by Alice Walker
He asks his wife to hand him a beer. She is black-skinned, curvaceous, and silent.
“Mabel doesn’t agree with me,” Joe says, sipping his beer, “but that’s okay. I love it here. I love the climate, everything. In Boston I was always sick. Had to stay off work all the time because of colds, my tonsils, the flu. Here it doesn’t get that cold. In my job as manager of a night club I don’t have to be out in all kinds of weather changing tires the way I had to do in Boston. Changing tires was the only kind of job somebody with my education could get.”
I know Joe as well as I know my own brothers. We grew up near each other, attended the same school. He was one of the smartest students ever to attend the local schools in Eatonton, Georgia, our hometown. According to his IQ test results he was gifted. But he could not be disciplined. He was eventually expelled from school in the eleventh grade for slapping a teacher and threatening to slap our school principal.
“If I had a college education,” he says, “I could really do well here.” He thinks back to our high-school days: “I couldn’t take school because when I wore my hair long, like an Afro, in 1954 and ’55, the teachers bugged me about it. And I couldn’t stand Mr. McGlockton [our principal] because he wasn’t a man. He let the white folks in town run him. And through him, us. They wouldn’t even call him ‘Mr.’ or ‘Dr.’; they called him ‘Professor.’”
I had liked Mr. McGlockton. It was true, I said to Joe now, that he was humiliated by whites in town who hated to see any black person with an education or a position of importance, but he had been a kind, gentle man who always made time to talk to the students. I assumed he was better than the people who humiliated him, not worse.
This rather generous rationalization (as he sees it) does not impress Joe Harris, who wanted a hero, and got, he thinks, a coward.
“Except,” he says sadly, drinking his beer, “those crackers would never have called him ‘Mr.’ back then, no matter what. That being the case, I should have stuck it out in school, gone off to college somewhere, become a lawyer, and come back home to kick asses. But it’s too late now.”
His two sons come in. They are bright-eyed, curious eight-and nine-year-olds. “Where’ve you two little niggers been?” asks Joe.
Hearing this, I remember why I have not seen Joe in such a long time. It is because he calls people nigger. Once, in fact, he called my daughter that. We argued, bitterly. I felt I could never forgive him.
“I’ve cut down a lot,” he says apologetically, “on my use of that word. You know, before you mentioned it to me that time, I didn’t realize anybody’d be offended by it.”
“Not simply offended,” I say, “hurt. Whenever I hear a black person I love using that word I feel as if I’m being killed.”
Faye has been listening intently. “I still use ‘nigger’ a lot,” she says, “and I just assumed there was nothing negative about it any more. After all, Red Foxx uses it on national television all the time.”
“I’ve told Joe not to call our kids that,” says Joe’s wife, Mabel. “I keep telling him that just because they’re ‘niggers’ to white people they shouldn’t be ‘niggers’ to him, too.”
“I’m preparing them,” says Joe.
“You are preparing them to be ‘niggers’?” I ask.
He makes a gesture that means I do not understand.
Faye continues: “But then something happened that made me know I had been meaning negative things about the person I called ‘nigger,’ no matter how many positive adjectives I put in front of it. I met a young man, younger than me—I do think there’s a lot to be said for the younger generation—who was so wise and so fine, I mean, where his head was, and his tenderness toward me and his respect for all black people, that I just had to tell my best friend about him, so I called her and I said, ‘Girl, let me tell you about this fine nig—’ and I just couldn’t finish. I couldn’t call him that. Because no matter how I prettied it up, he just wasn’t a nigger.”
“I hate Red Foxx’s show anyway,” says Mabel, finally sitting down, ‘not just for his stupid nigger and Puerto Rican jokes, but for how he treats ‘Aunt Esther.’”
(Aunt Esther is a character on Red Foxx’s “Sanford and Son.” She is tall, angular, and black, and is called “gorilla” with stunning regularity.)
“Everybody’s laughing at Aunt Esther,” says Mabel, “but they know she looks just like them or some of their relatives. We forget white people have been calling us ‘gorillas’ for years. They probably think they’re right, now that they see us on TV doing it to ourselves.”
