The Evolution from Accepted Oppression to Moral Righteousness

of the Title Character in

Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland

OR

You Only Live Thrice

In her novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Alice Walker tells the story of Grange Copeland, a man who lives a life full of degradation and oppression, and accepts it as a natural state. However, because of some extraordinary changes he made in his life, he is able to break out of the rut of socially and personally accepted oppression, and changes his life for the better. Walker's message, shown through the progression of Grange's thoughts and actions, is that it is possible for men to lift themselves out of their constraints, to make a change so drastic that they become seemingly different people.

The story begins in rural Georgia during the 1920's. Grange is a Black sharecropper, living in destitution with his wife, Margaret, and son, Brownfield. From the outset it is plain that they live miserable lives. Grange works all day in an atmosphere of oppression. He is expected to act as though he is the social inferior of his employer, the man who drives the truck, Mr. Shipley.

"When the truck came [Grange's] face froze into an unnaturally

bland mask... A grim stillness settled over his eyes and he

became an object... Some of the workers laughed and joked with

the man who drove the truck, but they looked at his shoes... never

into his eyes." (9)

This passage shows just what kind of racial tension Grange and the others have to live under. To his boss, he truly is an object, and he knows this, "he worked for a cracker and... the cracker owned him" (5). His reaction, to freeze, is one of fear and rage. The fear was of Shipley's superior air, which as Brownfield described, made him seem like something alien, "the man was a man, but entirely different from [Grange]," (10). The rage is over that fear, and the feelings of inadequacy that come with it.

Grange takes his evil feelings out on his family. He dominates them in an attempt to feel more in control himself. Margaret and Brownfield are forced to play the submissive roles to make up for Grange's feelings of lack of manhood around Shipley, and Whites in general. Brownfield states, "his mother was like their dog in some ways. She didn't have a thing to say that did not... show her submission to his father," (6). Grange, at regular intervals "would come home lurching drunk, threatening to kill his wife and Brownfield, stumbling and shooting off his shotgun" (15). His end in this is to replicate what he feels the Whites are doing to him. It is a way to gain some feeling of power through his feelings of subjugation. He needs to seem powerful to someone. But deep down, he knows that abusing his family only hurts himself, as well as them. At the end of each drunken tirade Grange would roll out the door and into the yard, crying like a child in big wrenching sobs," (15). His weeping is his only release. In the end it is too much for him, and he flees north, to New York.

In the North, Grange is overcome by his first change. To Southern Blacks, the North represents some kind of Promised Land. "He had come North expecting those streets paved with gold," (206), but soon receives a rude awakening. Where the South looked contemptuously down on him, in the North " to the people that he met and passed daily he was not even in existence," (206). From this hostile setting came the catalyst for moral change.

While begging in Central Park in the dead of winter, during his third year in New York, he comes upon a pregnant woman, a White. He watches her, and she is soon joined by her lover, a soldier. They speak, and exchange "chaste kisses... as befitted soon-to-be parents," (299). This is a kind of human intimacy that he had not experienced while in the city, and naturally it touches him. After such a long period of isolation in the North, this closeness between the woman and the soldier opens his mind to new ideas. The woman, at this point in the story, comes to symbolize to Grange a kind of unselfish, pure, high emotion. She represents exactly how Grange believes, through his oppressive experiences, that Whites behave, in a way higher than blacks. It is indicative of his first life.

Later, Grange watches as the soldier leaves the woman, the reason being that he already had a wife, and would not leave her. He gives her some money and a ring. She drops both and walks to a pond. "Grange had watched the scene deteriorate from the peak of happiness to the bottom of despair. It was honestly the first human episode he had witnessed between white folks," (210). Because it is the first time, the woman becomes symbolic, and her actions influences his views on Whites as a whole.

Grange picks up the ring and the money, which totals to seven-hundred dollars, and walks over to her, intending to give her three-hundred and the ring. At first she refuses. Then, she demands all of it, "'You ain't going to have any of it; before I let you sneak off with it I'll throw it all into the pond!'", (215).A little later, she drowns in the pond, refusing Grange's saving hand. Her transition form a symbol of pure love into something horrible and human destroys Grange's early misconception that Whites were somehow more than human, and forces him to reevaluate his life.

At this point, the life changing epiphany takes place. The pregnant woman had symbolized to Grange all that was good in Whites. Her contemptuous actions towards him ( which were ironically motivated similarly to his mistreatment of his family, the need to have power over someone when feeling powerless ), destroyed all of that, making her, and all Whites symbols of corruption. Her symbolic transformation and death represents his loss of fear, and of love, "her contempt for him had been the last straw; never again would he care what happened to any of them," (217).

Grange is now in his second life, his fear of Whites has disappeared, his rage, intensified, but different. After the Central Park incident, he spends weeks fighting with any White he sees. He now blames them for the evils he did to his family, "every white face he cracked, he cracked in his sweet wife's name," (221). He is a different man from the poor sharecropper. He screams "teach them to hate!" (218), and his hatred is no longer because of his subjugation. He believes that hatred is the only way to avoid subjugation, the only way to survive. With his newfound philosophy, he returns home to Georgia.

Things have changed since his departure. Margaret is dead, she committed suicide after he left. Brownfield has married, and has fallen into the same trap of oppression and domination that Grange did, setting into a more violent , but otherwise identical, pattern to his father's a few years before. Grange marries a woman, Josie, with money, and buys an isolated farm, self-sufficient and free of Whites, free in his hatred and isolation. In the following years, Brownfield kills his wife, and Grange take custody of Ruth, one of Brownfield's daughters.

Ruth finds a place in Grange's heart. Like the pregnant woman of in the past, Ruth is the catalyst of Grange's transition into his third life, a transition that leads him to a opposite conclusion to his previous one. Ruth is young and new to the world, she has no set ways or bigotries, unlike the pregnant woman. Where the woman inspires hate, Ruth inspires love. He treats her the way he wished he had Brownfield. She is his second chance, and he attempts to make up for his mistakes, and he begins to change again. The exact moment that this transition takes place is not as well defined as the first, but it is noticeable.

Grange's meaning in life begins to change, " the older Grange got the more serene and flatly sure of his mission he became. His one duty in life was to prepare Ruth for some great and herculean task... some harsh and foreboding reality," (279). He also begins to doubt his hate philosophy. Towards the end of the novel, he says to Ruth, " I know the danger of putting al the blame on somebody else for the mess you make out of your life. I fell into the trap myself!" (288). His admission of this shows a metamorphosis of thought, and leads him close to a third life of selflessness. He continues, "you gits... the feeling of doing nothing yourself... and begins to destroy everybody around you, and you blames it on the crackers," (288).

Shortly after this, Grange kills Brownfield to keep him from hurting Ruth, and, in effect, gives his life for hers. Grange's third life, when fully realized, was selfless, and heroic, as he wished his other two had been.

It is important at this point to consider what Walker is trying to say in the novel. Grange's first life is filled with oppression, both on his part and on the part of others, and it is fully accepted by himself and those around him. It takes extraordinary circumstances and a great act of will on his part to overcome it. Grange did not become good in a day, or even after his encounter in Central Park. It took years, and a great desire, an unselfish need for someone else, Ruth, not to go through what he did. In short, it took love, which was always inside him to break through the hatred, and that is what Alice Walker is trying to get across.

Grange Copeland is a composite of three believable personalities that come together to form an unbelievable individual. It is improbable that the first Grange would perform the third's acts. Yet, the way all three are tied together through transition, Grange one through three becomes a very real character. He succeeds, in his death, in lifting himself out of the rut of oppression and hatred he is caught in, and through him, Alice Walker gives a message of hope to us all.