Meridian (1976)

by Alice Walker

  Thinking this, he shot up from his chair by the bed as if from an electric shock. The bottle of Ripple slipped from his fingers and crashed to the floor.

  “Just don’t tell me you done wasted the wine,” said Tommy Odds, groaning. “I was just working myself up for a taste.”

  “I’ll bring another bottle,” Truman said, getting towels from the bathroom and mopping up. He cut his finger on a piece of glass and realized he was trembling. When he’d put the wastebasket outside the door for the janitor he looked back at Tommy Odds. Some small resemblance of his friend remained on the bed. But he could feel the distance that already separated them. When he went out that door they would both be different. He could read the message that Tommy Odds would not, as his former friend, put into words. “Get rid of your bitch, man.” That was all.

  Getting rid of a bitch is simple, for bitches are dispensable. But getting rid of a wife?

  He had read in a magazine just the day before that Lamumba Katurim had gotten rid of his. She was his wife, true, but apparently she was even in that disguise perceived as evil, a castoff. And people admired Lamumba for his perception. It proved his love of his own people, they said. But he was not sure. Perhaps it proved only that Lamumba was fickle. That he’d married his bitch in the first place for shallow reasons. Perhaps he was considering marrying a black woman (as the article said he was) for reasons just as shallow. For how could he state so assuredly that he would marry a black woman next when he did not appear to have any specific black woman in mind?

  If his own sister told him of her upcoming marriage to Lamumba he would have to know some answers before the nuptial celebration. Like, how many times would Lamumba require her to appear on television with him, or how many times would he parade her before his friends as proof of his blackness.

  He thought of Randolph Kay, the Movie Star, who also shucked his white bitch wife, to black applause. But now Randolph Kay and his shiny new black wife had moved into the white world completely, to the extent of endorsing the American bombing of civilian targets in Vietnam. Randolph Kay, in fact, now sang love songs to the President! But perhaps it was perverse of him to be so suspicious. Perhaps, after all, he was just trying to cover up his own inability to act as decisively and to the public order as these men had done. No doubt these were great men, who perceived, as he could not, that to love the wrong person is an error. If only he could believe it possible to love the wrong person he would be home free. As it was, how difficult hating his wife was going to be. He would not even try.

  But of course he had.

  There was a man he despised, whose name was Tom Johnson. Tom had lived with a white woman for years, only most people didn’t know about it. He shuttled her back and forth from his house to a friend’s house down the street. Whenever he had important guests, Margaret was nowhere to be found. She was waiting at their friend’s house. She was a fleshy blonde, with big tits and a hearty laugh. Once he asked Tom— who was thinking of running for political office—why he didn’t marry her. Tom laughed and said, “Boy, you don’t understand anything yet. Margaret is a sweet ol’ thing. We been living together in harmony for five years. But she’s white. Or hadn’t you noticed?” Tom had reached out a chubby hand to bring Truman’s head close to his own and his small eyes danced. “It’s just a matter of pussy. That’s all. Just a matter of my personal taste in pussy.” And then he had pulled Truman’s head even closer and said with conspiratorial glee, “It’s good stuff. Want some?”

  “I used to believe that—” he had begun, but Tom cut him off.

  “This is war, man, war! And all’s fair that fucks with the sucker’s minds!”

  Then he had begun to see them together. Not in public, but with small groups of men, in the back rooms of bars. Margaret could play poker and he liked to see her when she won. She jumped up, squealing, in her small-girl voice, her big tits bouncing at the top of her low-cut blouse, and all the men looked at her tolerantly, in amusement, their curiosity about her big body already at rest. After what Tom had told him this did not surprise him: the exhibition of her delight in winning, the men’s amused solidarity, their willingness to share her in this position of secrecy. And Margaret? Those squeals of delight—what did she feel? Or was it unmanly, un-black now, even to care, to ask?

