TO HELL WITH DYING
by Alice Walker, 1973

More than anything, Alice Walker's "To Hell with Dying" (1968) is about her roots as a writer. It represents, for example, one of her first real successes in African American literary circles and her first published story. (It was later also published in the 1973 collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women.) Langston Hughes included the story in his collection The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present (1967) to illustrate what young writers were producing in the 1960s, and he comments in the introduction that "neither you nor I have ever read a story like [it] before." Yet, despite such praise, it seems impossible that even Hughes could have anticipated the career that lay ahead for Walker. Neither could Hughes have envisioned the story's incarnation as a children's book (1988), lavishly and brightly illustrated by Catherine Deeter. This returned, in spirit at least, to the story's roots in Walker's own life, as evidenced by the illustrations that clearly depict Walker as the story's narrator and by the dedication: "To the old ones of my childhood who taught me the most important lesson of all: That I did not need to be perfect to be loved." The story thus uncannily anticipated Walker's preoccupation throughout her writing—perhaps most notably in The Color Purple—with the construction or restoration of communities, with the recovery of those communities' outcasts, and with the power art has to mediate difference and transcend time. Certain other details in the story, such as a reference to the narrator's finishing a doctorate in Massachusetts, do not, however, match Walker's biography, and we may be better served by calling "To Hell with Dying" an example of "autofictography."

"To Hell with Dying" works beautifully as a children's story. A first-person narrative, it embodies the charm and magic of the narrator's youth as tempered by the perspective of experience and adulthood, and it is told with an innocence that is knowing rather than naive. Mr. Sweet's essential goodness may be the center of the story, but it exists alongside more negative aspects of his existence. From her earliest childhood the narrator has been aware of these, including his alcoholism, lost ambition, occasional fits of depression, largely unhappy marriage to Miss Mary, shiftless son who may not even be his own, and long lost love "now living in Chi-cago, or De-stroy, Michigan." In this sense "To Hell with Dying" is a truly bittersweet story. That Mr. Sweet finds acceptance and support in his community bears ample witness of its tolerance and of Walker's own value system, especially as the members of the community allow him a relationship with their children: "He had great respect for my mother for she never held his drunkenness against him and would let us play with him even when he was about to fall in the fireplace from drink…. His ability to be drunk and sober at the same time made him an ideal playmate, for he was as weak as we were and we could usually best him in wrestling, all the while keeping a fairly coherent conversation going."

Indeed, Mr. Sweet's relationship with the children makes the ritual of his deathbed revivals possible, as if the children's proximity to birth and the freshness of their lives can somehow pull him backward toward them and away from death's door. "To hell with dying, man," the narrator's father proclaimed at Mr. Sweet's bedside—after the physician had done what he could and had warned them away from the "death room"—"these children want Mr. Sweet." The children then swarm all over Mr. Sweet's bed to tickle him back to life. In their childish innocence they do not question the ultimate efficacy of their "revivaling" and suppose that their power over death is universal and not restricted to Mr. Sweet: "It did occur to us that if our own father had been dying we could not have stopped it, that Mr. Sweet was the only person over whom we had power." Whether this power is indeed divine or merely given by Mr. Sweet is not clear in the narrative. What is clear, however, is that the power has a limited efficacy, for it finally fails to save him on his 90th birthday even though the now 24-year-old narrator immediately rushes to his bedside, as she had so many times before. Perhaps she herself has grown too old to cheat death and nature yet again. In any case Mr. Sweet must have sensed the inevitable, for he had arranged some months before to have her father give her his guitar: "He had known that even if I came next time he would not be able to respond in the old way. He did not want me to feel that my trip had been for nothing." The inheritance from Mr. Sweet, the guitar on which he had played the blues for so long and the symbol of his one great talent, tempers the final loss and represents a passing on of the artistic, creative impulse from Mr. Sweet to the narrator. As she plucks the strings and hums "Sweet Georgia Brown," she understands that "the magic of Mr. Sweet lingered still in the smooth wooden box." It also lingers in the short story "To Hell with Dying," and perhaps that is the real "revivaling" power in operation here—the power of art.

—Phillip A. Snyder