by Alice Walker
They had an old 1947 Packard, black, chromeless, which they parked on the street near the courthouse. The courthouse was in the center of the square in the middle of town. It was red brick, made something like a big dusty box. Its corners were decorated with concrete cornices full of ornate scrolls: the steps were tall and wide, though hopelessly unimpressive. They were beginning to crack.
Because it was a Saturday morning few people were in town. The cotton farmers and dairymen would come in later. On the top of the steps Ruth turned for a last look at the town.
“I wish they’d move their damn stone soldier,” she said, glaring at the Southern soldier facing his old and by now indifferent enemy of the North. “I can’t see what time it is.” There was a new electric clock the size of a stop sign across the street in the window of the drugstore, but the stone soldier’s meager hips were enough to cover it.
“But I got my watch,” Grange said with some surprise, drawing out a heavy gold watch on a chain. Then he took her elbow firmly, too firmly for her to pull away. “Don’t you worry,” he said, shaking her gently. “I wouldn’t be worth nothing if I couldn’t take care of my own. And I want you to always remember—you is my own.” Grange kissed her on the top of her hair, lightly, and they walked together into the house of justice.
The judge was a kindly eyed, sallow-faced condescending water sportsman. A picture of him holding a fat glistening string of fish was the “in color” photograph that graced the front of the Baker County Messenger the week before. His face was the alert, watchful and yet benign face of a man who had started out in life with nothing and who had added positions as he added weight until he came to rest with heavy jowls and a judgeship in the same county where he was born penniless fifty years before. Behind his benign look was a door, never publicly opened, which led back into a soul so empty of charity and so full of dusty conceits that his townspeople could hardly have stood the sight. Not that their own souls’ doors were securely fastened enough to allow them to wonder about someone else’s. Even that of their judge. All in all, however, he was not a bad man, as bad men in the South go. He had never personally trafficked in violence; he had not even strenuously condoned it. He had, however, meted out unjust sentences and had been the beneficiary of much yard labor and housework which the city paid for and which he was able to secure from his position on the bench. In short, he was a petty person, with all the smallness of mind that went with being so. He was capable of stealing the labor of innocent people, almost always black, sometimes poor white, but was not capable of stealing large sums of money. Because of this honesty his townspeople respected him and made him a deacon in the First Presbyterian Church. Among the black boys for whom he felt responsible he was affectionately known as “Judge Harry.” His relationship with the “nigras” was generally good.
It was over so quickly! The judge showed them to his colored chambers. He and Brownfield exchanged jovialities. Grange stared beyond them, his face pale.
“How old are you, Ruth?” the judge asked.
“Sixteen.”
“You won’t be a grown woman in the state of Georgia till you’re two years older,” the judge said.
The room was quiet, except for Josie’s breathing. She wheezed.
“You want to be with your real daddy, don’t you, Ruth?” the judge asked kindly, looking at her with eyes that neither asked questions nor cared about answers.
“No, sir,” she said firmly.
Grange started to speak of his sons criminal record, of his neglect of his children, of his threats.
“This man killed his wife, your Honor!” said Grange, out of order.
“Now, I didn’t ask you nothing yet,” the judge said pleasantly, hurt. “You don’t have no right to go making unsolicited speeches in my chambers.” He looked at Brownfield solemnly and winked. Ruth knew it was over for her and Grange; she held tightly to her grandfather’s hand. She could not look up into his face for she could feel the tremors running through his body and knew he was crying.
“Hush,” she whispered under her breath, “hush, old baby.” His breath caught in a sob; she knew it was from helplessness. Ruth was so angry she couldn’t cry.
What the judge and Brownfield and Josie were doing was not important to Ruth. Not while she leaned her soul toward Grange and encouraged him to share her resignation. When she looked at the judge again he was taking a pair of tall slick boots from a closet near his desk.
