You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

by Alice Walker

  (He remembers only the freedom he felt there, not her long standing before the window of the plastic doll shop.) And if she is going to make a lot of new connections with dykes and whites, where will that leave him, the black man, the most brutalized and oppressed human being on the face of the earth? (Is it because he can now ogle white women in freedom and she has no similar outlet of expression that he thinks of her as still black and himself as something else? This thought underlines what he is actually saying, and his wife is unaware of it.) Didn’t she know it is over these very same white bodies he has been lynched in the past, and is lynched still, by the police and the U.S. prison system, dozens of times a year even now!?

  The wife has cunningly saved Tracey A. Gardner’s essay for just this moment. Because Tracey A. Gardner has thought about it all, not just presently, but historically, and she is clear about all the abuse being done to herself as a black person and as a woman, and she is bold and she is cold—she is furious. The wife, given more to depression and self-abnegation than to fury, basks in the fire of Gardner’s high-spirited anger. She begins to read:

  Because from my point of view, racism is everywhere, including in the women’s movement, and the only time I really need to say anything about it is when I do not see it…and the first time that happens, I will tell you about it.

  The husband, surprised, thinks this very funny, not to say pertinent. He slaps his knee and sits up. He is dying to make some sort of positive dyke comment, but nothing comes to mind.

  American slavery relied on the denial of the humanity of Black folks, and the undermining of our sense of nationhood and family, on the stripping away of the Black man’s role as protector and provider, and on the structuring of Black women into the American system of white male domination.…

  “In other words,” she says, “white men think they have to be on top. Other men have been known to savor life from other positions.”

  The end of the Civil War brought the end of a certain “form” of slavery for Black folks. It also brought the end of any “job security” and the loss of the protection of their white enslaver. Blacks were now free game, and the terrorization and humiliation of Black people, especially Black men, began anew. Now the Black man could have his family and prove his worth, but he had no way to support or protect them, or himself.…

  As she reads, he feels ashamed and senses his wife’s wounded embarrassment, for him and for herself. For their history together. But doggedly, she continues to read:

  After the Civil War, popular justice, which meant there usually was no trial and no proof needed, began its reign in the form of the castration, burning at the stake, beheading, and lynching of Black men. As many as 5,000 white people would turn out to witness these events, as though going to a celebration. [She pauses, sighs: beheading?] Over 2,000 Black men were lynched in a 10 year period from 1889–99. There were also a number of Black women lynched. [She reads this sentence quickly and forgets it.] Over 50% of the lynched Black males were charged with rape or attempted rape.

  He cannot imagine a woman being lynched. He has never even considered the possibility. Perhaps this is why the image of a black woman chained and bruised excites rather than horrifies him? It is the fact that the lynching of her body has never stopped that forces the wife, for the time being, to blot out the historical record. She is not prepared to connect her own husband with the continuation of that past. She reads:

  If a Black man had sex with a consenting white woman, it was rape. [Why am I always reading about, thinking about, worrying about, my man having sex with white women? she thinks, despairingly, underneath the reading.] If he insulted a white woman by looking at her, it was attempted rape.

  “Yes,” he says softly, as if in support of her dogged reading, “I’ve read Ida B.—what’s her last name?”

  “By their lynchings, the white man was showing that he hated the Black man carnally, biologically; he hated his color, his features, his genitals. Thus he attacked the Black man’s body, and like a lover gone mad, maimed his flesh, violated him in the most intimate, pornographic fashion.…” I believe that this obscene, inhuman treatment of Black men by white men, has a direct correlation to white men’s increasingly obscene and inhuman treatment of women, particularly white women, in pornography and real life. White women, working towards their own strength and identity, their own sexuality, have in a sense become uppity niggers. As the Black man threatens the white man’s masculinity and power, so now do women.

  “That girl’s on to something,” says the husband, but thinks, for the first time in his life, that when he is not thinking of fucking white women—fantasizing over Jiveboy or clucking at them on the street—he is very often thinking of ways to humiliate them. Then he thinks that, given his history as a black man in America, it is not surprising that he has himself confused fucking them with humiliating them. But what does that say about how he sees himself? This thought smothers his inward applause for Gardner, and instead he casts a bewildered, disconcerted look at his wife. He knows that to make love to his wife as she really is, as who she really is—indeed, to make love to any other human being as they really are—will require a soul-rending look into himself, and the thought of this virtually straightens his hair.

  His wife continues:

  Some Black men, full of the white man’s perspective and values, see the white woman or Blond Goddess as part of the American winning image. Sometimes when he is with the Black woman, he is ashamed of how she has been treated and how he has been powerless, and that they have always had to work together and protect each other. [Yes, she thinks, we were always all we had, until now. He thinks: We are all we have still, only now we can live without permitting ourselves to know this.] Frantz Fanon said about white women, “By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. I marry the culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.” [She cannot believe he meant to write “white dignity.”]

  She pauses, looks at her husband: “So how does a black woman feel when her black man leaves Playboy on the coffee table?”

  For the first time he understands fully a line his wife read the day before: “The pornography industry’s exploitation of the black woman’s body is qualitatively different from that of the white woman,” because she is holding the cover of Jivers out to him and asking: “What does this woman look like?”

