by Alice Walker
Pamela’s father was one of the richest men in the world, though no one ever mentioned it. Pam only alluded to it at times of crisis, when a friend might benefit from the use of a private plane, train, or ship; or, if someone wanted to study the characteristics of a totally secluded village, island or mountain, she might offer one of theirs. Sarah could not comprehend such wealth, and was always annoyed because Pam didn’t look more like a billionaire’s daughter. A billionaire’s daughter, Sarah thought, should really be less horsey and brush her teeth more often.
“Gonna tell me what you’re brooding about?” asked Pam.
Sarah stood in front of the radiator, her fingers resting on the window seat. Down below girls were coming up the hill from supper.
“I’m thinking,” she said, “of the child’s duty to his parents after they are dead.”
“Is that all?”
“Do you know,” asked Sarah, “about Richard Wright and his father?”
Pamela frowned. Sarah looked down at her.
“Oh, I forgot,” she said with a sigh, “they don’t teach Wright here. The poshest school in the U.S., and the girls come out ignorant.” She looked at her watch, saw she had twenty minutes before her train. “Really,” she said almost inaudibly, “why Tears Eliot, Ezratic Pound, and even Sara Teacake, and no Wright?” She and Pamela thought e.e. cummings very clever with his perceptive spelling of great literary names.
“Is he a poet then?” asked Pam. She adored poetry, all poetry. Half of America’s poetry she had, of course, not read, for the simple reason that she had never heard of it.
“No,” said Sarah, “he wasn’t a poet.” She felt weary. “He was a man who wrote, a man who had trouble with his father.” She began to walk about the room, and came to stand below the picture of the old man and the little girl.
“When he was a child,” she continued, “his father ran off with another woman, and one day when Richard and his mother went to ask him for money to buy food he laughingly rejected them. Richard, being very young, thought his father Godlike. Big, omnipotent, unpredictable, undependable and cruel. Entirely in control of his universe. Just like a god. But, many years later, after Wright had become a famous writer, he went down to Mississippi to visit his father. He found, instead of God, just an old watery-eyed field hand, bent from plowing, his teeth gone, smelling of manure. Richard realized that the most daring thing his ‘God’ had done was run off with that other woman.”
“So?” asked Pam. “What ‘duty’ did he feel he owed the old man?”
“So,” said Sarah, “that’s what Wright wondered as he peered into that old shifty-eyed Mississippi Negro face. What was the duty of the son of a destroyed man? The son of a man whose vision had stopped at the edge of fields that weren’t even his. Who was Wright without his father? Was he Wright the great writer? Wright the Communist? Wright the French farmer? Wright whose white wife could never accompany him to Mississippi? Was he, in fact, still his father’s son? Or was he freed by his father’s desertion to be nobody’s son, to be his own father? Could he disavow his father and live? And if so, live as what? As whom? And for what purpose?”
“Well,” said Pam, swinging her hair over her shoulders and squinting her small eyes, “if his father rejected him I don’t see why Wright even bothered to go see him again. From what you’ve said, Wright earned the freedom to be whoever he wanted to be. To a strong man a father is not essential.”
“Maybe not,” said Sarah, “but Wright’s father was one faulty door in a house of many ancient rooms. Was that one faulty door to shut him off forever from the rest of the house? That was the question. And though he answered this question eloquently in his work, where it really counted, one can only wonder if he was able to answer it satisfactorily—or at all—in his life.”
“You’re thinking of his father more as a symbol of something, aren’t you?” asked Pam.
“I suppose,” said Sarah, taking a last look around her room. “I see him as a door that refused to open, a hand that was always closed. A fist.”
Pamela walked with her to one of the college limousines, and in a few minutes she was at the station. The train to the city was just arriving.
“Have a nice trip,” said the middle-aged driver courteously, as she took her suitcase from him. But for about the thousandth time since she’d seen him, he winked at her.
