by Alice Walker
“Yes,” said Little Sister Lucille smugly, watching their changed faces, “she’s fat and black and seventy-two years old, and the first man she opened her legs to made her pregnant.”
“Sixty-nine,” said Miss Margaret.
Laughter, like a wicked silver snake, wriggled up Truman’s spine. It knocked him out to hear Meridian ask, conversationally, “How far along are you?” He glanced at her expecting to see a face fighting to control itself, but there was only a slight blush already fading into her brown skin.
“Ahhh!” Miss Margaret screamed and jumped to her feet, pulling at the heavy bed. “Help me burn it up now, y’all,” she cried, and yanked with such force her wig fell off at their feet. Little Sister Lucille grabbed it up and began to laugh, forgetting, apparently, that her own hair was severely marcelled and dyed a foolish orange.
Truman and Meridian took hold of the bed and pushed with all their strength. It hung over the edge of the porch like an ancient ship hovering over the edge of the sea. Miss Margaret pulled and the bed crashed down the steps and into the yard, Miss Margaret’s leg caught under it. She did not seem to feel the pain but tugged relentlessly at the bed trying to pull it over her and out to the edge of the cornfields where the fire, by this time, had gone out.
“You’re out of gasoline,” said Meridian, holding up the can.
Meridian and Truman sat in the yard under a hot midsummer sun, binding Miss Margaret’s leg in cold-water wraps.
“Miss Margaret,” said Meridian, holding the leg on her lap and giving it an affectionate pat every now and then, “from the way you handle yourself, I don’t think you’re pregnant. Do you think she looks pregnant?” she asked Truman. “Truman’s wife had a little girl,” she explained to Miss Treasure, “so he’d be a good person to ask because he’d know.”
Truman shook his head slowly, “You don’t look a bit pregnant to me,” he choked out.
Miss Margaret’s face lit up, but quickly went dark again. “Rims said it, too,” she said. “Him and Little Sister Lucille both said it.”
“Well,” said Meridian, “when we take you in to the doctor for your leg we can ask him.”
Miss Margaret looked at them in fear. It had been years since she was off the plantation, and from the magazines she read the world beyond her property was not safe. She grieved over her life and moaned from the pain coming into her wounded leg. She had been a virgin until Rims came into her life, filling it with fluttery anticipation and making her body so changed, so full of hurting brightness she had known it was a sin for which she would be punished. She lay on the hot ground like a lost child, or like a dog kicked so severely it has lost its sense of smell and wanders about and leans on the tree it otherwise would have soiled.
Truman and Meridian supported her every step of the way, holding her fat arms firmly, up to the very door of the doctor’s examination room. Her face, when she emerged an hour later, held a vacancy of grief that made it appear blank and smooth, as if all her wrinkles had been, by kisses, erased. The next day she came to place her name in Meridian’s yellow pad.
“Ask me to do anything, young peoples,” said Miss Treasure, “I’m y’all’s!”
Pilgrimage
AND SO THEY MUST GO to the prison. And so they must. And so they must see the child who murdered her child, nothing new. But the prison was. Only two stories high, it was set back from the road in a sea of green, the black trees around it like battlements around a castle. The grate of the key, the lock, the creaking door opening inward, sucking in the light into the gloom. Signing in. Hearing the harsh music of women’s voices, women confined to sit and buzz like insects, whine, wait in line. Who was that person? That man/woman person with a shaved part in close-cut hair? A man’s blunt face and thighs, a woman’s breasts? But they had not come to stare or feel the cold security of being who they were, unconfined.
She was in a cell as small, as tidy, as a nearly empty closet. Meridian had brought magazine pictures of green fields, a blue river, a single red apple on a white page, large, containing in itself all the mystery there ever was or will be in the world. It was the apple (not the river or the green fields) the girl liked. She liked red, liked roundness, liked a clean shine on things she ate.
Yes. She had bitten her baby’s cheek, bitten out a plug, before she strangled it with a piece of curtain ruffle. So round and clean it had been, too. But not red, alas, before she bit. And wasn’t it right to seek to devour a perishable? That, though sweet to the nose, soft to the touch, yummy, is yet impossible to keep? It was as if (she said, dreamily) I had taken out my heart (red and round, fine, a glistening valentine!) and held it in my hands (my heart was sweet, sweet, smelled sweet, like apple blossoms) and took a bite out of it. It was my heart I bit, I strangled till it died. I hid beside the river. My heart the roaming dog dug up, barking for the owner of that field. My heart. Where I am (she continues) no one is. And why am I alive, without my heart? And how is this? And who, in the hell, are you?
