by Alice Walker
She wrote the letter of support: questioning, however, the love, if not “the strong clenched fist.” It was the word “now.” Because her mind was always preoccupied to some degree with the lives of Native American and African women in the Americas during earlier centuries, she found herself musing on the daily attacks on these women, then. Was being sold to someone who raped and beat you seen as an attack? Was having your village torched and your children murdered seen as an attack, or what? This was the part of Anne Gray’s mind that could become so bitchy and bitter that it could easily capsize her. She’d given it a name: Grandma. So now she said, sternly, Cut the shit, Grandma. This shit’s not helpful, to me personally, just at the moment. Thank you. Hearing a door fly open with a bang, somewhere behind her in the house, she spoke again. You know I don’t mean any disrespect, but, Life being what it is, I’ve got to just limp along here as best I can in the present, pretty much making it up as I go along. She sat still a moment, waiting. The house remained quiet. The banging door closed itself.
Thank you, she said again.
Still, all day long the letter nagged her. Who was this woman writing to her? Someone she’d met but did not remember. Was she white or black? White, most likely. And why had she wanted her support, her statement? Because she was a feminist. More than likely because she was black. And if that was the reason, then undoubtedly these white women against violence against women were seeking not to be seen as only white women. And she wondered if there were not black men somewhere in the murkiness of all this—and the white women not wanting to appear racist, but intent, nonetheless, on asserting their right to exist, unmolested. She cheered them. And yet, she thought: How easy it will be for all the attention to focus on black males, their violence, their general unruliness, because that is simply how America responds to its white damsels in distress; even though the majority of rapists, killers and whatnot are white men. And have been, in this country, on this continent, for the last five hundred years. White men, of course, control the media. They are notoriously kind to themselves.
She worried the woman’s letter, and her response to it, for hours, for days: working, reading, walking, with it always at the back of her mind. So that when she heard that the Klan had opened fire on anti-Klan demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina, she felt guilt that she had perhaps, by writing her letter, made black men’s lives—and women’s: ironic how this still came as an afterthought; more ironic when she learned no black men were killed, only white men and one black woman—that much more vulnerable to attack. And yet, she must support women. She must support herself: the black and female self. And also The People, of which she was part, was, as woman, half.
More than half. Grandma chimed in.
Anne Gray had a wonderful sense of Grandma, and whenever she spoke, she saw her with perfect clarity. She was very dark brown, her face creased, her mouth “chuned” up, a word Grandma herself used to describe the way an old person held her mouth after she’d lost all her teeth. Her head rag was worn low over her brow, nearly covering her wise, fed-up, take no prisoners and no bullshit neither eyes. She was slender, and walked slowly with a cane, with which she would hit you, likely as not, if you tried to act dirty. She even had a smell, like earth and greens and roses. And maybe a bit of liniment that she used for her arthritis. Anne loved her, and would sometimes laugh at how lucky she was to have her, and the fact that she and Grandma “went everywhere together”!
So with Grandma along, though sulky from having been asked to lie low, Anne Gray continued her day, thoughts of complicity, assertiveness, guilt, crowding her: to speak out provoked violence; to remain silent encouraged death. It was a dilemma not at all new to people of color, or women.
Or even to good white men, too, said Grandma, grudgingly, but determined to be fair.
When her daughter arrived home with new roller skates and offered a demonstration, Anne Gray was relieved.
Half an hour later, having watched her daughter skate down the hall, leaving tracks in the carpet, and having, wobbly, tried the skates herself, it was time to cook dinner.
The cracked crab had been waiting on a shelf in the refrigerator all afternoon. She took it out and placed it in the crab pot to steam. Next she began to parboil a bowl of green beans and to wash lettuce for a salad. She located the local jazz station on the radio in the kitchen and listened to music. While the beans boiled, she made a quick study of the covers of Freedomways and Callaloo, magazines that lay unopened on the coffee table. All the time her mind was busy: The Abalone Alliance newsletter lay on the counter near the small pile of stems from the stringbeans. It proclaimed against the new Trident submarine (they named it after chewing gun, the bastards, she thought; to make it appear harmless, familiar: she had forgotten the God of the Deep, Poseidon), against the continued escalation of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States. She read:
In August, 1945, the nuclear age began in pain and horror with the destruction of two Japanese cities. In the thirty-four years since, we have come to tolerate a vast military-industrial machine in our midst—a machine that siphons off our resources and produces only the devices of mass death.
The United States now has 30,000 nuclear weapons—equivalent to eight billion tons of T.N.T. These figures numb the mind and stagger the imagination. But the momentum of the military machine keeps building. It builds Missle-X and Trident in the name of security, and we grow ever less secure in an increasingly deadly world.
Individually we can do little but despair. Collectively, we have the power to act. Stopping the arms race is undeniably difficult, and may require transforming the political and social structures that support it. But we cannot build a free society on nuclear ruins.
Every time they raped me, said Grandma, muttering over Anne Gray’s shoulder, I said that if they had the power they would blow up the earth. Hate rules them. And they know that they are the only ones down here on earth to fear.
