You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

by Alice Walker

  “But even if Freddie Pye had been hired by someone to rape Luna, that still would not explain his second visit.”

  “Probably nothing will explain that,” said Our Muralist. “But assuming Freddie Pye was paid to disrupt—by raping a white woman—the black struggle in the South, he may have wised up enough later to comprehend the significance of Luna’s decision not to scream.”

  “So you are saying he did have a conscience?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said, but his look clearly implied I would never understand anything about evil, power, or corrupted human beings in the modern world.

  But of course he is wrong.

  Laurel

  IT WAS DURING THAT SUMMER in the mid-sixties that I met Laurel.

  There was a new radical Southern newspaper starting up…it was only six months old at the time, and was called First Rebel. The title referred, of course, to the black slave who was rebelling all over the South long before the white rebels fought the Civil War. Laurel was in Atlanta to confer with the young people on its staff, and, since he wished to work on a radical, racially mixed newspaper himself, to see if perhaps First Rebel might be it.

  I was never interested in working on a newspaper, however radical. I agree with Leonard Woolf that to write against a weekly deadline deforms the brain. Still, I attended several of the editorial meetings of First Rebel because while wandering out of the first one, fleeing it, in fact, I’d bumped into Laurel, who, squinting at me through cheap, fingerprint-smudged blue-and-gray-framed bifocals, asked if I knew where the meeting was.

  He seemed a parody of the country hick; he was tall, slightly stooped, with blackish hair cut exactly as if someone had put a bowl over his head. Even his ears stuck out, and were large and pink.

  Really, I thought.

  Though he was no more than twenty-two, two years older than me, he seemed older. No doubt his bifocals added to this impression, as did his nonchalant gait and slouchy posture. His eyes were clear and brown and filled with an appropriate country slyness. It was his voice that held me. It had a charming lilt to it.

  “Would you say that again?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, making it two syllables, the last syllable a higher pitch than the first. “I’m looking for where First Rebel, the newspaper, is meeting. What are you doing?”

  The country slyness was clumsily replaced by a look of country seduction.

  Have mercy! I thought. And burst into laughter.

  Laurel grinned, his ears reddening.

  And so we became involved in planning a newspaper that was committed to combating racism and other violence in the South…(until it ran out of funds and folded three years and many pieces of invaluable investigative journalism later).

  Laurel’s was not a variation of a Southern accent, as I’d at first thought. His ancestors had immigrated to the United States in the early 1800s. They had settled in California because there they found the two things they liked best: wine grapes and apples.

  I’d never heard anything like Laurel’s speech. He could ask a question like “How d’you happen t’ be here?” and it sounded as if two happy but languid children were slowly jumping rope under apple trees in the sun. And on Laurel himself, while he spoke, I seemed to smell apples and the faint woodruffy bouquet of May wine.

  He was also effortlessly complimentary. He would say, as we went through the cafeteria line, “You’re beaut-ti-ful, reel-i,” and it was like hearing it and caring about hearing it for the first time. Laurel, who loved working among the grapes, and had done so up to the moment of leaving the orchards for Atlanta, had dirt, lots of it, under his nails.

  That’s it, I thought. I can safely play here. No one brings such dirty nails home to dinner. That was Monday. By Tuesday I thought that dirty nails were just the right nonbourgeois attribute and indicated a lack of personal concern for appearances that included the smudged bifocals and the frazzled but beautifully fitting jeans; in a back pocket of which was invariably a half-rolled, impressively battered paperback book. It occurred to me that I could not look at Laurel without wanting to make love with him.

  He was the same.

  For a while, I blamed it on Atlanta in the spring…the cherry trees that blossomed around the campus buildings, the wonderful honeysuckle smells of our South, the excitement of being far away from New York City and its never-to-be-gotten-used-to dirt. But it was more: if we both walked into a room from separate doors, even if we didn’t see each other, a current dragged us together. At breakfast neither of us could eat, except chokingly, so intense was our longing to be together. Minus people, table, food.

