A reader recommended Rebecca Walker’s Baby Love  a few weeks back when I took a survey of what everyone was reading.  I grew up reading Alice Walker and was eager to find out what had happened to the daughter who was frequently mentioned back then in her mother’s iconic poems and books.  

It took me a day to read Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (2007). But it’s taken four days to catch my breath and figure what I think about the book’s content.

Believe me, getting through the memoir of a self-absorbed,  emotionally starved young woman who spends much of the book writing about shopping, eating, getting pedicures, obsessing over every infirmity in her life, and consulting a small army of healers (birthing doula, homeopath, pedicurist, masseuse) for her every psychic ailment took some doing.  But discovering that her newborn son managed to make it through the frightening medical complications he endured his first few weeks of life was heartening. 

Yet Baby Love did try my patience. But I kept reading believing I would be rewarded for giving myself over to what felt like a black woman’s narrative version of “Sex in the City.” (I avoided the TV show but  recognize the genre a mile away. Young female narcissm run amok.)

Exploring the abortion she had at 14, her stormy relationship with her iconic mother, her bisexuality, and the ecstasy of bearing a child at 37, the contents of Baby Love (Walker’s second memoir) has enough in it to keep the feud between women across the generational divide going for years. Talk about the women we long for!

Rebecca Walker was born in 1969 to Alice Walker and husband Mel Levanthal a Jewish civil rights attorney. The two lived and worked in Mississippi back then trying to change the racist, murderous politics of the time. Rebecca’s birth, like that of many biracial babies born back then, was supposed to prove to Mississippi and the rest of America that love trumps race. Alice Walker writes movingly and hauntingly about that period in her life in The Way Forward is With A Broken Heart (2001), about the youthful passion and idealism she and Mel, and others of that generation, clung to, and admits that when it came time some years later to leave Mississippi she and her Jewish husband limped out of Mississippi, broken, disillusioned, and headed for the divorce court. Mississipi won, Alice Walker writes.

Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001), Rebecca Walker’s first memoir, is the daughter’s tale of what felt like her parents’ failed experiment, beginning with their failed marriage and ending with the custody agreement the two settled upon that sent Rebecca shuttling back and forth every two years between her father and stepmother’s world in New York’s conventional, rich, Jewish, Upper East Side; and that of her mother with her bohemian, black, mostly poverty stricken activists and feminists friends in California. Rebecca grew up with deep feelings of not belonging.

Rebecca Walker takes feminism (and her mother) to task in Baby Love for what she sees as one of its most crippling legacies. It leaves young women in their 20s and 30s ambivalent about parenting and romance. Walker sees her book as providing the counsel she wishes her feminist mother and godmothers (Gloria Steinem being one) had given her when she was in her 20s. What advice might that be?

Plan to have a baby as you would plan out your career.

In other words, don’t leave having children to chance. And don’t let feminists tell you that it’s impossible to be a mother and stay sane, active, creative, and productive. It is possible, says the younger Walker.

In contrast to her mother whom the daughter feels found meaning in writing and activism, motherhood, Rebecca Walker claims, has given her the purpose and identity she longed for: “I feel like I have arrived in myself to where I want to be and who I want to be,” Ms. Walker says. “Motherhood is the first club I’ve unequivocally belonged to.”

Rebecca Walker is convinced that she was harmed by her mother’s choices. The younger Walker accuses her mother of leaving her with friends and neighbors a lot while she (mother) went off to write or fight some cause; and she failed to understand  that Rebecca’s promiscuity and abortion at 14 was her way of pleading for her mother’s love and attention. The public battle between a daughter and her iconic mother (the mother who ironically penned the now classic “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”)strikes me as terribly sad. “It’s like listening in on a dysfunctional family therapy session—painful, but oh so fascinating,” says one friend. 

Not surprisingly, the younger Walker is harder on her mother than her father for what she sees as the deprivations of her childhood. And while she seems intent upon proving in Baby Love that she is prepared to do what needs to be done to be a better mother than her mother was, what Rebecca Walker ends up really proving, unintentionally of course, is that she’s good at playing the dozens and using her mother to score points for herself.

