Meridian (1976)

by Alice Walker

  When her mother tracked her to Truman’s house they heard her screaming from three blocks away, because it was then that her mother noticed she had tracked her only daughter—who had slipped out of the house as furtively as a rabbi from a pogrom—to a black neighborhood. And she had screamed without ceasing, without, seemingly, even stopping to inhale, all the way to the Helds’ steps. Where she had paused long enough to press the bell, the ringing of the bell itself like a blunter bellowing of her anguish. That harsh buzz, followed by the continuation of her mother’s, by then, howl, rested in the back of Lynne’s brain like a spinning record on which the sound was turned down. It would never leave her, even when she was most happy. Like the birth cry to a lucid mother it existed simultaneously with the growth of herself away from and apart from her mother. When she died she knew it would still be spinning soundlessly there.

  Tommy Odds

  “ALTUNA JONES?” Tommy Odds laughed. “Hedge Phillips, and what was that other guy’s name?” He stood over her while she sewed, his usually sad black eyes brightly twinkling.

  “I bet them guys never saw nobody like you. And if they did they never would let on. I bet you’re scaring them niggers to death in them shorts.”

  He was only half-playful because he disliked what whites in the Movement chose to wear in black communities. A girl who had volunteered to take notes at church meetings had liked to sit with her dress pulled up so high you could see her drawers. This she did in the amen corner. The pious old women and hacked-down prayerful old men had hardly been able to express their grievances. And she, a blonde with a blank, German face—had placidly chewed gum and scratched her thighs, oblivious to what was hanging the people up. And of course nobody dared tell her. It wasn’t fear. They were simply too polite to tell a guest in their community that she was behaving like a tramp.

  Tommy Odds looked at Lynne carefully. She had tanned since coming South. She seemed relaxed and happy. He thought of her life with Truman—how they could never ride on the same seat of their car, but must always sit as if one of them were chauffeuring the other. And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up. Sometimes she would paste an especially good one—one she’d liked—in front of the commode, at eye level. You had no choice but to read it. These were usually love poems to Truman, or poems about the need for gentleness in the heart of the Revolution. Her favorite book was Jane Stembridge’s plea for love and community, I Play Flute. It was clear also in her poetry and in the things she said that to her black people had a unique beauty, a kind of last-gasp loveliness, which, in other races, had already become extinct.

  He had wanted to make love to her. Because she was white, first of all, which meant she would assume she was in control, and because he wanted—at first—to force her to have him in ways that would disgust and thrill her. He thought of hanging her from a tree by her long hair and letting her weight gradually pull the hair from her scalp. He wondered if that would eventually happen to a person hung up in that way.

  But Lynne grew on him, as she did on everyone. And she was a good worker. Better—to be honest—than the black women who always wanted to argue a point instead of doing what they were told. And she liked doing things for him; it was almost as if she knew he must be placated, obeyed. She had sewed the armbands willingly, and listened to his teasing enthusiastically, and tried to be carefree and not too Northern or hip. And she had worn her hair—for some strange reason that amounted almost to a premonition—in tight braids that she pinned securely to the top of her head.

  Lynne

  FOR OF COURSE it was Tommy Odds who raped her. As he said, it wasn’t really rape. She had not screamed once, or even struggled very much. To her, it was worse than rape because she felt circumstances had not permitted her to scream. As Tommy Odds said, he was just a lonely one-arm nigger down on his luck that nobody had time for any more. But she would have time—wouldn’t she? Because she was not like those rough black women who refused to be sympathetic and sleep with him—was she? She would be kind and not like those women or any other women who turned him down because they were repulsed and prejudiced and the maroon stump of his arm made them sick. She would be a true woman and save him—wouldn’t she?

  “But Tommy Odds,” she pleaded, pushing against his chest, “I’m married to your friend. You can’t do this.”