  A veritable movie.

  Throughout the rest of the week we racked our brains trying to think of a place to make love. But the hotels were still segregated, and once, after a Movement party at somebody’s house, we were severely reprimanded for walking out into the Southern night, blissfully hand in hand.

  “Don’t you know this is outrageous?” a young black man asked us, pulling us into his car, where I sat on Laurel’s lap in a kind of sensual stupor—hearing his words, agreeing with them, knowing the bloody History behind them…but not caring in the least.

  In short, there was no place for us to make love, as that term is popularly understood. We were housed in dormitories. Men in one. Women in another. Interracial couples were under surveillance wherever the poor things raised their heads anywhere in the city. We were reduced to a kind of sexual acrobatics on a bench close beside one of the dormitories. And, as lovers know, acrobatics of a sexual sort puts a strain on one’s powers of physical ingenuity while making one’s lust all the more a resident of the brain, where it quickly becomes all-pervading, insatiable, and profound.

  The state of lust itself is not a happy one if there is no relief in sight. Though I am happy enough to enter that state whenever it occurs, I have learned to acknowledge its many and often devastating limitations. For example, the most monumental issues fade from one’s consciousness as if erased by a swift wind. Movements of great social and political significance seem but backdrops to one’s daily exchanges—be they ever so muted and circumscribed—with the Object of One’s Desire. (I at least was not yet able to articulate how the personal is the political, as was certainly true in Laurel’s and my case. Viz., nobody wanted us to go to bed with each other, except us, and they had made laws to that effect. And of course whether we slept together or not was nobody’s business, except ours.)

  The more it became impossible to be with Laurel, to make love fully and naturally, the more I wanted nothing but that. If the South had risen again during one of our stolen kisses—his hands on my breasts, my hands on his (his breasts were sensitive, we discovered quite by acrobatic invention and accident)—we would have been hard pressed to notice. This is “criminal” to write, of course, given the myths that supposedly make multiracial living so much easier to bear, but it is quite true. And yet, after our week together—passionate, beautiful, haunting, and never, never to be approximated between us again, our desire to make love never to be fulfilled (though we did not know this then)—we went our separate ways. Because in fact, while we kissed and said Everything Else Be Damned! the South was rising again. Was murdering people. Was imprisoning our colleagues and friends. Was keeping us from strolling off to a clean, cheap hotel.

  It was during our last night together that he told me about his wife. We were dancing in a local Movement-oriented nightclub. What would today be called a disco. He had an endearing way of dancing, even to slow tunes (during which we clung together shamelessly); he did a sort of hop, fast or slow depending on the music, from one foot to the other, almost in time with the music—and that was dance to him. It didn’t bother me at all. Our bodies easily found their own rhythms anyway, and touching alone was our reason for being on the floor. There we could make a sort of love, in a dark enough corner, that was not exactly grace but was not, was definitely not, acrobatics.

  He peered at me through the gray-and-blue-framed g
lasses.

  “I’ve got a wife back home.”

  What I’ve most resented as “the other woman” is being made responsible for the continued contentment and happiness of the wife. On our last night together, our lust undiminished and apparently not to be extinguished, given our surroundings, what was I supposed to do with this information?

  All I could think was: She’s not my wife.

  She was, from what little he said, someone admirable. She was away from home for the summer, studying for an advanced degree. He seemed perplexed by this need of hers to continue her education instead of settling down to have his children, but lonely rather than bitter.

  So it was just sex between us, after all, I thought.

  (To be fair, I was engaged to a young man in the Peace Corps. I didn’t mind if it was just sex, since by that time our mutual lust had reached a state, almost, of mysticism.)

  Laurel, however, was tormented.

  (I never told him about my engagement. As far as I was concerned, it remained to be seen whether my engagement was relevant to my relationships with others. I thought not, but realized I was still quite young.)