For all her complaints about her mother’s choices, one thing is clear: the daughter is obsessed with duplicating her mother’s life. Like Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker is a writer and a feminist. And like her mother who was once involved in a lesbian relationship with Tracy Chapman, Rebecca Walker is bisexual who for eight years was involved with musician Meshell Ngedecello. (By the way, Rebecca Walker lives now in Hawaii with Glen, Buddhist teacher and African American father of her son.) Independent with strong opinions like her mother, the younger Walker is determined to prove herself to be the better feminist, mother, and writer even it it takes exposing her mother’s failures, repudiating her mother’s feminism, and using her mother’s fame to carve out a name for herself.

Outraged at her daughter’s characterization of her in Black, White and Jewish  Alice Walker dashed a string of blistering emails off to the younger Walker a few years back (says the younger Walker) that ended with the mother cutting her daughter out of her will and signing one of her final emails to her daughter with the words, “I resign as your mother.” Not to be outdone, Rebecca Walker responded by writing Baby Love.   

Talk about drama. Move over Jerry Springer. Take note on how the rich and famous do things. Publish your version of the story.

Looking back there are probably some things Alice Walker the mother wish she had done differently. But here’s hoping for the younger Walker that the the reality of mothering lives up to whatever fantasies she has about being a mother. And that the constant giving, sacrifice, worry, and putting on hold one’s own dreams that comes with being a mother provide Rebecca Walker the lens she needs to be able to look back on the failures, ambivalences, and cruelties of her iconic mother with perhaps a little more compassion and empathy.

Someone on another website who identified with the younger Walker’s views and confessed to being around Rebecca Walker’s age left this comment: It must be hard being Alice Walker’s daughter.

As a mother who knows what it means to have a wild, irrational love for your child but catch yourself staring out in space from time to time and wondering “what if”, I say: 
Touch your neighbor and repeat after me: “It must be hard being Rebecca Walker’s mother.”

Talking last night to mothers who’ve had children murdered on the streets of Boston has left me scrambling for words today. The occasion was a Mother’s Day Monday Interfaith Worship service spearheaded by the office of Massachusetts State Senator Diane Wilkerson. For the past ten years Wilkerson has used her office to help call attention to the alarming number of young people who are murdered every year in Boston as a result of street violence.  As a politician Senator Wilkerson knows that her office has to tackle the issue of violence and crime in her city and state, but as a woman of faith she knows that there is also a spiritual problem that needs attending to.  “I have no memory of going to a classmate’s funeral when I was a child,” she said. “But it’s a common occurrence for inner-city children here. Everybody knows at least one someone who was shot or killed in street violence. That tells me that we have failed our children.”

I was slated to be the speaker at the Mother’s Day Monday service, but I did more listening than I did talking. Mothers stood and talked about the children they lost to gang violence, cross fire, and unsolved street violence. There was lots of talk about love, family, faith, and forgiveness. Still, it was like it happened yesterday. Each woman could remember exactly what she was doing when the knock on the door came with news of her child’s death.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. Mothers talked about the pain of burying children, and the rest of us sat there and listened and wept. Like mourning women all over the world we gathered to weep with the mothers and to protest to anyone who may be listening, “This has got to stop.”

School will be out soon, and lots of inner city youth everywhere who are looking forward to the summer will have little to nothing to do all day while their parents are at work. Funds for summer youth programs have dried up, says our elected officials. “Something is wrong when more money is spent in this country on building prisons than it is on educating and lifting the spirits of children,” says Senator Wilkerson.

Meanwhile, mothers in Boston are bracing themselves. And praying. And weeping. And organizing. And praying. And weeping. And organizing.

