency of divinities to explain phenom-
ena, to a state of disenchantment, in which explanation of phenomena
depends on rational theory based on empirical data and calculation.
The process of rationalization displaced the gods as civilization came
to rely on its own mastery of nature rather than the supplication of
superhuman powers. This is the heart of disenchantment:
[I]t means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces
that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all
things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One
need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or
implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers
existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This
above all is what intellectualization means. (139)
If Weber is right, and disenchantment is normative in modernity,
the consequences for the African American writer are clear. Because
African American culture has been so strongly associated with the
enchantment of the "savage"—thejungle, the tribe, pagan ritual, desire
unconstrained by reason—there is a risk that African Americans them-
selves can never be admitted to modernity. They appear as incarnations
of the very forces disenchantment is trying to displace. Though critics
may rightly shy away from such logic and preclude enchantment from

5. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 15
scrutiny, the problem of modernity is hardly new to African American
writers, philosophers, and activists. From the slave narratives' articula-
tion of the narrator as a moral patient to Ralph Ellison's invisible man
and Zora Neale Hurston's dangerous love of folklore, there has always
been a tension between black modernity and the Anglo-American
fear of enchantment. Walker inherits this dilemma and addresses it in
multiple genres. The essay presents a special problem in this respect
because it is understood to be non-fiction. Essays, particularly in the
pragmatic American tradition, are meant to contain some degree of
objectivity or reasonableness. If Walker's essays are instruments of
abolitionist enchantment—vectors of a world-order in which humanity
is not master—there may be political consequences.
But why should Walker desire the consequences of enchantment? Is
it not prudent for African Americans to inhabit modernity on its own
terms and repudiate the supplication of gods? Part of the confusion of
these questions lies in the rationalized German Calvinism in which
Weber articulated his historical categories. By conserving Reformed
Protestantism as the telos of Western history, he can identify paganism
with enchantment and Christianity with disenchantment, an argument
more fully articulated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Furthermore, though he worries that the old gods are rising again in
the powers of nationalism and fascism, Weber identifies modernity
primarily with the defeat of religious despotism by the Enlightenment
and the material advances of scientific research. From the perspective
of the black Atlantic, of course, modernity is troubled from the begin-
ning by slavery and genocide. The idea "that one can, in principle,
master all things by calculation" begs the questions, What, or who, is
being mastered? and Why is mastery a legitimate goal? If slave-masters
are masters in Weber's sense, does it follow that disenchantment
abets slave-holding? Or, to put it in Walker's terms, does enchantment
promote liberation? Though religion in the hands of the slave-holders
became an instrument of domination and deceit,9
Judaism, Christian-
ity and syncretic survivals of West African religions, such as Vodoun
and Santeria, play an important role in slave rebellion, liberation, and
later struggles for civil rights.10
Thus, the belief in non-human pow-
ers appears, in the context of the black Atlantic, as a positive force
against the disenchantments of slavery. Furthermore, the association
of ocean with the Middle Passage, land with forced labor, and slaves
with animals represents an immensely troubled environmental his-
tory in the New World. This history is memorably symbolized by the
title character of Toni Morrison's Beloved, who is a fugitive from the
water, an indwelling spirit of the water, and an effaced memory in the
water. But Beloved is unstable, and finally "the girl who waited to be

6. 16 I S L E
loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts" (274), suggesting
that there can be no easy enchantment for Americans, no return to
pre-modern cosmology in postmodernity. Thus, the question of Alice
Walker's essays as instruments of enchantment arises in a context "dis-
remembered and unaccounted for" in Weberian theory.11
Her challenge
is to refashion the American relationship to the environment without
betraying the vexed history that precedes her. My assessment of this
effort follows, beginning with the historical and generic precursors to
Walker's essays.
It is important to acknowledge the precursors in African American
history and literature to Walker's green abolitionism, which might oth-
erwise seem to appear out of nowhere. The first is regional: Walker is
native to Georgia, and there is a documented history of black women
in Georgia who "rebelled, rioted, and ran away" in resistance to slavery
(Wood 551). This history dates at least as far back as the middle of the
eighteenth century.12
Though activity of this kind is often not included
in the history of abolition, at least one historian of the movement argues
that it ought to be: "Black resistance to slavery not only amounted to
practical abolitionism, it inspired antislavery sentiment in the North
and made the southern white reaction more desperate than it would
have been otherwise" (Harrold, American Abolitionists 8). I am inclined
to read Walker's writing, and her narratives of other Georgian black
women, as extensions of this history. The second precursor is generic:
the tradition of the slave narrative. Though there has been much work
done on Walker's fiction as neo-slave narrative,13
we should keep in
mind, when interpreting her essays, the importance of voice in the
genre: "The strident, moral voice of the former slave recounting, expos-
ing, appealing, apostrophizing, and above all remembering his ordeal
in bondage is the single most impressive feature of a slave narrative"
(Stepto 3). Though modified by the familiar essay's more intimate
tone, the strident voice of the slave narrator is never far away when
Walker deals with environmental destruction. But there is another
autobiographical voice that is not so often connected to Walker, the
voice of spiritual autobiography. In his edition of the autobiographies of
Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote, Sisters ofthe Spirit, William L.
Andrews points out that the genre of spiritual autobiography predates
the fugitive slave narrative "by almost fifty years" (1). Thus, the theme
of spiritual emancipation was already in play when ex-slaves began to
write about political emancipation, and it is precisely the connection
between these modes that animates Walker's essays. Emancipation in
the autobiographies is seen, as it would be in later abolitionist literature,
as explicitly cosmological: the fallen world and the fallen self were the
same ground of warfare against Satan's rule (13).14
Significantly, many

7. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 17
of the warriors were women: spiritual autobiography provides a re-
cord of female-identified activism that is often ignored in the history
of American feminism. It will be no surprise to us, however, when
Walker connects the spiritual destruction of her female ancestors to
contemporary environmental destruction, nor when a matrilineage
of resistance is brought to light. There is a more famous mother-line,15
black and white, in the fourth precursor, Abolition, including Lydia
Maria Child, Harriet Beacher Stowe, Angelina Grimke, Harriet Jacobs,
and Sojourner Truth. The most important contribution to Walker's
essays from Abolitionist literature is its demand for political change,
or what is called, in theological terms, realized eschatology: the expecta-
tion ofjustice on earth during regular historical time.16
Walker departs
most profoundly from the tradition of Montaignian essayism and its
Emersonian offshoots by crafting essays which offer not only per-
sonal reflection, but demands for action on the part of the audience.17
Thus, the elements of Walker's essayism which seem most alien to
the Anglo-American personal essay—the activism, the feminism, the
strident voice of morality mixed with the more familiar meditations
and anecdotes—are actually conventional when viewed from a larger
sphere of evidence.
Walker has published three collections of essays so far: In Search of
Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Living by the Word: Selected
Writings 1973-87 (1988), and Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997).18
"Am
I Blue?," the first essay we will consider, was first published in Ms. in
1986, and later collected in Living by the Word. It is the kind of essay
that tells a story as a personal recollection and in that sense is simpler
in structure than its ancestor, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens,"
which will be considered later. The story itself is deceptively simple:
Walker and her partner are renting a house in northern California
next to a meadow where a white horse named Blue is being stabled
by a neighbor. Walker becomes friends with the horse by feeding him
apples, and remarks on the ease of communication between them
(Blue has learned how to signal that he wants an apple). The horse
seems otherwise lonely and bored until another horse, whom Blue is
meant to impregnate, is put in the meadow. There is a brief period of
happy companionship for the two horses until the other horse becomes
pregnant and is permanently removed from the meadow. After this
removal, Blue becomes agitated and distrustful of humans, and never
again accepts an apple from Walker's hand. This story could hardly be
less complicated: it has a beginning, a middle, and an unhappy ending;
it revolves around two meetings, one between human and horse, one
between horse and horse; and it resolves in two departures, horse from

8. 18 I S L E
horse and horse from human. It appears even to have a familiar moral:
thingsfall apart. There does not appear to be much to interpret.
Things become more complicated when the title is taken into ac-
count. "Am I Blue?" has several levels of meaning. As an allusion to
the Billie Holiday song—part of which, "Ain't these tears in these eyes
tellin' you?," serves as the essay's epigraph—it asks a question about a
human singer's relationship to a lost love. The parallel to the love lost
between horses, and between human and horse, is thus connected to
the tradition of the blues, the musical form that grew out of slave culture
and into the post-Reconstruction world of Jim Crow and the segrega-
tionist South. This is significant in itself: a musical form preoccupied
with the transitory nature of human desire and the misery caused by
the failure of love is asked now to stand for a parallel experience in
the life of an animal, crossing the line of the pathetic fallacy. The line
is crossed without comment, though Walker surely understands that
she is doing something sophisticated writers are not supposed to do
anymore. On the second level, "Am I Blue?" can be translated as "Am I,
Alice Walker, that horse named Blue?" The question of the identification
between horse and human is raised from the other direction, making
Blue the horse a model for the human writer. Blue's condition reflects
Walker's condition, and by extension, may reflect the reader's as well.
The title prompts the reader to ask "Am I like this horse?" Finally, the
title canbe interpreted as a combination of the other possibilities, which
might be rendered as "Do I, like horse and writer, have the blues?"
This is a provocative set of questions, given the historical and
ideological connection between black slaves, especially black women,
and animals. Delores Williams, in "Sin, Nature and Black Women's
Bodies," explains:
Female slaves were beaten, overworked, and made to experience ex-
cessive childbearing in order to provide income, comfort, and leisure
for slave-owning families. Because, in the nineteenth century, slave
owner consciousness imaged black people as belonging to a lower
order of nature than white people, black people were to be controlled
and tamed like the rest of the natural environment. Black women (and
black men) were "viewed as beasts, as cattle, as 'articles' for sale" (Nicols
1963, 12). The taming of these "lower orders of nature" would assure
the well-being of both master and slave—so slave owner cosciousness
imagined. Put simply, the assault upon the natural environment today
is but an extension of the assault upon black women's bodies in the
nineteenth century. (24-25)
Precisely because of the connection between black women slaves
and bestial nature, much energy has been spent during the twentieth
century insisting that black women are not animals, are not more like

9. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 19
nature than white women, are in fact an equal symbol of civilization,
learning, and decorum.19
As bell hooks emphasizes, "More so than any
other group of women in this society, Black women have been seen as
'all body, no mind'" (hooks and West 153). What is striking in Williams's
analysis, then, is her refusal to elevate black women above nature into
the place of dominance. Rather, the defense of black women and men
actually implies the defense of nature, now seen as another enslaved
part of creation in need of liberation. Walker's question "Am I Blue?"
moves in this direction in ways that may be disturbing. Is it not quite
dangerous to assert the connection between a horse and a black woman,
just as black women are beginning to recover from the effects of that
very identification? The stakes are further revealed by Elizabeth Ann
Beaulieu's analysis of gender and class in the slave narrative. Slaves
could not be women or men in the normative sense and were instead
"things" or beasts (because beasts were also things) in the ante-bellum
South as in imperial Rome (12). So the escape from slavery is also an
escape into gender, which is a privilege of freedom. To be recognized
as a human being, and as a woman, is the outward sign of the escape
from slavery and its bestial status. To identify with a beast is to risk a
slide back into slavery and quiddity.
That this connection is not lost on Walker is demonstrated by the
way she interrupts the pastoral story of her encounter with Blue with
the following rumination:
After giving Blue the apples, I would wander back to the house,
aware that he was observing me. Were more apples not forthcom-
ing then? Was that to be his sole entertainment for the day? My
partner's small son had decided he wanted to learn how to piece a
quilt; we worked in silence on our respective squares as I thought...
Well, about slavery: about white children, who were raised by black
people, who knew their first all-accepting love from black women, and
then, when they were twelve or so, were told they must "forget" the
deep levels of communication between themselves and "mammy" that
they knew. Later they would be able to relate quite calmly, "My old
mammy was sold to another good family." My old mammy was
—." Fill in the blank. Many more years later a white woman would
say: "I can't understand these Negroes, these blacks. What do they
want? They're so different from us." (5)
In a previous paragraph, Walker has related her shock at herself for
forgetting what she had known in childhood about communication
with animals. A parallel is being drawn: humans are to horses as slave
owners are to slaves: willfully ignorant of the personhood of their

