'In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women' is a 1973 novel by Alice Walker, containing the widely popular story ‘Everyday Use’. There are thirteen stories in the collection, all having the themes of love, feminist issues, and racism in common. None of the stories can be considered as conventional happy love stories and contain deeper subtext on the agency of women in African-American families in Southern US states.
Alice Walker, born 1944, is a popular American activist-novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for ‘The Color Purple’. A common element in her works, the issues of African-American women are a major theme in this anthology as well. Walker brings a new perspective to how education, though enlightening, can sometimes distance people on the view of religion and heritage. In ‘Her Young Jerome’, the schoolteacher who marries a fat, but financially independent woman abuses her. He is revealed to have radical ideas of bringing a ‘Black Revolution’ but doesn’t shy away from using violence on his black wife who is unknowingly funding these ideas.
In the popular ‘Everyday Use’, education makes Dee realize of the worth of her African heritage which leads her to change her name to Warengo to distance her from her ‘oppressors’. But despite her new-found appreciation for her heritage, Dee looks at it from surface only, she doesn’t appreciate her culture as her mother or sister do. For her, they are backward. They don’t understand their heritage.
There is also the backdrop of violence and domestic abuse in some stories. In ‘The child Who Favoured Daughter’, the father sees the women of his family as his property who are not allowed to have any agency, and are often beaten mercilessly, leading to the suicide of his wife. In the end, he mutilates his wife for choosing to deny a letter she wrote to his white boss. The theme of ending of innocence is also discussed with the backdrop of slavery in South, particularly in the story 'The Flowers'. The anthology is a homage to the lives of black women who have struggled against their conditions, to love. Love that doesn’t bode well for any of them.
