All in the Mix.(interview of Rebecca Walker)(Interview)

A CONVERSATION WITH WRITER REBECCA WALKER

Rebecca Walker flies into the upscale San Francisco restaurant 45 minutes late, enveloped in a long black leather jacket and stylish sunglasses. She greets me with an apologetic warm smile and goes on about the Bay Bridge traffic, the toxins around her home in Berkeley, Calif., her cat who just died of cancer, her hectic touring schedule and how bored she is by the formalities of the face-toface interview. "I've been so buttoned up for the last few months, I just feel like everything I do is so fucking serious," she says as she changes her order and requests a lunchtime Cosmopolitan rather than a glass of champagne.

Calling herself a lightweight, Walker stops drinking halfway through her cocktail and talks about the trials of touring. "I just came yesterday from Arkansas, Minneapolis and eastern Michigan:' she says. "I spoke in Mankato [Minn.], which is this really depressed town. ... The second I got there I felt like something was really deeply wrong with this place. The woman who brought me out was saying that there was one of the biggest massacres of Native Americans in that area. ... So, it's weird like that - to go to all these different places and just get these different hits of these environments and cultures."

At age 31, she has just finished a whirlwind tour of her first book, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, a book that has generated a buzz among a wide audience. The daughter of African-American novelist Alice Walker and Jewish civil-rights lawyer Mel Leventhal, Walker offers an honest personal narrative of what it was like for her to grow up biracial in a race-obsessed world.

Over a bowl of garlic soup, greens and a side of polenta, Walker speaks fondly of her life as a child of an interracial couple who were active in the Civil Rights movement in the segregated South. "As long as my parents were …