by Alice Walker
“But I didn’t want to leave Source, oh no! Listen, average sex, but with great dope, a little music, somebody above you to intercede with God, and the world outside your immediate premises fails to interest.”
“Hummmmm,” said Irene.
“Leave Source? Not on your life! Or my life, as the case was. Enter my parents—as screwed up as I was myself, but a mite put out that I was in the habit of talking to myself as easily as to strangers on the street.” She shrugged. “Back to Arkansas. A few months of house arrest, no dope, church music (listen, the only reason Jehovah’s Witnesses can sing is they’ve ripped off so many Baptists) and the realization that neither black nor white had ever known what to do with us in Arkansas. That we were freaks. And that it was my parents’ ambivalence, as much as anything, that had driven us all nuts. They were horrified if my friends were poor and black, disappointed in my taste if they were black and middle class, and embittered if they were white; where was my racial pride?
“I married the first man who signed up from Arkansas to work on the Alaska pipeline. Found a job. Divorced him. Voilà.”
Irene thought of Fania, whose interest in reading had finally been sustained by the slave narratives of black women so similar, she felt, to herself, and who would have read with keen interest the story Anastasia was now telling.
Was your mother white?
Yes, she pretty white; not white enough for white people. She have long hair, but it was kinda wavy.…
Were your children mulattoes?
No, Sir! They were all white. They looked just like him…then he told me he was goin’ to die…and he said that if I would promise him that I would go to New York, he would leave me and the children free.… He told me no person would know it (that I was colored) if I didn’t tell it*
“Did I ever tell you about Fania Evans?” asked Irene. “No? She was one of the women I tried to teach to read the newspaper. I had trouble because she refused to learn to read anything that hurt her. The world being what it is, this left very little news.”
“Oh yes, I think I remember something about her,” said Anastasia, in the spirit of the conversation. She didn’t remember a word. “But wait a minute,” she said, “let me really bring you up to date. The man I live with now is an Indian, an Aleut. Did I tell you that?”
“You probably tried to,” said Irene, “but no saga of sexual superiority, womanlike tenderness or rippling muscles, please.”
“He does have it all,” said Anastasia, happily, “but I won’t mention it.”
“Thanks,” said Irene.
“We live in a small fishing village where the only industry is smoking salmon. That’s all the women there know how to do. But as a white woman—” she grinned across the table at Irene, who at that moment was feeling unpleasantly sour, “or should I say as a non-Native? Anyway, they didn’t expect me to know how to smoke salmon. When I did it along with them, they were delighted. It was as if I’d evolved. They don’t know this yet, but I’m on my way to being them.” She paused. “I think really that Source was a fascist. Only a fascist would say nobody’s anything. Everybody’s something. Somebody. And I couldn’t feel like somebody without a color. I don’t think anyone in America can.… Which really is pathetic. However, looking as I look, black wasn’t special enough. It required two hours of explanation to every two seconds of joy.” She paused again. “And it was two seconds.”
“Gotcha,” said Irene. She was so drunk by now that she understood everything Anastasia said as if she’d thought it herself. But she also forgot it at once.
“Now, tell me about Fania Whosis? I want to know all about her,” said Anastasia.
“No,” said Irene, “I’m too drunk.”
“I’ll order coffee,” said Anastasia. “I also have to go to the toilet.”
“So do I,” said Irene, feeling her stomach muscles rebel against her control-top panty hose.
When they returned, a pitcher of coffee shaped like a moose’s head awaited them. Irene was still mopping her face and neck with a wet paper towel, and Anastasia was taking a small container of honey from her handbag. She did not eat sugar.
For ten minutes they drank the strong coffee in silence. Eventually, their heads began to clear.
For the first time, Irene was aware of the people in the booth directly behind them. Fifteen years ago, a man’s voice said, they weren’t allowed in places like this. No dogs, Eskimos or Indians Allowed. That’s terrible, a woman’s voice replied. Especially since it was their country, a young man spoke, sneeringly. But we developed it, said the young woman, in sisterly explanation. Oh, sure, said the young man. How can a woman say something so stupid? You’ve been developed yourself, only you’re so dumb you think you like it. The older woman’s voice, attempting to keep the peace, spoke up, changing the subject. Is it really all that much bigger than Texas? Oh, way bigger, said the older man with pride.
