Essay Questions

Why are Peach and Sun able to enjoy an emancipated life when their sister, Always, is not?

Peach and Sun have extremely light complexions and are therefore able to pass as white in the white world. This enables them to go about life in much the same way that the white people do; they worry about their education, their prospects, getting married, creating a family of their own - in short, they worry about all of the things that free people worry about, because their worries are about things that they can at least moderately control. Because they appear white, they can also live in the same way as white people, and consequently are also anxious not to enable Always, whose darker complexion would give lie to their claims of being white themselves, free and participating in their lives in any way.

Always is much darker complected and therefore unable to assume the identity of a white person. She needs someone to secure her freedom for her, and is unable to just take it like her sisters have been able to do. Sun believes that her sister is "not white....enough".

Alice Walker has described Cooper's writing as "deceptively simple". In what way does this simplicity manifest itself?

In this novel in particular, Cooper's writing in is the style of a folkloric tale or an oral history. Each of the tales that Clora narrates also seem to contain some kind of teachable moment so that within the family history she is relating there is a fable-like element. She allows Clora to tell her story as an eyewitness to what has happened, and also as a student of it, an observer of the way in which life has changed for her daughters.

There is almost something Biblical about her narrative and use of vocabulary in the story; she uses a lot of images of fire and brimstone, describing herself as having an anger like a river of blood, and this is very similar to the way in which many of the parables and events in the Bible are told. There is a simplicity in the stories because they describe an event or an action, a cause for it, and a result coming from it. Despite descriptive language the stories themselves are extremely simple and give the reader the answer to a question that they were as yet unaware they would be asking.