We can’t build anything on nuclear ruins, Anne Gray thought. And yet, as yet, she was paralyzed, inactive, against the huge nuclear military machine. Had not marched against nuclear anything since the early Sixties. Then she had marched, had gone to Russia itself to express horror at the nuclear future that by now had caught up with them. Her daughter’s primary fear was that the world would blow up. Her greatest fear, as a child her daughter’s age, had been of being lynched, burned out, by mobs of white men, their women and children crowding around eager and curious during and after the act. At least she could conceive of a place—up North, she had thought—where these mobs of her nightmares could not reach; but not so her child, who had never known the earth as stable, timeless—her child was unable to make any assumptions whatsoever about the planet. It seemed to shift under her feet.
Anne and Grandma peeked into the crab pot. Anne poked at the beans.
She felt her head inclining toward the comfort of Grandma’s shoulder; she wished she had time to sit herself in Grandma’s receptive lap. Surely there was simply too much to think about. The world was ending, possibly. Probably. And all the people who had no power individually, and who could not get together collectively, were prisoners of those who had power and the unity of their money; and we would all be destroyed together. She resented this most of all.
She began to set the table in this mood. So that when she heard her lover’s key in the lock, she made a conscious effort to shake off an incipient depression. She remembered Toni Cade Bambara’s statement that Depression Is Collaboration with the Enemy.
Her lover was brown and jovial, seeming to bounce—when he was happy, as he was tonight—when he walked. Having liberated himself from a marriage that no longer fit, he had the polished, just born look of the recently freed. Middle age looked good on him. He drew political cartoons for a living, and could always be counted on to recognize the humorous. Hugging her, he grabbed her butt, and lifted her tight against him. “Is that crab I smell steaming, baby,” he asked, “or is that you?”
“Did you know,” he said, over dinner, “that there’s a place in North Dakota, or is it South? Anyway, a place where they are mining uranium. (Usual suspects, said Grandma.) The Indians, whose land it is, of course, say that this spot they’re digging in is the most sacred of all. And the most taboo. Because they consider it their mother’s heart. According to legend, when a certain depth is reached, it means the death of the world.”
“And they’re right,” she said. Though she thought this place was in Arizona.
Jason was angry that more black people did not join the anti-nuke movement. He did quite a number of cartoons admonishing them. Angry, too, that more feminists did not see it as a women’s issue.
“Give us a break,” said Anne. “Of course it’s a black and women’s issue, but black folks anyway are preoccupied with day-to-day survival. Our neighborhoods are being destroyed, for instance, so that affluent whites can move back into the city—which they left twenty years ago because we were coming.”
Sometimes these people tickle me, said Grandma. Always trying to keep us out of their neighborhoods. I bet it was a big surprise to them that they can’t keep out cancer.
“But all neighborhoods are in danger,” said Jason.
Anne wondered if this meant white people now understood about precariousness. She doubted it.
She marveled at the mundane fact that she and her lover now sat like Mom and Pop at opposite ends of a familiar table, and were lovers and compañeros publicly. Their old lives had eventually—with their acquiesence and even help—expelled them, like a mother giving birth. Being children of the Sixties, they had opted for conscious delivery.
They had rented a cabin near the coast, down the road a bit from Big Sur. She, her lover, her lover’s wife, Suni, and their small child. She had written Suni a letter saying yes, perhaps they could be sisters, which was a reply to Suni’s opinion that perhaps sisterhood was possible between them, and might even involve sitting outdoors on the steps in the evening braiding each other’s hair. This was a romantic notion, but a gallant one; besides, as children of the Sixties, the unromantic didn’t appeal to them, or even seem to apply. However, once actually at the site of the experiment—can a lover and a wife explore being sisters if the man they both love is seriously freaking out?—the reality of simple coexistence sobered them all, considerably.
“I often wondered what you saw in him,” said Suni, speaking of Anne’s husband. She was still married to Phillip, though separated, and beginning to see, like Suni herself, other women. To hear this from Suni startled her. No one had ever questioned her marriage to Phillip in just this way. They questioned why she married a white man—to which her reply was sometimes, Is he white?—but never what she’d seen in Phillip himself. What she’d seen in Phillip was only too apparent, she had thought: He was good-looking, warm, intelligent, and committed to the struggle for justice for black people—the last a major requirement for all her men, lovers as well as friends.
Suni, a small white woman with red hair and green eyes, pale freckled skin and frequently chapped lips, walked with her head down, surveying the pebbles in the logging trail they were on. She seemed to be always stooping to pick up something.
Though Jason and Anne spent nearly every night together across the hall from where Suni slept with the baby, she had demanded certain times in which to be alone with each of them; her own lover, a woman, was back in the city. (How Sixties it all was! They would laughingly say to each other, twenty years later.) The night before, she had slept with Jason. Anne was trying desperately to keep from thinking about it, but found it impossible.
“What did you do together?” she asked, flushing. Because each night she and Jason had made passionate love on the floor (the bed squeaked) beside the bed.
“I held him,” said Suni. “Then he held me.”
“What do you do on other nights?”
“I take care of myself,” said Suni, “which I enjoy doing sometimes.” She did not say: “I thought of the two of you together and it excited me fiercely,” which was true.