  When the community center was built, he began painting a mural of the struggle along one wall. The young men who would use the center for dances, Ping-Pong, card games, etc., were building tables and chairs. They were a shy, sweet bunch, country boys and naive as possible, who were literally afraid of white women. Their first meeting with Lynne had been comic. Nobody wanted to be seen talking to her alone, and even as a group they would only talk to her from a distance. She could, just by speaking to them and walking up to them as she spoke, force them back twenty yards. This shamed him now as he thought of Tommy Odds.

  Why should they be afraid of her? She was just a woman. Only they could not see her that way. To them she was a route to Death, pure and simple. They felt her power over them in their bones; their mothers had feared her even before they were born. Watching their fear of her, though, he saw a strange thing: They did not even see her as a human being, but as some kind of large, mysterious doll. A thing of movies and television, of billboards and car and soap commercials. They liked her hair, not because it was especially pretty, but because it was long. To them, length was beauty. They loved the tails of horses.

  Against this fear, Lynne used her considerable charm. She baked cookies for them, allowed them to drink wine in her house, and played basketball with them at the center. Jumping about in her shorts, tossing her long hair, she laughed and sweated and shouted and cursed. She forced them to like her.

  But while this building of trust and mutual liking was coming into being, the Movement itself was changing. Lynne was no longer welcome at any of the meetings. She was excluded from the marches. She was no longer allowed to write articles for the paper. She spent most of her time in the center or at home. The boys, unsure now what their position as young black men should be, remained inexplicably loyal. They came to visit her, bringing news she otherwise would not have heard. For Truman too was under pressure of ostracism from the group, and though he remained a member of all Movement discussions it was understood he would say nothing to his wife.

  The New York Times

  HE HAD GONE TO Meridian three years after he married Lynne, driving across from Mississippi to a small town in Alabama where Meridian, at that time, lived. She had still owned a few possessions then, and was teaching in a Freedom school and keeping rather than burning her poems. He had begged her, or tried to beg her (because she did not seem to understand what begging constituted), to give him another chance. She loved him, he rashly assumed—as she smiled at him—and he did not see why she should deny herself.

  “For Lynne’s sake alone, I couldn’t do it,” she had said languidly, rocking slowly in her yellow chair. “What does she have now besides you?”

  “Everything,” he said sarcastically. “She’s still an American white woman.”

  “Is that so easy?” asked Meridian, stopping her rocking, turning away from him toward the window. The light exposed small petal-shaped flecks of black in her brown eyes. “She was that when she decided she’d rather have you than everything. True? Or not?”

  “How can you take her side?”

  “Her side? I’m sure she’s already taken it. I’m trying to make the acquaintance of my side in all this. What side is mine?” She was not uptight. Nothing trembled. She thought. Rocked. “Don’t you think you owe something to Camara?” She looked him square in the eye.

  “I owe more to all the little black kids being blown away by whitey’s racism.”

  “Of which your daughter is one, surely?” She steadied the rocker, listened.

  “Besides,” he continued, “I don’t owe Lynne the way I do you. You notice I don’t lie and say I don’t love her at all. She’s meant a great deal to me. But you’re differen
t. Loving you is different—”

  “Because I’m black?”

  “You make me feel healthy, purposeful—”

  “Because I’m black?”

  “Because you’re you, damn it! The woman I should have married and didn’t!”

  “Should have loved, and didn’t,” she murmured.

  And Truman sank back staring, as if at a lifeboat receding in the distance.

  Truman had felt hemmed in and pressed down by Lynne’s intelligence. Her inability to curb herself, her imagination, her wishes and dreams. It came to her, this lack of restraint, which he so admired at first and had been so refreshed by, because she had never been refused the exercise of it. She assumed that nothing she could discover was capable of destroying her. He was charmed by her presumption; still, he was not prepared to love her over a long period, but for a short one.

