Published in 1983, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is Alice Walker's first collection of nonfiction in which she speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist. Here are thirty-six essays, ranging from the personal to the political. Essays about Walker's own work and that of other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid, courageous memoir of a scarring childhood injury.