She was attracted to Anne. And had told her so. She knew Anne was attracted to her, though she knew the feeling made Anne uncomfortable. They seemed to be attracted to each other through Jason, somehow, and this disturbed and puzzled them.
Anne had never seen what Jason saw in Suni, either. Though what he saw in her was exactly what she had seen in Phillip. Suni was attractive, intelligent, passionate about what she cared about, committed to the struggle to change society. She was incredibly and admirably dedicated to eradicating any racism she found lurking within herself. A difficult and ongoing battle, because she’d been raised by rich, Republican parents to remain perfectly white until the day she died, and she would have been, were it not for a summer spent teaching black children in Mississippi, and the awareness, while there, that a black “Grandma,” similar to the one who lived in Anne’s consciousness, lived in hers also. She was so white a white woman, she sometimes said, that she even seemed like a white woman to herself. This discovery had shocked her profoundly.
She’d laughed, telling Anne about her grandma. “The first time she started speaking I was walking over to the local rib joint in Tupelo, Mississippi, hoping to buy a fish sandwich. They had fish on Fridays. And Grandma said, just as clear: Are you sure white girls eat this kind of fish?”
Anne laughed.
“I stopped right in the middle of the road. I looked around. I said ‘Huh?’ And she kept on talking, really making fun of me, but in a kind of easygoing way. And I finally got it, that she was inside my mind.”
“Yes,” said Anne.
“Hallelujah!” said Suni, grinning. “Girl, I haven’t looked back since.”
“Well, you see,” said Anne, sitting down on a convenient log alongside the trail. “I fell in love with Phillip. Besides, black men like Jason, who were of interest to me, were busy sampling elsewhere.” She smiled, but it was surprisingly bitter, considering.
“But he loved you, black men loved black women, all the time!” said Suni. “His loving me didn’t mean he stopped loving you all.”
“I knew that by the way he was there beside me every day,” said Anne, sardonically.
“But your husband, Phillip, was beside you every day,” said Suni, exasperated. “A white man, remember? What did you want, both of them?”
Anne laughed. “Maybe,” she said. Because it seemed to her that that is what white women had. Their own men and hers if they wanted him. She said this aloud. To which Suni snorted. “But that’s what you had. Your own man—even though he was with me, you didn’t just drop out of his universe—and (she could not say ‘my man’ since she hated to think of white men as connected to her) a white man.”
How humiliating that their lives were so affected by men in general and by Jason in particular. Simply to cease thinking about men and to run off with each other was a thought that delighted some part of both of them. It would serve men, Jason for instance, right. And yet, the freedom of that choice, at least to Anne, was largely illusory. It was only her femaleness that she felt she related to in Suni. Her whiteness (not the color itself but the attitudes developed because of it, no matter how assiduously Suni sought to tame herself) she could not abide.
Arrogance: “I feel secure in my marriage,” she said. “Jason always comes back to me.”
Which meant that, as a black woman, Anne had no chance at all of winning him away.
And of course she preferred to think “winning him away” was the furthest thing from her mind.
You not fooling no one but yourself, said Grandma.
And so she had “won” him away and they had spent a decade and a half deconstructing every impediment to their intimacy. Racism and colorism were scrutinized. Sexism confronted head-on. Classism studied as if in a class. At the end of this process, which taugh
t them more than could be imagined prior to daring it, they realized they had other areas of study elsewhere, and with other mates. Twenty years later Jason was happily married to someone else, not either of them!
Suni was deep into spirituality and followed a guru, and Anne was having a passionate though platonic affair with a very young boy. A man, but young, boyish.
The minute he walked into my house I knew something was up, said Anne.
She was driving them to the local ashram and was looking forward to meeting, or at least hearing, Suni’s guru.
Suni turned to her expectantly.
He was sooo cute! said Anne. He’d come to see someone who used to live in our house, a former classmate. That person was long since gone; I’d lived in the house nine years. Still, we seemed to be who we were both really expecting to see. He sort of rocked back on his heels. I stood in the doorway staring at him as if I’d seen a ghost. I couldn’t have explained it then. I thought it was just how dear he looked. A smallish young man. Big dark eyes, a guileless grin. Nice teeth. Curly, curly hair. Less than half my age.
I think you turn here, said Suni, as they approached a light.
Right, said Anne.
All my cells sort of woke up.
Wow, said Suni, that’s how I felt the first time I heard Gurumayi. I didn’t even see her. A friend gave me a tape of a talk she gave at the ashram last year. It felt like water to my desert. I hadn’t realized how arid I was. How stuck and sort of floundering.
I know, said Anne. Isn’t it the pits? How we go along feeling half alive sometimes; not even half.
We’re asleep, said Suni. Just walking and talking, eating and shitting. Sound asleep.
And we have to be that way, of course, said Anne. It’s the human equivalent of fallowness.
Spiritual hibernation, said Suni.
But I hated it, said Anne. I used to hate it so much; it was such a state of numbness, interspersed of course with cliff-hanging depressions. There were times when I was tempted to try to reconnect with Jason. But every time we talked about maybe getting back together, I burst into tears. We’d burned all our material. Every scrap of the stuff we needed to do together.