10. 20 I S L E
property and therefore complicit in the destruction of what she calls
"completed creations" (5), a reference both to artistic creation and to
Genesis 1, where the creatures of each day of creation are pronounced
good by the Creator. Like Delores Williams, Walker is running the
logic of the slave-holders backwards: it is not that black women are
like animals, and therefore things, it is that animals, like black women,
are creatures, in the special sense of Genesis, artifacts that are beings-
in-themselves, related to God as both Maker and Parent and therefore
kin, though not the same. And in case the reader mistakes Walker as
intending to assert some privileged relationship between herself, or
black women in general, and horses, or otherkind20
in general, she goes
on, in the next paragraphs, to extend her analogy to Indians, "consid-
ered to be like 'animals' by the 'settlers' (5) and to Japanese, Korean,
and Filipina brides of American soldiers, whose advantages as wives
are lost when they learn to speak English" (6). So the problem is not
that the white reader should feel a paralyzing guilt for the slavery of
the past but that anyone who participates in the slavery of the present
should recognize themselves as slave-holders and attempt to undo
such peculiar institutions.
But "Am I Blue?" is finally a lament for a fallen world rather than
a map to its redemption: it ends with a trope from the slave narrative,
the tearing apart of the family when the owners sell its members away
from each other. Blue is deprived of his mate, an event that finally drives
him into what Walker describes as insanity and hatred:
[I]n Blue's large brown eyes was a new look, more painful than the
look of despair: the look of disgust with human beings, with life; the
look of hatred. It gave him, for the first time, the look of a beast. And
what that meant was that he had put up a barrier within to protect
himself from further violence; all the apples in the world wouldn't
change that fact. (8)
This moment, when the previously friendly and communicative horse
is lost to Walker and to humans in general, is both a repetition of the
expulsion from Paradise and of the Tower of Babel story, where an
original tongue is lost in a primal fracturing of unity. Here, Walker
emphasizes that social relations thought of as natural and inevitable,
guaranteed by the structure of the universe, are actually the products
of historical injustice that could be stopped by a collective repentance.
The beginning of this repentance can be seen at the end of the essay
when Walker sits down to eat steak with a friend and realizes, after
contemplating Blue's fate, that she is "eating misery," and spits the steak
out of her mouth. This is a shocking turn for the essay to take: there
has been no previous consideration of vegetarianism as a response to

11. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 21
Blue's predicament. The issue of the consumption of meat is not even
implied by Blue's narrative. But, remembering the rhetoric of Aboli-
tion, we can see that Walker ends the essay with a moment of personal
transformation like the kind asked of the people of the North. She has
realized that slavery goes against the justice of God, and now an out-
ward sign of that conversion—the meat spat out—is required. There is
no attempt to construct a logical argument against factory farming or
slaughterhouses; Blue is not in danger of being eaten. But, using the
sentimental strategies of Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl, Our Nig, and
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Walker makes herself an example of the lightning-
fast repentance required of the reader.21
This rhetoric might be called
"environmentalist immediatism" after the wing of Abolitionism that
demanded immediate liberation of all American slaves. It is also related
to the perfectionist doctrines in spiritual autobiography, which held
that redemption in Christ allowed the believer to overcome the power
of Satan absolutely.
But there is a problem: Walker has constructed a slave narrative out
of someone else's experience. Walker is not Blue himself, though she
is blue on his behalf. Moreover, she is even further removed from the
experience of Blue's slavery than the Abolitionist editors and prefacers
of ante-bellum narratives. William Lloyd Garrison could speak with
Frederick Douglass, as Lydia Maria Child could meet with Harriet
Jacobs. Walker's position is even more precarious: Blue may be able to
communicate, but he cannot literally speak, so there cannot even be
a conflict between the repetition and editing of the slave's words. All
the words are hers, and the interpretation of Blue's reactions are also
hers. It would be possible for another person, equally in sympathy with
Blue's suffering, to construct a completely different narrative based on
Blue's life. By her own admission, Walker is in the position of the slave-
holder relative to Blue and therefore in a double bind: in the terms of
slave society, she is too like the horse to be trusted, while in terms of
contemporary society, she is too unlike the horse to be trusted. This
quandary points to a failure of cosmology itself: in any of the worlds
of the past or the present, Walker cannot effect the identification with
the horse in just the right way to be an advocate. This is not her fault
as a writer, but a symptom that the proper cosmos where Blue can
have justice is just as far ahead of us as Abolition was from the eigh-
teenth century: imaginable and desirable, but not yet real. Like many
evangelists, Walker writes within a tension between her own conver-
sion experience and the conversion of the world itself, between "the
Kingdom of God is among you" and the reality of the Roman Empire's
continued dominion.

