The Third Life of Grange Copeland

Alice Walker's first novel, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in New York in 1970, traces three generations of the Copeland family, Black Georgia sharecroppers, across roughly the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Grange Copeland, trapped in debt to the white landowner whose fields he works, turns his humiliation inward on his wife Margaret and son Brownfield, then abandons the family for the North — where he finds racism and poverty waiting in another form — leaving Margaret dead and Brownfield to repeat the pattern exactly: Brownfield marries the educated, hopeful Mem, grinds her down in the same sharecropper cabins, and eventually murders her, going to prison for it. Grange's "third life" begins when he returns to Georgia, takes custody of Brownfield's youngest daughter Ruth, and attempts, in a hard-won late independence, to raise her without transmitting the damage — an attempt that ends in violence when Brownfield, released and backed by a white judge, comes to reclaim her. Written in a plain, unsparing style quite different from the lyricism of Walker's later work, the novel established the concerns — Black women's survival, male violence under racial oppression, and the possibility of change — that run through Meridian and The Color Purple.

Author: Alice Walker · Original publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (New York), 1970