To understand her history lesson a little better, it helps to know about the artist’s personal story. Walker spent her early childhood in racially mixed Stockton, California, where her father, Larry, taught art at the University of the Pacific. “I was actually born with a vaguely positive worldview. There was something kind of triumphant that I didn’t know what had been accomplished” in the civil rights movement, she recalls of her childhood in the Seventies. “In some ways, I grew up declawed. Declawed and unprepared.” As she gives the subject more thought, however, certain less than idyllic recollections come to mind, such as when the Walkers, the only black family in the neighborhood, had their house egged by “local idiot teenagers.” One time, when she was about 12, she went with her choir to San Francisco to see a show. The black and Latino kids went to McDonald’s for lunch, while one white boy went to a fancy restaurant. When Walker and her friends showed up at the restaurant to pick him up, the doorman told them, “There are no niggers in there.”
The Battle of Atlanta: Being the Narrative of a Negress in the Flames of Desire—A Reconstruction, 1995 (detail), cut paper and adhesive on wall
But it was only when the family moved to Georgia when she was 13, Walker says, that “‘nigger’ sort of became a way of life.” Accustomed to hanging out with kids of all races, she initially did the same at her new school. Then, while waiting at a bus stop with some white friends one day, she was taken aback to hear them using the slur to describe other classmates—and then to remark about Walker in a creepily complimentary way: “Oh, she’s not a nigger. She’s just like us.” Says Walker, “I remember distancing myself on that day from that group.” (It bears noting that, though the mainstream media has used “the n word” instead of “nigger” since the O.J. Simpson trial, Walker appears to find such editing a naive nicety. In a public talk with New York Times art critic Roberta Smith in January, Walker boldly spoke the word and at one point noted—on the off chance that someone in the audience had been asleep—“I’ve said ‘nigger’ twice now.” Later in the month, Walker explains that she is interested both in taboos and in “how a word can not just touch a person but take a person back in time and create a connection with past uses of the word.” Because she’s known for using the word in such forums—and in her work—she adds that when she doesn’t there’s an “expectation of rage that’s left hanging there.”)
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