Reanimating the Trope of the Talking Book in Alice Walkeris "Strong Horse Tea"

Abstract

In 1970 essay, The Black Writer and Southern Experience, Alice Walker qualifies her refusal to romanticize Southern black country of her upbringing, recalling that while she hated it, generally ... no one could wish for more advantageous heritage than that bequeathed to black writer in South: for earth, trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, and an abiding love of (21). Essays published in 1980s, such as Am I Blue and Everything is Human Being, and her more recent response to events of September 11, 2001, Sent by Earth, coalesce that southern, rural-bred compassion for earth into recognizable ecocritical world view. In The Universe Responds, for example, Walker unabashedly stakes richness of human creativity to health of natural world: are connected to [animals] at least as intimately as we are connected to trees, she says. plant life human beings could not breathe.... Without free animal life ... we will lose spiritual equivalent of oxygen. Magic, intuition, sheer astonishment at forms Universe devises in which to express life--itself--will no longer be able to breath in us (191-92). In this regard, Walker explicitly diverges from anti-pastoral strain in African-American literary tradition that, since time of Frederick Douglass, has expressed profound antipathy toward ecological niches usually focused on in ecocriticism: pastoral space and wilderness (Bennett 208). Reacting to early black experience of rural South, in landscape distorted by slavery's crimes and decades of violence and racism following its abolition, tradition, Michael Bennett argues, has tended to view the relative safety of urban environment as more promising landscape of economic opportunity and social justice denied in more conservative and isolated, rural enclaves (198). Walker's 1967 short story, Strong Horse Tea, appears, in many ways, to echo this anti-pastoral tradition. (1) Her brutally poor protagonist, Rannie Mae Toomer, literally lives in pasture surrounded by fat whitefolks' cows and an old gray horse and mule (462). (2) And there is no hint of pastoral romance in image of fat winter fly roosting on forehead of her child, Snooks, who will ultimately die of double pneumonia and whooping cough (459). However, Walker refuses to privilege contrasting and more urban, albeit southern, domain: narrative tension of short story is, in fact, created by Rannie's waiting for a real doctor from town to arrive with his presumably superior arsenal of cures; having refused help of community witchwoman, Aunt Sarah, and swamp magic she proffers, Rannie realizes too late that more urban world, traditional anti-pastoralist preference, has ignored her plight and abandoned her to meager resources of her home community (459). To complicate matters further, however, story concludes on an apparently anti-pastoral note, with Rannie slipping and sliding in mud of pasture, soaked to bone from tremendous thunderstorm, collecting only thing, according to Sarah, that stands chance of reviving Snooks: mare's urine, strong horse tea of title (466). (3) That final scene also depicts come-uppance of sorts for Rannie: as she catches tea in her flimsy plastic shoe, she discovers a leak, tiny crack, at her shoe's front; with no other recourse, she stuck her mouth there over crack, and ... freezing in her shabby wet coat, ran home to give good and warm strong tea to her baby (466). Since Snooks dies while she is in pasture, Rannie obviously takes medicine. But in context of many polarities that critics have identified--between town/country, folk medicine/white medicine, black roots and heritage/white technological progress--the particular allegiance for which she is being chastened is not so clear. …