African-American Literature - Alice Walker

African-American Literature - Alice Walker

In Alice Walker's short story, "Her Sweet Jerome," the title is ironic, since readers learn on page 26, three pages into the story, that "dapper" Jerome was "beating her black and blue even then, so that every time you saw her she was sporting her 'shades.'

Actually, in the descriptive literary techniques used by Walker, readers get a feeling for the narrator right away; for example, why would a woman who is having a normal relationship and for whom life is good be hurling herself again and again in the closet? That's the first sentence of the short story.

And we also learn - through Walker's characterization - that the narrator is "a big awkward woman, with big bones and hard rubbery flesh" (25). Walker uses metaphors very effectively, throughout all her writing; and on page 25 readers find out that her brow was a "mountain" and her eyes were "nervous."

What kind of a relationship works well when the woman - who pursued the man - thinks, on first seeing him walk by, "...if he was hers the first thing she would get him was a sweet little red car to drive"? And then when it didn't like it - "it was only a Chevy" - she began to save "so she could make a down payment on a brand-new white Buick deluxe, with automatic drive and whitewall tires."

This has all the earmarks of a one-sided relationship to begin with, and Walker sets the reader up coyly prior to giving away the fact that this husband named Jerome is a wife-beater, a bad guy who is totally taking advantage of his wife. What kind of husband can't stand it when his wife opens up her mouth? What kind of husband knocks her "out of the room to keep her from talking to him"? And when she tries to kiss him while she walks out the door on the way to church, he curses her - how solid does that kind of marriage sound? Not very solid at all, obviously.

When her customers in her beauty shop began telling her that her husband was fooling around on her, she begins searching all over town trying to catch him at his evil deeds. And Walker uses understatement effectively in this instance, to set up the conflict. First, she juxtaposes "whorehouses" and "prayer meetings," saying that the wife was buying "axes and pistols and knives of all descriptions." Amazingly out of the blue comes those weapons, and this is from a woman who was being regularly beaten up by her husband, and didn't do anything about it but hide it behind sunglasses?

She turned "the whole town upside down" and began to get up in the middle of the night on a frantic search for what? To catch her husband? She began to smell bad "from mouth and underarms and elsewhere," Walker writes (29), and began grabbing innocent women "by the chin in a headlock with a long knife pressed against their necks below the ear."

She terrified the town, and meantime, the absurd part of her search was that her "sweet Jerome" just kept reading all his books and telling her "don't interrupt me" while shaking his finger at her. This paranoia of the protagonist in the story gets deeper and deeper, and Jerome is using up her money, and she's more and more frantic, looking under the bed, and finally, incredibly, she looks at all the books that her husband has been reading.

The reader sees clearly on page 34 what the conflict really was about, beyond her obvious obsession that he was cheating on her, the paranoid fantasies: she was nearly illiterate. She didn't know what "revolution" meant, unless it meant "to go round and round, the way her head was going." This woman was a loser from the beginning, a sad and desperate women who wanted a man for the wrong reasons, put up with bad violent behavior from him, and in the end, she stabs a knife through the books she didn't understand read by a man she didn't really have a relationship with, in spite of their marriage. Walker has painted a picture of pathos through her use of characterization and conflict.

In Walker's "The Welcome Table" there is an older woman character who understands that people have a fear "of the black and the old," a "terror of the unknown as well as the deeply known." She wasn't an "old collie turned out to die," but some people apparently had pity on her and saw her that way. That is a good metaphor, "old collie," and Walker also explains that she was "the color of poor gray Georgia earth, beaten by king cotton and the extreme weather."

Walker is just as effective using similes (82): Her elbows were "wrinkled and thick, the skin ashen but durable, like the bark of old pines." She word an old "mildewed black dress" with missing buttons, and when people saw her, some "saw the age, the dotage," and others saw in her "cooks, chauffeurs, maids, mistresses, children denied or smothered in the deferential way she held her cheek to the side..."

All these descriptions are stereotypes that people have of an old black woman, and Walker packs this story with descriptions of those stereotypes. The reader has a whole lot of images to plug into, to take one's pick up, in sizing up this woman. How could some people see "riotous anarchists looting and raping in the streets" when they saw this sad old women? How could others see "jungle orgies in an evil place"? The truth is, Walker is pointing out how prejudice against a race of people, in this case, African-Americans, can create all kinds of negative images and stereotypes in the minds of racists. When they see an old black woman, they think of riots, because some black inner city communities have burned down during riots? So, they link the color of a woman's skin with all the negative images they have in their heads about blacks?

Would it be fair for a black person to think of Adolf Hitler every time a she sees a white man? There is a point of fairness in society that a lot of people haven't reached, and a lot of people can't get past their narrow bigoted ways, and this is what Walker is apparently alluding to in this story.

On page 84, readers begin to assume the old woman is confused, and perhaps homeless, and certainly in the wrong church. But the usher wasn't polite in telling her she had to go out of this house of God, which is an irony from Walker. A house of God and some people aren't welcome because of the way they look? Is that right? "God, mother, country, earth, church. It involved all that, and well they knew it," Walker writes on 84. And the women in the rich church who dared their "burly indecisive husbands" to throw the old black woman out, wore "good calfskin gloves, and looked "with contempt at the bloodless gray arthritic hands of the old woman."