12. 22 I S L E
Nonetheless, Walker is unusually flexible in her self-identification as,
literally, an American black woman whose family history is a product of
slavery, and, metaphorically, as a white slave-holder, an enslaved horse,
and the horse's Abolitionist advocate. It is this flexibility itself which
may finally be the most important aspect of the essay. "Am I Blue?" is
an exercise in holding wildly different subject-positions at the same
time. It is an example of what Mae Gwendolyn Henderson has called
"speaking in tongues," after the early communities in the Book of Acts,
in which believers were overcome by ecstatic utterances inspired by the
Holy Spirit. In her essay "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Women Writer's Literary Tradition," Henderson claims
that contemporary black women writers speak in tongues, not through
glossolalia—the unintelligible form of inspired speech—but through
Bakhtinian heteroglossia, which itself is named after the miraculous
preaching of the disciples to a multi-lingual crowd (17-20). This practice
of speaking simultaneously in many languages and registers allows
them to cultivate another practice, "the privileging (rather than the
repression) of the 'other in ourselves'" (19). Black women writers, in
other words, are skilled at exploding or dissolving the boundaries of
the ego, and socially-given identity, in favor of multiple identifications
through the practice of writing in tongues. Walker's ability to inhabit
horse, slave-holder, and Abolitionist is an act with a history and a
community. If we think about this skill in cosmological context, the
tradition of speaking in tongues is a strategy aimed at disrupting one's
received place in a given order, a way to give speech to the speech-
less, whose communicative lack is the result of our complicity with a
particular dominion. Blue may not be able to speak in human words,
but he can communicate in other ways, and Walker's heteroglossia is
a means of translation, not a means of fabrication. Because of this, we
can complicate an earlier judgment and say that Walker is Blue, in that
she can be his advocate in the world of human language in a way that
may be a product of human imagination and a representation of his
political interests. Thus, it combines the functions of a slave narrative
and an Abolitionist tract.
However, "Am I Blue?" is not Walker's first or most famous essay
in these modes. That honor belongs to "In Search of Our Mothers'
Gardens," first published in Ms. in 1974, and later collected in a book
by the same name in 1983. It is difficult to underestimate the effects of
this essay and this collection. The collection is subtitled "Womanist
Prose," and begins with a complex definition of womanist, which as-
sociates black feminism with bold willfullness, as in an escape from
slavery; the love of other women and men, sexually or not; and the love
of food, music, dance, the moon, and the Spirit (In Search ofOur Moth-

13. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 23
ers' Gardens xi-xii). These associations are important for us in several
ways. First, Walker associates black feminism, and feminisms of color,
with a love that seeks justice and freedom. This is important because
of the contemporary association of "feminism" with hatred and anger,
particularly the hatred of men, which Walker clearly rejects as the basis
of activism. Significantly, she also connects the love of the body and
other humans with the love of creatures (flowers, gardens, the moon).
This reveals a cosmological dimension to womanism which would only
be made explicit in other feminisms once the term "ecofeminism" was
coined. Thus, despite the development of the parallel term "ecowoman-
ism" (see below), it seems that the "eco-" was implicit in womanism
from the beginning. Finally, Walker ends her list of loves with Spirit,
which receives the emphasis of italics: [a womanist] "Loves the Spirit"
(xii). Thus, there is also a critique of disenchantment in the ur-text of
womanism. The Spirit, which can equally refer to the Holy Spirit of
Christianity and to the Spirit of conjure, is, of course, the basic element
of enchantment, if it is remembered that en-chant means "to sing upon"
and that "Spirit" is rooted in the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma, and
the Hebrew ruach, all meaning "breath". The Spirit is the breath of the
cosmic song. Womanism is a capacious definition of feminism.
If the promulgation of this idea were the only thing the collection
accomplished, it would still have to be reckoned a watershed moment
in the history of American feminism. A whole field of theology is now
called "womanist" after Walker's definition. Delores Williams, cited
above, calls herself a womanist theologian, and Karen Baker-Fletcher
calls her theology "ecowomanist" at least once. (Shamara Shantu
Riley, a political scientist, calls her work ecowomanist; she is the first
example of this outside theology of which I am aware.) Ada Maria
Isasi-Diaz, a Cuban-American theologian, coined the terms mujerista
and mujerista theology ("womanist" and "womanist theology" in Span-
ish) after Walker, and one of the founding collections of Third World
women's theology in English is called Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens.
When Orbis Press, the premier American publisher of radical Christian
theology, published James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore's Black
Theology: A Documentary History in 1993, Volume II not only contained
an entire section called "Womanist Theology," but "In Search of Our
Mothers' Gardens" was included in Volume I as a foundational piece
of black theology. This occurred without editorial comment, as if the
inclusion of literature written by someone with no professional training
in theology was a non-issue. Yet no other literary essay was included in
either volume, and no other author who was not a theologian appeared
in the collection. Therefore, the question arises: What is so important
about "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," and the "womanist prose"

14. 24 I S L E
it inaugurated? It is a neo-slave narrative and a spiritual autobiography
that not only critiques the unjust world-order of the past, but announces
a new world-order in which it is possible to see black women as artists,
and black women artists as images of the Creator.
"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" opens in the disastrous world
after Reconstruction, where the promise of real emancipation has failed
to be realized for several generations. In a Montaignian move, Walker
begins her own discussion with a commentary on another writer's
work, in this case Jean Toomer, whose Cane provides the essay's epi-
graph, where Toomer tells a sleepy prostitute of "an art that would be
born, an art that would open the way for women the likes of her" (qtd.
in Walker 231). Walker comments:
When the poet Jean Toomer walked through the South in the early
twenties, he discovered a curious thing: black women whose spiritual-
ity was so intense, so deep, so unconscious, that they themselves were
unaware ofthe richness they held. They stumbled blindly through their
lives: creatures so abused in mind and mutilated in body, so dimmed
and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy
even of hope. (232)
A few lines later, she adds:
ThesecrazySaintsstaredoutattheworld,wildly,likelunatics—orquietly,
likesuicides;andthe"God"thatwasintheirgazewasasmuteasagreatstone.
Who were these Saints? These crazy, loony, pitiful women?
Some of them, without a doubt, were our mothers and grandmothers.
(232)
This is an extraordinary beginning, not onlybecause the status of these
women reflects the state in which Blue the horse is left at the end of his
essay, but because Walker has set a scene of absolute disenchantment
to rival Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.
Like a dammed river overflowing its banks, the spiritual power of the
women Toomer found is forced back on itself and strangled by the
conditions of their lives. So Walker begins here with a description of
spiritual disaster that links the fate of Southern black women with the
larger crisis of modernity in the American and European world. This is
important to keep in mind when considering the larger significance of
"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," which, like much other African
American literature, is often taken to refer only to the lives of African
Americans, despite its larger significance. (It may help to remember
that Ms. magazine had a largely white audience in 1974, when the essay
was first published.) In light of disenchantment, the characterization

15. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 25
of these women as "Saints" is even more ironic: as poor black women,
their status as spiritual heroes is in triple jeopardy in a world where
even T.S. Eliot is having a hard time finding God at Harvard. Indeed,
Walker puts the world God in quotation marks, indicating that, whatever
the women are staring at, it hardly deserves the name.
Walker immediately links the spiritual half-life of these ancestral
women with their social status, reminding the reader that black folklore
calls black women "the mule of the world" (232). This identification of
black women with the animal world is significant for several reasons.
First, it testifies to the historical metaphysics of slave-holding, such as
this opinion collected by Lydia Maria Child: "The Declaration of In-
dependence is exuberantly false and arborescently fallacious. Life and
liberty are not inalienable. Men are not born entitled to equal rights. It
would be far nearer the truth to say, that some are born with saddles
on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them; and the
riding does them good; they need the reins, the bit, and the spur" (5).
Further, it links the conundrum of "Am I Blue?" to the present, sug-
gesting that Walker, as the descendent of women who were identified
as half horse,22
may be in an especially good position to judge Blue's
blues. It also links the diagnosis of the ancestors' ills with the traditional
indictment of slavery found in Abolitionist literature. To take only the
most obvious example, David Walker's Appeal...to the Colored Citizens
of the World (1829) declares:
I am fully aware, in making this appeal to my much afflicted and suf-
feringbrethren, that I shall not onlybe assailed by those whose greatest
earthly desires are, to keep us in abject ignorance and wretchedness,
and are of the firm conviction that heaven has designed us and our
children to be slaves and beasts ofburden to them and their children,
[italics in original] (12)
From this quotation we can see that, even in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, the cosmological aspect of slavery was clear to the Abolitionists:
David Walker condemns the ideology of slaveholders who believe that
God has ordained a permanent and natural order in which black Ameri-
cans are not only slaves, but beasts, and slaves because they are beasts.
As Dwight A. McBride points out: "The primary site of contestation
for slavery debates in the nineteenth century was African humanity"
in the context, not only of slave-societies, but of artifacts of high Euro-
pean culture, such as Hegel's Philosophy ofHistory, in which the nature
of Africans is characterized as "merely isolated sensual existence" (2).
In 1829, only a few years before her conversion to the cause, Angelina
Grimke defended such ideas as God's plan: "There is a beautiful order
in the arrangements of Providence which cannot be disturbed without

16. 26 I S L E
occasioning confusion" (qtd. in Browne 2). So, Alice Walker's preoc-
cupation with animals and the status of black women as animals is
not, despite its womanist transformation, an idiosyncracy, but a crucial
aspect of Abolitionist and slave narrative argument against the order
of slavery. However, Walker must also correct a gendered injustice in
the Abolitionist imagination: "No abolitionist, black or white, female
or male, ever framed an address to the enslaved women of the South"
(Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism 13).
It is no surprise, then, when Walker mounts a defense of black
women as artists in much the same way slave narratives defended slaves
as human beings. In fact, the origin of this defense is the same, because
of Walker's theory of spirituality as the basis of art. In Abolitionist
tracts and slave narratives, there is a conventional argument, based on
Genesis and Exodus, of slaves as equal to white people as images and
children of God. Walker proceeds in much the same way by saying
that art, the creation of beauty, is based on spirituality. This is quite
different than saying, as does much of the post-Romantic tradition,
that art is based on genius. Originally, in Latin culture, a genius was
a local spirit that inhabited a place, person, or institution in a highly
particular way: one could speak of the genius of a spring, the genius
of the emperor, or the genius of Rome. In European Romanticism,
genius took on a similar particularism, such that one might speak of
the genius of Beethoven or Picasso as a way of indicating a source of
inspiration, a muse, that spoke only to that particular person. But in
basing artistry in the Spirit itself, to which everyone has access, Walker
democratizes the source of art and the identity of artist. Black women
can be artists because of their common human access to the Spirit of
God. It is this kind of reasoning that shows Walker to be a child of the
Enlightenment, as she follows to its logical conclusions the Declaration
of Independence, as it insists of the people, "they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights," including, now, the right to
the unfettered creation of beauty. It is also an idea embedded in the
Hellenistic heritage of Enlightenment thought: the Greek verb kosmein,
the origin of "cosmos," means "to create beautiful order," though, as
we saw with Angelina Grimke, the question of Abolition is a question
about the nature of beauty itself.23
That is why no one in the lineage who makes beauty-with-justice
can be left behind. The locus of artistic creation in the essay leads from
the community of stifled, lunatic women, to formerly derided figures
such as Phyllis Wheatley, the Neoclassical poet of the eighteenth cen-
tury, to feminist foremothers like Virginia Woolf, with her parable of
Shakespeare's sister—the white cousin of the Saints—and finally to
Walker's mother herself. Here, as in "Am I Blue?," Walker chides herself

17. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 27
for not realizing that her mother, with her stories, quilts, and especially
her garden, was an artist, or, like Blue, a creature with a spiritual life.
This self-blame is a motif throughout Walker's essays—she is not the
epistemic hero of her own writing, but someone who—like the Mon-
taigne of the famous Que sais-je?—constantly doubts the accuracy of
traditional ways of understanding the world, and therefore doubts her
own perceptions as they have been formed by that understanding.24
This is what Walker says she "finally noticed:"
I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that
she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator,
hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Order-
ing the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.
Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect
she leaves for me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She
handed down respect for the possibilities—and the will to grasp them.
For her, so hindered and intruded upon in so many ways, being an
artist has still been a daily part of her life. This ability to hold on, even
in very simple ways, is work that black women have done for a very
long time. (241-42)
This is the revelation at the core of this essay, and the reason why so
many readers find it a necessary theological text. The message could
hardly be clearer: right under Walker's nose, immersed in daily life, was
an artistic mother who is an image of the Maker. The signs from Gen-
esis are all here: the garden, the light, the visible invisibility of a prime
mover, "the ordering of the universe." Walker's mother gets a capital
"C" as Creator, indicating her divine identity, her realization of herself
as image of God. But if the mother is a First Cause, the First Cause is
itself changed. The bearded white man of Renaissance art, infamous
in The Color Purple as the picture of God that Celie must overcome, is
replaced by the picture of a poor black woman of the South who shines
so brightly in the creation of kosmos she can barely be seen. And the
shift from white to black, from male to female, from lord to sharecrop-
per, changes what it means to order the universe. Mrs. Walker is not
an image of Christ Pantocrator, the "All-Ruler," or the deus absconditus
of Deism, but God the Enchanter. She is a Word dwelling among us, a
Creator walking in the garden in the breeze of the day.25
Therefore, when Walker concludes the essay with the line "in search
of my mother's garden, I found my own" (243), she is refashioning
world-order, not only her personal fate. She is doing something tradi-
tional Christianities have never done: imagining the descent of God
the Daughter from God the Mother.26
This descent implies that the act