“People who ask people to vote.” (To struggle away, beyond, all in the world they have ever known.)
(She laughs, heartily and young.) Well, you don’t think there’s anybody here to vote? Peals of laughter washing them down to the absurdity of worms after a rain wrigglingly constructing ridges of sand to sink between before the crushing boot that’s raised above comes crushing down.
“Your mother and sister told us where you were.”
A mother and sister oddly smug about this child who killed her child. Thirteen (her mother said) and too damn grown, since before she was even ten. Doomed, I told her. Get out of my house. Walk the streets for all I care. She never was (turning to look) like Carrie Mae, the one that pained me most being born. Must have been because all my pain from Carrie Mae come then, and was got over with. Now (lifting her chin) this ’un in the prison was too easy coming. Like grease.
Spare me (says the girl). Across her face the sun has burned squares between the lighter color protected by the bars. I look out of my window every evening (she says) until it goes down, warming my chest. If you all can’t give me back my heart (she says suddenly, with venom), go the fuck away.
It is too much for them. Outside again they are strangers to the green land, the ground they walk on, have known forever. It is so close to Meridian she takes to her sleeping bag, there to weep underneath Truman’s trembling arm, there to rouse her own heart to compassion for her son. But her heart refuses to beat faster, to warm, except for the girl, the child who killed her child. Doomed, she thought, doomed. A fucking heart of stone.
Truman lay as if slaughtered, feeling a warmth, as of hot blood, wash over him. Shame. But for what? For whom? What had he done?
Meridian sat, watching the workmen from the city begin to clear the debris from the ditch, preparatory to filling it in (yes, the voters had won this small, vital service), and she wrote with such intensity and passion the pen dug holes in the paper—
i want to put an end to guilt
i want to put an end to shame
whatever you have done my sister
(my brother)
know i wish to forgive you
love you
it is not the crystal stone
of our innocence
that circles us
not the tooth of our purity
that bites bloody our hearts.
She slept that night with Truman’s arms around her, while Truman’s dreams escaped from his lips to make a moaning, crying song.
One day, after Truman—who was beginning to experience moments with Meridian when he felt intensely maternal—had wiped her forehead with a cloth soaked in cold water, Meridian wrote:
there is water in the world for us
brought by our friends
though the rock of mother and god
vanishes into sand
and we, cast out alone
to heal
and re-create
ourselves.
These poems she did not burn.
She placed them just above Anne-Marion’s letters, after which she did not look at the letters, the poems, or even the walls, again.
(Atonement: Later, in the Same Life)
TRUMAN HELD HER HANDS away from his shoulders. “I have something to tell you, Lynne. Try not to be upset.”
“You’re going to divorce me,” said Lynne bravely, sillily.
“No. I don’t think so. The truth is, I still love you.”
“Still?”
“I always did. I love you. You irritate me sometimes...”
“You irritate me, often.”
“... but. But I don’t desire you any more.”
Lynne sank back into her rocker. Truman knelt on the floor.
“Is it because I’m fat?” she asked. “Is it because I smell, maybe? Is it because my hair is messy? Or is it because—” and she laughed a strangled laugh—“is it because I have now become Art?”
“No, no,” he said, wondering about her. “I do love you. It’s just that—I don’t want to do anything but provide for you and be your friend. Your brother. Can you accept that?”
Lynne chuckled, thinking of the South, the green fields ...
“Maybe we can start over again,” she said. “Let’s go back South.”
“What for?” he asked.
Settling Accounts
“BUT DO YOU KNOW what I want from you?” Truman asked Meridian, leaning over her sleeping bag. “Promise me you won’t laugh at me....” He hesitated. “I want you to love me.”
“But I do love you,” said Meridian.
“You pity me. I want your love the way I had it a long time ago. I used to feel it springing out to me whenever you looked into my eyes. It flowed over me like a special sun, like grace.”
“My love for you changed.…”
“You withdrew it.”
“No, I set you free.…”
“Hah,” he said bitterly, “why don’t you admit you learned to hate me, to disrespect me, to wish I were dead. It was your contempt for me that made it impossible for me to forget.”
“I meant it when I said it sets you free. You are free to be whichever way you like, to be with whoever, of whatever color or sex you like—and what you risk in being truly yourself, the way you want to be, is not the loss of me. You are not free, however, to think I am a fool.”
