'The Welcome Table' By Alice Walker

Who is Alice Walker? Walker is an African-American Author, civil and a women’s right activist, born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. Walker attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1964, with the assistance of Staughton Lynd, (a historian teacher/friend) transferred to Sarah Lawrence College. Walker is most famous for writing, “The Color Purple” which she won the Pulitzer award for fiction as well as the National Book award for fiction. The themes used in Walker’s work are freedom and individual expression, suicide, spirituality, love, the power of activism, ecology, and civil rights. In 1968 “Once”, was her first published work, which contains poems that were written
The tables’ perimeter is wrapped around good god fearing people, where one is welcomed to sit and speak about life’s joy as well as the wounds sustained. Through the use of irony, the author is able to present the bigotry of the Christians. Irony is a figure of speech where a word’s meaning is different from the actual meaning. The story starts off with an elderly African-American woman dressed in her church clothes. She walks in the cold for a half a mile to attend an all-white church. Upon entering the church, it's apparent that she is not welcomed in the church. The woman is thrown out the church when she then sees Jesus walking down the highway with a sad but joyful look to his face. His face had a glow as if a candle was being held behind him. Jesus told the woman to follow him implying she had died and to follow the light. Alice Walker engages the reader the mockery of Christians through the eyes of the Elderly Black woman by the use of dramatic irony, while despite her treatment holds on to her
For the elderly lady to go to a church and be talked about by people was not Christian like. Walker describes the thoughts and attitudes of the white people. Some feared her, and some of them saw her as an old dog about to croak. To some, she was looked as the help and some saw a sign that the ending of their privacy was coming to an end. They feared the unknown and did not understand her intentions of being at their church.
As the elderly African-American woman steps into the vestibule, the bigotry continues when she is approached by the reverend. The reverend states “Auntie, you know this is not your church?” One would think that in a church discrimination was not existent. Walker also states that the woman had chosen the wrong church, but how can one simply choose the wrong church? The woman was not welcomed at the church because of the color of her skin.
Christians are raised to be honorable, kind, loving, respectable and helpful. In the story, it describes how the husbands placed their fists in the elderly woman’s armpits and threw her out the church. The Christians were blinded by her color and ignored the meaning of Christianity. Alice Walker connects with the reader by exploiting the hypocrisy of Christians. Despite the woman being talked about, discriminated, and thrown out of the house of God. The woman held on to her