nscended and that is where we ultimately find the creative spirit. These ancestors express themselves through songs and quilt-making because these are art forms that cannot be taken away from them. Hence, Walker has discovered that they find their freedom and independence here:And yet, it is to my mother - and all of our motherswho were not famous - that I went in search of the Secret of what has fed that muzzled and oftenmutilated but vibrant, creative spirit that the blackwoman has inherited, and that pops out in wild andand unlikely places to this day (Walker, 1996: 2319).In this statement, Walker embodies both hopelessness and hopefulness. These black women may have been treated like stray dogs and they may have felt that they have been abandoned and forgotten about, but Walker put a little gleam of hope into these lived lives. She forces the reader to recognize that these women set themselves free, even if it was only for small periods at a time, through a mysterious and vibrant creative spirit.Marshall's notion of independence is through language and she defines it as the spoken word'. In Marshall's mother's time, black women were viewed as powerless. Most of them did not work outside the home, and if they chose to do work, you would see them on the street corners begging white women to do their housework for them in exchange for a meager wage. This would have been a humiliating experience, so these women would retreat to their kitchens where they felt powerful. Marshall's mother and her friends would spend hours talking. Their colloquial African-American language became raised to a higher art. They created poetry through such phrases as: The sea ain't got no back door' and beautiful-ugly'. These such phrases are in no way eloquent, but they certainly were appealing to Marshall. Their use of African-American jargon gave them the freedom to express themselves in the only way they knew possible:Those late afternoon con...
