The World Has Changed Read Online Free PDF Page A

men and women are supposed to do in a place that is the only “home” they’ve ever known. There is only one “for coloreds” sign left in Eatonton, and it is on a black man’s barbershop. He is merely outdated. Booster, if you read this, change your sign!
     
    J.O.: I wonder how clear it was to you what you were going to do in your novel before you started. Did you know, for instance, that Grange Copeland was capable of change?
     
    A.W.: I see the work that I have done already as a foundation. That being so, I suppose I knew when I started The Third Life of Grange Copeland that it would have to cover several generations, and nearly a century of growth and upheaval. It begins around 1900 and ends in the sixties. But my first draft (which was never used, not even one line, in the final version) began with Ruth as a civil-rights lawyer in Georgia going to rescue her father, Brownfield Copeland, from a drunken accident, and to have a confrontation with him. In that version she is married—also to a lawyer—and they are both committed to ensuring freedom for black people in the South. In Georgia, specifically. There was lots of lovemaking and courage in that version. But it was too recent, too superficial—everything seemed a product of the immediate present. And I believe nothing ever is.
    So, I brought in the grandfather. Because all along I wanted to explore the relationship between parents and children: specifically between daughters and their father (this is most interesting, I’ve always felt; for example, in “The Child Who Favored Daughter” in In Love and Trouble , the father cuts off the breasts of his daughter because she falls in love with a white boy; why this, unless there is sexual jealousy?), and I wanted to learn, myself, how it happens that the hatred a child can have for a parent becomes inflexible. And I wanted to explore the relationship between men and women, and why women are always condemned for doing what men do as an expression of their masculinity.
Why are women so easily “tramps” and “traitors” when men are heroes for engaging in the same activity? Why do women stand for this?
    My new novel will be about several women who came of age during the sixties and were active (or not active) in the movement in the South. I am exploring their backgrounds, familial and sibling connections, their marriages, affairs, and political persuasions, as they grow toward a fuller realization (and recognition) of themselves.
    Since I put together my course on black women writers, which was taught first at Wellesley College and later at the University of Massachusetts, I have felt the need for real critical and biographical work on these writers. As a beginning, I am writing a long personal essay on my own discovery of these writers (designed, primarily, for lectures), and I hope soon to visit the birthplace and home of Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville, Florida. I am so involved with my own writing that I don’t think there will be time for me to attempt the long, scholarly involvement that all these writers require. I am hopeful, however, that as their books are reissued and used in classrooms across the country, someone will do this. If no one does (or if no one does it to my satisfaction), I feel it is my duty (such is the fervor of love) to do it myself.
     
    J.O.: Have women writers, then, influenced your writing more than male? Which writers do you think have had the most direct influence upon you?
     
    A.W.: I read all of the Russian writers I could find, in my sophomore year in college. I read them as if they were a delicious cake. I couldn’t get enough: Tolstoy (especially his short stories, and the novels The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection —which taught me the importance of diving through politics and social forecasts to dig into the essential spirit of individual persons, because otherwise, characters, no matter what political or current social issue they stand for, will not live), and