In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker

the room were black.”
    â€œI bet she was real old,” says my mother. “They’re the only ones still worrying over that war.”
    â€œSo I got up and said no, ‘we’ didn’t lose the war. ‘ You all’ lost the war. And you all’s loss was our gain.”
    â€œThose old ones will just have to die out,” says my mother.
    â€œWell,” I say, “I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all the sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer’s story. And the whole story is what I’m after.”
    â€œWell, I doubt if you can ever get the true missing parts of anything away from the white folks,” my mother says softly, so as not to offend the waitress who is mopping up a nearby table; “they’ve sat on the truth so long by now they’ve mashed the life out of it.”
    â€œO’Connor wrote a story once called ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge.’”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œEverything that goes up comes together, meets, becomes one thing. Briefly, the story is this: an old white woman in her fifties—”
    â€œThat’s not old! I’m older than that, and I’m not old!”
    â€œSorry. This middle-aged woman gets on a bus with her son, who likes to think he is a Southern liberal… he looks for a black person to sit next to. This horrifies his mother, who, though not old, has old ways. She is wearing a very hideous, very expensive hat, which is purple and green.”
    â€œPurple and green? ”
    â€œVery expensive. Smart. Bought at the best store in town. She says, ‘With a hat like this, I won’t meet myself coming and going.’ But in fact, soon a large black woman, whom O’Connor describes as looking something like a gorilla, gets on the bus with a little boy, and she is wearing this same green-and-purple hat. Well, our not-so-young white lady is horrified, outdone.”
    â€œI bet she was. Black folks have money to buy foolish things with too, now.”
    â€œO’Connor’s point exactly! Everything that rises, must converge.”
    â€œWell, the green-and-purple-hats people will have to converge without me.”
    â€œO’Connor thought that the South, as it became more ‘progressive,’ would become just like the North. Culturally bland, physically ravished, and, where the people are concerned, well, you wouldn’t be able to tell one racial group from another. Everybody would want the same things, like the same things, and everybody would be reduced to wearing, symbolically, the same green-and-purple hats.”
    â€œAnd do you think this is happening?”
    â€œI do. But that is not the whole point of the story. The white woman, in an attempt to save her pride, chooses to treat the incident of the identical hats as a case of monkey-see, monkey-do. She assumes she is not the monkey, of course. She ignores the idiotic-looking black woman and begins instead to flirt with the woman’s son, who is small and black and cute. She fails to notice that the black woman is glowering at her. When they all get off the bus she offers the little boy a ‘bright new penny.’ And the child’s mother knocks the hell out of her with her pocketbook.”
    â€œI bet she carried a large one.”
    â€œLarge, and full of hard objects.”
    â€œThen what happened? Didn’t you say the white woman’s son was with her?”
    â€œHe had tried to warn his mother. ‘These new Negroes are not like the old,’ he told her. But she never listened. He thought he hated his mother until he saw her on the ground, then he felt sorry for her. But when he tried to help her, she didn’t know him. She’d retreated in her mind to a historical time more congenial to her desires. ‘Tell Grandpapa to come get me,’