  How marvelous it was at first to find that she read everything. That she thought, deeply. That she longed to put her body on the line for his freedom. How her idealism had warmed him, brought him into the world, made him eager to tuck her under his wing, under himself, sheltering her from her own illusions. Her awareness of wrong, her indignant political response to whatever caused him to suffer, was a definite part of her charm, and yet he preferred it as a part of her rarely glimpsed, commented upon in passing, as one might speak of the fact that Lenin wore a beard. And as she annoyed him with her irrepressible questions that kept bursting out and bubbling up into their lives, like spring water rising beside a reservoir and undermining the concrete of the dam, he had thought of Meridian, whom he imagined as more calm, predictable. Her shy, thin grace, her relative inarticulateness (Lynne, by comparison, never seemed to stop talking, and her accent was unpleasant), her brown strength that he imagined would not mind being a resource for someone else.… In Meridian, all the things lacking in Lynne seemed apparent. Here was a woman to rest in, as a ship must have a port. As a train must have a shed.

  He was stunned to learn that she had long ago dismissed him. In fact, when he looked into her eyes, he knew he was remembering someone else, someone he had made up. Why, he had not known this woman at all! For the first time he detected a quality in Meridian that Lynne—who had know her only briefly—had insisted anyone could see. Meridian, no matter what she was saying to you, and no matter what you were saying to her, seemed to be thinking of something else, another conversation perhaps, an earlier one, that continued on a parallel track. Or of a future one that was running an identical course. This was always true.

  There was also something dark, Truman thought, a shadow, that seemed to swing, like the pendulum of a clock, or like a blade, behind her open, candid eyes, that made one feel condemned. That made one think of the guillotine. That made one suspect she was unbalanced. When he noticed it he felt a shrinking, a retreating of his balls: He wanted her still, but would not have wanted (or been able) to make love to her.

  And in front of this restlessness behind her eyes, this obvious mental activity, she placed a deceptive outer calm. He knew that in this woman who never seemed to hurry, and whom he was destined to pursue, the future might be short, but memory was very long.

  He groaned. Mightily, and at length.

  “Oh no,” Meridian said pleasantly. “You wanted a virgin, don’t you remember?” (He could remember nothing of the kind.) “You wanted a woman who was not ‘sexually promiscuous.’” (When had he said he wanted that?) “But on the other hand, you wanted a woman who had had worldly experiences ... to match your own. Now, since I already had a son, whose existence you frightened me into denying, and since you also wanted to make love to me, and since I had no worldly experience to speak of, marriage between us never reached the point of discussion. In Lynne you captured your ideal: a virgin who was eager for sex and well-to-do enough to have had ‘worldly experiences.’” She explained this in the voice of instruction.

  What she said was absolutely true. Though he was positive he had never told her any of these things. He had wanted a virgin, had been raised to expect and demand a virgin; and never once had he questioned this. He had been as predatory as the other young men he ran with, as eager to seduce and devirginize as they. Where had he expected his virgin to come from? Heaven?

  When he made love to Meridian it had been almost impossible to penetrate her; it was as if her vagina were sealed shut by a taut muscle that fought him. Afterward there was no blood and although she had not said she was a virgin, he had assumed it. It was only later that he could begin to understand why her vagina had been clenched so tightly against him. She had been spasmodic with fear. Fear because sex was always fraught with ugly consequences for her, and fear because if she did not make love with him she might love him, and if she did make love with him he might lose interest. As he must have seemed, to her, to have done.

  But the truth was different. After they had made love, he learned she had been married and had had a child. How could he have a wife who already had a child? And that she had given that child away. What repugnance there arose in him for her. For her eyes which, he thought, burned unnaturally bright. For her thin body on which her breasts (which he much admired) hung much too heavily: When he knew about the child he thought of her breasts as used jugs. They had belonged to some other man.

  He had wanted a woman perfect in all the eyes of the world, not a savage who bore her offspring and hid it. And yet, had she approached him on the street, dragging her child with her by the hand, he would never have glanced at her. For him she would not even have existed as a woman he might love.

