In her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, feminist. The theme of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, is at the heart of several of these essays: black women in relation to their families, their mothers; to each other; to black men; to white society, and the world at large. In a number of other pieces, Walker discusses the writing of Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Flannery O'Connor, as well as her own work. She also looks at the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the following decades.

Throughout the volume, Walker explores the theories and practices of feminists and feminism, incorporating what she calls the "womanist" tradition of black women. And in a final, courageous memoir, she tells of her scarring childhood accident and her daughter's healing words.