18. 28 I S L E
of enchanting the world will continue to be available throughout the
generations and does not depend on the survival of one special indi-
vidual. Art, as Walker defines it, becomes a spiritual force in history
that is already being passed down, whether we notice it or not. If we
read backwards through the wreckage of stifled artistry to the figures
of the Saints, we now see, in light of Mrs. Walker and her garden, what
they should have been all along. While the Saints represent the slaves
who never escaped and died in brokenness, Mrs. Walker represents
the slaves who did escape, who persisted in acting out their own holi-
ness. She is the ultimate proof that the cosmos of slavery was a false
one: given even the smallest chance, black women can embody divine
creativity. Reading forward, from the equality of black women in the
image of God to the problem of Blue's blues, we can see that Walker's
project of enchantment is incomplete: though she herself participates
in this new image of God the Black Woman Artist, the image of God
the White Horse still eludes us. Blue is still enslaved—like the Saints,
he will be an ancestor who did not escape, the lunatic victim of dis-
enchantment, whose memory awaits a transformation in the image of
God like the transfiguration of mother into Maker.27
Walker is aware that this part of her project remains to be completed.
In her 1983 address to the University of California, Davis, which became
the essay "Everything Is a Human Being," also collected in Living by
the Word, she makes a complex analysis of race and the nature/culture
divide in the contemporary United States. She starts with a kind of
fairy tale of disenchantment: she is sitting in a grove of trees, trying
to commune with them, much like Cinderella, who in certain versions
of her tale, flees into the woods to speak to her mother, whose spirit
answers through a tree. But in this version, the trees tell Walker to go
away. They are diseased, and blame their disease on human beings.
Walker protests:
I love trees, I said.
Human, please, they replied. (141)
After a long argument, in which Walker continues to claim innocence as
an individual over against the depradations of logging companies and
other villains, she finally realizes that being a politically-progressive
black woman does not save her, as a member of our species, from the
collective blame the trees level against humans. She continues to speak
about the human species as destroyer by using the term Wasichu, which,
she explains, is the Oglala Sioux word for "fat-stealer," a term which
refers extra-tribally to white people. While in previous essays Walker
has used the idea of Wasichu to mean "white people" unambiguously,

19. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 29
here she explains that a Wasichu is anyone who takes the best part of
something for themselves. "It is possible to be white and not a Wasichu
or to be a Wasichu and not white" (144). This new explanation, which
allows for people of color to themselves be destroyers, compounds the
problem with the trees. Now it is not simply Walker as an individual at
stake, but all of the people of the United States who are used to think-
ing of themselves as members of historically oppressed peoples. From
the point of view of otherkind, human distinctions among ourselves,
like race, skin color, or culture, are irrelevant in the current situation
of planetary crisis. From this insight, Walker concludes:
Some of us have been used to thinking that woman is the nigger of
the world, that a person of color is the nigger of the world, that a poor
person is the nigger of the world. But, in truth, Earth itself has become
the nigger of the world. It is perceived, ironically, as other, alien, evil,
and threatening by those who are finding they cannot draw a healthful
breath without its cooperation. While the Earth is poisoned, everything
it supports is poisoned. While the Earth is enslaved, none of us is free.
While the Earth is "a nigger," it has no choice but to think of us all as
Wasichus. While it is treated like dirt, so are we. (147)
This logic should be unsurprising, given the previous analysis of "Am
I Blue?" and "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens": here, Walker simply
moves her line of thought in those essays to an obvious conclusion.
Nonetheless, her claims are startling for a writer known for decades
of involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and feminism. In effect,
she says that Americans who thought themselves the righteous rem-
nant fighting Babylon should think again: in the face of environmental
destruction, we are all the oppressor. This stance allows for no escape,
no way to take the high ground against the dominant culture, without
claiming to be utterly disconnected from that culture. But the essay
itself takes the reader through Walker's own attempt at escape, her
own insistence that she is better than the destroyers, and as she fails,
so will her readers. That is why Walker's revision of precursor genres
is not only an attempt to invoke the lives of past slaves, or to show how
the history of slavery still affects the contemporary United States. It
is a renewal of the slave narrative itself, identifying the Earth and its
creatures as the new slaves, objectified subjects inneed ofjustice. It also
calls for a new Abolition, a movement to free otherkind from bondage,
and a conversion of the species from the way of the Wasichu to another
world which has not yet fully been imagined.
This proleptic quality in Walker's essays can help us understand
the nature of the essay as an instrument of enchantment. "In Search
of Our Mothers' Gardens" offers the most complete semiotic enchant-
ment, by which the inherited field of signs is resignified and narrative

