You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

by Alice Walker

  Now that he was here and almost well, I must drop everything, including the baby on my lap—whom he barely seemed to see—and come away with him. Had I not flown off to Africa, though it meant leaving the very country in which he lived?

  Finally, after the riddles within riddles that his words became (and not so much riddles as poems, and disturbing ones), my husband drove Laurel back to the bus station. He had come over a thousand miles for a two-hour visit.

  My husband’s face was drawn when he returned. He loved me, I was sure of that. He was glad to help me out. Still, he wondered.

  “It lasted a week!” I said. “Long before I met you!”

  “I know,” he said. “Sha, sha, baby,” he comforted me. I had crept into his arms, trembling from head to foot. “It’s all right. We’re safe.”

  But were we?

  And Laurel? Zooming through the night back to his home? The letters continued. Sometimes I asked to read one that came to the house.

  “I am on welfare now. I hate being alive. Why didn’t my father let me die? The people are prejudiced here. If you came they would be cruel to us but maybe it would help them see something. You are more beautiful than ever. You are so sexy you make me ache—it is not only because you are black that would be racism but because when you are in the same room with me the room is full of color and scents and I am all alive.”

  He offered to adopt my daughter, shortly after he received a divorce from his wife.

  After my husband and I were divorced (some seven years after Laurel’s visit and thirteen years after Laurel and I met), we sat one evening discussing Laurel. He recalled him perfectly, with characteristic empathy and concern.

  “If I hadn’t been married to you, I would have gone off with him,” I said, “Maybe.”

  “Really?” He seemed surprised.

  Out of habit I touched his arm. “I loved him, in a way.”

  “I know,” he said, and smiled.

  “A lot of the love was lust. That threw me off for years until I realized lust can be a kind of love.”

  He nodded.

  “I felt guilty about Laurel. When he wrote me, I became anxious. When he came to visit us, I was afraid.”

  “He was not the man you knew.”

  “I don’t think I knew him well enough to tell. Even so, I was afraid the love and lust would come flying back, along with the pity. And that even if they didn’t come back, I would run off with him anyway, because of the pity—and for the adventure.”

  It was the word “adventure” and the different meaning it had for each of us that finally separated us. We had come to understand that, and to accept it without bitterness.

  “I wanted to ask you to let me go away with him, for just a couple of months,” I said. “To let me go…”

  “He grew steadily worse, you know. His last letters were brutal. He blamed you for everything, even the accident, accusing you of awful, nasty things. He became a bitter, vindictive man.”

  He knew me well enough to know I heard this and I did not hear it.

  He sighed. “It would have been tough for me,” he said. “Tough for our daughter. Tough for you. Toughest of all for Laurel.”

  (“Tell me it’s all right that I didn’t go!” I wanted to plead, but didn’t.)

  “Right,” I said instead, shrugging, and turning our talk to something else.

  A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?

  DEAR LUCY,

  You ask why I snubbed you at the Women for Elected Officials Ball. I don’t blame you for feeling surprised and hurt. After all, we planned the ball together, expecting to raise our usual pisspot full of money for a good cause. Such a fine idea, our ball: Come as the feminist you most admire! But I did not know you most admired Scarlett O’Hara and so I was, for a moment, taken aback.

  I don’t know; maybe I should see that picture again. Sometimes when I see movies that hurt me as a child, the pain is minor; I can laugh at the things that made me sad. My trouble with Scarlett was always the forced buffoonery of Prissy, whose strained, slavish voice, as Miz Scarlett pushed her so masterfully up the stairs, I could never get out of my head.

  But there is another reason I could not speak to you at the ball that had nothing to do with what is happening just now between us: this heavy bruised silence, this anger and distrust. The day of the ball was my last class day at the University, and it was a very heavy and discouraging day.

  Do you remember the things I told you about the class? Its subject was God. That is, the inner spirit, the inner voice; the human compulsion when deeply distressed to seek healing counsel within ourselves, and the capacity within ourselves both to create this counsel and to receive it.

  (It had always amused me that the God who spoke to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth told them exactly what they needed to hear, no less than the God of the Old Testament constantly reassured the ancient Jews.)

  Indeed, as I read the narratives of black people who were captured and set to slaving away their lives in America, I saw that this inner spirit, this inner capacity for self-comforting, this ability to locate God within that they expressed, demonstrated something marvelous about human beings. Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God, just as it has created us with the capacity to know speech. The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate!

  I suppose this has all been thought before; but it came to me as a revelation after reading how the fifth or sixth black woman, finding herself captured, enslaved, sexually abused, starved, whipped, the mother of children she could not want, lover of children she could not have, crept into the corners of the fields, among the haystacks and the animals, and found within her own heart the only solace and love she was ever to know.

  It was as if these women found a twin self who saved them from their abused consciousness and chronic physical loneliness; and that twin self is in all of us, waiting only to be summoned.

  To prepare my class to comprehend God in this way, I requested they read narratives of these captured black women and also write narratives themselves, as if they were those women, or women like them. At the same time, I asked them to write out their own understanding of what the inner voice, “God,” is.

