Novel: The Third Life of Grange Copeland

Overview

Alice Walker’s debut novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) spans several decades in rural Georgia and traces the corrosive effects of sharecropping, racism, and poverty on a Black family across three generations. The title points to the metamorphoses of Grange Copeland, his first life as an exploited sharecropper and abusive husband, his second as a disillusioned Northern migrant, and his third as a man striving for moral rebirth through love and responsibility.

Plot

Grange begins as a tenant farmer crushed by debt to white landowners and by the psychic toll of Jim Crow. Unable to see a path to dignity, he directs his rage inward and homeward, brutalizing his wife Margaret and neglecting their son Brownfield. He abandons them to flee North in search of freedom and wages, only to meet fresh humiliations that reveal the limits of escape. Margaret, trapped and despairing, eventually takes her own life, and Brownfield grows up steeped in deprivation and anger.

Brownfield’s adulthood grimly mirrors and intensifies his father’s first life. He marries Mem, an educated, hopeful woman whose aspirations he both covets and resents. Their early tenderness collapses under economic precarity and Brownfield’s need to dominate. Isolated in a ramshackle house, Mem is beaten into silence; Brownfield’s infidelities and jealousies spiral. In a moment of violent rage, he murders Mem and is sent to prison. The couple’s three daughters are scattered; the youngest, Ruth, ultimately comes under Grange’s care.

Grange returns South transformed by bitterness but also by clarity. He acquires a small piece of land, rejecting the sharecropping trap, and builds a fragile independence. He becomes romantically involved with Josie, the hard-bitten owner of a juke joint, whose entanglements with both Copeland men embody the community’s compromised ways of seeking survival and power. Yet it is with Ruth that Grange begins his third life. He devotes himself to raising her gently and rigorously, teaching her self-worth, discipline, and the practical skills of tending the land. Through this guardianship, he wrestles with his past cruelty and tries to root out the habits of domination that once defined him.

Themes

Walker maps how systemic oppression breeds private tyranny, how men like Grange and Brownfield internalize the white world’s contempt and pass it on to the women and children closest to them. The novel refuses to excuse their violence even as it anatomizes its origins in economic exploitation and racial terror. Women’s suffering and moral clarity, seen in Mem’s dignity under siege and Ruth’s resilient intelligence, offer a counterforce to the cycle. The contrast between North and South exposes a false promise: geography cannot cure a soul or upend a system; only self-knowledge and accountable love can.

Resolution

When Brownfield is released and begins to shadow Ruth with the possessive menace that destroyed Mem, Grange recognizes the old cycle reasserting itself. He confronts his son and kills him, an act that costs Grange his freedom but preserves Ruth’s future. In prison, Grange accepts punishment without self-pity, certain that his final choice sealed his third life’s purpose. The novel closes on the precarious possibility of liberation: Ruth, shaped by Grange’s tender ferocity, poised to break free of the inheritance that claimed her parents and grandfather’s first two lives.