ABSTRACT
Alice Walker writes about her “mothers’ gardens” and Southern women as the “crazy saints” who could not realize their full potential as creators. Paule Marshall writes about the West Indian women who were the poets and bards and mothers in the kitchen. Very much like those women who had their personal and public survival strategies and triumphs, the author's own mother was forced to defy adversities in order to create fulfillment through her and around her. Black women in the New World have had to be more than domestic angels. The author's mother’s memories and ways of being were so much connected to that part of Mecklenburg County in Virginia where the James River overflows—where the river remembers, never forgetting the source from where it came. Sometimes the re-memory process is arduous, and at other times the process involves the source of events that are very close in time.
