The Third Life of Grange Copeland

The Third Life of Grange Copeland is a novel by Alice Walker, published in 1970. The story explores violence both within poor black communities, perpetrated by members of those communities on each other, and outside those communities by racist, supremacist forces.

The story begins with a young boy named Brownfield standing with his mother, Margaret, and his father, Grange, waving goodbye to his uncle Silas and Aunt Marilyn and their children as they drive away. Brownfield is embarrassed by the condition of the dirt road outside his humble house, which is not treating his uncle’s fancy new car very well. Brownfield sees the relative wealth of his cousins and believes that in the North, away from the South, black people can live free and prosperous lives.

Grange is a sharecropper who began his life with Margaret optimistic and assuming success but who has curdled over the years as his debt has grown to proportions that doom any dreams of a better life. Grange does not own the land he works, and the portion of his crop that the landlord takes leaves him barely able to survive each year. Grange is frustrated and angry, rarely speaks to his son, and is frequently drunk and violent both towards Margaret and Brownfield.



Grange begins sleeping with a prostitute in town, Josie. Josie has a niece named Mem who has been to school, and who speaks with an elegance and polish that impresses people. This shocks Margaret, who begins to behave in ways designed to enrage her husband, most notably by sleeping with white men. When Margaret becomes pregnant and delivers a light-skinned baby obviously fathered by a white man, Grange leaves her and the children and heads north, hoping to escape the poverty and racism he lives in. Margaret despairs when her husband leaves, and kills the newborn child and commits suicide. Brownfield finds himself abandoned and alone.

Brownfield is determined to not repeat his father’s mistakes, beginning with his decision not to work for the landlord and become mired in debt the way his father was. He meets Josie, and without realizing that she is the woman who had an affair with Grange, he begins seeing her romantically as well, and thus meets Mem. Brownfield falls in love with the beautiful, educated girl.

Mem is optimistic, and longs for a life of middle-class stability. Brownfield unwittingly starts down the same path as his father; needing to support Mem and the children she soon has with him, he takes on a sharecropper’s role just as his father did, starting off hopeful that he will be able to make enough of a living to give his young family a start. Just like his father, however, he begins to slide into debt and hopelessness as the rigged sharecropping system works against him and frustrates every attempt to break free. Mem manages to secure jobs for her and Brownfield as well as a decent house; this makes Brownfield angry as he sees it as an insult that his wife feels the need to make arrangements for them. In an alcohol-fueled rage, Brownfield beats his wife Mem to death; he is arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail.



Up north, Grange Copeland lives his second life. He finds that the North, instead of a bastion of racial equality and opportunity, is almost as oppressively racist as the South, but without the explicit legal and social structures of the latter. He becomes increasingly angry as he slowly realizes how the whole system of modern life is designed to oppress and control him. One day he walks through a park and sees a white woman struggling in the water; she is drowning. Grange initially thinks to rescue her, but then he stops himself and watches as she drowns. He imagines her to be the entire system that has hurt him, and he views allowing her to drown—essentially committing murder—to represent the destruction of that system’s hold on him. Grange considers himself to be reborn by this act, a new man. He returns to the South, where his granddaughter Ruth is as alone as Brownfield was. Grange decides to commit his third life to his granddaughter in an attempt to change the patterns that have doomed him and his son to misery and violence. He visits Brownfield and confesses his guilt, acknowledging that his behavior drove Margaret to suicide and indirectly drove Brownfield to murder his wife.

Grange cares for Ruth and refuses to let her work. He buys her expensive dresses and books, and Ruth believes she is special in part because of how her grandfather treats her. Ruth begins to become interested in and involved with the Civil Rights movement beginning to gain momentum in the South.

Brownfield is let out of prison and asserts his parental authority over Ruth, demanding that Grange let him have her. Grange is determined to save Ruth, and when Brownfield comes to confront them, Grange kills his son in order to ensure Ruth’s freedom.