She'll be at Vertigo Books in College Park tonight. "The working title for the book was 'Morphology,' " Walker says, smiling, as she settles in for an interview in an upstairs room at the George Hotel, in town for a book tour.
In it, she unravels a childhood in which she tries to find her place as a child of the civil rights movement, a child whose parents divorced when she was 8 years old and then shuttled her back and forth between their two worlds - one black and urban, the other white, Jewish, suburban - for the rest of her childhood. The book sprang from what Walker calls a "really strong need to sit down and live with my memories of childhood" - memories, she says, she had blocked out because of "the terrible pain" they caused.
Titled "Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self," the book Walker finally produced is as much about family as race or religion. You want to be seen, you want to be known, you want to be understood - especially by parents." "I felt I needed to really show them in concrete terms what I had gone through. "I really wanted my parents to understand what my life was like and they just couldn't grasp it," she says. The memories came like shards of glass, prompting tears, prompting sorrow, prompting anger. Years later, in her mid-twenties, she sat down at her computer and tried to remember. And she learned not to think about it too hard. Two years of being one person, two years of being another. Two years with her father, civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal, who looked at her blandly, uncomprehendingly, when she tried to explain how it felt to be the only black person in their upper-middle-class, predominantly Jewish suburb. Two years with her mother, author Alice Walker, who left notes admonishing Rebecca to "take care of yourself," while she went about the all-consuming work of being a writer. Different cities, different neighborhoods, different worlds. All she had, really, were a series of fragments, partial memories. Rebecca Walker spent years forgetting her childhood.
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