He noticed, above their heads, an addition to the line of letters. A blank sheet of paper and, next to it, forming the end of the line, a photograph of an enormous bull’s-eye. When he stood up close to it he discovered—after much twisting of his head and neck—that it was not a bull’s-eye at all but a gigantic tree stump. A tiny branch, no larger than his finger, was growing out of one side. The piece of paper next to it was not blank, though the handwriting was grotesquely small. Even so, he recognized it as Anne-Marion’s. It contained one line: “Who would be happier than you that The Sojourner did not die?” She had written, also in a minute script, “perhaps me,” but then had half-erased it.
Behind him on the floor Meridian was bending forward again and again to touch her toes, her flushed face tense with determination; a rush of gratitude that she was alive flooded Truman’s body. When she stopped for breath he dropped to the floor beside her and gathered her into his arms. But Meridian leaned against him for only a moment, then she continued to flex and stretch her muscles.
“Truman,” Meridian said, when she lay back, exhausted, on the floor. “Do you remember what happened the last time we went out? Remember how that woman attacked me and then slammed the door in our faces?”
He remembered.
“I never explained to you why she did that. She did it because I know something about her life that she told me, but now she wishes I didn’t know it because she’s afraid of what people will think about her if they know. That woman left her husband because he was infatuated with his dog.”
Truman laughed.
“No, no, I mean it. He was in love with a dog. He bought the best of everything for the dog to eat. He brushed its coat a dozen times a day. He talked to it constantly, ignoring his children and his wife. He let it sleep on the best bed in the guest room. Some nights he would stay with it. When his wife finally screamed and asked him why, he explained that the dog had better qualities than she had. The wife left him. Took all their five children and went to live with her mother. But her mother didn’t want her because the children gave her a headache, and so she convinced the daughter that even if the story she told was true, it would be better to go back to him. Because, after all, he owned his own house and was not stingy or mean. They ate well and he did not come home drunk on the weekends and beat her. The wife had no choice; she went back to her husband because alone she could not feed her children. Of course she made her husband promise to kill the dog.”
“And did he kill the dog?”
Meridian shrugged.
“I suspected that is not the point,” she said.
Release
SHE WAS STRONG ENOUGH to go and owned nothing to pack. She had discarded her cap, and the soft wool of her newly grown hair framed her thin, resolute face. His first thought was of Lazarus, but then he tried to recall someone less passive, who had raised himself without help. Meridian would return to the world cleansed of sickness. That was what he knew.
What he felt was that something in her was exactly the same as she had always been and as he had, finally, succeeded in knowing her. That was the part he might now sense but could not see. He would never see “his” Meridian again. The new part had grown out of the old, though, and that was reassuring. This part of her, new, sure and ready, even eager, for the world, he knew he must meet again and recognize for its true value at some future time.
“Your ambivalence will always be deplored by people who consider themselves revolutionists, and your unorthodox behavior will cause traditionalists to gnash their teeth,” said Truman, who was not, himself, concerned about either group. To him, they were practically imaginary. It was still amazing to him how deeply Meridian allowed an idea—no matter where it came from—to penetrate her life.
“I hate to think of you always alone.”
“But that is my value,” said Meridian. “Besides, all the people who are as alone as I am will one day gather at the river. We will watch the evening sun go down. And in the darkness maybe we will know the truth.”
She hugged him, long, lingeringly (her nose and lips rooting about at his neck, causing him to laugh), and then she went, walking as if hurrying to catch up with someone.
Truman turned, tears burning his face, and began, almost blindly, to read the poems she had left on the walls. He could not bring himself to read the letters yet. It was his house now, after all. His cell. Tomorrow the people would come and bring him food. Someone would come and milk his cow. They would wait patiently for him to perform, to take them along the next guideless step. Perhaps he would.
“whatever you have done, my brother… know i wish to forgive you ... love you it is not the crystal stone of our innocence that circles us not the tooth of our purity that bites bloody our hearts.”
Truman felt the room begin to turn and fell to the floor. A moment later, dizzy, he climbed shakily into Meridian’s sleeping bag. Underneath his cheek he felt the hard edge of her cap’s visor, he pulled it out and put it on his head. He had a vision of Anne-Marion herself arriving, lost, someday, at the door, which would remain open, and wondered if Meridian knew that the sentence of bearing the conflict in her own soul which she had imposed on herself—and lived through— must now be borne in terror by all the rest of them.
I wish to thank the Radcliffe Institute,
the MacDowell Colony, and the Yaddo Corporation
for their support during the writing of this hook. I also
thank Mel Leventhal and Rebecca Leventhal.
A Biography of Alice Walker
Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Wal
ker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.
Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.
Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book, Once (1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.
In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and her first story collection, In Love & Trouble (1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for Ms. magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.