“But no rough stuff now, Brown, you hear me?” He was smiling in that way Southern white men smile when they control everything—birth, life and death. Ruth hated him forever. She had been given in all speedy “justice” to a father who’d never wanted her by a man who knew and cared nothing about them. Any of them. Just a man who was allowed to play God. Ruth felt something hot standing in front of her. It was Josie, flushed and vermillion.
“You got to go with your daddy now,” she said, relieved, and Ruth was annoyed to see a pitying tear in Josie’s eyes.
“But don’t worry,” Josie continued, venturing to sit on the bench next to Grange, “I’ll take care of him.”
Brownfield came toward them grinning. “Got you this time,” he said, gloating.
Grange slowly raised his head and slowly stood. He looked down coldly at his son. One thumb strayed to and fro under his belt.
“Touch her and I lay you out,” he said; with one long arm he pushed Ruth behind him. Brownfield looked around for Judge Harry, who was just going toward the door.
“Judge Harry!” Brownfield called confidently. Judge Harry glanced back, took in the situation and walked purposefully to the door. Grange’s next words were like a cold blast against his back.
“Halt, Justice!” said Grange. The contempt in his voice was as tangible as the floor on which the judge stood.
Brownfield made a lunge for Ruth and managed to catch her arm for half a second. Then he felt himself thrown back as if by a great gush of wind. He saw lightning and thought he smelled a bitter smoke. He sank limply to the floor and did not manage to get a word out before he died. Underneath his flared tail coat Grange had carried his blue steel Colt .45. With it he had shot down his son.
“You can’t do this in a court of law,” the judge began to babble; he was still holding his fishing boots. His eyes bulged when he saw Brownfield’s blood spreading along the floor.
“Shet up, Justice,” said Grange, “or you sure ’nough going to be deaf, dumb and blind.” He grabbed Ruth by the arm, stepped around Josie, who was sobbing over Brownfield, and headed for the door.
“We’ll catch you, Copeland,” said the judge. “You can’t run away.”
“I ain’t running away,” said Grange, briefly, “I’m going home, and the first one of you crackers that visit me is going to get the rest of what I got in this gun.”
“We don’t have a chance,” said Ruth, as they raced home, sirens already sounding behind them.
“I ain’t,” said Grange, “but you do.” He ran his hand over his eyes. “A man what’d do what I just did don’t deserve to live. When you do something like that you give up your claim.” He slumped on the seat. “And what about that judge?” he asked bitterly. “Who will take care of him?”
Out of the car and into the house they ran. Police cars were racing down the dirt road to the house. Grange combed the house for guns and took off in a trot through the woods toward the cabin. Immediately cars circled the house; Ruth waited quietly on the bed. Grange had not even left her gun, knowing as she knew that she would live longer without it, at least in this battle. Ruth heard the men begin the sweep toward the house and then she heard a shot from far back in the woods. Grange leading the police away from her. Suddenly the air rang with the rush of bullets and a few minutes later, just as suddenly, everything was still.
To a person peeking it would have seemed that Grange prayed, sitting there dying outside the cabin that had been Ruth’s “house,” with the sun across his knees, and his back against a tree. But if it wa
s a prayer, how strange it was; for it was all about himself, and his deliverance to and from, and his belief in and out. Actually it was a curse.
It is true he opened his mouth wide in a determined attempt to pray. So near the end of the journey it seemed appropriate, as a drink is an appropriate end to a long dry poker game. But it was not, in fact, to be the case with Grange. He could not pray, therefore he did not.
He had been shot and felt the blood spreading under his shirt. He did not want Ruth to see. Other than that he was not afraid. He did not even hear the rustle of footsteps creeping nearer.
“Oh, you poor thing, you poor thing,” he murmured finally, desolate, but also for the sound of a human voice, bending over to the ground and then rearing back, rocking himself in his own arms to a final sleep.
