In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

This essay concerns the artist’s need for role models and the difficulty of finding them. The essay opens with a quote from a letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his friend Emile Bernard. In the letter, which Van Gogh wrote from a mental institution near the end of his life, he states that he is “suffering from an absolute lack of models” (10). In this statement Walker sees evidence of Van Gogh’s intensity as an artist and his awareness of his own singularity.

Walker focuses on the need for black artists, in particular, to find—or create—their own models. She quotes Toni Morrison as having said that she wrote “the kind of books she want[ed] to read,” and Walker used Morrison’s perspective in shaping her own works:

[S]he was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which ‘accepted literature’ is so often sexist and racist […] she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself (8-9).

Walker then describes her own experience with finding an important model: Zora Neale Hurston. Walker was attempting to draft a story in which voodoo figured prominently, yet the research that she consulted on the topic was dissatisfying, as all of it was authored by white writers.