by Alice Walker
She began to have headaches that were so severe they caused her to stutter when she spoke. She dreamed of such horrible things she would wake up shaking. Still, when she thought of the extraordinary opportunity she had in attending Saxon College, which had an excellent social and academic reputation, she knew herself to be extremely fortunate. She studied hard and made the dean’s list, and during her second year she joined the Atlanta Movement. She found it impossible to study while others were being beaten and jailed. It was also, surprisingly, an escape for her. After her friendship with Anne-Marion, they marched often together and would go to jail with their toothbrushes and books and cigarettes under their arms. In jail they were allowed to smoke, which helped to calm their shrieking nerves. On Saxon campus itself, ironically, smoking led to expulsion, as did any other form of “decadent” behavior.
The emphasis at Saxon was on form, and the preferred “form” was that of the finishing school girl whose goal, wherever she would later find herself in the world, was to be accepted as an equal because she knew and practiced all the proper social rules. The administration of the college neither condoned Saxon students’ participation in the Atlanta Movement nor discouraged it. Once it was understood that the students could not be stopped, their involvement, as much as possible, was ignored. All of Saxon’s rules, against smoking, drinking, speaking loudly, going off campus without an escort, remaining off campus after six, talking to boys before visiting hours, remained in effect. It was understood that a student who allowed herself to be arrested did so at her own academic risk. Fortunately, there were teachers who would lie for the students—a week in jail became a week on a field trip and was certainly as informative for the student as any field trip could ever be—though everyone knew this was a lie. Or a teacher might himself end up in jail. That too was ignored, though his name and photograph appeared in the papers.
A saying about Saxon was that you could do anything there, as long as you wore spotless white gloves. But because the gloves must remain clean and white, there was very little you could do. In fact, Meridian and the other students felt they had two enemies: Saxon, which wanted them to become something—ladies—that was already obsolete, and the larger, more deadly enemy, white racist society. It was not unusual for students to break down under the pressures caused by the two. One of Meridian’s classmates, a gentle drama student from Ohio, had been dragged out of a picket line by four thugs and forced, on the main street in Atlanta, to drink a pint of ammonia. Later, after she had recovered physically, in the infirmary, though was obviously far from recovered mentally, she was severely chastised one evening for standing about in the bushes near her dorm with her boyfriend. Neither of them had noticed that calling hours had ended ten minutes earlier. The girl’s nerves were wrecked, and she was forced to withdraw from the school for the rest of the term.
Meridian, the former wife and mother, already felt herself to be flying under false colors as an “innocent” Saxon student. The scenes she personally witnessed in the Atlanta streets, combined with this, caused the majority of her waking moments to seem fragmented, surreal. She saw small black children, with short, flashing black legs, being chased by grown white men brandishing ax handles. She saw old women dragged out of stores and beaten on the sidewalk, their humility of a lifetime doing them no good. She saw young black men of great spiritual beauty changed overnight into men who valued nothing.
Things happened. One day, along with a group of demonstrators headed for downtown Atlanta, Meridian passed a young girl, nubile, pretty, with long brown pigtails, sitting on the steps of her house, waving. On impulse Meridian called to her: “Come join us,” she cried. The girl, pigtails flying, came. Once downtown they sat in at a luncheon counter in Woolworth’s and, after being doused with catsup, smeared with mustard and sprinkled with salt and pepper by white patrons of the store, they were arrested. Meridian had tried to keep the girl, whose name was Anne, with her, but in the confusion she disappeared. In the middle of the night there were screams from another cell, far down the row. Screams, according to the guards, of an alcoholic who thought she was being chased around her cell by giant spiders. But Meridian knew it was Anne, and though she never saw her again, she began to imagine she did, and the screams became an accompaniment to the guilt already weighing her down.