All Irene had known about Alaska she’d read in an Edna Ferber novel. Now she had learned about gigantic turnips, colossal watermelons, marijuana that was not only legally grown, harvested and used, but that regularly grew twenty feet tall in the hot, intensely productive summers. She had learned that parkas were way beyond her budget and that mukluks made her feet sweat. The Eskimos and Indians she saw on the street looked like any oriental San Franciscan. Now her mind stuck on fifteen years ago, and her own witnessing of similar signs coming down in the South. But the signs had already done their work. For as long as she lived she knew she would be intimidated by fancy restaurants, hotels, even libraries, from which she had been excluded before.
“It’s nice to look at you. To tell you I enjoy the way you look.” Anastasia reached over and caressed Irene’s cheek. Then she got up, bent over Irene, and very deliberately gave her a kiss, pressing her lips firmly against the warm, jasmine-smelling brown skin. “I always envied you, before,” she said.
“It’s supposed to be the other way around,” said Irene, smiling.
“It was so miserable, growing up, not resembling any of my friends. Resembling, instead, the people they hated! And oh, black people were so confused. They showed me in every way they envied me because my color and my hair made things ‘easy’ for me, but those other people, with hair and skin like mine, they despised, and took every opportunity to tell me so. And another thing, I’m really rather homely, even funny-looking. But I was convinced very early that I was a beauty. I was never permitted an accurate reflection of myself.”
“Why do I think you must have enjoyed it, at least a little?” asked Irene.
“Of course I was glad to be the ‘princess’ for a long time,” said Anastasia. “I don’t deny it. But never without such feelings of guilt. Why was I picked to be Snow White, Cinderella, and any other white lady in distress, when all my classmates were better actresses? Why did the boys flock to me, in high school, when I couldn’t dance, was afraid to make jokes, and had a mother who let them know the darker shades of black were not acceptable? Oh, finally I got so tired of black people, that was why I decided to go to college in the North. They finally seemed to me—merely thoughtless, and selfish, and so fucked up over color it was embarrassing. Then in the sixties they started crying ‘freedom!’ but certainly this wasn’t for the likes of me.”
“You already had your freedom,” said Irene. “The freedom to go either way.”
“To be thrown either way, you mean,” said Anastasia. “Even you got in on the throwing.”
Like most people who have come to believe they are better than they are, Irene resented the notion that she could be intolerant. She sat up very straight to listen to this.
“Remember Styron’s Nat Turner?” asked Anastasia.
“Vaguely,” said Irene, who had worked diligently over a decade to erase the book from memory.
“Well, I remember it very well. One of our professors had the nerve to teach it to our class, and when you couldn’t make him see what an insult Styron’s monster was to the memory of the real Nat Tur
ner, you were so mad you wouldn’t speak to anyone on campus for days. That was when you started to drink a lot. And you were this shining example of sober, intelligent black peoplehood, too!” Anastasia laughed. “Not only drunk every evening, but nastily drunk. Throwing up, starting fights, calling people names. And they couldn’t really expel you; you were the only really dark black student they had. And they adored you. But you said that was shit because they could not adore you and teach Styron’s version of your history at the same time. Which made absolute sense to me.”
“Hypocrites, the whole bunch,” said Irene.
“And so were you. You loved being adored. Being exceptional. Representing the race. I knew, from the backhanded way I was treated, that they were hypocrites. I mean, they knew I was black, I just didn’t look black. I never got any of the attention you got, and I could have used some, because those white folks were just as strange to me as they were to you. But you thought everything was fine until the hypocrisy touched you.”
“Oh, if only we didn’t have to live with what we have been,” thought Irene, feeling a surge of self-disgust. What Anastasia said was basically true; but even worse was the realization that she had viewed Anastasia in the same “backhanded” way her professors had. In fact, she had never been able to consider her entirely black, and in subtle ways had indicated a lack of recognition, of trust.
“We had gone for a walk, to help clear your head,” Anastasia was saying. “I understood what you were feeling because, wonder of wonders, I felt the same way. I followed you back to your room—do you realize you were the only student in the whole school who had a private room? Remember what you said to me?”
She hadn’t wanted the private room, was all she could think, but that was not the answer to the question. Irene thought and thought. She couldn’t remember. She had been assigned the private room because she was “different,” that she could remember.
“As we were going into your room, I said, ‘God, I know just how you feel.’ And you turned, right there in the doorway, and you blocked me from coming into your room, and as you closed the door very slowly in my face, you said, very distinctly, and as if you’d thought about it for a long time, ‘How could you possibly?’”
Irene felt as if live coals had been thrown down her back.
“Wait, wait a minute,” she said with relief, having found a straw to clutch. “Styron’s book wasn’t even out then. That was two or three years later!”
Anastasia looked at her, and pushed her palms against the edge of the table in front of her.
“So?” she said. “It was the same book with a different name. There’s at least one racist best seller published a year.”