Afterword by Alice Walker
I BEGAN WRITING The Third Life of Grange Copeland during the winter of 1966. I had an apartment on St. Mark’s Place in New York, in the East Village, dank, poorly lighted, with a large intimidating colony of resident roaches; and so I spent most of my time in the room of a young law student at NYU whom I had met in Mississippi while working in the Civil Rights Movement the summer before. His room was small, but a large double window opened out just above the treetops of Washington Square. He brought a metal folding table from his mother’s house in Brooklyn and we covered it with a madras bedspread; we made sure that a brown earthenware vase a former classmate gave me, when I graduated from Sarah Lawrence a few weeks before, was always full of white daisies or, in spring, pink peonies. The table was placed beneath the window, the trees and grass of the park were in front of me, the flowers always to my right, my notebook and typewriter at my fingertips. Still, it was not the country, and the people in the novel complained.
Shortly before I married the young law student, I applied to and was accepted as a fellow [sic] by the McDowell Colony in rural New Hampshire. There I labored through a month and a half of snowy winter, the silence of my fir tree–encircled cabin broken only by the tapping of my typewriter, and the singing of Clara Ward and Mahalia Jackson, which mingled with the crackle of the fire. On weekends the law student drove up to visit, his tiny red Volkswagen stuffed to the windows with flowers, grapefruit and oranges.
I wrote several chapters of the novel while at McDowell, but I left in March to be married. My husband and I moved to Mississippi that summer, where he continued his legal activities in behalf of human and civil rights while I wrote textbook materials for the fledgling Headstart schools that were being set up all over the state, taught at two local colleges, and did other, more expressly political, work. I also continued to carry the novel forward. It was completed in November of 1969, three days before my only child, a daughter, was born. I was twenty-five.
It was an incredibly difficult novel to write, for I had to look at, and name, and speak up about violence among black people in the black community at the same time that all black people (and some whites)—including me and my family—were enduring massive psychological and physical violence from white supremacists in the southern states, particularly Mississippi. I will always be grateful that the people involved in the liberation of black people in the South almost never spoke of expediency, but always of justice, of telling the truth, of standing up and being counted, of fighting for one’s rights, of not letting nobody turn you round. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” they said. “Everybody’s got a right to the tree of life,” they said. “We want our freedom and we want it now,” they said. Black women and children did not merely echo these expressions, they, along with black men, formulated them.
But even so, given the amount of pain involved in the thinking about, and in telling, why write such a novel?
The simplest answer is, perhaps, that I could not help it. A more complicated one is that I am a woman of African heritage and so naturally I insist on all the freedoms. Why not?
The most disturbing incident in the novel, the brutal murder of a woman and mother by her husband and the father of her children, is unfortunately based on a real case. In my small hometown of Eatonton, Georgia, there was when I was growing up, and there still is now, an incredible amount of violence. “Eatonton is a violent little town,” is what is said by the locals when all other attempts to explain some recent disaster have proved useless. The black people there, as in so many parts of the world, are an oppressed colony, and as one of our great African-American writers has said (and I paraphrase), in their frustration and rage they of course kill each other. But what, I wondered, would happen if you could show the people in the oppressed colony the futility of this? In any case, perhaps the violence of my hometown was impressed upon me even more than upon many others because I visited the local black funeral home several times a week. I had a job as babysitter right next door, and my sister worked in the funeral home itself, as beautician and cosmetologist. On one side of the hall she shampooed, pressed and curled the hair of the living, on the other side she did the same for countless cadavers; she also made up their faces and sometimes bodies, covering bruises, cuts, gunshot wounds, scratches and tears as best she could with her magic tricks arsenal of assorted powders and paints.
But even she was unable to do much for the victim around whose demise this story is built. Needing to share her frustration and, I assumed, outrage (we never discussed how she felt), she invited me into the room where Mrs. Walker (same last name as ours) lay stretched on a white enamel table with her head on an iron pillow. I describe her in the novel exactly as she appeared to me then. Writing about it years later was the only way I could be free of such a powerful and despairing image. Still, I see it; not so much the shattered face—time has helped to erase the vividness of that sight—but always and always the one calloused foot, the worn, run-over shoe with a ragged hole, covered with newspaper, in its bottom.
