Fayetteville : Former reporter, Walker authority gives talk at UA
Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/146649/
FAYETTEVILLE — Only one person thought Evelyn White could complete Alice Walker’s authorized biography in four years.
Evelyn White.
Everyone else involved with the project, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and subject of the biography, knew the book wouldn’t be finished on time, White said Wednesday at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
“All of this pressure was selfimposed,” White said before delivering a one-hour lecture at the Mullins Library. “Nobody thought it would be done in four years. Not my agent, not my editor, not Alice Walker. If I’d known it would take 10 years, it would have taken me 20.”
The book, Alice Walker: A Life, drew critical praise after it came out in 2004. It was a satisfying ending for a decadelong journey that started when White composed the first draft of a letter to Walker inquiring about writing her life story.
White, a former reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, left no stone unturned in the 538-page biography of the 62-year-old Walker, who became the first black woman to receive a Pulitzer for fiction for 1982 ’s The Color Purple.
White worked on the fivepage letter for a year before putting it into the mailbox in 1994, she said. Walker later told White that her envelope mistakenly ended up in the recycling bin near Walker’s desk in her Bay Area home.
Walker cleaned out the bin one day, and the letter dropped out of the envelope. She wrote back to White, telling her that she wasn’t ready for a biography.
The next year, Walker told White that she wanted her to go to Boston to interview her older brother Bill, who had leukemia. White talked to him before his death, and the contract for the book was finalized shortly thereafter, she said.
Walker gave White full access to her papers and typed up a short form letter that told any potential person to be interviewed that White had Walker’s permission for the project.
White’s travels led her to Fayetteville to interview Dr. Morriss Henry, she told the UA audience.
Walker had been injured in 1952 when, as an 8-year-old growing up in rural Georgia, she was accidentally shot in the eye by her brother with a BB gun. Her father tried to rush Walker to a hospital by flagging down an oncoming motorist, but the driver, a white man, didn’t stop.
Walker became blind in that eye and grew despondent because of her disfigurement, White said. Six years later, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Henry performed surgery on Walker’s eye to remove a cataract and scar tissue.
Walker became a new person, White said.
“Dr. Morriss Henry changed Alice Walker’s life and in a nutshell, changed literary history forever,” White said.
Henry, who now lives in Fayetteville, attended the lecture with his wife, Ann. The talk was held at the Helen Robson Reading Room in the Mullins Library.
White read aloud an e-mail that Walker sent her last week in anticipation of her trip to Fayetteville. In it, Walker thanked Henry “for being the thoughtful, wonderful person you were all those years ago.”
“You will continue to live in my heart. Three deep bows,” Walker wrote.
White began the book with the incident involving the eye injury. But as the “years kept whizzing by,” she had no ending, she said.
In the summer of 2002, Walker told White that she had been hounded by a man who wanted Walker to speak at his daughter’s college graduation. Walker finally agreed after the white man, who turned out to be the chief executive officer of Barnes & Noble Booksellers, told her that he’d send her a private plane. White knew she had her ending, she said. Later, she asked Walker if she realized the irony in the fact that 50 years earlier, she had been refused a ride by a white motorist. Walker took her by the hands, White said. “The ancestors saw that plane coming as the car was going by,” Walker said.
To contact this reporter: cbranam@arkansasonline. com