works better if you see the whole thing

Kate’s first step is to embark on a woman-only rafting trip down the Colorado River. She becomes violently ill after experiencing her first rapids. As she regurgitates for days, she feels her past words crowding her mouth:

All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion. (23)

All of her spoken words must move through her body and out, reversing Audre Lorde’s claim that the words that make us “sicken and die” are those we have kept “still in silence” (cite). Walker suggests here that words we have shared can be as nauseating, as unhealthy, as silence. Furthermore, Kate begins to abandon her attachment to other language; treating her situation matter-of-factly, she promises her companions that she’ll recover and quietly gazes up at the stars from her perch in the Port-a-Potty (cite). Finally, listening to “the voice of her body”, Kate heals when she eats an herb that had gotten stuck in her shoe. Her instinct is to identify it by name, but when no one knows what it is, she calls it after its function: a “friend”, one who takes care of her whose “health” she “felt concern for” (31). This functional approach suggests that she is in a phase of dealing with her crisis at which words had become poisonous, then were simply incidental. Echoing Celie’s tense relationship with language, Kate’s obsession with words fades before the healing she gets from the physical world and the “friendship” this healing develops among all living things. Walker illustrates in this passage the necessity of Kate’s traveling up the body of the river, through the body and its pain, and attending to the voice of the body—all to arrive at a place of awareness and silence. The emphasis on this level of contact with the physical world and Kate’s experience of her body suggests that Walker’s work has not utterly abandoned the importance of being in the body. Rather, Kate’s embodiment is a phase of her growth, reflected in her use of language.