Rebecca Walker

Alice Walker is in labor. It’s the final days of 1969 in the deeply Southern and still defiantly segregated Jackson, Miss. As the tumultuous decade draws to a close, the fruit of years of sacrifice is starting to take root. It is an ending and a beginning.

In less than two months, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will finally order Mississippi to fully desegregate its public schools. Walker’s husband rushes to Jackson’s University Hospital after arguing a school desegregation case in New Orleans.

Hours of contractions and labor pains pass, and a new voice is heard in the delivery ward. It belongs to Rebecca Walker, the product of the author’s nine-year union to Jewish civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal. The margins on the birth certificate will contain the penciled-in affirmation by the bewildered medical staff that the juxtaposed races of the birth parents are, in fact, “correct.”

From the start, award-winning author Rebecca Walker has challenged her culture to do a double-take and reassess the status quo. Through her international work as an author, activist and speaker, Walker strives to make bridges of barriers to find common ground, inclusion and equality for people from all walks of life.

“I am not a postfeminism feminist,” Walker declared in a historic piece in Ms. Magazine, “I am the Third Wave.”

These memorable words of the fresh-faced Yale graduate in 1992 are often referred to as the beginning of third wave feminism, an expansion of the movement for women of color. That same year, she went on to found Third Wave Foundation, a non-profit organization to encourage young women to get involved in activism and leadership. In its first year, the organization registered more than 20,000 new voters.

At the age of 25, Walker was named one of the 50 most influential future leaders of America by Time Magazine. Other awards quickly followed, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters.

Fast-forward to 2007. Walker is celebrating the publication in March of her highly anticipated third book and with unmistakable Walker fervor, the title itself makes a statement … gives pause … begs a second look. “Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence.’’

The journey into motherhood is one of Walker’s biggest fights yet, and the result, son Tenzin, is undoubtedly her greatest creative endeavor. As the opening and closing speaker for the Gulf Coast Women’s Expo, Walker will share her unique perspective on becoming a mother and living a vibrant existence.

Bella Magazine caught up with Walker to discover what the view is like at this stage in life, and how her early activism has blended with her new role as a mother. Walker is buoyant about the release of “Baby Love.’’

A part of me being reborn

“I wanted to write a book that could be a companion to pregnancy and also to reassure women thinking about becoming pregnant,” she said. Walker realizes that her experience with feelings of ambivalence and uncertainty about having a child plague many women of her generation.

“I looked out the window at the leaves of the poplar trees shimmering in the breeze,” Walker writes, recalling the day she was told she was finally pregnant. “My eyes settled on a vulture falling from the sky in a perfect spiral … and I thought to myself: I will remember this moment and that vulture for the rest of my life. I thought to myself: That vulture is a sign. A part of me is dying.”

The analogy of death may seem an odd sentiment from an excitedly expectant mother.

“I had this sense that a part of me was not only dying, but another part of me was being reborn,” Walker said. “It was a death of an old self that was really about just me and being very self-absorbed, and the birth of a self that was bigger than me and now encompassed not just me and my baby but mothers and children all over the world.”

Her mother, Alice Walker, is known not only for writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Color Purple,’’ but also for her fight in both the civil rights and feminist movements. Feminist, Gloria Steinem, is Rebecca’s godmother.

In this nucleus of accomplishments and causes, Walker wasn’t taught to prioritize becoming a mother.

“I had been raised to think that if I had a baby, I would lose my freedom or my creativity, or my professional life would suffer.” She describes a 15-year period of wrestling these ideas to the ground. “After becoming pregnant,” Walker said, “I realized that those 15 years of longing were like my first trimester.”

“It was an initiation,” she said. “It was a calling. It was a part of the whole birth experience. The anticipation. The desire. The visitation of the idea of the baby in my mind was all a part of the pregnancy.”

DECISION A LONG TIME COMING

Her only regret is that the decision to have a child took so long.

“Part of what I hope this book can do is support women who are having this struggle and encourage them to go for it,” she said. “Your fertility really is finite.”