Meridian found, when she was not preoccupied with the Movement, that her thoughts turned with regularity and intensity to her mother, on whose account she endured wave after wave of an almost primeval guilt. She imagined her mother in church, in which she had invested all that was still energetic in her life, praying for her daughter’s soul, and yet, having no concern, no understanding of her daughter’s life whatsoever; but Meridian did not condemn her for this. Away from her mother, Meridian thought of her as Black Motherhood personified, and of that great institution she was in terrible awe, comprehending as she did the horror, the narrowing of perspective, for mother and for child, it had invariably meant.
Meridian felt as if her body, growing frailer every day under the stress of her daily life, stood in the way of a reconciliation between her mother and that part of her own soul her mother could, perhaps, love. She valued her body less, attended to it less, because she hated its obstruction.
Only during a crisis could she forget. While other students dreaded confrontation with police she welcomed it, and was capable of an inner gaiety, a sense of freedom, as she saw the clubs slashing down on her from above. Only once was she beaten into unconsciousness, and it was not the damage done to her body that she remembered when she woke up, but her feeling of yearning, of heartsick longing for forgiveness, as she saw the bright lights explode behind the red blood that curtained her face, and her feeling of hope as the harsh light of consciousness began to fade.
After The Wild Child’s death she could not live on campus, although she continued to attend classes, and lived instead in the ghetto that surrounded it. It was a poor community but friendly and very clean. In order to pay her rent and to buy other items that one needed at a school like Saxon—tennis racket, bathing suit, ballet slippers and tights, etc.—she went to work as a typist for a professor who had recently retired and whose office was a few blocks from her door. He was a very old man who had, years ago, known her mother’s family. It was her mother who encouraged her to take the job, reminding her that her father could not afford to send Meridian the two or three dollars a week she had asked him to send. His health was poor, and with the loss of the farm he was diminished in every way. He was no longer qualified to teach, now that integration was threatening the schools, and was doing odd jobs when and where he could find them.
It was her mother who first noticed that Meridian’s thick, shoulder-length hair was beginning to thin. She even essayed a joke about how Meridian should be careful not to wind up bald, like Nelda’s mother. It did not surprise Meridian that her hair came out as she combed it, any more than it surprised her that her vision sometimes blurred. She was too driven to notice; and it seemed essential to her then that whatever happened to her she should be prepared to accept. Besides, she was in love, with Truman.
The Conquering Prince
TRUMAN STOOD ON THE other side of the screen door in a flowing Ethiopian robe of extravagantly embroidered white, his brown eyes aglow with excitement. Everyone thought him handsome because his nose was so keen and his skin was tan and not black; and Meridian, though disliking herself for it, thought him handsome for exactly those reasons, too. Or had, until, when she had known him for about a year, she began to look closely at him. With scrutiny, much of the handsomeness disappeared behind the vain, pretentious person Truman was. And his teeth were far from good.
But the sly, serious double takes were still in the future. Therefore, she threw open the door for him with such passionate force it banged like a shot against the wall. Truman strode in like a conquering prince returning to his lands.
“You look fantastic!” Meridian breathed, as she cuddled up in his arms.
; “Et toi aussi,” he replied in French. “Tu es très magnifique!”
Truman loved all the foreign cultures of the world, but his favorite was French. He had spent a year in Avignon and Paris. He believed profoundly that anything said in French sounded better, and he also believed that people who spoke French were better than people (les pauvres, les misérables!) who did not.
Therefore, “Bon!” said Meridian—which was the only French expression with which she felt comfortable. Luckily, she understood the language better than she spoke it, because Truman would continue to speak it throughout the evening. When he talked to her she had to translate every syllable into English before answering. Their conversation moved slowly. But it didn’t matter. She loved being with Truman. She felt protected when she was with him. To her he was courageous and “new.” He was, in any case, unlike any other black man she had known. He was a man who fought against obstacles, a man who could become anything, a man whose very words were unintelligible without considerable thought. She also wanted to make hot, quick, mindless love with him whenever he was near. When he touched her now, on the arms where they joined her shoulders, she trembled against him, faint with desire, as the description read in old novels. She had never felt faint with desire before and felt she had discovered a missing sense.
