In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women

Overview

Alice Walker’s 1973 collection In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women gathers thirteen tales that center Black women’s lives with unsentimental clarity and lyric intensity. Moving from rural back roads of the Jim Crow South to Northern city blocks and, in one case, to an East African convent, the stories track the costs and consolations of love, the bruising pressures of racism and poverty, and the stubborn will to define oneself against the expectations of men, churches, and the state. The title balances tenderness with ordeal; affection, desire, and kinship arrive entwined with betrayal, deprivation, and moral risk.

World and Themes

The collection’s terrain is domestic and communal: kitchens where quilts are folded and recipes remembered, front porches where gossip hardens into judgment, church pews that shelter and expel, fields where labor grinds down the body. Walker’s women wrestle with inheritance, what to keep, what to refuse, and with the uses and misuses of tradition. The stories probe colorism, class difference within Black communities, the pull of urban aspiration versus rural rootedness, and the uneasy friction between folk practices and institutional power, whether medical, religious, or governmental. Voices shift from intimate first person to close third, and the tonal range spans fable-like compression to bitter comedy and stark tragedy.

Selected Stories

“Everyday Use” distills the question of heritage into a domestic standoff. A mother and her shy younger daughter face an older daughter newly remade by college and stylish politics. Quilts stitched by ancestors become the contested emblem of culture, whether heritage is something to exhibit as an aesthetic, or something to live inside and wear out with use.

“Roselily” unfolds at the altar, a stream of consciousness from a Southern woman marrying a Northern, devout man who promises rescue from hardship. Each vow feels like another stitch closing around her: security and respectability on one side, the loss of spontaneity and the weight of doctrine on the other. Freedom, in her mind, hovers just beyond the ceremony she cannot stop.

“The Welcome Table” follows an elderly Black woman turned out of a white church who then encounters a figure of Jesus and walks with him beyond the reach of those who scorn her. The vision turns exclusion on its head, giving her a final dignity that the congregation denied.

“Strong Horse Tea” captures the desperation of a poor mother whose infant is gravely ill. Stymied by distance, weather, and indifference, she turns to a folk remedy while waiting for help that never comes. The story refuses condescension toward either science or conjure, focusing instead on a mother’s calculus under impossible pressure.

In “The Flowers, ” a child named Myop wanders through late-summer fields and stumbles upon the remnants of a lynching. One small, precise discovery seals the end of a private innocence and links her life to a public, violent history.

“Her Sweet Jerome” portrays a shopkeeper’s violent jealousy toward her bookish husband, whose secret cache of papers becomes a battlefield for class insecurity, sexual suspicion, and political commitment. The revelation of what he has hidden exposes a chasm between their desires and humiliations.

“The Diary of an African Nun” places a convert’s voice at the center, chronicling the conflict between bodily memory and the strictures of Catholic asceticism, between communal ritual and the colonizing demands of a foreign faith.

“The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff” recounts a humiliation at the hands of a relief worker and a turn to rootwork for justice. The hex, whether efficacious or not, forces a reckoning with grief, guilt, and the ethics of retribution.

Style and Legacy

Walker’s prose is spare, musical, and exact, attentive to gesture and texture, the thud of a screen door, the shine of a churn, the weight of a name. Irony is edged with compassion; even when characters fail one another, the stories keep sight of the hurts that formed them. Together, they chart a map of Black womanhood under pressure and declare ordinary lives worthy of the same fearlessness, scrutiny, and beauty usually reserved for the grand and the mythic.