by Alice Walker
She is down low. Her neck strains backward, bringing her face up to his. She is a small, round-bosomed girl with tumbly hair pulled severely back except for bangs. Her eyes are like the lens of a camera. Now they click shut. Now they open and drink in the light. Something, a kind of light, comes from them and shines on the professor of French. He is suddenly amazed at the mixture of orange and brown that is her skin.
“En France, nous buvons le vin!” The force of his breath touches her. She draws in her own. It makes a gasping sound that shocks him. He springs upright. Something stiff, aghast, more like a Daumier than ever, about him. The girl is startled, wonders why he jumped back so fast. Thinks he does not want to mingle breaths with her. For a hot flurried moment she feels inferior.
The professor takes cover behind his desk. His eyes race over the other forms in the class. He wonders what they notice. They are even worse than adult foreigners; they are children. When they see him going to the post office underneath their windows they call their friends to come and look down on his balding head. In the classroom they watch him professionally, their brown eyes as wary as his own. The blue-eyed girl begs for, then rejects, kinship. With him. With them. Her skin is white as the ceiling. The brown and rose of the skins around her do not give her a chance to exhibit beauty. By the range of colors she is annihilated. For this he feels vaguely sorry for her. But it is a momentary pang. He is too aware of her misery ever to bring it up. Hearing the bell he turns from her. For a moment his eyes lock with those of the girl who never has her French. She is dreaming, has not heard the bell, is unaware. For a moment she drifts into his eyes, but the click comes and the eyes go blank. When she passes him at the door his heart flutters like old newspapers in a gutter disturbed by a falling gust of wind.
2
The professor goes by for his mail: it is a magazine and a letter from Mexico, where he will go as soon as summer comes. He can hardly wait to leave Mississippi for even greater sun. The surrounding beauty has crept up on him gradually since his arrival three years ago. He can no longer ignore it and it hurts him, terribly. In Mexico he will find an even slower-infecting beauty. When it becomes painful he will begin to explore countries even farther south. He has been chased across the world by the realization of beauty. He folds the letter, looks with horror at the narrow walls and low ceiling of the post office, rushes out into the bright sunshine.
3
Harriet is an ugly name. She wonders if it would sound better in French. She leans forward from the weight of six large and heavy books. She is not stupid, as the professor of French thinks. She is really rather bright. At least that is what her other teachers say. She will read every one of the thick books in her arms, and they are not books she is required to read. She is trying to feel the substance of what other people have learned. To digest it until it becomes like bread and sustains her. She is the hungriest girl in the school.
She sees the professor take out his mail; the letter, which he reads, and the magazine, which he sticks under his arm. While she scans the bulletin board noting dances to which she will not be asked the panic of his flight reaches her. She wonders if his letter was about someone who has died.
4
Later, in the car, her body is like a lump of something that only breathes. She feels her lover’s hands, dry and young, rake up the impediments of her clothes. A thrust of one hand against her nipples, nearly right, then a squeeze that accomplishes nothing. She feels herself borne backward on the front seat of the car, the weight pressing her down, the movement anxious, selfish, pinning her, stabbing through. When it is over she is surprised she can sit up again, she had imagined herself impaled on the seat. Sitting up, looking out the window: “Yes, it was good”; she remembers not the movement knocking against her stomach but the completely correct account she has given the word boire. Je bois, tu bois, il boit, nous buvons. …
They move back toward the campus, she feeling outside the car, far away from the hands that manipulate the wheel. They hurry. If the gate is locked she will have to climb over the wall. For this she could be expelled. The boy sweats, worried about their safety, the future he wants. She thinks climbing walls an inconvenience but the humiliation of failure is not quite real. The knot behind her ear where a policeman struck her two weeks before begins to throb. But they are not late. She walks the two blocks to the campus gate, passes the winking guard, smells the liquor on his breath as he sniffs after her. She wonders about this injustice, her confinement, tries to construe an abstract sentence on the subject in impeccable French.
5
The professor will have cottage cheese, a soft egg, a glass of milk and cream for his meal. He has an ulcer and must take care of it. He wonders if Mademoiselle Harriet has noticed how he belches and strokes his stomach. He really must stop thinking of her. Must remember he is old. That death has had its hands on him. That his odor is of ashes while hers is of earth and sun.
As he eats his colorless meal he remembers the magazine. It opens to his own story; a story he wrote to make the new pain less than the old. It is a story about life in a concentration camp. The same camp that gobbled up his wife and daughter and made fertilizer from their bones. He recalls the Polish winter, cold and damp and in his memory always dark; the stiff movement of the long marches, bleeding feet. It is all in the story; seven years of starvation, freezing, death. The publishers have described his escape in sensational language. His survival, in their words, appears abnormal. He is a monster for not now pushing up plants in the backwoods of Poland. A criminal for crossing Europe unslaughtered; for turning up in France already knowing the language. For having had parents devoted to learning that in the end had not done them any good!
The author is now Professor of French at a school for black girls in the Deep South.
Outraged, the professor flings the acknowledgement of his existence across the room.
6
“Mon Dieu, quelle femme!” Harriet inspects her naked body in the glass. She imagines that the professor will climb up the fire escape outside her window, that he will creep smiling through the curtains, that she will reach out to him all naked and warm and he will bury his cold nose and lips in the hot flesh of her bare shoulder. Undressed (she imagines him first in long red underwear), he will lean over her on the bed, looking. Then into bed with her. They will lie, talking. For there is no hurry about him. He is old enough to know better. He strokes her neck below the ear and tells her of his life. Explains the blue stenciled numbers she has seen peek from beneath his cuff—a cuff he is always adjusting. For she is ignorant of history. Her own as well as his. He must tell her why he put a tattoo there only to keep trying to hide it later. He must promise her he will not be embarrassed to remove his coat in class, especially on hot days when it is clear he is miserable. So much he must tell her. … But now her body has completely warmed him. His body seems to melt, to flow about hers. His mouth, fuller, plays with her breasts, teasing the nipples, light as the touch of a feather. His hands find, discover, places on her back, her sides. She takes him inside herself, not wanting to make him young again, for she is already where he at old age finds himself.
A knock, harsh and resounding, announces bed check and the house mother. Harriet has time to slip into her nightgown and mumble “Yes, ma’am” before the gray-brown dream-dispelling face pokes rigidly into the room.
7
Once in bed the professor abandons himself. He thinks hungrily of his stupid pupil. He remembers her from the very first week of classes; her blurred, soft speech, which he found difficult to understand, her slow comprehension—far behind the nearly white girl with the blue eyes, who ate French sentences choppily, like a horse chopping grass—her strange brown eyes so sorrowful at her ignorance they seemed capable of moaning. She is younger than the grandchild he might have had—and more stupid, he adds. But he cannot think of her as a child. As young, yes. But not the other way. She brings the odor of Southern jails into class with her, and hundreds of aching,
marching feet, and the hurtful sound of the freedom songs he has heard from the church, the wailing of souls destined for bloody eternities at the end of each completely maddened street.
Her speech, which he had thought untutored and ugly, becomes her; the sorrowful eyes have bruised him where they touched. He dreams himself into her songs. Cashes the check from the story and buys two tickets to Mexico, lies with her openly on the beaches, praises the soft roundness of her nose, the deep brown he imagines on her toes, bakes his body to bring them closer to one. All the love from his miserable life he heaps on her lap.
When he awakes from his dream sweat is on his forehead, where years ago black hair curled and fell. And he is crying, without any tears but sweat, and when he turns his face to the wall he is already planning the wording of his resignation and buying brochures for South America.
8
“Nous buvons le vin,” Harriet practices before entering the class, before seeing him. But the lesson for the day has moved on. It is “Nous ne buvons pas le vin” that the professor forces her to repeat before hiding himself for the last time behind his desk.
To Hell with Dying
“TO HELL WITH DYING,” my father would say. “These children want Mr. Sweet!”
Mr. Sweet was a diabetic and an alcoholic and a guitar player and lived down the road from us on a neglected cotton farm. My older brothers and sisters got the most benefit from Mr. Sweet for when they were growing up he had quite a few years ahead of him and so was capable of being called back from the brink of death any number of times—whenever the voice of my father reached him as he lay expiring. “To hell with dying, man,” my father would say, pushing the wife away from the bedside (in tears although she knew the death was not necessarily the last one unless Mr. Sweet really wanted it to be). “These children want Mr. Sweet!” And they did want him, for at a signal from Father they would come crowding around the bed and throw themselves on the covers, and whoever was the smallest at the time would kiss him all over his wrinkled brown face and begin to tickle him so that he would laugh all down in his stomach, and his moustache, which was long and sort of straggly, would shake like Spanish moss and was also that color.
Mr. Sweet had been ambitious as a boy, wanted to be a doctor or lawyer or sailor, only to find that black men fare better if they are not. The South was a place where a black man could be killed for trying to improve his lot; the laws of segregation kept most black people from ever having decent schools, housing, or jobs. Since he could become none of these things he turned to fishing as his only earnest career and playing the guitar as his only claim to doing anything extraordinarily well. His son, the only one that he and his wife, Miss Mary, had, was shiftless as the day is long and spent money as if he were trying to see the bottom of the mint, which Mr. Sweet would tell him was the clean brown palm of his hand. Miss Mary loved her “baby,” however, and worked hard to get him the “li’l necessaries” of life, which turned out mostly to be women.
Mr. Sweet was a tall, thinnish man with thick kinky hair going dead white. He was dark brown, his eyes were very squinty and sort of bluish, and he chewed Brown Mule tobacco. He was constantly on the verge of being blind drunk, for he brewed his own liquor and was not in the least a stingy sort of man, and was always very melancholy and sad, though frequently when he was “feelin’ good” he’d dance around the yard with us, usually keeling over just as my mother came to see what the commotion was.
