Since 1968 when Once, her first work, was published, Alice Walker has sought to bring closer that day for which her maternal ancestors waited--"a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be known." In four collections of poetry, two volumes of short stories, three novels, and many essays, she has expressed with graceful and devastating clarity the relationship between the degree of freedom black women have within and without their communities and the "survival whole" of black people. Her particular angle of vision is sharpened by her use of the history of black people in this country, and therefore of the South, where they were most brutally enslaved. A Southerner, she also presents that land as the place from which their specific characteristics of survival and creativity have sprung. Her works confront the pain and struggle of black people's history, which for her has resulted...