Once away from her friends she did not miss them. The school was all they had in common. How could they ever know her if they were not allowed to know Wright, she wondered. She was interesting, “beautiful,” only because they had no idea what made her, charming only because they had no idea from where she came. And where they came from, though she glimpsed it—in themselves and in F. Scott Fitzgerald—she was never to enter. She hadn’t the inclination or the proper ticket.
2
Her father’s body was in Sarah’s old room. The bed had been taken down to make room for the flowers and chairs and casket. Sarah looked for a long time into the face, as if to find some answer to her questions written there. It was the same face, a dark Shakespearean head framed by gray, woolly hair and split almost in half by a short, gray mustache. It was a completely silent face, a shut face. But her father’s face also looked fat, stuffed, and ready to burst. He wore a navy-blue suit, white shirt and black tie. Sarah bent and loosened the tie. Tears started behind her shoulder blades but did not reach her eyes.
“There’s a rat here under the casket,” she called to her brother, who apparently did not hear her, for he did not come in. She was alone with her father, as she had rarely been when he was alive. When he was alive she had avoided him.
“Where’s that girl at?” her father would ask. “Done closed herself up in her room again,” he would answer himself.
For Sarah’s mother had died in her sleep one night. Just gone to bed tired and never got up. And Sarah had blamed her father.
Stare the rat down, thought Sarah, surely that will help. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether I misunderstood or never understood.
“We moved so much looking for crops, a place to live,” her father had moaned, accompanied by Sarah’s stony silence. “The moving killed her. And now we have a real house, with four rooms, and a mailbox on the porch, and it’s too late. She gone. She ain’t here to see it.” On very bad days her father would not eat at all. At night he did not sleep.
Whatever had made her think she knew what love was or was not?
Here she was, Sarah Davis, immersed in Camusian philosophy, versed in many languages, a poppy, of all things, among winter roses. But before she became a poppy she was a native Georgian sunflower, but still had not spoken the language they both knew. Not to him.
Stare the rat down, she thought, and did. The rascal dropped his bold eyes and slunk away. Sarah felt she had, at least, accomplished something.
Why did she have to see the picture of her mother, the one on the mantel among all the religious doodads, come to life? Her mother had stood stout against the years, clean gray braids shining across the top of her head, her eyes snapping, protective. Talking to her father.
“He called you out your name, we’ll leave this place today. Not tomorrow. That be too late. Today!” Her mother was magnificent in her quick decisions.
“But what about your garden, the children, the change of schools?” Her father would be holding, most likely, the wide brim of his hat in nervously twisting fingers.
“He called you out your name, we go!”
And go they would. Who knew exactly where, before they moved? Another soundless place, walls falling down, roofing gone; another face to please without leaving too much of her father’s pride at his feet. But to Sarah then, no matter with what alacrity her father moved, foot-dragging alone was visible.
The moving killed her, her father had said, but the moving was also love.
Did it matter now that often he had threatened their lives with the rage of his despair? That once he had spanked the crying baby violently, who later died of
something else altogether…and that the next day they moved?
“No,” said Sarah aloud, “I don’t think it does.”
“Huh?” It was her brother, tall, wiry, black, deceptively calm. As a child he’d had an irrepressible temper. As a grown man he was tensely smooth, like a river that any day will overflow its bed.
He had chosen a dull gray casket. Sarah wished for red. Was it Dylan Thomas who had said something grand about the dead offering “deep, dark defiance”? It didn’t matter; there were more ways to offer defiance than with a red casket.
“I was just thinking,” said Sarah, “that with us Mama and Daddy were saying NO with capital letters.”
“I don’t follow you,” said her brother. He had always been the activist in the family. He simply directed his calm rage against any obstacle that might exist, and awaited the consequences with the same serenity he awaited his sister’s answer. Not for him the philosophical confusions and poetic observations that hung his sister up.
“That’s because you’re a radical preacher,” said Sarah, smiling up at him. “You deliver your messages in person with your own body.” It excited her that her brother had at last imbued their childhood Sunday sermons with the reality of fighting for change. And saddened her that no matter how she looked at it this seemed more important than Medieval Art, Course 201.
