The inhabitants of her fictional world search, with varying degrees of success, for that divine spark that makes them uniquely who they are, in spite of the forces of sexism and racism that often deny them their identities. Walker contends that definition of self must come from within and that the right to say who one is and who one should be must never be surrendered to another person.
Walker was born 9 February 1944 — the youngest of eight children, five boys and three girls — to Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker, sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia. She remembers generally hating the southern sharecropper's life with its backbreaking field work and its string of shabby houses but loving to recite in church, in her starched dresses and patent leather shoes, and declaring smugly at age two and a half, "I'm the prettiest." In In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) she writes, "It was great fun being cute.
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