“I am so glad you came to Saxon,” he whispered, en français, of course. “You were going to waste out there in the sticks. Speaking of which,” he suddenly said, drawing back, but keeping his arms tight about her, “aren’t you losing weight?”
She buried her nose in the center of his throat and sucked his collarbone. They were going to a party, but if he didn’t stop caressing her shoulders, whispering in French (which did sound awfully sexy) and looking at her with his wild brown eyes, she knew they would never make it. So she said, “Let’s go,” abruptly, pushing him reluctantly but firmly from her, and preceded him out the door.
Driving through town Meridian told him of the three white exchange students who had come on the march with them that afternoon.
“From where?” Truman asked. “Swarthmore?”
“No, Smith and Carleton.”
“What do they look like?”
“One is exactly like the little Dutch boy on Dutch Boy paints. A pale blonde with ear-length hair. She’s the prettiest. The other two are kind of homely. Susan is short and mousy with thick legs. Lynne is thin and dark, with bright black eyes that sort of stab at you. They’ve been here a week, and I’ve already been out canvassing voters with Lynne. I like her. She can’t say ‘saw,’ she says, ‘I sarh it.’ And she starts her sentences with ‘So.’ Listen, let me tell you about this one lady’s house we went to ... way back in the sticks, on the edge of nowhere. This lady was sitting on her front porch, just as serene and untroubled as she could be. We should’ve seen that her Kingdom had already begun to approach, just by looking at her face. But we have to try everybody, right? She was one of these large, motherly types, with the tits, you know? Everybody’s grandmother. Her food was cooking back somewhere on the stove. Butter beans, Lynne swore she could tell by the smell. Anyhow, we walked up and Lynne put one foot up on the lady’s step. Her stomach was growling and she held her canvassing pad in front of it. The lady looked at her foot for a full minute.
“ ‘How y’all durin’?’ she asked, and started fanning herself real slow, with one of those fans that show Jesus walking on water.
“Lynne said, ‘My name is Lynne Rabinowitz ...’
“ ‘Lynn Wizz,’ the lady repeated.
“ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Lynne.
“ ‘And who you down ther uprootin’ my collards with yo’ eyes?”
“ ‘Meridian Hill,’ I said, starting to laugh, because I liked her and because I sure was eyeball deep in her greens. They were so healthy they flashed in the sun, like they’d been greased.
“‘We came up here to ask you to register to vote.’
“ ‘Did?’ asked the woman.
“Lynne’s stomach let out a massive growl. ‘You’re not already registered, are you?’ she asked, clutching her pad.
“ ‘Nome,’ said the woman.
“ ‘You are Mrs. Mabel Turner, aren’t you?’ asked Lynne. She knew she was but she had to work that ‘Mrs.’ in somewhere.
“The slow fanning stopped. The light of recognition beamed from Mrs. Turner’s eyes. ‘Y’all must be them outside ’taters. Jooz an runnin’ dogs. Y’all hongry?’ She heaved herself up from her chair and started for the kitchen.
“We sat down at the table and had a big meal. Butter beans, collards, cornbread, the works. Mrs. Turner urged second helpings.
“ ‘So isn’t this terrific? I’m about to pop right open,’ said Lynne.
“‘If you did it wouldn’t make much mess, skinny as you is,’ said Mrs. Turner. ‘I wants to feed y’all real good, ’cause I don’t believe in votin’. The good Lord He take care of most of my problems. You know he heal the sick and race the dead. Comfort the uncomfortable and blesses the meek.’
“I said right then, ‘We thank you for feeding us, Mrs. Turner,’ and I got up to go, but Lynne wanted to argue.
“ ‘So God fixes the road in front of your house, does he?’ she asked, using her Northern logic.
“ ‘Let’s go,’ I said. But no, she was just tuning up.
