You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

by Alice Walker

  “People should understand,” said Anastasia, speaking very fast and somewhat blindly, Irene felt, as if she were speaking with her eyes closed, so that for a moment she reminded Irene of Fania, “that when they suffer it is because they choose suffering. If you suffer in a place, leave.”

  The baby was awake now and Irene was holding him. His thick hair smelled of incense. His slender fingers probed her nose.

  “You can’t leave a baby,” Irene said.

  “Men do it all the time.”

  “Women stay because they don’t want to be ‘men.’”

  “And men go because they don’t want to be women—that half of the human race that never realizes it has a choice.”

  “But who will look after the children?”

  “Someone will,” she said, “or won’t.” She looked into Irene’s face.

  “It’s all the same.” She shrugged. “That’s the point.”

  The baby’s mother came into the room. She had a face the color of a pink towel, a stout figure and blue eyes shaped like arrows. Spiritual striving was most apparent in her speech; over her harsh New York accent she’d poured a sweetness that hurt the ears.

  “It’s a beautiful baby,” Irene said, as she plucked grapes off a bunch on the table and began plopping them into her own and the baby’s mouths.

  “Thank you,” she cooed. “We’re giving him to Anastasia. She loves him so much and is such a good mommy. We’re going to South America.”

  “When?” asked Irene.

  She shrugged. “Sometime.”

  “Was that hard to decide?” Irene wanted to know.

  “Source teaches us that all children belong to everyone, to the whole world.”

  “But not to anyone in particular?”

  She sang, “That’s right,” and swept out of the room.

  “We have to take you to meet Source,” said Peace, who came in next and rummaged through the grapes. He was emaciated, far taller than the refrigerator and wore his long straw-colored hair in a ponytail tied with a bright green cord. A brilliant red birthmark, shaped like a tiny foot, “walked” across his nose.

  Source lived in a large apartment house very close by. One of his daughters, a thin, sad-eyed girl in her teens, her long black hair shining against her sallow brown skin, showed them up to his flat. After admitting them she kept her gaze below their knees.

  Anastasia, Peace, Calm and Bliss had brought an offering of wine and money, which they placed on a table near Source’s feet. Source himself was seated in the lotus position on a round bed shoved against the wall of the otherwise bare and dingy room. The guests were offered cushions on the floor. A second daughter padded up silently, her eyes as sad as the first’s, and poured the wine into glasses which she handed to each of them. She also lit a stick of incense. Soon the room was hazy with smoke and the air heavy with the sweet, oppressive smell.

  A third daughter came and stood at her father’s left hand, which he periodically raised and sent her scurrying into the other rooms for something he wanted.

  “It is possible that all swamis look alike,” Irene was thinking. Source was a pale, grayish brown, with dark glittery eyes and graying dark hair parted in the middle and hanging about his shoulders. He wore a white robe that he used, as he talked, to cover and uncover his bare feet. It was a slow, flipping motion that relaxed and in a way hypnotized his audience.

  Irene was determined not to think any of the prejudicial things she was thinking, and adjusted her face to show interest, concern, anticipatory delight.

  Source’s voice had a whine and a drone somewhere in it, however, and this made it objectionable. He was saying how the first time he met Anastasia, whom he called, in Sanskrit, Tranquility, she looked exactly like Kathleen Cleaver, “dressed all entirely completely in black” (he was to use triple qualifiers frequently). “Her hair like an angry, wild, animal bush. And her skin pale pale pale, like that one. Militant, you see?” He laughed, fluttered the fingers of his left hand in the air beside his nose, and the sad-eyed daughter standing beside him shifted the pillow behind his back.

  Anastasia was laughing, fingering her spoon and occasionally sniffling and rubbing her eyes, which were red and glassy.

  “Well”—she shrugged—“I thought I was black.”

  “Nobody’s anything,” said Source, as to a dense child, and Anastasia shrugged again.