Irene groaned. “I was drunk.”
“Not good enough,” said Anastasia.
“No.”
Anastasia was glad she was finally able to say these things. All her life she had felt compelled to take and take and take from black people, anything they gave. Compliments and curses with the same benign, understanding silence. After all, she was exempt from their more predictable suffering, and must not presume to assert herself. Now that was over, and it felt good.
She realized that something was shifting, in her talk with Irene. They were still linked together, but it was not, now, the link of race, which had been tenuous in any case, and had not held up. They were simply two women, choosing to live as they liked in the world. She wondered if Irene felt this.
“You were my objective correlative,” said Irene. She struggled over each word, as if she would unmask her own confusion in this matter, or else. “You see, my great fear in college was that I could hardly avoid becoming an ordinary bourgeois success. I was bright, energetic, attractive, with never a thought of failure, no matter what sociologists say. Those students who were destined, within ten years, to know the names of the designers of their shoes and luggage, to vacation in Europe once a year and read two best sellers every five—while doing a piss-poor job of teaching our children—scared the hell out of me. That life, and not the proverbial ‘getting pregnant and dropping out of school,’ represented ‘the fate worse than death.’
“Your dilemma was obvious. You, even objectively speaking, didn’t know who you were. What you were going to do next; which ‘you’ would be the one to survive. At the same time that I condemned you for your lack of commitment to anything I considered useful, I used you as the objectification of my own internal dilemma. In the weirdest way, your confusion made mine seem minor by comparison. For example, I understood that the episode with Source was a short cut, for you, to the kind of harmonious, multiracial community that you could be happy in, and which I also believed possible to create in America. But politically this is a shaky vision. It was, in a way, convenient for me to think how much more shaky your ‘dope & guru’ program was. I was looking toward ‘government’ for help; you were looking to Source. In both cases, it was the wrong direction—any direction that is away from ourselves is the wrong direction.”
“Ah, ah,” said Anastasia, shaking her head from side to side, though the “ah, ah” was affirmative. “I was attracted to you because your destiny seemed so stable. Whatever else, you would remain a black woman. Black women, even the bourgeois successes, don’t desert.”
“Can’t desert. Some of them certainly would if they could.”
Anastasia laughed, as did Irene.
Anastasia now felt smug. Whatever she was, she thought, her child, which she hoped to have someday, would be a Native American, once more and at last at the beginning of things.
“You know,” she said thoughtfully, rising and collecting her things, because although it was still disconcertingly bright outside, it was after midnight, “Source made us use his name as our mantra during meditation, so there’d be no part of our consciousness he was excluded from. But you know how mantras are: at first they sound like someone’s name and you keep getting that person in your mind. But soon the name becomes just a sound. For me, the sound became a longing and then a direction for my life.” She shrugged. “I knew I had to merge this self with something really elemental and stable, or it would shatter and fly away.” She smiled, thinking of the man she loved.
“You’re happy to be going home to him, eh?” said Irene.
“Positively ecstatic,” said Anastasia, beaming.
“Write,” said Irene. “I’ve missed you.”
“You have?” asked Anastasia.
Irene hushed her with a hug that was not an embrace of shoulders; she hugged her whole body, feeling knee against knee, thigh against thigh, breast against breast, neck nestled against neck. She listened to their hearts beating, strong and full of blood.
As they left the bar they passed a group of tourists who were pointing off merrily into the distance. Irene and Anastasia looked in the direction they were pointing and began to smile. They thought they were finally seeing the great elusive mountain, a hundred miles away. They were not. It was yet another, nearer, mountain’s very large feet, its massive ankles wreathed in clouds, that they took such pleasure in.
* Rev. H. Mattison, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life (New York, 1861), as quoted in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life, edited, with an Introduction, by Bert James Lowenberg and Ruth Bogin (The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pa., and London, 1976).
A Biography of Alice Walker
Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.
Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and M
innie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.
Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book, Once (1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.
In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and her first story collection, In Love & Trouble (1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for Ms. magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.
With the 1982 release of her third novel, The Color Purple, Walker earned a reputation as one of America’s premier authors. The book would go on to sell fifteen million copies and be adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film by director Steven Spielberg. After the publication of The Color Purple, Walker had a tremendously prolific decade. She produced a number of acclaimed novels, including You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), as well as the poetry collections Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) and Her Blue Body Everything We Know (1991). During this time Walker also began to distinguish herself as an essayist and nonfiction writer with collections on race, feminism, and culture, including In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and Living by the Word (1988). Another collection of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, was released in 2010, followed by her memoir, The Chicken Chronicles, in the spring of 2011.