If there were summer camps  that you went away to back when I was a kid we didn’t know anything about them. Summer was spent outside. “Go outside and play.” “Stay out of trouble.” “Be in the house when the street lights come on.” Playing outside in the streets was how we spent our summers when I was child. Bike riding. Skating. Running to the store.  But no one plays outside much anymore these days. For one reason, it’s too dangerous.  Another reason is because the community youth centers where we learned to swim, play softball, and passing love notes to each other have been replaced by the violent games children get to watch on TV and the computer.

While words do not come easy today, I don’t want to miss the opportunity today to salute women like State Senator Diane Wilkerson and organizations everywhere like “Mothers on A Mission” who are working to make neighborhoods safe for boys and girls to be able to play and working to help mothers of murdered children find a way to turn their grief into a cause to organize to save the children that are still with us.

Here I was planning to close the week out on some sentimental note about mothering when I dropped by a blog by a woman of color that I hadn’t visited in some time and read some idiotic statement there about presidential politics, and now I can’t think straight. I didn’t intend to close the week out talking about the one subject that has me and my friends yelling in our cell phones at each other as we drive down the street in our cars. But I must.

Praise the Lord.

Let me first say: I have a rule. I don’t throw a fit on other people’s blogs. If explaining to you on your blog why I think you’re harebrained will take more than a few sentences, I won’t bother. I backed away and headed for the door when I saw that Hillary and not beauty tips (which is what the blog is supposed to be about) was the topic of the day. I know. That’s what I get for visiting a beauty blog at my age. I dropped by to get some recommendations on hair conditioner and lip gloss. Only to find folks there opining about politics and trashing Hillary Clinton for staying in the race after her loss this past Tuesday in North Carolina and her just barely won win in Indiana. The streetfighting online is intense, and the goal is clear.  Browbeat Clinton into giving up.

If the highest office you are ever likely to aspire to is the parliamentarian of your sorority, you don’t get it.  You don’t walk away empty handed this far into the game– even if the odds of your winning the nomination are now slim. A delegation comes to meet with you to persuade you to drop out. With incentives. With promises. With their checkbook in hand. You negotiate, you don’t quit with nothing to show for all your work and for all the gut punches you took  for the cause. You decide the terms of your leaving and what mark you want to leave. It’s what those with power know that others who don’t have it don’t know. Politics 101. Business school 201. Religion 301. The air is different, and the rules are different, the higher up you go. Barack who? This is between Clinton and the Democratic Party.

Should Clinton drop out? I hope she doesn’t. The game is not over. Play to the end. I hate seeing women wimp out. But that’s my opinion.

But I didn’t mean to close the week out talking about politics. I certainly didn’t mean to tick off fans of this blog who are Obama devotees.

I just had to get that off my chest. Something I can do on my own blog.

Now, where was I?

Oh yeah. Have a Happy Mother’s Day. I know I plan to do just that. Even though I should be thinking about the sermon I gotta preach. I’m going to sit out on my screen porch this weekend with my feet up, reading and nodding and sipping Kool-Aid, and watching as others grille the fish and chicken I’ve requested. Yeah, I’m bossy. What’s it to you?

If my Old Testament seminary professor hadn’t gotten to me first, I would have given myself over to the study of Church History. Stories of fallen preachers, scandal-ridden evangelists, church heresies, and humans battling for God fascinate me. I’m no scandalmonger. It’s stories of human contradictions and human reversals, including my own, that floor me.

Take, for example, the story of a modern fallen preacher.

Carlton Pearson’s church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in Tulsa, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. Pearson was one of the first black megapreachers back before there were megapreachers. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the pastor. Pearson didn’t have a sexual affair. He didn’t embezzle money from his church. His sin was worse: He stopped believing in Hell. Today Pearson teaches that sincere people who do not directly acknowledge Christ — such as Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Unitarians — will go to heaven. The finished work of Christ at Calvary redeemed all of humanity, not just Christians, back to God. To a conservative believer, a Pentecostalal especially, it’s “Holiness or Hell.” Anything else is heretical.