  Source called out sharply. There was a flurry of movement in the kitchen, and his other two daughters came and stood next to the one who had remained beside the bed.

  “Nobody’s anything,” he repeated. The daughter began to write down his words. Through her rather bedraggled sari it was clear she was pregnant.

  “I used to live in Africa, in Uganda,” continued Source, “and the Africans wanted to be black black black. They were always saying it: black black black. But that is because Africans are backward people. You see? Indians do not go about saying, ‘We are brown brown brown,’ or the Chinese, ‘yellow yellow yellow.’”

  “No,” said Irene, “they say they are Chinese Chinese Chinese and Indian Indian Indian.”

  However, it was out of line to speak while Source spoke. He continued as if she had not interrupted.

  “Africans are strange creatures. I will tell you a story that really happened in Africa. An African…”

  It was such an ancient racist joke, Irene had not heard it since she was a small child. “The African” in it as stupid, lazy, backward and unmotivated to improve as any colonialist could wish. Tranquility, Peace and Calm and even the baby—whose vicariously stoned response to the world was a look of slack wonder—giggled.

  “Where are you going?” asked Tranquility, as Irene rose.

  “I’ll meet you on the street,” Irene said.

  On the way back, Peace and Calm talked disjointedly of ego and humility and how they now, since knowing Source, had none of the former and lots of the latter. It was hinted that Irene might likewise be improved.

  “Is the pregnant daughter married?” she asked coldly.

  “Why should she be?” asked Calm.

  “She has Source,” sniffed Peace.

  Which was precisely what Irene feared, but she decided against pursuing it.

  “Who supports Source?” she asked.

  “We all do,” they said proudly. “Source is too precious to waste his life working.”

  A moment later, Tranquility said, “He’s a teacher, like you. Teaching is his work.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Anastasia next day. “But we have decided you have to go.”

  “What?” asked Irene.

  “You disapprove of us.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Listen,” said Anastasia. “I’ve finally got my life together, and it’s all thanks to Source. I understand I am nothing. That is what Source was testing you to see. You still think you are Somebody. That you matter. That Africans matter. They don’t,” she said. “And if they are nothing—if nobody’s anything—it is impossible to humiliate them.”

  “But he’s a racist; he treats his daughters like slaves.”

  “He is above all that. You don’t understand. Right. But see, if nobody’s anything, everyone is equal. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

  “Clear enough, but impossible.”

  “Before I had my breakdown I didn’t understand either. I wanted to be Kathleen Cleaver. I met her once at a party in New York before she was Kathleen Cleaver. She had long, straight, light-colored hair, like mine, just like mine, and she sat in a corner all evening without saying a word. Not one. Men did all the talking. Months later, she changed. Suddenly she was doing the talking because the men were dead or in jail. She cursed a lot, she dressed in boots and sunglasses and black clothes and posed for photographers holding a gun. I did all that. I even found a revolutionary black man to live with who beat me—and thought nothing of forbidding me to talk to what he considered ‘strangers,’ even though they were my friends.

  �
�My parents came from Arkansas and got me. They had me locked away in a ‘rest’ home. It was a long time before I could see their point of view.

  “When I was a child I wanted to change things. When the sit-ins started I wanted to join. I wanted to integrate schools and lunch counters. But I was so fair, and I’d never even seen my own hair unstraightened; mother started having it straightened when I was three, for God’s sake.… But my color wasn’t the problem. Oh God, I’m so bored with color being the problem. It was my undeveloped comprehension of the world. My parents already had the Truth, which is why they love Source so much, as much as I do. They knew nobody’s anything, that color is an illusion, that the universe is unchangeable. Source teaches us nothing can be changed, all suffering is self-indulgence and the good of life is, basically, indifference to it—pleasure, if that is possible.”

  “The good of life is indifference?”

  “They released me into Source’s care. They help support him, financially. It works out.”

  The baby, hungry, was crying and crawling over the floor. Irene walked over to him and picked him up. His mother flew into the room and snatched him from her arms.

