Walker, Alice 1944–: Critical Essay by Klaus Ensslen

The Third Life of Grange Copeland takes the adult life of its title character as the historical delimitation of its fictional action, roughly comprising three generations from the 1920's to the peak of the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960's (as marked by systematic black voters' registration, freedom marches and the first struggles for school integration). Half a century of family history is the narrative material used by the novel to dramatize essential changes in the conditions of black people in the rural South of the United States, beginning in total economic and psychological dependence and moving towards a certain measure of self-awareness as the ground for new self concepts and the social roles or life-plans based on them. Grange Copeland as a young man sets out, like millions of black men before him, with the socially propagated illusion that he will be able to provide a home and the necessary subsistence for himself and his attractive wife Margaret via his labor as a sharecropper in the heart of Georgia. Quite soon the efficient system of exploitation by manipulation of debt and wage cutting … begins to close its grip on Grange Copeland. He stops fighting the decay of dilapidated cabins unworthy of human habitation, he seeks escape from the total drain of physical energy and an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the arms of Josie, a prostitute he has known from before his marriage. He totally neglects his wife who after an initial phase of apathy begins to protest against this treatment by craving dissipation for herself, not disdaining even the white boss Shipley, and ends up giving birth to a second son obviously fathered by a white man, half-brother to her first child Brownfield (whose name graphically reflects the hopelessness of his parents). In spite of his basically unchanged affection for his wife, Grange, under the burden of his psychological humiliation and economic defeat goes through the inevitable escalation of violent quarreling and withdrawal and finally resorts to the classical escape of the black man denied any options for responsible action. Grange disappears, Margaret a few weeks later poisons herself and her younger child, leaving the 15-year-old Brown-field who under constant neglect has become so hard-boiled that he instinctively evades Shipley's effort to tie him to the soil and sets out on his own. (pp. 191-92)

Grange Copeland as the explicit central character of the novel dramatizes essential parts of the collective experience of his group. His answer to the total subjugation and discouragement on the economic level by an overpowering, cynical and hypocritical white world is an unshakable moral judgment—expressed at the beginning of the novel by Grange's avoiding to meet the eyes of his oppressor Shipley—a symbolic gesture of non-cooperation and masked contempt of long standing in Afro-American literature (frequently to be met with in the fugitive slave narratives of the 19th century). Grange's calm contempt for the white man's norms—interrupted only temporarily by his rebellious rage in the Harlem phase of his second life—contrasts sharply with Brownfield's attitude whose self-destructive hatred stamps him as a total victim of white domination. Grange and Brownfield are set up as contrasting figures embodying diametrically opposed options for the black man under white supremacy. Grange's flight from the sharecropper's condition is destructive towards his family, but not with regard to his own person: It turns self-aggression into the more constructive act of resistance against the norms of the South and initiates a learning process as prerequisite for a positive self-concept.

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