Another irony: Mrs. Walker’s daughter was one of my classmates. Her name was Kate. Was this not the name of my own grandmother, also shot to death by a “lover”? And who, in whispered family conversations, was somehow blamed for this? I think I must have spent the rest of the school year staring at Kate as at an apparition. When I offered my sympathy (a Southern expression, so sweet, if ineffectual, “to offer one’s sympathy”) she barely responded. The weight of caring for the household and for numerous siblings now rested on her. She was, like me, thirteen years old. She wondered aloud if they, the white prison authorities, the only kind there were and probably still are, in Eatonton, would let her father out of prison soon. He was the only means of support the family had. By now her father’s violence haunted my dreams; I never wanted him to be let out.
In my immediate family too there was violence. Its roots seemed always to be embedded in my father’s need to dominate my mother and their children and in her resistance (and ours), verbal and physical, to any such domination. Discussing this with my husband, who came from a different culture entirely (or so I thought) from mine, I discovered there had also been precisely the same kind of violence in his family. Seeing the dead body of Mrs. Walker there on the enamel table, I realized that indeed, she might have been my own mother and that perhaps in relation to men she was also symbolic of all women, not only including my husband’s grandmother and mother, who were as different from my own, I had thought, as possible, but also of me. That is why she is named Mem, in the novel, after the French la mime, meaning “the same.”
How can a family, a community, a race, a nation, a world, be healthy and strong if one half dominates the other half through threats, intimidation and actual acts of violence? Living as I was in Mississippi it was easy to see how racist violence sapped the strength and creativity of the entire population. Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation not because of the federal government’s meddling in its affairs, beginning with the Civil War, as white apologists for the state’s poverty at the drop of a hat exclaimed, but because every tiny surplus of energy not used in immediate living day-to-day was put into maintaining a hypocritical, artif
icial and basically untenable separation of the races, with domination of black people attained through violence. Beatings, castrations, lynchings, arrests or imprisonments were daily events, as they are now in a similarly doomed racist society in South Africa. It is almost bitterly comic today, as we see our exploited, poisoned, depleted planet wobbling underneath our collective weight, to think that white supremacists have actually thought, and in places still think, that they can acquire peace and security for themselves in the world by dispossessing people of color.
Mrs. Walker was half of her world, as people of color are more than half of the people on the planet. Could I make the reader realize this fact, and see the connection between her oppression as a woman (and the oppression of her children) and ours as a people? Could I make the reader care? Is grief alone to be our profit from experiencing tragedies that few people wish to see? And what of the writer s duty to those who fall, pitiful, poor, ill-used, under an embarrassed pall of silence?
“We own our own souls, don’t we?” the beautiful old man, Grange Copeland, demands of his son, Brownfield, who unfortunately cannot answer this question in the affirmative any more than our current legion of community drug users and dealers can. Their self-hatred and sense of futility is the same as Brownfield’s, as is their violence against others, though now stretching beyond mere family members and menacing entire peoples, entire worlds.
In a society in which everything seems expendable, what is to be cherished, protected at all costs, defended with one’s life? I am inclined to believe, sadly, that there was a greater appreciation of the value of ones soul among black peopie in the past than there is in the present; we have become more like our oppressors than many of us can bear to admit. The expression “to have soul,” so frequently spoken by our ancestors to describe a person of stature, used to mean something. To have money, to have power, to have fame, even to have “freedom,” is not at all the same. An inevitable daughter of the people who raised and guided me, in whom I perceived the best as well as the worst, I believe wholeheartedly in the necessity of keeping inviolate the one interior space that is given to all. I believe in the soul. Furthermore, I believe it is prompt accountability for one’s choices, a willing acceptance of responsibility for one’s thoughts, behavior and actions, that makes it powerful. The white man’s oppression of me will never excuse my oppression of you, whether you are man, woman, child, animal or tree, because the self that I prize refuses to be owned by him. Or by anyone.