  “We try to protect him from bad vibes,” she said.

  “Bitch,” said Irene, under her breath, then she turned again to Anastasia, who was trembling from the righteousness of her stand.

  “Anastasia,” Irene said, “I didn’t come all this way to criticize your life. I came all this way because mine is lying kaput all around me, remember?” She knew she wasn’t wrong about Source, but what did he matter? she thought. “Perhaps I was wrong about Source. Perhaps you are right to defend him. This is a bad time in my life to have someone like that sprung on me, actually. I was predisposed not to like him; maybe he sensed this.…” She rambled on, but Anastasia was not listening. She imagined Anastasia, Peace and Calm meeting in the dead of night to plan just this scene between them. It seemed to her that only the baby, Bliss, had welcomed her, from the start.

  “Your life is what you make it,” Anastasia said, stonily.

  “But that’s absurd. Not everyone’s life is what they make it. Some people’s life is what other people make it. I would say this is true of the majority of the people in the world. The women I teach didn’t choose to be illiterate, didn’t choose to be poor.”

  “But you chose to teach that kind of people. Why complain?”

  “That kind of people?”

  “Miserable. Hopeless in this incarnation.”

  Irene laughed. “You make me think of Kissinger, who said, ‘This is not Africa’s century.’”

  Anastasia did not smile.

  “I didn’t mean to complain,” Irene said, humiliated at the thought.

  “If you suffer in a place, leave,” Anastasia said with conviction, and, Irene thought, a great deal of smugness.

  “If you suffer in a condition?”

  Anastasia lifted her spoon.

  It was now years later for almost everyone. It was certainly years later for Irene, who was astounded one day to find herself discussing teaching methods with a group of Native American and white women educators in Alaska.

  “As soon as I heard you were coming,” said Anastasia, who now lived near Anchorage, “I told my man, ‘I have to go see her; she’s an old friend!’”

  They were sitting in a bar that on clear days boasted a perfect view of Mt. McKinley, a hundred miles away. Alas, clear days were apparently rare, and Irene had seen nothing of Alaska’s legendary mountains but their feet. But even these were impressive.

  “You’ve forgiven me, I hope, for throwing you out,” said Anastasia.

  “Oh, sure,” said Irene. She was looking at the other people in the bar. She liked Alaska. She liked the way the people looked as if they had come, that very month, from someplace else. The damp weather, however, though not cold—as she had expected it to be—made her long for the sun, for fireplaces, for a less penetrable selection of clothing than she’d brought.

  Anastasia had snared her directly from the stage, where Irene had sat beside a Native Alaskan woman who talked of the failing eyesight of Alaskans, who were reading print, over long periods, for the first time.

  “Native Alaskans always took perfect vision for granted,” the woman had said. “Then comes this reading. This television. This shopping where everything is labeled with words for more reading. Everybody needs glasses now to see anything at all.” She was wearing huge aviator glasses with purple lenses. She yanked them off and blinked at the audience. It was a long pause, during which she dropped the assertive stance of her statement and seemed, somewhere inside herself, to fold. “There’s a basic distrust maybe,” she continued softly, “about acquiring knowledge in a way that can make you blind. This has to be behind many of our older people’s reading problems.”

  Irene didn’t doubt it for a moment.

  Anastasia had taken Irene’s arm and stood close beside her while Native Alaskan educators pressed her hand warmly. “So good to see you!” they said, as if they had been waiting for her. “So happy you could come all this way up from the Lower 48!”

  “When I heard you were coming, and that it would be a conference about Natives, I thought I’d be the only white chick around. But I see I’m not.”

  Irene did not blink at this.

  And now they sat at the bar, with its famous absent view of Mt. McKinley. Irene felt drained from the panel discussion. Thinking of the woman in the aviator glasses, she was also depressed. She finished her first Irish whiskey and ordered another. When she looked at Anastasia, whose hair was now in braids and held by leather thongs with feathers, and whose eyes literally danced, it was as if Anastasia were receding, receding, receding, into the blurred landscape. But this was a momentary and maudlin vision, which Irene had another gulp of her drink to squelch.