  “You don’t have to tell him,” he said, undoing her braids and wrapping his hand twice in her hair. “Kiss me,” he said, pulling her against him. Water stood in her eyes as she felt her hair being tugged out at the roots.

  “Please don’t do this,” she whimpered softly.

  “You knows I cain’t hep mysef,” he said in loose-lipped mockery, looking at her red cheeks where tiny red capillaries ran swollen and broken. His eyes were sly, half-closed, filled with a sensuousness that was ice-cold. “You’re so white and red, like a pretty little ol’ pig.” He lifted her briefly by her hair, pulled her closer to him.

  “Tommy Odds—”

  “Put your arms around me,” he said, “and tell me you love me.”

  “Tommy Odds please.” She was crying aloud now and when she flailed her arms she bumped against his stump. Her throat worked.

  “It makes you sick?” asked Tommy Odds. “You think I’m a cripple? Or is it that you really don’t dig niggers? Ones darker than your old man?”

  “You know that’s not true,” she groaned.

  He had tripped her back onto the bed and was pulling up her skirt with his teeth. His hand came out of her hair and was quickly inside her blouse. He pinched her nipples until they stung.

  “Please” she begged.

  “I didn’t really mean that,” he said. “I know your heart is in the right place” (sucking her left nipple). “You’re not like the others.”

  “God—” she said.

  There was a moment when she knew she could force him from her. But it was a flash. She lay instead thinking of his feelings, his hardships, of the way he was black and belonged to people who lived without hope; she thought about the loss of his arm. She felt her own guilt. And he entered her and she did not any longer resist but tried instead to think of Tommy Odds as he was when he was her friend—and near the end her arms stole around his neck, and before he left she told him she forgave him and she kissed his slick rounded stump that was the color of baked liver, and he smiled at her from far away, and she did not know him. “Be seein’ you,” he said.

  The next day Tommy Odds appeared with Raymond, Altuna and Hedge.

  “Lynne,” he said, pushing the three boys in front of him into the room, “I’m going to show you what you are.”

  She thought, helplessly, as if it were waiting for just this moment to emerge from her memory, of a racist painting she had once seen in Esquire of a nude white woman spread-eagled on a rooftop surrounded by black men. She thought: gang rape. Her anal muscles tightened, her throat closed with an audible choking sound.

  “What do you want?” she asked, looking—for the first time—downward toward the genitals of Hedge and Altuna and Raymond. They were looking sideways at her, as if embarrassed. All of them had been smoking grass, she smelled it on them.

  Pointing to her body as if it were conquered territory, Tommy Odds attempted to interest the boys in exploring it: “Tits,” he said, flicking them with his fingers, “ass.”

  “What do you want?” demanded Lynne, furious because seeing the faces of Altuna, Hedge and Raymond through the front window had reassured her, and she had not locked her door.

  “What did we do yesterday afternoon?” Tommy asked lazily, idly, holding the back of her neck. “What did I do?”

  Lynne gathered her courage. “You raped me.”

  “Um hum,” he said, smiling at the boys who were attentive, curious and silent, as if holding their breath. “
And what did you do when I was getting ready to get out of you?”

  She did not reply. He squeezed her neck.

  “I—” she began.

  “A little nine-year-old black girl was raped by a white animal last week in Tchula,” said Tommy Odds, “they pulled her out of the river, dead, with a stick shoved up her. Now that was rape. Not like us.” He tightened his grip. “Tell us, bitch, what did you do when it started getting good to you?”

  “It was never good,” said Lynne. Then, “I kissed your arm.”

  “My stub,” he corrected her. “You hugged me and you kissed my stub. And what else did you do?”

  He was holding her neck in the crook of his elbow, her chin was pointed at the ceiling. He squeezed.

  “I forgave you,” said Lynne.

  Tommy Odds laughed. “Forgave me,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Lynne.

