Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1972) is an eye-opening and captivating personal account that tells how Walker discovered what she calls her garden. She opens her account by analyzing “Avey” Cane by Jean Toomer, in which he describes black women from the south as, “black women whose spirituality was so intense, so deep, so unconscious that they were themselves unaware of the richness they held”(Walker 401). However, he also described them as, “Black women … [were] creatures so abused and mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy even of hope” (Walker 401). In other words, black women during that time were resilient, artistic and hard-working, but they also lived so scar …show more content…
Walker’s personal account talks about a young black woman know as Phillis Wheatley and her struggle to self-express, “... [she] did try to use her gift for poetry in a world that made her a slave, she was so thwarted and hindered by...contrary instincts, that she...lost her health” and she died (Walker 404). Phillis Wheatley died because she was a black woman; therefore, she was not even allowed to be literate. Walker, putting aside her resentment towards Wheatley, acknowledges that, “had [Wheatley] been white, she would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all women and most men in the society of her day” (Walter 404). Wheatley knowing that no one would help her or give her that recognition she deserved impacted her health. Furthermore, black women were often sexually abused and they could not talk about it. As a result is possible that they could have developed mental disabilities. Walker writes, “They dreamed dreams that no one knew...and saw visions no one could understand. They wandered or sat about a countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts…” (402). Walker is referring to black women after they were freed because before they were free they were slaves and did not have self-expressions or even freedom of