  “So,” she said, “nobody’s anything.”

  “I heard you were happily married,” said Anastasia, ignoring Irene’s remark.

  “We were happy. I’m almost sure we were happy. You know happiness is being able to assume you are happy. Anyway, he left me.”

  “I love being white,” Anastasia said, plunging in and screwing up her face in a mock excess of delight. “Ask me why.”

  “Why?” said Irene.

  “Because as a black person I had no sense of humor!” She laughed, and her funny face and her laughter meshed.

  “I can’t deny that,” said Irene. “Besides, passing for white is so—so—colorful.” She meant, really, that it was passé.

  “No, no,” said Anastasia. “That’s Imitation of Life—and what was that other tacky movie? Pinky? Not even a Jessie Fauset or a Nella Larsen novel, where being white is such a to-do about what colors now look good against your skin. There were shades of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in the beginning—you know, could a potentially great black woman find happiness as a mediocre white one?—but that passed.” She laughed. “Anyway, I’m not passing; I’m just through trying to correct other people’s opinion.”

  Irene, staring directly into Anastasia’s eyes, felt the strangest sensation. Those eyes now looked out of a white person. What did that mean?

  “I loved being married,” said Irene, lowering her gaze to her glass. “I was finally calm enough to look about me without panic.” She shrugged. For years of her marriage there had been so little panic she’d fallen asleep. So that if you asked her what she did between 1965 and 1968, she would probably recall only that those three years amounted to one day, really, and that on that day one of her neighbors had invited her to go fishing, and she had declined.

  “That’s it,” said Anastasia, “sort of. When you’re not living with someone it’s like all sides of you are exposed at once. Right? But when you are living with someone at least one side of you is covered. Panic can still strike, but not on that one side.” She wanted to emphasize how this was especially true in the case of race. That, having put race aside as a cause of concern, she could now concentrate on whate
ver assaults were in store for the other facets of herself. But of course Irene would say she had not put aside race, only chosen a different side of it to live on. Blacks who had not had her experience were rarely inclined to appreciate her point of view; though she understood this, she still thought it spoke of limitation on their part.

  “What happened to Source, Peace and Calm, Bliss and Co.—South America? Do you have the baby here with you?” Irene asked, looking about the bar as if she expected to see Bliss crawling under the tables in their direction.

  Anastasia looked glum. Her cheeks, Irene noticed, sagged when she wasn’t smiling. But this was no worse than what the years had done to Irene’s own face.

  Anastasia had switched to Mai Tais; in her mind, Alaska and Hawaii were very close—they were so distant from the other forty-eight states. She said, sullenly, taking a sip from her small, overdressed drink (in addition to the traditional umbrella, there were tiny snowshoes), “I have a permanent tremor under my eye now—you know that? I’ve had it since living in San Francisco. It comes and goes. Now that I’ve mentioned it, watch for it. It is sure to make its appearance before long.”

  Her right eye, underneath the eye, really, began to quiver.

  “I hate that,” she said, clapping her palm over it. “I don’t know where they are. They may have gone to South America, for all I know. I don’t know what happened to Bliss.” She giggled.

  “Something happened to bliss,” said Irene, and giggled also. The two of them whooped, thumped their glasses on the table and rumbled their feet underneath. A solicitous waitress inquired if there were something she could do.

  “Find out what happened to bliss!” they said, laughing up at her and ordering doubles.

  “After a couple of years I began to fall apart again,” said Anastasia. “Facial tic, constant colds, diarrhea, you name it. You should have seen me. My hair looked like brass wire, my skin had more eruptions than Indonesia. My teeth were loosening.… If I was so tranquil, why was this happening? I hadn’t slept a whole night since I couldn’t remember when, either.