  He loosened his grip. They stood together now, his arm around her shoulders, his fingers lightly stroking her breast. From the reflection in the windowpane they appeared to be a couple. Lynne looked into the horrified faces of Altuna, Hedge and Raymond. But perhaps, she thought, they are not horrified. Perhaps that is not a true reading of what I see on their faces (for the first time it seemed to her that black features were grossly different—more sullen and cruel—than white). Though none of them smiled, she could have sworn they were grinning. She imagined their gleaming teeth, with sharp, pointed edges. Oh, God, she thought, what a racist cliché.

  “You want it?” Tommy Odds asked the boys.

  Lynne closed her eyes. She could not imagine they would say no. The whole scene flashed before her. She was in the center of the racist Esquire painting, her white body offered up as a sacrifice to black despair. She thought of the force, the humiliation, the black power. These boys were no longer her friends; the sight of her naked would turn them into savages.

  “Go on,” said Tommy Odds. “Have some of it.”

  Altuna Jones—whose head was shaped exactly like a person’s head would be shaped with such a name, like a melon, long, and with close-cut hair—cleared his throat.

  “It? It?” he said. “What it you talking about? That ain’t no it, that’s Lynne.”

  Hedge Phillips spoke. Like his name there was evasion in his looks. He was short and fat and so oily black his features were hard to distinguish until he smiled. When he talked one foot stroked the ground experimentally, as if eager to move off down the street.

  “We not gon’ hurt you,” he said to Lynne. “Us thought it was a party here this evening.”

  Raymond, shyer even than the other two, but grasping somehow that a masculine line, no matter how weak, must be taken, said, plaintively as it turned out, to Tommy Odds, “You know, Tommy, that I have a girlfriend.”

  “Look,” said Odds, with contempt, “she’s nothing particular. You guys are afraid of her, that’s all. Shit. Crackers been raping your mamas and sisters for generations and here’s your chance to get off on a piece of their goods.”

  “Man, you crazy,” said Altuna Jones, and he looked at Lynne with pity, for she had obviously not been—in his opinion—raped. All his life he had heard it was not possible to rape a woman without killing her. To him, in fact, rape meant that you fucked a corpse. That Lynne would actually stoop to sleeping with Tommy Odds meant something terrible with wrong with her, and he was sorry.

  The three boys left.

  “They’re not like you,” said Lynne, though she had barely finished thinking they would be exactly like Tommy Odds. “They don’t need to rape white women to prove they’re somebody.”

  “Rape,” said Tommy Odds. “I fucked you. We fucked.”

  Again he pressed her down on the bed and fumbled with her clothes. Even before she began to fight him off she knew she would not have to. Tommy Odds was impotent. He spat in her face, urinated on the floor, and left her lying there.

  When Truman came home again, Lynne could not talk about it. She could hardly talk at all. She was packed and ready to leave. She wished she could go to the police, but she was more afraid of them than she was of Tommy Odds, because they would attack young black men in the community indiscriminately, and the people she wanted most to see protected would suffer. Besides, she thought as long as she didn’t tell, Truman would never know. It would hurt him, she thought, to know how much his friend hated her. To know how low was her value. It was as if Tommy Odds thought she was not a human being, as if her whiteness, the mystique of it, the danger of it, the historically verboten nature of it, encouraged him to attempt to destroy her without any feelings of guilt. It was so frightening a thought that she shook with it.

  She had insisted on viewing them all as people who suffered without hatred; this was what intrigued her, made her like a child in awe of them. But she had not been thinking of individual lives, of young men like Tommy Odds whose thin defense against hatred broke down under personal assault. Revenge was his only comfort. And, she thought, on whom was such a man likely to take his revenge? Not on white men at large; certainly not. Not on the sheriff or the judge or the businessman sitting home over his drink. Not on the businessman’s wife, because she would scream and put him away for good. He—Tommy Odds—had actually reached (and she understood this too well for her own comfort) an improvement in his choice of whom to punish, when he chose her. For, look at this: He had not, as black men had done foolishly for years, gotten drunk on the weekend and stabbed another black man to death. Nor had he married a black woman in order to possess, again erroneously, his own whipping post. Surely this was proof of a weird personal growth on Tommy’s part. There were no longer any white boys, either, in the Movement, so that they could no longer be beaten up or turned, with guilty contempt, out into the street. That left her: a white woman without friends. A woman the white community already assumed was fucking every nigger in sight. Yes, Tommy Odds’s logic—convoluted though it might be—was perfect.