“ ‘Jesus Christ must be pleased to let you live in a house like this. The good Lord must get his jollies every time you have to hop outside to that toilet in the rain. The Holy Ghost must rejoice when your children catch pneumonia every winter....’
“‘You sounds just like a blasphemer to me,’ said Mrs. Turner. ‘You sound like maybe you is kin to Judas Iscariot.’ She frowned sadly and shook her head.
“Well, they argued and argued, until Mrs. Turner was afraid she had insulted her religion by feeding us. And Lynne refused to acknowledge the state of grace Mrs. Turner thought she was in.
“ ‘If only we hadn’t eaten,’ she kept saying, ‘if only we had refused the food, don’t you think Mrs. Turner would have registered to vote?’ ”
“Of course I said no. A blind man could have seen Mrs. Turner was just well beyond the boundaries of politics....”
“La fanatique,” said Truman.
Meridian drew back as if to strike him. “Stop talking like that about your cousins and aunts!”
Truman laughed. “And grandmother and so forth.… What’s the name of the Dutch Boy?”
“Jill.”
“C’est vrai?”
“Oui.”
Meridian lit a cigarette and passed it to Truman. “I think they’ll all be at the party tonight. They’re eager to see how the natives make out after dark. Oka-mo-gah! Do you know what Charlene told me? She said that Jill was taking photographs of the girls straightening their hair and also of them coming out of the shower.”
“Et puis?”
“Well, and then Charlene and the other girl whose pictures were being taken threatened to beat her up unless she destroyed the film. ‘This here ain’t New Guinea,’ Charlene says she said.”
“They were just curious about les noirs,” said Truman. “When I was in Paris I was curious about the French. I’m sure I did strange things, too.”
“Like photographing them while they styled their hair and when they emerged from the shower? Or is it true that the French never bathe?”
Truman laughed. “My little kitten has sharp claws. Still,” he said, “it pays to have a little tolerance with other people’s curiosity. It never bothers me any more when foreigners look at my hair and say, ‘A leetle beet of zee tar brush, eh?’”
“Everyone is proud to acknowledge a tiny bit of a ‘bad’ thing,” said Meridian. “They know how fascinating it makes them.”
She looked out the car window and realized they had stopped a few houses down from where the party was. Truman reached for her and gathered her tightly into his arms. She felt his tongue licking the eau de cologne off her earlobes. His hands were squeezing the nipples of her bre
asts. When she pulled her head away he buried his face in her lap, an action that briefly shocked her. She felt warm tingling sensations creeping up from the bottom of her stomach.
“Let’s not go to the party,” he pleaded. “Let’s go back to the apartment. Everybody else is here, we’ll be alone. I want you.”
“I love you,” she said.
“And we’re going to the party, right?” Truman sat up and ran his fingers through his hair.
“But do you understand?” Meridian asked. “I’m not a prude. Afraid, yes, but not a prude. One day soon we’ll be together.”
“You’re so young,” said Truman, getting out and adjusting his robe. “I wish I could make you feel how beautiful it would be with me.”
“I feel it, I feel it!” cried Meridian, taking his hand and walking up the street.
At the party Meridian danced, as seemed to be her fate at most parties, with a plodding young man from Arkansas. His first name was Terence; she deliberately kept herself innocent of his last. They pushed along the floor until a white boy broke in. Terence, exhibiting his freedom from prejudice, practically shoved Meridian into his arms.
“You go to school around here?” the white boy asked.
“Yes,” said Meridian, “more or less.” He was a head taller than she and her chin, when she looked up at him, poked into his chest. He was not ugly, only plucked-looking, with short black hair, shaved down around the bottom of his hairline, and teeth that had tiny white spots in the enamel, as if tiny pieces of seashell had been embedded there.
“Where are you from?” she asked. She hated to think in clichés at a time like this, when she could see he was gazing at her admiringly, but his dance was very stiff.
“Connecticut,” he said. “We came down from the University of Connecticut. Con U,” he added, and laughed. Meridian did not get the joke. She almost asked, “What you want to con me for, already?”