WHITE MIDDLE-CLASS guilt does not get any more uncomfortable than in the presence of Alice Walker.

Here is an African-American woman whose annual tax bill is more than her parents earned in their lifetimes. And here is a woman, blinded in one eye as a child, whose brother asked his employer for a loan so that she could see a doctor. “Why you wanna waste $250 getting your sister’s eye fixed?” came the reply. “She’s just gonna end up marrying a no-good nigger like you.”

Being a heterosexual male does not score points with Walker either. Her writing — most famously The Color Purple, which has sold six million copies worldwide — is full of men of extraordinary violence and cruelty, and strong women who overcome them.

In her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the anti-hero beats his wife, takes up with a prostitute, raises a violent son, then goes on a killing spree in New York, refusing to save a pregnant white woman from drowning. The woman calls him a “nigger” with her final breath.

So it is with some trepidation that this white male interviewer reaches her serene hilltop home in Berkeley.

I am here because of a new Broadway musical based on The Color Purple (part-funded by Oprah Winfrey, Oscar-nominated for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film of the book); a project to transcribe 40 years of Ms Walker’s journals; and the reaction to her latest novel, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart, dismissed as a “remarkably awful compendium of inanities ” by Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times.

I am apprehensive but Walker, a slight, dreadlocked 61-year-old, who could easily be two decades younger, catches me off-guard with a handshake and a bowl of fresh strawberries. “They’re delicious,” she promises, in a soft, firm voice somewhere between schoolmarm and shaman.

She has just returned from Houston, where she helped victims of Hurricane Katrina. “I was mostly in the Astrodome, but there were a lot of evacuees in my hotel,” she says. “I just passed out what I had brought: money and clothing, and books. I brought lots of books because I thought that if I were stuck somewhere, I would want to read.”

Was racism to blame for the treatment of the black and poor in New Orleans? She nods. “It’s exactly where America is. It has not sufficiently dealt with the race issue, and it certainly has not dealt with the issue of poverty. In a sense it was nothing new, but it was shocking for the world to see this side of America.”

Has she changed her mind about white people? “It is very clear to me that the white, Eurocentric view of the world is very oppressive because at its core is a racist vision that has been enacted with such incredible destructiveness,” she says, referring to her opposition to the Iraq War, which led to her arrest at a White House demonstration in 2003.

“The people who make those incredibly efficient guns, and amazingly efficient landmines, and incredibly efficient bombs — those people, generally speaking, are white people. The people of colour in the world, the people whose children now have no legs, no eyes, no arms — they are aware of this.”

Then she softens: “In my development, I have tried to see people as people, and get to know them, because I wanted to prove that people are basically the same. One of the reasons I married a white man was to see up close, ‘who is this?’ I mean, do all white people have to be racist and brutal to people of colour? Or is it possible to be white and egalitarian, and kind to other people. I knew no kind white people when I was growing up.”

The marriage to Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer, ended after nine years after pressure from the Ku Klux Klan and black activists. Her present partner is William Poy Lee, a Chinese-American lawyer, although she has had women lovers.

None of these contradictions — the black victim who marries a white; the straight woman with lesbian lovers — will surprise fans of Walker’s writing, in which dramatic personality shifts are possible through learning. The Third Life of Grange Copeland is so called because, in the final act, the serial killer becomes a wise old man, advising his son not to blame his behaviour on whites. “Nobody’s as powerful as we make them out to be,” he says. “We got our own souls, don’t we?”

Yet Walker’s work has often examined the degradation of the black, male soul by segregation and slavery. She is no man-hater: she doted on her grandfathers, despite knowing that they had beaten their wives. Male violence was inescapable in Walker’s home: her father, Willie, was traumatised by watching his mother die after being shot by an admirer. According to Walker’s biographer, Evelyn White, Willie Lee Walker beat his daughters for showing an interest in boys, but told his sons: “Like bulls, a man needs to get a little something on his stick.”

She admits that she initially dreaded a Broadway version of The Color Purple. “It felt like, ‘am I ready for another drubbing?’ ” she says. “Because, y’know, I was attacked for a good five to seven years after the movie. I didn’t really want to go back to that, but I was convinced by this wonderful producer, Scott Sanders, who called and said, ‘If we can ’t make this as wonderful as the movie, and a true honour of the book, we won’t do it’.”

Where to see...

ALICE WALKER
DATE Saturday October 8
PLACE The Centaur
TIME 2.30pm
TICKETS £10 from 01242 227979

www.cheltenhamfestivals.org.uk

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Jane Bussman's Top 10 journalism tips
• Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads