In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1973. The thirteen stories announce Walker’s central subject — the interior lives of Black women — with an authority and specificity that made the collection immediately influential. The women in these stories are wives, mothers, daughters, lovers, churchgoers, and artists; they live in the rural South and the urban North; they are young and old, educated and illiterate, devout and secular. What unites them is the double bind of being Black and female in America: subject to racial oppression from white society and gendered oppression from Black men, yet possessed of a resilience and creativity that these structures cannot entirely suppress.
“Everyday Use” — the collection’s most anthologized story — dramatizes the conflict between two sisters over a family quilt: Dee (who has renamed herself Wangero in an embrace of African identity) wants the quilt as an art object; Maggie, who stayed home and learned to quilt from their mother, will use it as a blanket. The story is Walker’s most compressed statement about the difference between cultural heritage as performance and cultural heritage as lived practice.
“Roselily” opens the collection with a tour de force of interior monologue: a Southern Black woman’s thoughts during her wedding ceremony to a Northern Muslim man, each paragraph interrupted by phrases from the marriage service, creating a counterpoint between public ritual and private terror. The formal innovation is characteristic of Walker’s approach throughout: she works within realist conventions but bends them toward her subjects’ needs.
Collecting In Love and Trouble
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1973): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100
- Signed: $200–$500