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Roselily

"Roselily" by Alice Walker.

Alice Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton. She is a U.S. writer and feminist. The novel "The Color Purple" awarded the Pulitzer prize and the American Book Award 1983. This short story is from her book 'In Love and Trouble. Stories of Black Women' which was published in 1985.
Alice Walker was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960"s.

She has spoken for the women"s movement, the anti-apartheid movement, for the anti-nuclear movement, and against female genital mutilation.
In the short story «Roselily», Alice Walker tells two stories in one. The most obvious story is the one about the Black American woman Roselily, who stands before the alter, just about to marry a Muslim, while she thinks about her past, wonders about the future and is questioning whether she is making the right choice. The other, hidden story is the story about Black American women in general, their history and their ongoing search for something better.
The whole story takes place on the front porch of her house. We are in the middle of a country wedding. It is right by the highway 61. There are people there, men, women and children, her father, her sisters and her children. They are all standing in the yard somewhere in Mississippi.
Roselily is an independent woman of her time, but being a single mother of three children, working long hours for most likely lousy wages in a sewing plant, she is far from free. Roselily feels old. She has already given birth to four children. The last child she gave away to his father. He had a good job, and told his wife he had found the right baby through friends. She is poor. She has five beds in one room and no bath except from four to six on Sundays. The children have different fathers, some that waves when they drive by and some that represent "times she would just as soon forget".
It is quite clear that neither Roselily nor her husband are comfortable. He is a Muslim and she a Christian. She is imagining God as...