The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker

First published: 1970

Type of plot: Family chronicle

Time of work: 1920 to the early 1960’s

Locale: Georgia and New York City

Principal Characters:

• Grange Copeland, the protagonist, a black sharecropper, later an independent cotton farmer
• Margaret Copeland, his wife
• Brownfield Copeland, their son
• Mem Copeland, Brownfield’s wife
• Ruth Copeland, their youngest daughter
• Josie, a prostitute, owner of the Dew Drop Inn, mistress of both Grange and Brownfield, and later Grange’s wife

The Novel

George Copeland’s life stretches from before 1900 to the early 1960’s. It covers roughly three generations of blacks in the state of Georgia, and his three lives roughly correspond to the generations. Alice Walker, however, does not focus exclusively on George Copeland to characterize the three generations. She devotes the first half of the novel to Grange’s son, Brownfield, to reveal what Grange was as a young man; to capture the essence of Grange’s “third life,” she tells the story of Ruth, Grange’s granddaughter. Only the account of the middle period of Grange’s life, his ten-year experience in the North, relies totally on Grange’s own experiences; those are told in flashback, and remain a secret even to Ruth, to whom Grange confides almost everything else. They are the crucial events that make him different from his son and allow him to go beyond a tainted past to cope creatively with the future. Grange’s new attitude toward blacks and American society derives both from his own experience and reflection and from his granddaughter’s fresh, instinctive responses to her world. What begins as a novel of overwhelming depression, of seemingly absolute entrapment, ends as an encouraging tribute to the human spirit.

Brownfield’s life is a repetition of his father’s—up to the crucial moment of change. A visit by his uncle, aunt, and cousins from the North creates for him the illusion that somewhere outside the South exists a world where blacks are, like whites, rich and free. In dreams contentment is confused with whiteness; he never develops a pride in his race. His own family is disintegrating, as his father, Grange, inextricably in debt to a white boss, Shipley, decides there is no hope of a future for him and his wife and children. He takes out his frustrations in wife-beating and unfaithfulness, especially (one learns later) with Josie, a prostitute in Baker County, just to the north. When Grange finally decides to escape to the North, his wife, Margaret, poisons herself and her new baby (not Grange’s but a white man’s). In a symbolic series of moves, Brownfield follows in his father’s footsteps, going only as far as Josie’s Dew Drop Inn. Suggesting a genetic and environmental determinism, Walker has him take up with Josie, as his father had done. After two years of being Josie’s and her daughter’s lover, and being kept by them, Brownfield meets Mem, Josie’s niece, eventually marries her, and repeats his father’s experience as a sharecropper, gradually falling into debt to a white boss. In the early years of their marriage, Brownfield is loving to Mem, but once again he falls into the pattern established by his father, beating Mem and being unfaithful to her. Mem’s response, however, is different from that of Brownfield’s mother. Trained as a teacher, Mem has a measure of independence and a strong sense of self-respect. At one point, she forces Brownfield at gunpoint to move into town, live in a modern home, and get a job in a factory while she teaches in a black school. She forces him to break the pattern and thus offers him a chance to be a new man. His pride, however, will not allow him to accept a new life from her hand. He forces the family back onto the land and resumes his life as a tenant farmer. Continuing to resist, however, and refusing to abandon her self-respect as a black woman, she finds another job. Again following his father’s destructive example, Brownfield gets what he thinks is his final revenge by shooting her head off with a shotgun. Although both men are responsible for the death of their wives, their fates are not the same: While Grange went North for ten years, Brownfield goes to prison for ten years.

The second half of the novel shifts focus from Brownfield to Ruth, his daughter. When Grange reappears, he is not the young man that Brownfield represents but a man tempered by realities outside the South, and by one particular experience that he recalls in detail—the death of a pregnant white woman in Central Park. She had chosen to drown rather than grab his hand, the hand of a black man. If whites could not understand tolerance, love, and forgiveness, they will have to understand hate. It is this lesson that Grange teaches to Ruth. After Mem’s death, Ruth moves in with him. He prepares her for a life of independence, pride in the black race, and hatred of the enemy—the whites. Grange has returned South and has married Josie in order to get her money to buy a farm. As an independent farmer with his own land and his own income, he can compete with whites on their terms. For a while, Josie continues to live with Grange and Ruth, but when it becomes clear that she is not really a member of the family, she turns to Brownfield in prison. Grange and Ruth have a home. As he introduces her to every imaginable experience and prepares her to face the realities of adult life, the two of them gain notoriety within the black community as rebels. Unfortunately, Grange must die for Ruth to live. After being released from prison, Brownfield gains custody of her. Knowing that Brownfield would sadistically destroy Ruth as he had his own wife, Grange shoots him in the courtroom in front of the judge, and then goes to his woods to die. Grange’s third incarnation is not only the new man who returns from exile in the North; it is also Ruth, who carries in her his spirit and all he had taught her about joy and survival.