  What he has refused to see—because to see it would reveal yet another area in which he is unable to protect or defend black women—is that where white women are depicted in pornography as “objects,” black women are depicted as animals. Where white women are depicted at least as human bodies if not beings, black women are depicted as shit.

  He begins to feel sick. For he realizes that he has bought some if not all of the advertisements about women, black and white. And further, inevitably, he has bought the advertisements about himself. In pornography the black man is portrayed as being capable of fucking anything…even a piece of shit. He is defined solely by the size, readiness and unselectivity of his cock.

  Still, he does not know how to make love without the fantasies fed to him by movies and magazines. Those movies and magazines (whose characters’ pursuits are irrelevant or antithetical to his concerns) that have insinuated themselves between him and his wife, so that the totality of her body, her entire corporeal reality is alien to him. Even to clutch her in lust is automatically to shut his eyes. Shut his eyes, and…he chuckles bitterly…dream of England.

  For years he has been fucking himself.

  At first, reading Lorde together, they reject celibacy. Then they discover they need time apart to clear their heads, to search out damage, to heal. In any case, she is unable to fake response; he is unwilling for her to do so. She goes away for a while. Left alone, he soon falls hungrily on the magazines he had thrown out. Strokes himself raw over the beautiful women,
spread like so much melon (he begins to see how stereotypes transmute) before him. But he cannot refuse what he knows—or what he knows his wife knows, walking along a beach in some black country where all the women are bleached and straightened and the men never look at themselves; and are ugly, in any case, in their imitation of white men.

  Long before she returns he is reading her books and thinking of her—and of her struggles alone and his fear of sharing them—and when she returns, it is sixty percent her body that he moves against in the sun, her own black skin affirmed in the brightness of his eyes.

  * “Womanist” approximates “black feminist.”

  Fame

  “IN ORDER TO SEE anything, and therefore to create,” Andrea Clement White was saying to the young woman seated across from her and listening very attentively, “one must not be famous.”

  “But you are famous,” said the young woman, in mock perplexity, for the television cameras.

  “Am I?” asked Andrea Clement White, and then added, “I suppose I am. But not really famous, you know, like…like…” But she could not bring herself to utter a rival’s name, because this would increase the rival’s fame, she felt, while diminishing her own.

  “Your books have sold millions of copies,” the young interviewer was saying. “They’ve been translated into a dozen languages. Into German and Dutch and Portuguese…”

  “Into Spanish and French and Japanese and Italian and Swahili,” Andrea Clement White completed the list for her, omitting, because they never came to mind, Russian, Greek, Polish and Lithuanian.

  “And you’ve made from your work, how much? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Andrea Clement White, in a little girl’s voice that mixed pride with peevishness. “I can’t complain, as to sales.”

  And so the interview continued. A gentle interrogation with no embarrassing questions, because Andrea Clement White was now old and had become an institution and there was never anyone in her presence who did not evince respect.

  “Let me put it this way,” she said. “It is more important that they are people, from the novelist’s point of view. A botanist might say of a flower, it is a red flower. He is really studying flowers.”

  (Her mind had switched to automatic. No one had asked an interesting question in years.)

  If she was famous, she wondered fretfully behind the alert face she raised for television, why didn’t she feel famous? She had made money, as the young woman—lamentably informed in other respects—had said. Lots of money. Thousands upon thousands of dollars. She had seen her work accepted around the world, welcomed even, which was more than she’d ever dreamed possible for it. And yet—there remained an emptiness, no, an ache, which told her she had not achieved what she had set out to achieve. And instead must live out her life always in the shadow of those who had accomplished more than she, or had, in any case, received a wider and more fervid recognition. But, on closer scrutiny, those “others” she immediately thought of—the talk show guests, the much reviewed, the oft quoted—had not received more acclaim or been more praised than she; why then did she feel they had?

  (She knew she would not be satisfied with the interview when it was aired. She would come across as a fatuous, smug know-everything, or as an irritable, spacy old fool. Her chronic dissatisfaction was always captured by television, no matter how cleverly she tried to disguise it as, oh, fatigue, too much to think about, doddering old age, or whatever.)

  She left the studio thinking of the luncheon for her that same afternoon. It was at the college where she’d taught English literature (how she’d struggled to prove Charles Chesnutt wrote in English!) for over a decade. The president would be there and all her colleagues, with whom she’d battled, sometimes successfully, sometimes not (for five years they’d resisted Chesnutt, for example) over the years. They would fulsomely praise her—obliterating from memory the times they’d wished her dead; she would graciously acquiesce. She thought of Cooke, the dean, now retired of course, but unthinkable that he would not show up; how he had always been the first to kiss her whenever she returned from even the slightest triumph, and how she had detested that kiss—his lips rough, cluttered and gluey—and how she had told him, explicitly, her feelings. “But ladies are meant to be kissed!” he replied. She had thrown up her hands—and endured. Or had avoided him, which, because they shared an office, was not easy.