  That night, Laurel wrung his hands, pulled his strangely cut hair and cried, as we brazenly walked out along Atlanta’s dangerous, cracker-infested streets.

  I cried because he did, and because in some odd way it relieved my lust. Besides, I enjoyed watching myself pretend to suffer.… Such moments of emotional dishonesty are always paid for, however, and that I did not know this at the time attests to my willingness to believe our relationship would not live past the moment itself.

  And yet.

  There was one letter from him to me after I’d settled in a small Georgia town (a) to picket the jailhouse where a local schoolteacher was under arrest for picketing the jailhouse where a local parent was under arrest for picketing the jailhouse where a local child was under arrest for picketing…and (b) to register voters.

  He wrote that he missed me.

  I missed him. He was the principal other actor in all my fantasies. I wrote him that I was off to Africa, but would continue to write. I gave him the address of my school, to which he could send letters.

  Once in Africa, my fiancé (who was conveniently in the next country from mine and free to visit) and I completed a breakup that had been coming for our entire two-year period of engagement. He told me, among other things, that it was not uncommon for Peace Corps men to sleep with ten-year-old African girls. At that age, you see, they were still attractive. I wrote about that aspect of the Peace Corps’ activities to Laurel, as if I’d heard about it from a stranger.

  Laurel, I felt, would never take advantage of a ten-year-old child. And I loved him for it.

  Loving him, I was not prepared for the absence of letters from him, back at my school. Three months after my return I still had heard nothing. Out of depression over this and the distraction schoolwork provided, I was a practicing celibate. Only rarely did I feel lustful, and then of course I always thought of Laurel, as of a great opportunity, much missed. I thought of his musical speech and his scent of apples and May wine with varying degrees of regret and tenderness. However, our week of passion—magical, memorable, but far too brief—gradually assumed a less than central place even in my most sanguine recollections.

  In late November, six months after Laurel and I met, I received a letter from his wife.

  My first thought, when I saw the envelope, was: She has the same last name as his. It was the first time their marriage was real for me. I was also frightened that she wrote to accuse me of disturbing her peace. Why else would a wife write?

  She wrote that on July fourth of the previous summer (six weeks after Laurel and I met) Laurel had had an automobile accident. He was driving his van, delivering copies of First Rebel. He had either fallen asleep at the wheel or been run off the road by local rebels of the other kind. He had sustained a broken leg, a fractured back, and a severely damaged brain. He had been in a coma for the past four months. Nothing could rouse him. She had found my letter in his pocket. Perhaps I would come see him?

  (I was never to meet Laurel’s wife, but I admired this gesture then, and I admire it now.)

  It was a small Catholic hospital in Laurel’s hometown. In the entryway a bloody, gruesome, ugly Christ the color of a rutabaga stood larger than life. Nuns dressed in black and white habits reminded one of giant flies. Floating moonlike above their “wings,” their pink, cherubic faces were kind and comical.

  Laurel’s father looked very much like Laurel. The same bifocals, the same plain clothing, the same open-seeming face—but on closer look, wide rather than open. The same lilt to his voice. Laurel’s sister was also there. She, unaccountably, embraced me.

  “We’re so glad you came,” she said.

  She was like Laurel too. Smaller, pretty, with short blond hair and apple cheeks.

  She reached down and took Laurel’s hand.

  Laurel alone did not look like Laurel. He who had been healthy, firm-fleshed, virile, lay now on his hospital bed a skeleton with eyes. Tubes entered his body everywhere. His head was shaved, a bandage covering the hole that had been drilled in the top. His breathing was hardly a whistle through a hole punched in his throat.

  I took the hands that had given such pleasure to my breasts, and they were bones, unmoving, cold, in mine. I touched the face I’d dreamed about for months as I would the face of someone already in a coffin.

  His sister said, “Annie is here,” her voice carrying the lilt.

  Laurel’s eyes were open, jerking, twitching, in his head. His mouth was open. But he was not there. Only his husk, his shell. His father looked at me—as he would look at any other treatment. Speculatively. Will it work? Will it revive my son?