The Characters

Walker’s purpose in this novel is to provoke an empathetic as well as critical response to the race problem in America. She writes primarily for readers who do not understand racism and its effects on personality—hence her strategy to create black characters that feel intensely the pressures of the situation, characters that are agonizingly human. She gives her characters a real setting, the American South that she knows so well. In fact, when she leaves the cotton fields, the dusty clay roads and quiet woods, the drafty tenant shacks, and travels north to Central Park, she loses the touch of immediacy. Walker is also successful with dialogue; she knows the dialect of her people. Nothing captures better the color, the humor, and the pain of the black experience than her manipulations of nonstandard English, and her vivid and often raunchy metaphors. In order to reveal the motivation behind the characters’ behavior, Walker assumes an omniscient point of view and moves the center of consciousness from one character to another. First one sees the world through Brownfield’s eyes, understands why he develops such hatred for his wife, his father, and his daughter. From his own perspective, his father never loved him. Grange’s abandonment is, for him, a selfish, unfeeling act. From Brownfield, Walker transfers the reader to Josie’s mind, where the keys to her weakness and her prostitution still dwell in her unconscious, in her dreams. In many scenes, Walker assumes total omniscience, reporting not only observable events but also the thoughts of various characters. In the second half of the novel, she mainly reports the thoughts of Grange and Ruth. One comes to understand that Grange’s abandonment of his family was the result of extraordinary sensitivity and frustration, that Grange and Ruth, whom the society regards as crazy, are isolated examples of sanity, and that Ruth’s dogged independence and defensiveness derive from the horrible experience of seeing her murdered mother’s body.

Walker’s purpose goes beyond identification with individual characters. She tries to survey the racial situation in the South (and to some extent in the rest of America) over the past hundred years, and perhaps by implication even earlier, during the era of slavery. The characters are thus not only individuals but also representations of black consciousness. Grange, the title character, contains in himself the history of the black race in America. In tracing the changes in his own racial consciousness, he identifies changes in black attitudes. In the first stage, he says, the white society hated him, and he, adopting their judgment, hated himself. In the second stage, he began to hate whites and love himself. The third stage is a movement outward from the self; Grange directs his love toward another. At the end of the novel, Ruth and others may be on the verge of a fourth stage, friendship and equality with whites, but Grange himself dies in the third.

As Alice Walker is a black woman writer, one might anticipate bias against whites and perhaps against men. Yet the novel is remarkably free of bias. Whites as individuals have little place in the action. When they do appear, Walker seems almost consciously trying to balance them out. The stereotyped white boss, Shipley, superficially well-meaning but patronizing and insensitive to blacks as human beings, is replaced by a white couple at the end participating in civil rights marches and voter registration. Walker does not try to make any of the white characters fully motivated human beings—there are enough white novels around to do that. She concentrates on black society. One sees a similar balance in the depiction of men and women. The strong wife (Margaret) eventually worn down by the man, the stronger wife (Mem) who is invincible and therefore murdered by the man, the strong-willed young woman with a future (Ruth), and the wise juju woman (Sister Madelaine) share the stage with Josie, defeated early in life by her own intolerant father, and Mrs. Grayson, Ruth’s teacher, who has entirely lost her black consciousness. While Walker with some sympathy paints Brownfield as the most dangerous destructive force in black society—making him by the end a hateful devil that deserves killing—she insists that men are capable of change—Grange is the proof—and finally makes Grange a powerful force for good, not because he has attained the level of love and acceptance that characterize Quincey at the end, but because he, more than anyone, understands the hell of racism and yet survives with his personality intact. All that having been said, Walker clearly has the greatest respect for black women who have maintained racial pride in defiance of the oppressive slavery that both white and black males have imposed on them.

Critical Context

This first novel by Alice Walker is in some respects more ambitious and more satisfying than a later novel, The Color Purple (1982), which many have called her best work and which won for Walker the American Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The two books have much in common. They both reveal a preoccupation with the Southern black family; the problem and the solution for individual blacks are inseparable from the homes that nurture or fail to nurture love and self-respect. She studies especially the cause of deterioration in the family—the black male who (understandably, perhaps) cannot withstand racist pressures and sadistically takes out his frustrations on his wife and children. Hence, neither book offers a close look at a fulfilling sexual relationship within marriage. The male with no identity of his own resorts to oppression and violence. The Color Purple has two males on the edge of definition and, far away in Africa, a third who has already found it, yet in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker has already created an epic figure of a black man, an exception to be sure, who attains spiritual and intellectual strength that does not require physical violence to assert itself. He discovers the identity too late to be a husband but not too late to be a father.

To emphasize the difficulty of transformation, both novels stretch over the entire lifetime of the protagonist. In both, the pattern is the same, a depressing, even hopeless beginning and eventual salvation through enlightenment, emotional honesty, and love. What is impressive about The Third Life of Grange Copeland is that Walker traces the transformation in a man and does it convincingly. What is especially satisfying is the unobtrusiveness of its moral. One cannot say the same for The Color Purple, yet Walker’s imagination and narrative skill, even there, make palatable a heavy didactic strain—her gratuitous lessons on African culture and her promise of success to those who find themselves.

Bibliography

Banks, Erma, and Keith Byerman. Alice Walker: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Press, 1989. Collects the major and minor material written on Alice Walker from 1968 to 1986.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007. Compilation of scholarly essays on Walker’s life and work. Includes an essay on her representation of southern life and culture in The Third Life of Grange Copeland.

Dixon, Henry O. Male Protagonists in Four Novels of Alice Walker: Destruction and Development in Interpersonal Relationships. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Examines the relationship between sadism and reform in The Third Life of Grange Copeland.

Gaston, Karen C. “Women in the Lives of Grange Copeland.” CLA Journal 24 (March, 1981): 276-286. Positions the women characters’ lives as Walker’s major thematic concern.

Harris, Trudier. “Fear of Castration: A Literary History.” In Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Argues that Grange and Brownfield attempt to flee the symbolic castration and lynching of the sharecropping system. Only Grange is able to resurrect his dignity.

Hogue, W. Lawrence. “History, the Feminist Discourse, and The Third Life of Grange Copeland. ” In Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986. Demonstrates how Walker uses a period of black history to represent a largely feminist story.