3
“Yes, Grandma,” Sarah replied. “Cresselton is for girls only, and no, Grandma, I am not pregnant.”
Her grandmother stood clutching the broad wooden handle of her black bag, which she held, with elbows bent, in front of her stomach. Her eyes glinted through round wire-framed glasses. She spat into the grass outside the privy. She had insisted that Sarah accompany her to the toilet while the body was being taken into the church. She had leaned heavily on Sarah’s arm, her own arm thin and the flesh like crepe.
“I guess they teach you how to really handle the world,” she said. “And who knows, the Lord is everywhere. I would like a whole lot to see a Great-Grand. You don’t specially have to be married, you know. That’s why I felt free to ask.” She reached into her bag and took out a Three Sixes bottle, which she proceeded to drink from, taking deep swift swallows with her head thrown back.
“There are very few black boys near Cresselton,” Sarah explained, watching the corn liquor leave the bottle in spurts and bubbles. “Besides, I’m really caught up now in my painting and sculpting.…” Should she mention how much she admired Giacometti’s work? No, she decided. Even if her grandmother had heard of him, and Sarah was positive she had not, she would surely think his statues much too thin. This made Sarah smile and remember how difficult it had been to convince her grandmother that even if Cresselton had not given her a scholarship she would have managed to go there anyway. Why? Because she wanted somebody to teach her to paint and to sculpt, and Cresselton had the best teachers. Her grandmother’s notion of a successful granddaughter was a married one, pregnant the first year.
“Well,” said her grandmother, placing the bottle with dignity back into her purse and gazing pleadingly into Sarah’s face, “I sure would ’preshate a Great-Grand.” Seeing her granddaughter’s smile, she heaved a great sigh, and, walking rather haughtily over the stones and grass, made her way to the church steps.
As they walked down the aisle, Sarah’s eyes rested on the back of her grandfather’s head. He was sitting on the front middle bench in front of the casket, his hair extravagantly long and white and softly kinked. When she sat down beside him, her grandmother sitting next to him on the other side, he turned toward her and gently took her hand in his. Sarah briefly leaned her cheek against his shoulder and felt like a child again.
4
They had come twenty miles from town, on a dirt road, and the hot spring sun had drawn a steady rich scent from the honeysuckle vines along the way. The church was a bare, weather-beaten ghost of a building with hollow windows and a sagging door. Arsonists had once burned it to the ground, lighting the dry wood of the walls with the flames from the crosses they carried. The tall spreading red oak tree under which Sarah had played as a child still dominated the churchyard, stretching its branches widely from the roof of the church to the other side of the road.
After a short and eminently dignified service, during which Sarah and her grandfather alone did not cry, her father’s casket was slid into the waiting hearse and taken the short distance to the cemetery, an overgrown wilderness whose stark white stones appeared to be the small ruins of an ancient civilization. There Sarah watched her grandfather from the corner of her eye. He did not seem to bend under the grief of burying a son. His back was straight, his eyes dry and clear. He was simply and solemnly heroic; a man who kept with pride his family’s trust and his own grief. It is strange, Sarah thought, that I never thought to paint him like this, simply as he stands; without anonymous meaningless people hovering beyond his profile; his face turned proud and brownly against the light. The defeat that had frightened her in the faces of black men was the defeat of black forever defined by white. But that defeat was nowhere on her grandfather’s face. He stood like a rock, outwardly calm, the comfort and support of the Davis family. The family alone defined him, and he was not about to let them down.
“One day I will paint you, Grandpa,” she said, as they turned to go. “Just as you stand here now, with just”—she moved closer and touched his face with her hand—“just the right stubborn tenseness of your cheek. Just that look of Yes and No in your eyes.”
“You wouldn’t want to paint an old man like me,” he said, looking deep into her eyes from wherever his mind had been. “If you want to make me, make me up in stone.”