During the 90s, Pearson put on huge revival meetings there in Tulsa drawing thousands of people. I know because I attended a few myself. Based on my husband my computations, our daughter was conceived at the ‘92 Auzsa Conference. But that’s another discussion. (LOL)

Pearson called his revivals “Azusa” Conferences, ‘Azusa’ after the name of the original Pentecostal crusade 100 years ago. At Pearson’s Azusa Conference, as many as 40,000 people would fill the bleachers over seven days, and sell out all the hotels in the city.

Back then Carlton Pearson served as a “bridge” between traditional black preachers and the contemporary “neo-Pentecostal” movement.  One might say that Pearson was the first African-American to be on national Christian television and getting African-Americans into this whole media age. Azusa provided a platform for lots of big names preachers and singers along with lots of promising, but lesser known, gospel luminaries (like T D. Jakes). One of his biggest supporters back then was his old mentor, Oral Roberts, who predicted that Carlton Pearson would be the next great leader of his people. Everything Pearson did was blessed, or so it seemed, from as far back as his days as a wunderkind and boy preacher growing up in the South.

But one day something happened.

One day Pearson was sitting in the living room of his spacious, comfortable home in Tulsa having his dinner in front of the TV set. There was a news story on about the refugee crisis in Rwanda.

With his own fat cheek baby daughter sitting nearby in her stroller, Pearson sat watching these African people — mostly women and children walking slowly back home with dull empty eyes, swollen bellies and skeletal bodies, emaciated, babies looking at the mom and the mama looking out in space. As a man of God, a preacher of the Gospel, and Evangelist, Pearson sat looking at those people on his TV set assuming that they were probably Muslim and going to Hell. After all, God wouldn’t do that to Christians

And then Pearson had a revelation.

Pearson said to God, “God I don’t know how you’re gonna call yourself a loving God and allow those people to suffer so much and then just suck them into hell.” The Spirit of God, Pearson says, responded back to him, ”Is that what you think we’re doing?” ”That’s what I’ve been taught,” Pearson replied. And the voice in his head replied: “Can’t you see they’re already in Hell?” And as clear as a bell, says Pearson, he heard God telling him to preach this new message that Hell is a place in life, and that after death everybody is redeemed. Everybody.

Powerful stuff, huh? Yeah, but dangerous too.

Once Pearson (by now Bishop Pearson) started preaching this new revelation, things started crashing in all around the him.  After all, without Hell to believe in, what’s the point in believing in Jesus and being saved from Hell. After all, if the pastor can change his mind about Hell what else is he likely to change his mind about?

Within a few months of preaching his new gospel there was a mass exodus from his church.  And I do mean a mass exodus. From 5000 members to a few hundred people. As he continued to preach his “gospel of inclusion,” membership in Higher Dimensions plummeted to a tenth of what it had been. He lost his megachurch complex facility because his dwindling congregation could no longer afford the payments, and had to rent meeting space from an Episcopal church across town (a church Pearson would never had stepped into years ago). Top gospel artist friends would not return his calls and found excuses not to go to the Azusa Conference. Invitations to speak at friends’ churches dried up. Pastors and friends around the country abandoned him, including people I know who know Pearson.  Even prominent members of the Tulsa community stopped doing business with Pearson and Higher Dimensions (new name of the church is New Dimensions).

Pearson underestimated just how conservative conservative theology is.

A member of Pearson’s ministry, a friend of mine, who has remained with the pastor during this downfall and agrees with his teachings on inclusivity admits there were many, many Sundays when the pastor and the handful of parishioners who remained sat in the church and wept from the beginning to the end of the worship service at the sight of the empty pews. Those who left felt betrayed and made sure to let Pearson and others know. “The tide is turning and our church is on its way back, but there were times we weren’t sure our pastor was gonna make it” she told me. “We don’t believe in Hell anymore. But what we’ve experienced for our beliefs have felt like a kind of Hell”

For sure, there’s more to this story. There always is.

But this morning I woke up thinking about religion, friendship, vocation, preaching, public opinion, beliefs, scandal, the battle for God, and the price that comes with thinking and believing out loud. You get the picture.