Alice Walker wanted to keep a record of her life before she could even walk — she used a twig to write in the sand behind her house, according to her mother's stories. By the time Walker was in her 60s, her personal and literary archive filled 122 boxes.

Now the archive is being cataloged at Emory University. And the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet says she has no regrets about parting with all the letters, journals, manuscripts, photos and other materials she saved through the years, including a book of poems she wrote as a teenager in Eatonton.

Joey Ivansco/AJC (ENLARGE)
Alice Walker says letting go of the mementos and papers 'was a process. There were times I felt bereft.'
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Letting go of the mementos and papers "was a process. There were times I felt bereft. But that has passed and now I feel the most wonderful freedom," she said Tuesday. It was her first visit to Emory since the university announced in December it had acquired her archive for an undisclosed sum.

Walker, who won a Pulitzer in 1983 for her novel "The Color Purple," spoke with the AJC a few hours before she was scheduled to give a public reading on the Emory campus.

Finding surprises

Before Emory took over the task of maintaining her archive, Walker had kept her papers in an "archive room" with custom drawers in her home in Berkeley, Calif. But "now, if I want to leave that house, I can," she said. "I won't have to be concerned about what's in the drawers. I think about freedom, always, so freedom means I can move and not worry about things."

Walker's trip to Atlanta was brief, a little more than 24 hours. She traveled with her partner, Garrett Larson, a classical and jazz trumpet player. He plays with the Symphony of the Redwoods in Mendocino, Calif.

Walker said she found some surprises as she looked through her materials Tuesday.

"I found some letters I didn't know I had written, letters to one of my sisters and a couple of letters to my former husband," she said. "I was just actually asking the archivist, 'What kind of person would be keeping all this stuff?' Sometimes it strikes me as odd that I did keep all of these things, even though I realize it's important for younger people to have a record of what the older people have done and said."

Walker said she wished she had such a thorough record of her family history.

"For instance, I had no idea how hard my parents struggled for our education. I didn't know until much later that my father had walked past three white men with shotguns on his way to vote. He was very courageous," she said. "I wish I had known that because, maybe if I had, I wouldn't have fought with him so much."

A love of the land

From a very early age, it was clear Walker wanted to write, she said. "My mother says that when I was crawling, she'd search for me behind the house and I'd be there writing in the sand with a twig or in the margins of a Sears Roebuck catalog."

The last time Walker was in Eatonton — about a year and a half ago — she took part in a "full-blown funeral" for one of her great-grandmothers, a slave whose grave recently had been discovered on land near a proposed housing development. Her name was Sally Montgomery Walker. Unlike many slaves, she had a headstone instead of a wooden marker, Walker said.

"She had been born in 1830. She was buried with four of her children, so there was this whole mystery of what had happened to her. We exhumed her body and had a ceremony for her," she said.

Walker has memories of difficult times in Georgia, especially Atlanta, where she attended Spelman College for two years. She and a roommate tried to attend a white church, only to be turned away at the door by deacons brandishing ax handles.

"Or trying to go into a restaurant here and not being able to for so long. So when I think of Atlanta, I don't have much feeling of affection," she said.

"My feelings about the South, and I lived for many years in Mississippi, is still the love of the land. I love the land, and because part of my ancestry is native, I feel I've been here forever," she said.

"It's only now, coming 'round again, that I see a possibility of a reconnection that is fertile, joyful and is built on the sacrifices that seemed at times so unbearable."