  Ironically, it was this awareness of his own limitation, which grew keener year by year, that caused Meridian to remain, a constant reproach, in his thoughts. Wherever he was he would think of her face, her body, the way her hands had fluttered over his back when she kissed him. He thought of the times she had seemed embarrassed for him and he did not know why. He thought of how frequently he had felt superior to her. There was one memory in particular that pained him: Years ago when he was dating the white exchange students she had asked him, the words blurted out in so thick a shame he knew she intended to forget she’d ever asked—“But what do you see in them?”

  And he had replied cruelly, thoughtlessly, in a way designed to make her despise the confines of her own provincial mind:

  “They read The New York Times.”

  Truman felt that that exchange, too, rested somewhere behind Meridian’s eyes. It would have been joy to him to forget her, as it would have been joy never to have been his former self. But running away from Lynne, at every opportunity, and existing a few days in Meridian’s presence, was the best that he could do.

  Visits

  THE SUMMER BEFORE Meridian arrived in Chicokema, which was near the Georgia coast, Lynne visited her. They had not seen each other since the death of Lynne and Truman’s daughter, Camara, a year earlier. Meridian was living in an adequately furnished house that the black community—having witnessed one of her performances and the paralysis that followed it—provided. The house was in an obscure farming village on the Georgia-Alabama line, and how Lynne tracked her there Meridian was at first unable to imagine. The simple answer was that Truman, who was also visiting her at that time, and whose visits had become so commonplace she hardly noticed them, had apparently phoned her.

  There were periods in Meridian’s life when it could not be perceived that she was ill. It was true that she’d lost so much of her hair that finally she had shaved her head and begun wearing a striped white and black railroad worker’s cap: the cotton was durable and light and the visor shaded her eyes from the sun. And it was also true that she was frail and sickly-looking. But among the impoverished, badly nourished black villagers—who attempted to thrive on a diet of salt meat and potatoes during the winter, and fresh vegetables without meat during the summer—she did not look out of place. In fact, she looked as if she belonged.

  Like them, she could summon whatever energy a task that had to be performed required, and like th
em, this ability seemed to her something her ancestors had passed on from the days of slavery when there had been no such thing as a sick slave, only a “malingering” one. Like the luckless small farmers around her who tended their crops “around the weather”—sitting out the days of rain, rushing out to plant or chop or harvest when the sun came out—she lived “around” her illness. Like them, it seemed pointless to her to complain.

  Meridian wondered who the stout white woman could be, knocking at her door as if her fist were made of iron. Then she saw that it was Lynne, a great deal changed.

  “I’ll make us some tea,” she said, inviting her in.

  “Thanks, Meridian,” said Lynne, unburdening herself of her satchel bag and flopping heavily onto the couch. “I’m exhausted!”

  She wore a long Indian bedspread skirt—yellow, with brown and black elephants—and a loose black blouse embroidered with flowers and small mirrors around the neck. Intricately worked gold earrings dangled against her neck. Her olive complexion, which tanned golden in a day of sun, was now chalk-white, her eyes were red-veined and her eyelids drooped. Her dark hair was tangled and dull.

  “I haven’t slept for three motherfuckin’ days,” said Lynne.

  “You should have stopped at one of those new Scottish Inns. They’re cheap.”

  “Not cheap if you’re broke,” Lynne said flatly, looking about the room, her eyes resting for a moment on one of Meridian’s broadside poems which she had stapled to the wall. It was the last object of personal value Meridian owned, and she intended, when she vacated the house, to leave it there.

  “Truman’s here, you know,” Meridian said, bringing in the tea. She had added bologna and light bread, the two foods people donated to help her upkeep wherever she went, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Lynne began eating the bologna without the bread, which was white and spongy, rolled up like a wiener. Then she licked the jelly from the peanut butter, poking at it delicately but never missing, like a cat.