Reading Reflections, Essay Example

Alice Walker’s “The Welcome Table”: Biographical/Historical Analysis

It seems difficult to analyze any work by Alice Walker in a way that does not at least employ some biographical and/or historical analysis.  She is esteemed as one of a handful of admired women writers who focus on the black experience, and one who also draws, naturally enough, on her personal history and recollections.  When a great writer so consistently addresses a single aspect of life in his or her work, it becomes virtually necessary to examine how that subject is important to the writer, and how it is translated in the work.  In “The Welcome Table”, Alice Walker treats the racism she lived as the greater sadness touching everyone it must be.

Race relations, particularly of the discriminatory kind, figure in all of Alice Walker’s work because, as her political life supports, the subject is perhaps the most meaningful one in her life.  The daughter of a poor sharecropper in Georgia, Walker knew firsthand the deprivations faced by blacks in the middle of the twentieth century.  Only her mother’s determination ensured her education in a community where black children were not expected to attend school.  Walker would go on to earn her degree at the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in New York, but she also deliberately retained all her impressions of her early years, as well as the family stories passed down to her.

Much of this foundation is, not unexpectedly, apparent in the story, “The Welcome Table”.

The tale is a very simple one, and nearly a parable; a poor, elderly black woman walks to a white church, sits, and is thrown out.  She sees the figure of Jesus Christ, she follows him in joy, and is later discovered dead from exhaustion by the side of a road.  That the Christ figure is a delusion is never stated.  Moreover, no other character in the story is mentioned save in a removed fashion, and no one besides Christ has a name.  All of this adds to the fable quality.

The heart of the story appears to be racism.  That is to say, the basis is racist in that it is composed of what was, to Walker’s memories, an uneventful and ordinary fact of life.  Walker’s perceptions of white bias against blacks was not, in her own words, an explosive situation, but an ingrained element of living: “’Few blacks spent much time in discussing their hatred of white people…It was understood that they were – generally, vicious and unfair…Your job, if you were black, was to live with that knowledge’” (White,  p. 9).  To Walker growing up, racial hatred was as much a part of everyday living as the grass growing in the yards.

What renders this perspective especially interesting is how Walker the woman translates this form of experience as Walker the writer.  If blatant discrimination was built into existence, Walker saw it in relation to the rest of that existence, and “The Welcome Table” reflects this scope in its lack of actual anger.  All that occurs is rote and ordinary.  Some force is used to eject the old women, but it is not so violent as to overshadow the result of the action itself:  “She had been singing in her head. They interrupted her” (Walker, 2004, p. 84).   More interestingly, the white men of the community do it seemingly unwillingly, to placate their wives, and this shows Walker’s understanding of the humanity behind even racist actions: “The men in Walker’s fiction are so miserable because there is an absence of love in their lives which leads them to abuse their wives and children” (Pratt, 2007,  p. 9).   The implication in the story is that the only Christian joy to be had in that church was within the woman removed from it; Walker’s white people are no happier than their victim, even before her vision comes.

Then, Alice Walker conveys a lesson apparently deeply felt by her, that racism is born from a truly extraordinary level of ignorance.   As she seems to have marveled at in her own experience, racism is an appalling unwillingness to connect basic dots, for the blacks and whites in her work do indeed coexist, and often in humane ways.  The most striking element of the story, in fact, goes to this: blinded by their bias, the whites in the church are unable to connect that this woman whom they see as a “desecration’ is the same woman who cared for their children (White, 2004, p. 160).   It is astounding, certainly from Walker’s viewpoint, that intimate domestic relations with black women was a fact of life, yet lines were drawn in the social – and presumably all-loving – arena of the church.

As a highly regarded modern novelist, Alice Walker has forged a long, popular, and distinguished career by drawing upon what was, and is, the most profound source of concern in her life, that of the role of the black woman in a society largely dismissive of her.  In other works, such as The Color Purple, she has created a vast array of such women, revealing the inescapable reality of their varied lives and characters as human beings.  In “The Welcome Table”, she takes a far simpler route to a simpler point.  In this short story,  Alice Walker presents the racism she knew and lived as the greater sadness touching everyone racism inevitably must be.

References

Pratt, L. H. (Bloom, H., Editor.)  Alice Walker. New York, NY: Infobase Publishing.

Walker, A.  (2004.)  In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

White, E. C. (2004.)  Alice Walker: A Life.  New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.