20. 30 I S L E
disenchantments are broken. Walker's mother replaces the Saints as
the locus of history; the possibilities of artistry in the midst of suffer-
ing become apparent. The Garden is regained. Nonetheless, the action
of the essay should be understood as an epiphany of something that
is already true. The essayist writes her way into comprehension; the
essay is an act of recognition whose vision can be fulfilled because it
has already occurred. In contrast, the cosmic reconstruction in "Am
I Blue?" is incomplete; the essay reflects, but cannot correct, a defect
in the current world-order, unlike The Color Purple, whose fairy-tale
ending provides the closure readers expect in fiction. The plot of "Am I
Blue?," which ends with an insane animal protagonist and a rebellious
human narrator, demonstrates the need for an enchantment it will not
deliver. Blue's salvation is part of the not-yet that is projected ahead of
the reader as the proper telos of history. "Everything Is a Human Being"
consolidates this pattern: here, Walker makes it clear that Blue was not
an exceptional creature who attained a degree of human-ness and thus
warranted unique concern. He is only one example of the multitude of
creatures being made into the "niggers of the world" by the order of
slavery. This revelation of the suffering of otherkind at human hands
completes the transferance of the slave-narrative pattern to an environ-
mentalist position. The disenchantment of environmental destruction
is now seen completely through the disenchantment of slavery: other
species become subjects of injustice rather than objects of control. This
is not a metaphorical relationship. Walker, like Delores Williams and
bell hooks, sees human slavery as a paradigm for biospheric slavery;
the latter must be rejected on the same grounds as the former because
they reflect the same world-system of injustice. However, the rejec-
tion of biospheric slavery is an epochal project lying almost entirely
in the future. The essay can demand it and suggest what might come
of it, but it does not narrate what such an enchantment would be like.
Rather, the idea of enchantment as a process of abolition promotes the
principle of justice as the center of political order.
The essays taken together can also reveal the relationship be-
tween Walker's thought and contemporary conflicts about the status
of modernity. Each essay reflects a different part of the liberatory im-
pulse in the Enlightenment and its struggle for a realized eschatology.
Like the Lumieres themselves, Walker rejects any attempt to abstract
salvation into an otherwordly heaven. Social structures that abet op-
pression must be resisted until they are destroyed. Walker merges the
contemporary environmentalist strand of rights-based thinking with
the direct-action tradition exemplified by EarthFirst!, Sea Shepherd,
and Greenpeace, while her mother becomes a good ancestor for the
Environmental Justice Movement, a matrifocal and racially inclusive

21. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 31
effort. These liberal, anarchist, and grass-roots impulses co-exist with
the more Romantic strain in her recent novels, especially The Temple
of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, which draw on contem-
porary Goddess-feminism to assert a continuity of all life through
the Earth-mother. But Walker's thought does not collapse into radical
separatism, as many anti-modern Romanticisms do. Therefore, her
liberationist thinking is still consistent with a figure such as Jiirgen
Habermas, who posits modernity or Enlightenment as an unfinished
rather than a failed project. Unlike Habermas, whose theory of com-
municative rationality still privileges the intellect over the emotions
and the body, Walker uses the popular essay to combine appeals to the
rational mind, the emotions, and the senses. This attempt to incarnate
the full range of rhetoric through essayism, though consistent with
nineteenth-century Abolitionist strategies, is also a critique of the
intellectualization that Weber believed to be at the heart of disenchant-
ment. Intellect alone may be sufficient if the goal is mastery of nature,
but Walker has rejected such a project, and therefore the question of
non-rational (not anti-rational) human capacities naturally arises. The
end of the exile of narrative, desire, and bodily sensation from the text
implies a resurgence of enchantment in Weberian terms. But Walker is
working after Weber's well-founded fears of nationalism and fascism as
evil enchantments have come to pass, so not any enchantment will do.
Her essays are postmodern in their acknowledgement of the failure of
certain aspects of modernity, and they incite the hope of a new order
that repeats neither the patterns of premodernity nor the mistakes of
prior modernities. Her abolitionist enchantment offers a standard for
what comes next: the projects of postmodernity must be tested from
the perspective of the dispossessed. If a nascent world-order does not
preserve the gardens of our mothers, if it does not offer Blue some hope
of sanity, if it guarantees no freedom for the "niggers" of the world, it is
insufficient. This standard can alsobe stated positively: the sign of ajust
world-order is the end of cosmic loneliness. Beauty arises in solidarity
with other creatures. And there is also a question: When Zora Hurston
appears on a dusty road in this new world, is she laughing?28
N O T E S
1. Some exceptions are: Michael Bennett, "Anti-Pastoralism, Frederick
Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery." Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the
Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace.
Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001.195-210; Rachel Stein, Shifting the Ground:
American Women Writers' Revision of Nature, Gender, and Race. Charlottesville:
UP of Virginia, 1997; and Kathleen R. Wallace and Karla Armbruster, "The

22. 32 I S L E
Novels of Toni Morrison; 'Wild Wilderness Where There Was None.'" Arm-
bruster and Wallace 211-32.
2. This pattern structures many of the entries in the "Introduction to Eco-
criticism" section of the home site of the Association for the Study of Literature
and Environment, http://www.asle.umn.edu.
3. The eco-philosopher whose concerns are closest to my own is David
Abram. Abram takes the idea of language-as-enchantment very seriously,
but his account of it opposes language and proper perception of the world;
linguistic and non-linguistic enchantments are opposed, and language blots
out the more-than-human world. My own account emphasizes the way the
world of signs and the material world form a continuous enchantment. See
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-
Human World. New York: Vintage, 1997.
4. Attempts to redress this problem include: Tuzyline Jita Allan, "A Voice
of One's Own: Implications of Impersonality in the Essays of Virginia Woolf
and Alice Walker." The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Ruth-Ellen
Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993,131-50;
Matthew Fike, "Jean Toomer and Okot p'Bitek in Alice Walker's 'In Search of
Our Mothers' Gardens.'" MELUS 25/3-4 (Fall 2000): 141-62; Christine Gerhardt,
"The Greening of African-American Landscapes: Where Ecocriticism Meets
Post-Colonial Theory." The Mississippi Quarterly 55/4 (Fall 2003): 515-35; Clara
Juncker, "Womanizing Theory." American Studies in Scandinavia 30/2 (1998):
43-49; Pamela Klass Mittlefehldt, "'A Weaponry of Choice': Black American
Women Writers and the Essay." The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Ed.
Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1993,196-208; Felipe Smith, "Alice Walker's Redemptive Art." African Ameri-
can Review 26/3 (Autumn 1992): 437-51; Meera Viswanathan and Evangelina
Mancikam, "Is Black Woman to White as Female Is to Male? Restoring Alice
Walker's Womanist Prose to the Heart of Feminist Literary Criticism." Indian
Journal ofAmerican Studies 26/1 &2 (Winter and Summer 1998): 15-20.
5. Wall's recent book Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and
Literary Tradition contains the first sustained treatment of Walker's essays as
such. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005. See especially Chapter 9.
6. The best introduction to the heritage of the European essay, and to
Montaigne's contribution, is Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature,
Modern Criticism, and the Essay. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.
7. For instance, Pamela A. Smith's otherwise excellent essay "Green Lap,
Brown Embrace, Blue Body: The Ecospirituality of Alice Walker" begins with In
Search ofOur Mothers' Gardens but turns immediately to the fiction and poetry.
CrossCurrents 48/4 (Winter 98/99): 471-88.
8. The political scientist Alkis Kontos explains that Weber recognized three
enchanted worlds: the world of the primitive, the world of the peasant, and
the world of ancient Greece. He comments: "The primacy given to ancient
Greece integrates the images and imagery of enchantment under the rubric
of Nature, polytheism, and myth, and stresses the significance of the intellect
and consciousness." "The World Disenchanted, and the Return of Gods and
Demons." The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment.
Ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. 229.

23. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 33
9. I take this term from the theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, who
coined it to describe the way oppressive social systems develop false cos-
mologies to abet their own power. See Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of
Earth-Healing. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.115-201.
10. See, for instance, Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith
Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rigths Movement to Today. New York: Basic
Books, 2005 and Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in
Brooklyn. Updated edition. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.
11. I borrow the term "disremembered and unaccounted for" from Toni
Morrison's description of the revenant's fate in Beloved (274). It describes the
way the experiences and consequences of slavery are actively repressed from
memory by the community, which finds them unbearable in overt form.
12. Betty Wood, "Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery in
Low Country Georgia, 1763-1815." The Slavery Reader. Ed. Gad Neuman and
James Walvin. London: Routledge, 2003. 551-68.
13. See Bernard Bell, Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal
Remembrances of Things Past. African American Review 26/1 (Spring 1992): 7-15.
14. American Abolitionists often used the term "the Slave Power" to de-
note their collective political enemy. But this enemy was also spiritual: the
Pauline epistles refer to the "powers and principalities," the fallen angels,
who are the bulwark of political and social oppression. Therefore, "the Slave
Power" is also a reference to Satan as fallen angel and ultimate author of the
anti-cosmos of slavery.
15. For a more nuanced understanding of the problem of lineage, see Wall,
Worrying the Line.
16. For examples of such expectation, see C. Bradley Thompson, ed., Anti-
slavery Political Writings, 1833-1860. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004.
17. This is not to say that Emerson's antislavery essays had no political
effect, but that the conflict between Transcendentalism and activism was a
matter of public controversy in New England. See Albert J. von Frank, "Mrs.
Brackett's Verdict: Magic and Means in Transcendental Antislavery Work."
Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts. Ed.
Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. Boston: Massachusetts Historical
Society, 1999. 385-407.
18. There are a number of other books of nonfiction, but none of these is
an essay collection. For instance, The Same River Twice, Walker's account of the
making of the film The Color Purple, is a memoir with a scrapbook; Sent by Earth:
A Messagefrom the Grandmother Spirit after the Attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon is, as its front cover says, a pamphlet, not a collection.
19. See Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of
Themselves. New York: Norton, 1999.
20.1 take this term from the papers presented at the 1998 Conference on
Christianity and Ecology held at the Harvard University Center for the Study
of World Religions, collected in the volume Christianity and Ecology: Seeking
the Weil-Being of Earth and Humans, edited by Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary
Radford Ruether. Cambridge: Harvard University Center for the Study of
World Religions, 1999. The term has several advantages. "Other" keeps us from
constantly defining species as non-human—as if plankton and woodpeckers are

24. 34 I S L E
primarily connected by not being us—while preserving a real sense of differ-
ence. "Kind," while still denoting "type," is related to a medieval nexus of ideas
we moderns have lost: kindness, kin, and Kinde (Dame Kinde is a Germanic form
of Lady Nature). Yoked together, the terms could be rendered as "the Others
who are nonetheless family, who deserve and may render kindness, and are
related through their own evolutionary histories to nature as a whole."
21. On the strategies of nineteenth century sentimental narrative, see Jane
Tompkins, "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary
History." Feminisms: An Anthology ofLiterary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R.
Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. 20-39.
22. A mule is the product of a cross between a horse and a donkey.
23. See the extended explanation of kosmos and kosmein in Gregory Vlastos,
Plato's Universe. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1975.
24. "Que sais-je?" means "What do I know?" and is often taken to be one
of the founding questions of the Essais.
25. There are precedents for this transformation in Christianity and in
conjure. The pre-Constantinian martyrologies, the Catholic idea of sacramental
indwelling and the Orthodox idea of theosis, or "God-ing," all allow the indi-
vidual believer to become an alter Christus, another Christ, in various ways.
In American comjure as in Voudun proper, the practice of being "ridden by
the spirit" posits the believer as a vessel of a deity or Iwa.
26. Many forms of heterodox Christianity, especially Montanist and Gnostic
forms, did imagine just this descent, which contributed to their marginaliza-
tion as heresies. See Elaine Pagels, "Whatever Became of God the Mother?"
Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1979.107-119. Walker is aware of at least part of this history: one of the essays
included in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is a review of the book Gifts of
Power, about the African American Shaker leader Rebecca Cox Jackson. Jackson,
like other Shakers, possessed a theology of the Spirit-as-mother.
27. The notion that Blue is a sign of a continuing oppression is especially
poignant in light of the history of horses in the struggle for abolition in the
British colonies. In "An Address...on...the Emancipation of the Negroes of
the British West Indies" (1841), Emerson recounts the cause celebre of the Brit-
ish ship Zong whose master , in 1781, threw 132 slaves into the sea to cheat
the underwriters of the voyage. In the first trial, the jury acquitted the master
because, according to the judge, Lord Mansfield, the jury felt that the "case
of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard." See Em-
erson's Antislavery Writings. Ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1995. 29~
28.1 would like to thank the following people for their help and encourage-
ment in the writing of this essay: Kristen Abbey, Rick Anderson, Sarah Avery,
John Fitzgerald, Katherine Lynes, Marc Manganaro, John McClure, Laurie
Naranch, Brian Norman, Alicia Ostriker, Erica Romaine, Channette Romero,
Rachel Stein, Derval Tubridy, and Cheryl Wall.

25. An End to Cosmic Loneliness 35
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