Toward all of us children he was very kind, and had the grace to be shy with us, which is unusual in grownups. He had great respect for my mother for she never held his drunkenness against him and would let us play with him even when he was about to fall in the fireplace from drink. Although Mr. Sweet would sometimes lose complete or nearly complete control of his head and neck so that he would loll in his chair, his mind remained strangely acute and his speech not too affected. His ability to be drunk and sober at the same time made him an ideal playmate, for he was as weak as we were and we could usually best him in wrestling, all the while keeping a fairly coherent conversation going.
We never felt anything of Mr. Sweet’s age when we played with him. We loved his wrinkles and would draw some on our brows to be like him, and his white hair was my special treasure and he knew it and would never come to visit us just after he had had his hair cut off at the barbershop. Once he came to our house for something, probably to see my father about fertilizer for his crops because, although he never paid the slightest attention to his crops, he liked to know what things would be best to use on them if he ever did. Anyhow, he had not come with his hair since he had just had it shaved off at the barbershop. He wore a huge straw hat to keep off the sun and also to keep his head away from me. But as soon as I saw him I ran up and demanded that he take me up and kiss me with his funny beard which smelled so strongly of tobacco. Looking forward to burying my small fingers into his woolly hair I threw away his hat only to find he had done something to his hair, that it was no longer there! I let out a squall which made my mother think that Mr. Sweet had finally dropped me in the well or something and from that day I’ve been wary of men in hats. However, not long after, Mr. Sweet showed up with his hair grown out and just as white and kinky and impenetrable as it ever was.
Mr. Sweet used to call me his princess, and I believed it. He made me feel pretty at five and six, and simply outrageously devastating at the blazing age of eight and a half. When he came to our house with his guitar the whole family would stop whatever they were doing to sit around him and listen to him play. He liked to play “Sweet Georgia Brown,” that was what he called me sometimes, and also he liked to play “Caldonia” and all sorts of sweet, sad, wonderful songs which he sometimes made up. It was from one of these songs that I learned that he had had to marry Miss Mary when he had in fact loved somebody else (now living in Chi-ca-go, or De-stroy, Michigan). He was not sure that Joe Lee, her “baby,” was also his baby. Sometimes he would cry and that was an indication that he was about to die again. And so we would all get prepared, for we were sure to be called upon.
I was seven the first time I remember actually participating in one of Mr. Sweet’s “revivals”—my parents told me I had participated before, I had been the one chosen to kiss him and tickle him long before I knew the rite of Mr. Sweet’s rehabilitation. He had come to our house, it was a few years after his wife’s death, and was very sad, and also, typically, very drunk. He sat on the floor next to me and my older brother, the rest of the children were grown up and lived elsewhere, and began to play his guitar and cry. I held his woolly head in my arms and wished I could have been old enough to have been the woman he loved so much and that I had not been lost years and years ago.
When he was leaving, my mother said to us that we’d better sleep light that night for we’d probably have to go over to Mr. Sweet’s before daylight. And we did. For soon after we had gone to bed one of the neighbors knocked on our door and called my father and said that Mr. Sweet was sinking fast and if he wanted to get in a word before the crossover he’d better shake a leg and get over to Mr. Sweet’s house. All the neighbors knew to come to our house if something was wrong with Mr. Sweet, but they did not know how we always managed to make him well, or at least stop him from dying, when he was often so near death. As soon as we heard the cry we got up, my brother and I and my mother and father, and put on our clothes. We hurried out of the house and down the road for we were always afraid that we might someday be too late and Mr. Sweet would get tired of dallying.
When we got to the house, a very poor shack really, we found the front room full of neighbors and relatives and someone met us at the door and said that it was all very sad that old Mr. Sweet Little (for Little was his family name, although we mostly ignored it) was about to kick the bucket. My parents were advised not to take my brother and me into the “death room,” seeing we were so young and all, but we were so much more accustomed to the death room than he that we ignored him and dashed in without giving his warning a secon
d thought. I was almost in tears, for these deaths upset me fearfully, and the thought of how much depended on me and my brother (who was such a ham most of the time) made me very nervous.
The doctor was bending over the bed and turned back to tell us for at least the tenth time in the history of my family that, alas, old Mr. Sweet Little was dying and that the children had best not see the face of implacable death (I didn’t know what “implacable” was, but whatever it was, Mr. Sweet was not!). My father pushed him rather abruptly out of the way saying, as he always did and very loudly for he was saying it to Mr. Sweet, “To hell with dying, man, these children want Mr. Sweet”—which was my cue to throw myself upon the bed and kiss Mr. Sweet all around the whiskers and under the eyes and around the collar of his nightshirt where he smelled so strongly of all sorts of things, mostly liniment.
I was very good at bringing him around, for as soon as I saw that he was struggling to open his eyes I knew he was going to be all right, and so could finish my revival sure of success. As soon as his eyes were open he would begin to smile and that way I knew that I had surely won. Once, though, I got a tremendous scare, for he could not open his eyes and later I learned that he had had a stroke and that one side of his face was stiff and hard to get into motion. When he began to smile I could tickle him in earnest because I was sure that nothing would get in the way of his laughter, although once he began to cough so hard that he almost threw me off his stomach, but that was when I was very small, little more than a baby, and my bushy hair had gotten in his nose.