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Conclusion
“’You have to get used to using your voice, you know. You start on simple things and move on…’” –Meridian Hill (225)

Alice Walker’s Meridian “makes it possible for her readers to understand what was lost when the Civil Rights Movement ended” (Hendrickson 120). Meridian meets this loss with a care for its traumatic impact on individuals and this attentiveness strays from what Bambara calls “linear literary conventions” into a spiritual conversion narrative structure (43). Walker presupposes the legitimacy of lingering trauma and the existence of a spiritual reality; the particular traumas addressed are historical actualities that emerge, haunting and affirming, as traces in everyday life. In Walker’s novel, these traces disrupt Meridian’s consciousness, in her preoccupation with the past, and the connection between her physical and spiritual well-being and the traumas of national politics. MacDowell argues that Meridian “fashions” a self from “the artifacts of her own heritage” (176), transcending the way that trauma typically enacts a “tyranny of the past” (Vickroy 12). As the novel draws to a close, Walker uses spiritual interconnection to develop a wider and more holistic view of how to heal the terrible losses and challenges of civil injustice.
The theoretical position shared by all the writers and critics I adopt in this dissertation is, in fact, that this traumatized position must be understood as socially imposed. Meridian is stuck at a specific moment in time, and her past, present, and possible future experiences bind her to a host of memories, attachments, and illnesses that threaten her life. These irrational realities are demonstrated to be logical and accurate perceptions, harbingers (for their subjects) of the imperative to heal severe political trauma. At the novel’s opening, Meridian, exasperated with Truman’s wonder at her condition, replies
“Of course I’m sick,” snapped Meridian. “Why else would I spend all this time trying to get well!”
“You have a strange way of trying to get well!” (10-11)
Meridian and Truman dispute the “normalcy” of Meridian’s practices, but it is precisely her “strange way” that heals her and passes the cap to Truman at the novel’s end. The eruptions of the past into the present suggest spiritual ecstasy, an unconventional self-cognition, and the rhythms of “mystic time,” all converging at “the meeting place where all seeming contradictions and polarities melt” (Bambara 43).
As the priestess discovering herself at this nexus, Meridian leads herself through the tremendous fire and passes along the burden to Truman, who dons her cap and her role. As he sits in her house—now his domain—“[h]e had a vision of Anne-Marion herself arriving, lost, someday, at the door, which would remain open, and wondered if Meridian knew that the sentence of bearing the conflict in her own soul which she had imposed on herself—and lived through—must now be borne in terror by all the rest of them” (242). Throughout the text, Meridian offers simple solutions, community-building and connection, but herself cannot discover the power to move on until she can move through the body. When Truman and Meridian visit a woman in prison who killed her child, she begs them to leave their political agendas aside, challenging, “if you all can’t give me back my heart… go the fuck away” (235). Meridian’s journey gives peace to the trauma of racism and the civil rights movement, granting her heart back to herself. The novel suggests that, indeed, Meridian does understand what she has passed on, but she no longer adopts that burden of understanding into her own body; she passes it along, because she has passed through it herself.
In comparing Meridian with a priestess, Walker’s radical theology disputes Ryan’s claim that “what distinguishes the priestess is the willingness to become the sacrifice offered on behalf of spiritual/cultural community” (62). As I asked earlier in the chapter, how can one execute powerful spiritual and political leadership without damaging a powerful self? Walker’s Meridian lives inside this question until she can declare a new purpose beyond the larger moral quandaries of violence and institutional racism and the smaller, but no less powerful, dramas of intra-movement relationships. At the end of the novel, like Jarena Lee traveling the country to preach, Meridian is liberated by being “strong enough to go” (241), to be able to “heal / and re-create” herself (236), as she writes in a poem after her last community visit to a young woman in prison. This distinction illustrates Walker’s humanism and her revision/revisitation of the transition from nonviolent community-based work to more revolutionary black activism. These roots are linked, however, by Walker’s use of circular narrative, generational stories, and spiritual narrative, with the deepest roots of American black women’s spiritual traditions, in which radical theology becomes an expressive vehicle for political strategy.