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What work does Walker's mother do?

In the essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," Alice Walker describes not only what her mother, Minnie Lou Grant Walker, did for a living, which was sharecropping, but how she found ways to be creative even in her oppressive and impoverished circumstances.


Walker is the daughter of Georgia sharecroppers. Sharecropping was a system of agrarian, or farm, labor that existed after slavery was abolished. Sharecropping remained common throughout the South from the 1860s to the 1940s. Arguably, after the Great Migration in the late-teens and early-1920s, there were fewer blacks to work as sharecroppers on plantations due to their movement to northern and mid-western cities.


Sharecropping was a system in which farm laborers, usually black, lived and worked on a plantation. In exchange for their labor, they would be given living quarters, a sum of money (usually doled out at the end of the harvest season), and a small plot of land near their living quarters, on which they could grow whatever they pleased.


Though sharecropping was not as inhumane as slavery, it was an unjust system. Planters frequently cheated laborers out of their due share of income, and living quarters were often in an abominable condition. There was also an expectation that children, once they were big enough, would work on the plantation instead of acquiring an education. In Walker's essay, this becomes a point of contention between Walker's mother and the plantation owner who insists that Alice forget about school and work on the plantation. This comment unleashes her mother's "quick, violent temper" as well as her insistence that her children would lead a different kind of life. The desire to deny black children an education—any education—is indicative of the white South's insistence on keeping black people in some form of bondage.


In addition to working beside her husband in the fields, Walker's mother tended to traditional domestic duties.



She made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers' overalls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds.



Her day, like that of many women who had families and participated in the sharecropping system, began "before sunup and did not end until late at night."

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