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Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
Alice Walker's great-great-great-great grandmother, “walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Ga. with two babies on her hips,” we learn early on in Pratibha Parmar's 2013 documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.
“She lived to be 125 years old,” the writer says. “It is in memory of this walk that I choose to keep, and to embrace, my maiden name Walker.”
Her surname - and that sojourn of her grandmother's - are apt metaphors for the extraordinary journey of Alice Walker's own life.
The daughter of two impoverished sharecroppers (her mother earned $17 a month in the 1950s working as a maid), Walker attended Spelman College on a full scholarship before transferring to Sarah Lawrence, where she published her first book of poetry.