The completed grave was plump and red. The wreaths of flowers were arranged all on one side so that from the road there appeared to be only a large mass of flowers. But already the wind was tugging at the rose petals and the rain was making dabs of faded color all over the green foam frames. In a week the displaced honeysuckle vines, the wild roses, the grapevines, the grass, would be back. Nothing would seem to have changed.
5
“What do you mean, come home?” Her brother seemed genuinely amused. “We’re all proud of you. How many black girls are at that school? Just you? Well, just one more besides you, and she’s from the North. That’s really something!”
“I’m glad you’re pleased,” said Sarah.
“Pleased! Why, it’s what Mama would have wanted, a good education for little Sarah; and what Dad would have wanted too, if he could have wanted anything after Mama died. You were always smart. When you were two and I was five you showed me how to eat ice cream without getting it all over me. First, you said, nip off the bottom of the cone with your teeth, and suck the ice cream down. I never knew how you were supposed to eat the stuff once it began to melt.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “sometimes you can want something a whole lot, only to find out later that it wasn’t what you needed at all.”
Sarah shook her head, a frown coming between her eyes. “I sometimes spend weeks,” she said, “trying to sketch or paint a face that is unlike every other face around me, except, vaguely, for one. Can I help but wonder if I’m in the right place?”
Her brother smiled. “You mean to tell me you spend weeks trying to draw one face, and you still wonder whether you’re in the right place? You must be kidding!” He chucked her under the chin and laughed out loud. “You learn how to draw the face,” he said, “then you learn how to paint me and how to make Grandpa up in stone. Then you can come home or go live in Paris, France. It’ll be the same thing.”
It was the unpreacherlike gaiety of his affection that made her cry. She leaned peacefully into her brother’s arms. She wondered if Richard Wright had had a brother.
“You are my door to all the rooms,” she said. “Don’t ever close.”
And he said, “I won’t,” as if he understood what she meant.
6
“When will we see you again, young woman?” he asked later,
as he drove her to the bus stop.
“I’ll sneak up one day and surprise you,” she said.
At the bus stop, in front of a tiny service station, Sarah hugged her brother with all her strength. The white station attendant stopped his work to leer at them, his eyes bold and careless.
“Did you ever think,” said Sarah, “that we are a very old people in a very young place?”
She watched her brother from a window of the bus; her eyes did not leave his face until the little station was out of sight and the big Greyhound lurched on its way toward Atlanta. She would fly from there to New York.
7
She took the train to the campus.
“My,” said one of her friends, “you look wonderful! Home sure must agree with you!”
“Sarah was home?” Someone who didn’t know asked. “Oh, great, how was it?”
“Well, how was it?” went an echo in Sarah’s head. The noise of the echo almost made her dizzy.
“How was it?” she asked aloud, searching for, and regaining, her balance.
“How was it?” She watched her reflection in a pair of smiling hazel eyes.
“It was fine,” she said slowly, returning the smile, thinking of her grandfather. “Just fine.”
The girl’s smile deepened. Sarah watched her swinging along toward the back tennis courts, hair blowing in the wind.
Stare the rat down, thought Sarah; and whether it disappears or not, I am a woman in the world. I have buried my father, and shall soon know how to make my grandpa up in stone.
Source
IT WAS DURING the year of her first depressing brush with government funding of antipoverty programs that San Francisco began to haunt Irene. An educational project into which she’d poured much of her time, energy and considerable talent was declared “superfluous and romantic” by Washington, and summarily killed; Irene began to long for every amenity the small, dusty Southern town she worked in did not offer. With several other young, idealistic people, she had taught “Advanced Reading and Writing” to a small group of older women. Their entire “school” was a secondhand trailer in back of a local black college; the books they used were written by the teachers and students themselves. The women had a desire for learning that was exciting; the town, however, was dull; its main attraction a grimy, only recently desegregated movie theater with an abandoned appreciation for Burt Reynolds. Irene daydreamed incessantly of hilly streets, cable cars, Chinatown and Rice-o-Roni. Of redwood forests and the Pacific Ocean.