Character Analysis Of Alice Walker's 'Meridian'

1020 Words3 Pages

Long-Stemmed Roses In Alice Walker’s Meridian, she tells the story of the slave Louvinie who buried her tongue, that her white slave masters cut out, beneath a weak magnolia tree on a slave plantation. Walker’s character, Meridian follows suit by laying the decomposing body of five-year-old boy that drowned due to the city commissioner’s neglect, in front of a representative of the racist hierarchy. These stories follow a classic Alice Walker theme, “when they torture you too bad to talk plant a tree” (Torture). Meridian carries the body of the boy like flowers to a gravesite, and teaches us to use our experiences to invest in our future, as an opportunity to grow stronger. One of the things that Alice Walker looks to address in many of her …show more content…

The story of the five-year-old boy is reminiscent of Emmett Till, the teenager lynched in 1955, his body was sunk in the river. Both of their bodies were found “ravaged” (209) and left in the water for days. Tommy Odds shared a story with Lynne of the nine-year-old black girl raped by a white man, “they pulled her out of the river, dead, with a stick shoved up her” (179). There is a habitual pattern of mourning, the tears building up, waiting for the next black person to die unjustly. The women at Saxon college act similarly, by retelling the stories of Wile Chile, Louvinie and Fast Mary they are “ritualizing their suffering, the Saxon women recognize that their own lives are part of a continuum. Their circle includes those women that have suffered before them.” (43 Downey) Although, the black community is always looking for something to stop this cycle, they protest violently and non-violently, attempting to vote, sharing stories or praying. Meridian, when the activist Medgar Evers was assassinated, planted a wild sweet shrub bush in the gardens at Saxon College and when she carried the body of the five-year-old boy “it was as if she carried a large bouquet of long-stemmed roses” (209). As if she was taking flowers to a grave of a

Open Document