My Daughter Smokes

My Daughter Smokes


Alice Walker


Not everything passed down in a family from one generation to another is a positive inher­itance. Alice Walker, the prize-winning author of The Color Purple and many other fiction and nonfiction works, deals with a deadly tradition in her family in the following autobio­graphical essay. Alice Walker was born in Georgia in 1944, the youngest of eight children. Her parents were sharecroppers. This essay not only draws on her Georgia childhood but also focuses on the next generation of her family. It shows us the writer’s profound world­view and historical insights.


1 My daughter smokes. While she is doing her homework, her feet on the bench in front of her and her calculator clicking out answers to her algebra prob­lems. I am looking at the half-empty package of Camels tossed carelessly close at hand. Camels. I pick them up, take them into the kitchen, where the light is bet­ter, and study them—the^y’i^e filtered, for which I am grateful. My heart feels ter­rible. I want to weep. In fact, I do weep a little, standing there by the stove holding one of the instruments, so white, so precisely rolled, that could cause my ^dau^ghters death. ^When s^he smoked ^Mar^lboros an^{d Pl}a^yers ^I tardmed myself a^gainsi: ^feelm^g so ^ba^d; nobody ^{I k}new ever smoked these bran^ds.