All About Alice Walker, Tracy Chapman’s Messy Love Affair

In recognition of Pride Month, we thought we’d revisit the little-known love story between critically acclaimed author Alice Walker and the reclusive, Grammy-award-winning singer Tracy Chapman. And trust us when we tell you, this is some interesting lore to explore.

As you know, Walker’s claim to fame in the literary world and in culture at large is due to her 1982 book, “The Color Purple.” The influential body of work—which centers around a young Black woman in the South who endures abuse while on a quest to find freedom and her own voice—put Walker on the map and eventually turned into an acclaimed film of the same name just three years later.

However, it would be another three years that Walker would find love in Chapman, who burst onto the music scene in 1988 with her self-titled debut album and hit single “Fast Car.” While the song itself was immaculate, its popularity (and Chapman’s talents, by extension) blew up thanks to a last-minute opportunity to perform at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday tribute in June of that same year.

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And it was thanks to that same song that the brilliant Walker started taking a liking to Chapman, as she told Gayle King in an interview in April 2022.

“It was her voice. There are some voices in our culture that can carry the whole culture and really make an emotional sense of it and liberate you into a deep love,” Walker said at the time.

The famed author also went into more detail about her relationship with Chapman in her 2022 memoir, “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker,” detailing how they were together for two years, various sit-downs and conversations they’d have, and more. And though that all sounds sweet—the book fails to mention some of the more intricate and alleged messy details of their relationship. But lucky for you, we’ve got them to share.

For starters, not many people recognized that, at the time the two women got together, there was a 20-year age gap between them, with Walker near 50 and Chapman nearing 30. And while Walker has described the relationship as “lovely, “delicious,” and “wonderful,” we’re pretty sure her daughter Rebecca feels differently about it.

What does Walker’s daughter have to do with her mother’s relationship to Chapman, you may ask? Well, beyond a very public and pretty messy 1996 business dispute over a cybercafé (we’ll get to that in a second), the internet has spun Rebecca and Chapman into a much more salacious narrative. According to unverified rumors that circulated in the New York rumor mills back then, Rebecca was allegedly romantically involved with the “Fast Car” singer first, before her mother “swooped in.”

But while that sounds like the perfect storyline for a Bravo show or Lifetime movie, there is no public evidence supporting the long-circulating claim that Chapman was first involved with Rebecca and later with Alice Walker. Given the lack of publicly available reporting corroborating the claim and the fact that none of the aforementioned parties have ever spoken about anything remotely related to this—the rumor remains unverified.

What we do know, however, is that Rebecca and her mother had a very long, estranged relationship before eventually reconciling. This is evidenced by Rebecca’s 2000 memoir “Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self.” In the book, Rebecca didn’t mince words about her issues with her mother, describing how she felt Alice was emotionally distant and ambivalent towards her existence.

Their bond was further harmed after Alice told her in her 20s that she “chose to love her” as her mother and later refused to apologize for any past hurt she caused, telling her that she was no longer interested in “the job of mother.”

As if that wasn’t enough to raise eyebrows everywhere, as we mentioned a bit ago, things got even messier in January 1996 after Rebecca and another Black woman opened a cybercafé in Brooklyn. In a twist you wouldn’t believe, Chapman was one of the financial backers of the establishment, per the New York Times, dishing out $60,000 to help open the business. However, when she didn’t get the return on her investment on time, Chapman called in her loan and subsequently sent local authorities to seize “$1,500 in payroll money, its espresso machine, cash register, office computer, microwave, two coffee urns, five tables and 25 chairs.”

And while that ordeal definitely soured Rebecca and Chapman’s friendship, the ending of Alice and Chapman’s relationship unfortunately saw a similarly bad demise. According to YouTuber GABI U.K., the tension between the author and the singer started growing due to Chapman’s need for privacy in their relationship and Alice’s opposite feelings. With them not seeing eye to eye on things, it started to put a strain on both of them, to the point where things got toxic.

Chapman even subtly aired out her feelings about their relationship (which ended in the early 90s) in her 2000 song “Telling Stories,” which many believed to have been about Alice and their issues. Part of the lyrics read: “There is fiction in the space between/The lines on your page of memories/Write it down, but it doesn’t mean/You’re not just telling stories.” Whew, now that sounds like shade, albeit of the poetic kind.

For what it’s worth, over the years, Chapman has publicly said absolutely nothing about her relationship with Alice or Rebecca, and given what we know about her famously private way of living—we’re sure she never will.