  It was an extraordinary class, Lucy! With women of all colors, all ages, all shapes and sizes and all conditions. There were lesbians, straights, curveds, celibates, prostitutes, mothers, confuseds, and sundry brilliants of all persuasions! A wonderful class! And almost all of them, though hesitant to admit it at first—who dares talk seriously of “religious” matters these days?—immediately sensed what I meant when I spoke of the inner, companion spirit, of “God.”

  But what does my class on God have to do with why I snubbed you at the ball? I can hear you wondering. And I will get on to the point.

  Lucy, I wanted to teach my students what it felt like to be captured and enslaved. I wanted them to be unable, when they left my class, to think of enslaved women as exotic, picturesque, removed from themselves, deserving of enslavement. I wanted them to be able to repudiate all the racist stereotypes about black women who were enslaved: that they were content, that they somehow “chose” their servitude, that they did not resist.

  And so we struggled through an entire semester, during each week of which a student was required to imagine herself a “slave,” a mistress or a master, and to come to terms, in imagination and feeling, with what that meant.

  Some black women found it extremely difficult to write as captured and enslaved women. (I do not use the word “slaves” casually, because I see enslavement from the enslaved’s point of view: there is a world of difference between being a slave and being enslaved.) They chose to write as mistress or master. Some white women found it nearly impossible to write as mistress or master, and presumptuous to write as enslaved. Still, there were many fine papers written, Lucy, though there was also much hair tugging and gnashing of teeth.

  Black and w
hite and mixed women wrote of captivity, of rape, of forced breeding to restock the master’s slave pens. They wrote of attempts to escape, of the sale of their children, of dreams of Africa, of efforts at suicide. No one wrote of acquiescence or of happiness, though one or two, mindful of the religious spirit often infusing the narratives studied, described spiritual ecstasy and joy.

  Does anyone want to be a slave? we pondered.

  As a class, we thought not.

  Imagine our surprise, therefore, when many of us watched a television special on sado-masochism that aired the night before our class ended, and the only interracial couple in it, lesbians, presented themselves as mistress and slave. The white woman, who did all the talking, was mistress (wearing a ring in the shape of a key that she said fit the lock on the chain around the black woman’s neck), and the black woman, who stood smiling and silent, was—the white woman said—her slave.

  And this is why, though we have been friends for over a decade, Lucy, I snubbed you at the ball.

  All I had been teaching was subverted by that one image, and I was incensed to think of the hard struggle of my students to rid themselves of stereotype, to combat prejudice, to put themselves into enslaved women’s skins, and then to see their struggle mocked, and the actual enslaved condition of literally millions of our mothers trivialized—because two ignorant women insisted on their right to act out publicly a “fantasy” that still strikes terror in black women’s hearts. And embarrassment and disgust, at least in the hearts of most of the white women in my class.

  One white woman student, apparently with close ties to our local lesbian S&M group, said she could see nothing wrong with what we’d seen on TV. (Incidentally, there were several white men on this program who owned white women as “slaves,” and even claimed to hold legal documents to this effect. Indeed, one man paraded his slave around town with a horse’s bit between her teeth, and “lent” her out to other sado-masochists to be whipped.) It is all fantasy, she said. No harm done. Slavery, real slavery, is over, after all.

  But it isn’t over, Lucy, and Kathleen Barry’s book on female sexual slavery and Linda Lovelace’s book on being such a slave are not the only recent indications that this is true. There are places in the world, Lucy, where human beings are still being bought and sold! And so, for that reason, when I saw you at the ball, all I could think was that you were insultingly dressed. No, that is not all I thought: once seeing you dressed as Scarlett, I could not see you. I did not dare see you. When you accuse me of looking through you, you are correct. For if I had seen you, Lucy, I’m sure I would have struck you, and with your love of fighting this would surely have meant the end of our ball. And so it was better not to see you, to look instead at the woman next to you who had kinked her hair to look like Colette.

  A black student said to the S&M sympathizer: I feel abused. I feel my privacy as a black woman has been invaded. Whoever saw that television program can now look at me standing on the corner waiting for a bus and not see me at all, but see instead a slave, a creature who would wear a chain and lock around my neck for a white person—in 1980!—and accept it. Enjoy it.

  Her voice shook with anger and hurt.

  And so, Lucy, you and I will be friends again because I will talk you out of caring about heroines whose real source of power, as well as the literal shape and condition of their bodies, comes from the people they oppress. But what of the future? What of the women who will never come together because of what they saw in the relationship between “mistress” and “slave” on TV? Many black women fear it is as slaves white women want them; no doubt many white women think some amount of servitude from black women is their due.

  But, Lucy, regardless of the “slave” on television, black women do not want to be slaves. They never wanted to be slaves. We will be ourselves and free, or die in the attempt. Harriet Tubman was not our great-grandmother for nothing; which I would advise all black and white women aggressing against us as “mistress” and “slave” to remember. We understand when an attempt is being made to lead us into captivity, though television is a lot more subtle than slave ships. We will simply resist, as we have always done, with ever more accurate weapons of defense.