When asked for a word of advice to expectant mothers, Walker takes a deep breath and exhales, “Oh my gosh.” She laughs for a moment.

“Don’t be daunted by the complexity and demanding nature of the endeavor,” she said. “It takes effort when you’ve grown up in situations where you haven’t had the best modeling. You can rewrite the script so that your maternity and your motherhood is positive and beautiful.”

Listening to her passionate words, you’re struck by the life-altering experience this fiercely independent woman has undergone.

“I think my activism, the view from here, has expanded,” Walker said. “I now see a whole other realm of which I was conscious before, but now my sensitivity to it is more acute.

“Becoming a mother has really made my commitment to trying to make the world a better place even more intense, because I now have the responsibility of this beautiful, very pure, very open, very vulnerable being in my hands,” Walker said. “I am much more aware of the urgency around trying to create a peaceful world.”

BIG-PICTURE MOMENTS

Walker points to several radical big-picture moments during her pregnancy.

The first occurred after she was told she was having a boy, and she was made aware that the prison industrial complex in our country is growing at an alarming rate. Walker said she must become more conscious of the issue “in order to protect my son and to protect all boys who are being criminalized by the system.”

Another frightening revelation occurred during Walker’s amniocentesis.

“There’s a genetic counseling process, where a biotech company takes all of the parents’ health records and puts them into a database,” she said. “It occurred to me that we need to become very aware of genetic discrimination.”

Walker worries about the long-term consequences of genetic information being available.

“When my son is 20 or 30 or 40 and trying to get a job or health insurance, and his genetic history can be pulled up on a computer, who knows what the implications are going to be?”

Maternity leave has also surfaced as a new cause for the activist. When speaking to female managers in Stockholm, Walker was struck by the positive results she witnessed from the year of paid maternity leave offered in Sweden.

“I burst into tears, because American women have not known that experience at all,” she said. “We have to piece-meal our child care. To be robbed of the experience of having that kind of time and institutional state support is very serious to me. We need to transform our culture into one in which maternity leave and paternity leave is valued.”

In “Baby Love,’’ Walker also speaks about the importance of choosing a strong life partner. The strength she advocates is not the typical machoism and workaholism that characterizes familiar male stereotypes. Walker said many men are now “trying to embrace being more complex and vulnerable yet strong human beings.”

She believes that this male evolution relies on women: “We have to allow men to be this way, rather than gravitating towards the tough, mysterious, uber-macho man.”

Crusade to end ambivalence

So what is her advice to the single readers of Bella?

Walker relishes the question.

“The most important things to look for are emotional reciprocity, intellectual compatibility and somebody who really can make your life better — who wants to help you grow and wants to see you flower,” she said.

“Not the cool and cute,” she pauses to laugh at the description. “He can be cool and cute, but you really want someone who you can talk to and who can be your best friend.”

Building on the idea that women play an intrinsic role in defining manhood, she said, “That’s what we should cultivate in our sons and other men that we meet. We are a part of shaping what men become, and we have to take responsibility for our part in it.”

In her self-proclaimed “crusade against maternal ambivalence,” Walker is striving to become more decisive about everything in her life.

“I don’t want to live in this ambivalent, murky soup of ‘should I’ …” she said. “On some level, when you avoid committing to a path or a place or a person or anything in your life, you can lose precious time, and it’s a lack of recognition that your life itself is finite.”

Walker looks forward to talking about the issues that are important to the women in our community at the Gulf Coast Women’s Expo.

“I do a lot of speaking around the country and around the world,” she said. “I like to be spokesperson for the women that I meet and talk to, and I look forward to listening and being your vigilant cultural worker.”

The birth canal, for all that it symbolizes, is the most flesh and blood moments of the human experience. For Walker, the act of giving birth and every day that has followed signifies her own emergence into a new perspective on life.

“The transition from observer to participant has been inexplicably liberating,” she writes at the close of her new memoir. “It’s the how to live your own life version of learning to swim. Once you know how, you no longer need lessons; you just get in the ocean and go.”