  Then there was Mrs. Hyde, her secretary, also retired from the college though still working for Andrea Clement White in her office at home, who was the closest thing she had to someone to lean on. Any time of the day or night she was able to call on Mrs. Hyde—and Mrs. Hyde seemed to have nothing better to do than serve her. She understood she represented to Mrs. Hyde a glamour utterly missing from her own life, and Andrea Clement White had, over the thirty years of their acquaintanceship, ridiculed Mr. Hyde unmercifully. Because, in truth, she grew used to being served by Mrs. Hyde, had come to expect her service as her due, and was jealous and contemptuous of Mr. Hyde—a dull little man with the flat, sour cheeks of a snake—who provided his wife little of the excitement Andrea Clement White felt was generated spontaneously in her own atmosphere.

  Mrs. Hyde was, in fact, driving the car, Mrs. Clement White seated beside her. And one could tell from the restful silence in the car that they shared a very real life together. If Andrea Clement White sat in the same car with her husband it was clear they shared a life. He was a man who cared little for Literature, having—as he said—married it and seen how crazy it was. But the quality of the silence was quite different. In her husband’s silence there was tension, criticism of her, impatience. He held his tongue the better to make her know what he thought. Mrs. Hyde held hers as a comfort; she knew Mrs. Clement White needed the silence—after an encounter with other people—to settle into herself again.

  “Imagine thinking that black people write only about being black and not about being people.” Andrea Clement White fumed, rummaging through her purse for a tissue. “Disgusting make-up,” she said, running a tissue around her collar and bringing it down a very dark brown. “Can you imagine, as many shades of brown as there are, they have only one jar to cover everything? And one jar, of course, for them, but then they only need one jar.” Mrs. Hyde did not say anything. She drove expertly, smoothly. Enjoying the luxury of the car, a silver Mercedes 350SL. Her foot barely touched the pedal and the car slid along, effortlessly.

  I walked into the studio, Andrea Clement White replayed herself, as she did all the time (someone called this the curse—or was it the blessing?—of the artist; she thought everyone did it), and right away, as usual, I knew it was going to be awful. That the questions would be boring and the interviewer ill read, ahistorical and poorly educated. It was enough when white liberals told you they considered what you said or wrote to be new in the world (and one was expected to fall for this flattery); one never expected them to know one’s history well enough to recognize an evolution, a variation, when they saw it; they meant new to them. But how cutely ignorant the young black woman interviewer had been! “You are the first!” she had boomed—strangely unbleached black voice as yet, but TV would whiten it out—and when Andrea Clement White said, “But there’s no such thing as a first, an absolute first in the area of human relations, only perhaps in Science,” the woman had thought her coy, and had grinned, indulgently. (Andrea Clement White hated to be indulged when she was not seeking indulgence. It was at that point that she switched her mind to automatic.)

  And now the lilacs along the road rushed as if drawn against the silver of the car; and lilacs and television interviewer mixed: there was an image of the interviewer with a sprig of lilacs in her hair. But why so many so far south? Had they been creeping south with the harsher winters? Or had they been here always? Andrea Clement White could not remember. She saw herself among the lilacs on her college campus in upstate New York. I stood drenched in the smell of lilacs. It was my perfume for twenty years,
with one year out for an experiment with patchouli.…

  Mrs. Hyde had stopped the car and reached into the back seat and fetched up the cane that made walking a somewhat more steady affair for Mrs. Clement White. It was a lovely oak cane, hand carved by a famous eighteenth-century carver who fell into the hands of a mistress who demanded twenty such carved canes a week; these she sold in the marketplace in Charleston, and thus, after her husband lost his money gambling and ran off with a woman who supplied him with more, she had supported herself. The carver, sick of carving and unbelieving that the Civil War would free the slaves, and too much of a gentleman to rebel or run away from a helpless white woman who needed him, cut off three fingers from his left hand, “accidentally,” while “branching” a tree. But he had not reckoned on the Scarlett O’Hara persistence of his mistress. She limited the number of canes she expected weekly to fifteen.

  I was standing watching Ben make the canes, thought Andrea Clement White, because I was his daughter. Was I pretty? She thought probably she was. And she had been his other hand until freedom came. Freedom had come and everyone had had ideas about what it was for, even Ben. He had simply died. I was at the burying, of course. It was I, in fact, who dug the grave, along with…then she wondered if she would have had to be a boy to help dig the grave. She saw herself as one. Handsome, was he? She thought probably yes. But then she thought she would not have had to be a boy to do it because she had been doing every kind of work on the plantation as a girl, and no one thought anything of it, so she’d stay a girl. She sighed with relief.

  Rudolph Miller opened the car door on her side and she looked out and up into his lapel. He had the unctuous, shit-eating grin she’d despised for—thirty years. How had she stood it without throwing up? It seemed to be made of wet papier-mâché. Took his hand: dry, plump, old hand, horny nails. Yuck. (Her grandchildren’s expressions came in handy at times like this.) Mrs. Hyde trotted around the car with the cane. So fat, Mrs. Hyde, and given to hyperventilation. But oh, the lilacs! Even here. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed…” Abe Lincoln had probably never dreamed there would be colleges like this, for blacks, in the South. What had he dreamed? To be better looking, she didn’t doubt.