  As a matter of fact, Lucy, it occurs to me that we might plan another ball in the spring as a benefit for this new resistance. What do you think? Do let us get together to discuss it, during the week.

  Your friend,

  Susan Marie

  A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring

  For the Wellesley Class

  SARAH WALKED SLOWLY off the tennis court, fingering the back of her head, feeling the sturdy dark hair that grew there. She was popular. As she walked along the path toward Talfinger Hall her friends fell into place around her. They formed a warm jostling group of six. Sarah, because she was taller than the rest, saw the messenger first.

  “Miss Davis,” he said, standing still until the group came abreast of him, “I’ve got a telegram for ye.” Brian was Irish and always quite respectful. He stood with his cap in his hand until Sarah took the telegram. Then he gave a nod that included all the young ladies before he turned away. He was young and good-looking, though annoyingly servile, and Sarah’s friends twittered.

  “Well, open it!” someone cried, for Sarah stood staring at the yellow envelope, turning it over and over in her hand.

  “Look at her,” said one of the girls, “isn’t she beautiful! Such eyes, and hair, and skin!”

  Sarah’s tall, caplike hair framed a face of soft brown angles, high cheekbones and large dark eyes. Her eyes enchanted her friends because they always seemed to know more, and to find more of life amusing, or sad, than Sarah cared to tell.

  Her friends often teased Sarah about her beauty; they loved dragging her out of her room so that their boyfriends, naive and worldly young men from Princeton and Yale, could see her. They never guessed she found this distasteful. She was gentle with her friends, and her outrage at their tactlessness did not show. She was most often inclined to pity them, though embarrassment sometimes drove her to fraudulent expressions. Now she smiled and raised eyes and arms to heaven. She acknowledged their unearned curiosity as a mother endures the prying impatience of a child. Her friends beamed love and envy upon her as she tore open the telegram.

  “He’s dead,” she said.

  Her friends reached out for the telegram, their eyes on Sarah.

  “It’s her father,” one of them said softly. “He died yesterday. Oh, Sarah,” the girl whimpered, “I’m so sorry!”

  “Me too.” “So am I.” “Is there anything we can do?”

  But Sarah had walked away, head high and neck stiff.

  “So graceful!” one of her friends said.

  “Like a proud gazelle” said another. Then they all trooped to their dormitories to change for supper.

  Talfinger Hall was a pleasant dorm. The common room just off the entrance had been made into a small modern art gallery with some very good original paintings, lithographs and collages. Pieces were constantly being stolen. Some of the girls could not resist an honest-to-God Chagall, signed (in the plate) by his own hand, though they could have afforded to purchase one from the gallery in town. Sarah Davis’s room was next door to the gallery, but her walls were covered with inexpensive Gauguin reproductions, a Rubens (“The Head of a Negro”), a Modigliani and a Picasso. There was a full wall of her own drawings, all of black women. She found black men impossible to draw or to paint; she could not bear to trace defeat onto blank pages. Her women figures were matronly, massive of arm, with a weary victory showing in their eyes. Surrounded by Sarah’s drawings was a red SNCC poster of a man holding a small girl whose face nestled in his shoulder. Sarah often felt she was the little girl whose face no one could see.

  To leave Talfinger even for a few days filled Sarah with fear. Talfinger was her home now; it suited her better than any home she’d ever known. Perhaps she loved it because in winter there was a fragrant fireplace and snow outside her window. When
hadn’t she dreamed of fireplaces that really warmed, snow that almost pleasantly froze? Georgia seemed far away as she packed; she did not want to leave New York, where, her grandfather had liked to say, “the devil hung out and caught young gals by the front of their dresses.” He had always believed the South the best place to live on earth (never mind that certain people invariably marred the landscape), and swore he expected to die no more than a few miles from where he had been born. There was tenacity even in the gray frame house he lived in, and in scrawny animals on his farm who regularly reproduced. He was the first person Sarah wanted to see when she got home.

  There was a knock on the door of the adjoining bathroom, and Sarah’s suite mate entered, a loud Bach concerto just finishing behind her. At first she stuck just her head into the room, but seeing Sarah fully dressed she trudged in and plopped down on the bed. She was a heavy blonde girl with large milk-white legs. Her eyes were small and her neck usually gray with grime.

  “My, don’t you look gorgeous,” she said.

  “Ah, Pam,” said Sarah, waving her hand in disgust. In Georgia she knew that even to Pam she would be just another ordinarily attractive colored girl. In Georgia there were a million girls better looking. Pam wouldn’t know that, of course; she’d never been to Georgia; she’d never even seen a black person to speak to, that is, before she met Sarah. One of her first poetic observations about Sarah was that she was “a poppy in a field of winter roses.” She had found it weird that Sarah did not own more than one coat.

  “Say listen, Sarah,” said Pam, “I heard about your father. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Thanks,” said Sarah.

  “Is there anything we can do? I thought, well, maybe you’d want my father to get somebody to fly you down. He’d go himself but he’s taking Mother to Madeira this week. You wouldn’t have to worry about trains and things.”