  But Truman didn’t want her to leave. He would not give her money to leave even after she told him, hysterical finally, what had happened. He chose not to believe her.

  Ask Tommy, she had cried, Just ask him! But if he did, she never knew.

  “Why did you do it, man,” Truman asked Tommy Odds.

  “Because your woman ain’t shit. She didn’t even fight. She was just laying back waiting to give it up.”

  Lynne cried every night in her sleep. Truman could not bear it, so he did not usually come home. He slept on a couch in the center. His hand shot out and caught Odds at the base of the throat, which was black and scrawny, like the neck of a hen.

  “She’s better than you,” he said, as Tommy Odds stretched his eyes wide, feigning fear. “You creep,” said Truman, with a sneer, “you motherfucker. She felt sorry for you, because you lost your fucking arm.”

  He raised his clenched fist underneath Odds’s chin and, holding the collar of his shirt, rocked him back and forth, his feet nearly off the floor. It was like lifting a bag of loose, dirty laundry. “She felt sorry for you and look what you did.”

  Odds did not raise hand to defend himself. He looked into Truman’s eyes, and his own eyes were laughing. The laughter in them was like two melting ice cubes gleaming in a dish.

  “You wish it was my fucking arm she felt sorry for.”

  “What do you mean, you son of a bitch?”

  But Tommy Odds, tired now of being held in an awkward position, yanked himself out of Truman’s grasp. He straightened his collar, tucked his shirt into his pants, extended his stub out from his side, like a turkey flapping a wing, and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Why don’t you wise up,” he said. “She didn’t get involved with you because of anything you lost.”

  “Why don’t you say what you mean!”

  “I mean,” said Tommy Odds mockingly, “it is true that you speaks French when you wants to impress folks, and it is true that you went to college, and it is true that you can draw and stuff and one time lived overseas for six months
without pig feet or greens. But that ain’t what won you Miss Lady Fair. Oh noooo ... you’re like a book she hadn’t read; like a town she wanted to pass through; like a mango she wanted to taste because mangoes don’t grow in her own yard. Boy, if you’d had an arm missing she probably would have kidnapped you a lot sooner than she did.”

  Truman wanted very much to destroy Tommy Odds. The impulse was overwhelming.

  “Black men get preferential treatment, man, to make up for all we been denied. She ain’t been fucking you, she’s been atoning for her sins.”

  “That’s not true,” said Truman, sounding weak, even to himself

  “She felt sorry for me because I’m black, man,” said Tommy Odds, and for the first time there was dejection in his voice. “The one thing that gives me some consolation in this stupid world, and she thinks she has to make up for it out of the bountifulness of her pussy.” His voice hardened. “I should have killed her.”

  “No,” said Truman, “no—”

  Tommy Odds stood facing him. He looked terrible. Puny and exhausted and filthy. Dead. “Listen, man, you want to defend her. It’s all right with me. I don’t care, man. You want to beat me up,” he said, “I’m ready, man. You want to kill me. Look, I won’t even complain. You want me to go find you a gun? Or do you want to do it with your fists? Come on, man. Hit me. We’ll feel better.”

  But Truman had already turned away.

  And so Lynne sat alone, at home always now because she was afraid to go over to the center she had helped create. Afraid and ashamed and not even conscious enough of her own worth to be angry that she was ashamed. She counted the days until she was sure she was not pregnant. When she sold one of her poems—to an anthologist who wanted to document the Movement in poetry, and who wanted the white woman’s point of view—she bought birth control pills. Enough for two months.