Interview of Alice Walker, writer of The Color Purple. 

Walker: “May Pool was my great great great grandmother who lived to be 125 so the legend goes: which means she lived from 1795 right through the next century. She died when my father was 11. This was told to us as a wonderful story because she apparently got off the boat as an enslaved person in Virginia and there were two children with no one to take care of them. And she apparently put one child on one hip and one child on the other hip and she walked in a slave coffle which means she was chained by the neck to the person in front of her and to the person behind her. And she carried those children all of those miles. And that is when I decided to be Alice Walker, in honor of her walk, I would remain Alice Walker (Walker’s maiden name).”

(03:48; In Depth with Alice Walker; C-SPAN)

Link to full interview: https://www.c-span.org/video/?203000-1/depth-alice-walker&start=216