  I did not work. I did not revive his son. Laurel lay, wheezing through the hole in his throat, helpless, insensate. I was eager to leave.

  Two years later, the letters began to arrive. Exactly as if he thought I still waited for them at my school.

  “My darling,” he wrote, “I am loving you. Missing you and out of coma after a year and everybody given up on me. My brain damaged. Can you come to me? I am still bedridden.”

  But I was not in school. I was married, living in the South.

  “Tell him you’re married now,” my husband advised. “He should know not to hurt himself with dreaming.”

  I wrote that I was not only married but “happily.”

  My marital status meant nothing to Laurel.

  “Please come,” he wrote. “There are few black people here. You would be lonesome but I will be here loving you.”

  I wrote again. This time I reported I was married, pregnant, and had a dog for protection.

  “I dream of your body so luscious and fertile. I want so much to make love to you as we never could do. I hope you know how I lost part of my brain working for your people in the South. I miss you. Come soon.”

  I wrote: “Dear Laurel, I am so glad you are better. I’m, sorry you were hurt. So sorry. I cannot come to you because I am married. I love my husband. I cannot bear to come. I am pregnant—nauseous all the time and anxious because of the life I/we lead.” Etc., etc.

  To which he replied: “You married a jew. [I had published a novel and apparently reviewers had focused on my marriage instead of my work as they often did.] There are no jews here either. I guess you have a taste for the exotic though I was not exotic. I am a cripple now with part of my brain in somebody’s wastepaper basket. We could have children if you will take the responsibility for bringing them up. I cannot be counted on. Ha Ha.”

  I asked my husband to intercept the letters that came to our house. I asked the president of my college to collect and destroy those sent to me there. I dreaded seeing them.

  “I dream of your body, so warm and brown, whereas mine is white and cold to me now. I could take you as my wife here the people are prejudiced against blacks they were happy martin luther king was killed. I want you here. We can be happy and
black and beautiful and crippled and missing part of my brain together. I want you but I guess you are tied up with that jew husband of yours. I mean no disrespect to him but we belong together you know that.”

  “Dear Laurel, I am a mother. [I hoped this would save me. It didn’t.] I have a baby daughter. I hope you are well. My husband sends his regards.”

  Most of Laurel’s letters I was not shown. Assuming that my husband confiscated his letters without my consent, Laurel telegraphed: ANNIE, I AM COMING BY GREYHOUND BUS DON’T LET YOUR DOG BITE ME, LAUREL.

  My husband said: “Fine, let him come. Let him see that you are not the woman he remembers. His memory is frozen on your passion for each other. Let him see how happy you and I are.”

  I waited, trembling.

  It was a cold, clear evening. Laurel hobbled out of the taxi on crutches, one leg shorter than the other. He had regained his weight and, though pale, was almost handsome. He glanced at my completely handsome husband once and dismissed him. He kept his eyes on me. He smiled on me happily, pleased with me.

  I knew only one dish then, chicken tarragon; I served it.

  I was frightened. Not of Laurel, exactly, but of feeling all the things I felt.

  (My husband’s conviction notwithstanding, I suspected marriage could not keep me from being, in some ways, exactly the woman Laurel remembered.)

  I woke up my infant daughter and held her, disgruntled, flushed and ludicrously alert, in front of me.

  While we ate, Laurel urged me to recall our acrobatic nights on the dormitory bench, our intimate dancing. Before my courteous husband, my cheeks flamed. Those nights that seemed so far away to me seemed all he clearly remembered; he recalled less well how his accident occurred. Everything before and after that week had been swept away. The moment was real to him. I was real to him. Our week together long ago was very real to him. But that was all. His speech was as beautifully lilting as ever, with a zaniness that came from a lack of connective knowledge. But he was hard to listen to: he was both overconfident of his success with me—based on what he recalled of our mutual passion—and so intense that his gaze had me on the verge of tears.