[MUSIC] >> I've been guided, I'm dealing with regions inside people. You know, although. Although they are, the people are in the South. And in fact, I guess I really just leave it up to other people to decide. I mean, if they want it, if they can only understand writing by placing it in a context, that's fine. I have no, I don't really quarrel with it. But as far as I'm concerned, I'm really trying to understand people, and what, and what, how they get to be the way they are. So the region is, is the mind and the heart, not the, the you know, not the section. >> Alice Walker's voice leads us into fascinating worlds in the American South of race and gender. She explores those in ways that have never been understood fully before the publication of The Color Purple. Which takes us inside the black family and takes us into the persona of women, who experience abuse and who survive. Alice talks about the South, and gender, and how women have been abused in every generation. And, as a writer, she sees literature as a way of exposing that abuse, and also protesting it. She's drawn instinctively to the musical worlds of the Blues. She adores BB King and says she sees him as one of her, her heroes. As well as Bessie Smith. And in The Color Purple, we see. A Shug Avery, who is inspired in part by Bessie Smith, a blues singer and a very strong female protagonist. Alice carries us beyond the civil rights era and into the present with the power of women speaking their mind in ways that are especially important. And as a poet, she uses both fiction and poetry to probe in the same way that a blues singer probes through singing the blues. >> You see, the reason. There are many reasons why I've, I'm ill at ease with the Southern thing. Part of it is that is,that it. Any kind of labeling limits, I think. I mean, it tends to make, make what you're doing seem localized, when, in fact, if you're dealing with just characters. If your main main focus is to find out why people act the way they do, it, it makes it possible for you to mean it. It means that wherever people are, that's where you are. You know? And Southern writers. When you think of Southern writers you really think of white Southern writers. I mean, that's what most people think of so that, I don't really have any interest in, in sort of, integrating Southern writers, you know? On the other hand, how can I possibly ever not be considered a Southern Writer, since I'm a Southerner [LAUGH] and since I write?