I am reminded that on a recent American Airlines flight from San Francisco to New York I watched an NFL football short starring a famous black running back. The opening shot was of several monkeys dressed in scarves and raincoats, waving large pocketbooks, jumping up and down, “cheering” in the stands. After some footage showing the famous star doing his famous running, the closing shot was of his wife and two other black women, dressed almost identically to the monkeys, jumping up and down cheering the famous star, their pocketbooks in the air. The persons who made this film were making a visual derogatory statement; one I could not immediately protest, except to ache to rip the screen out of the plane, at thirty-five thousand feet. When I arrived in New York, at Kennedy Airport, I learned La Guardia Airport had been bombed. And I thought: Where there are insults to the dignity of people, acts of retaliatory violence endanger the lives of all of us. Each of us pays in fear and anxiety—if not in actual loss of life—and it is a high price.
Joe Harris talks about his garden, his trees, his unlittered quiet street. “I can go for days, even weeks,” he says happily, “without seeing a white person. I buy gas for my car from a black man. I shop, and I see only black faces. Black night clubs here are owned by black people, and they’re nice, nothing flashy or tacky, like in Boston. Liquor stores are owned by black people. I bought my house from a black realtor. .. All I get from white folks is my electricity and my telephone.
“In Boston a poor man can work his ass off, and never own anything but dirt and roaches.”
“And the children’s education?”
“Well”—he frowns—“that’s about the same here as in Boston. When they integrate the schools in this country what they integrate is teachers. In my children’s classes all the children are black, the teachers white. Our oldest boy is just as rebellious as I was. He has a hard time accepting discipline from a white teacher.”
While Joe has graciously gone out to buy me a barbecue sandwich, I ask Mabel why she isn’t as satisfied with life in the South as Joe.
“Things are nicer here,” she says, “but I don’t make friends easily. All my friends are in Boston. Of course,” she adds, “you have to live where you can live. And if leaving people you care about hurts, you’re just expected to suffer.”
And I think, Yes, two hundred years ago you might have tried to escape to Canada, no matter what the slaves who’d already settled there wrote you of the murderous cold.
Taylor Reese
I have asked Taylor Reese to come by Joe’s house so I can ask him how it feels to be a success.
“I don’t know how it feels,” he says.
He is the realtor from whom Joe Harris bought his house. He is also from our hometown. Rumor had it several years ago that he was becoming rich selling real estate in and around Atlanta. Living lavishly. Getting fat.
“Nobody’s buying houses much in this recession,” he says, “it’s been rough just keeping the business open.”
He has brought his young son with him, and I am immediately attracted to the child, who, at four years old, reminds me of his father years ago. The same deep-brown skin, the same laughing hazel eyes.
I say: “You could have been my child.”
He says: “Uh-uh!”
I fell in love with Taylor Reese when I was six years old. When I was fourteen and he sixteen we began going steady. Later we became engaged. Our relationship lasted for more than six years, th
roughout high school and well into my freshman year at college. The last time I saw Taylor was in 1965. I was in Atlanta on my way farther south to work for a summer in the Movement; he was married and about to become a father. He was not very political then, and I found it hard to relate to him.
Now I discover he is political, but I don’t want to talk about it. Or about selling houses, success, or the recession. I want to know if he is happy. I want to know if he is the same person I used to love. That he is still good-looking, though not as thin, I can see, and his after shave, as I tell him, is delicious.
“I dream about you,” I say.
He smiles, whispers (because Joe and Mabel are in the next room), “We always have fantasies about making love with our old lovers.”
I smile back, though that is not what I meant.
“You were my best friend for nearly seven years; we went through things together only best friends go through. I’ve always wanted to tell you how good I thought you were….”
“Oh, yeah? Good at what?”
“Not at anything in particular …”
He pretends to be crestfallen. We laugh.
“But just good. I mean, you were loyal, you were gentle, you were thoughtful, loving. Good. The older I get, the more I can appreciate that. The more shameful it seems that people who once loved each other are urged to forget it. I want to know all about you. I would like to know your children. I want to know your wife. I want to know all that you’ve become.”
Looking at him, father, husband, businessman, grown-up, I remember things I never, now, think about. Our junior-senior prom, our Saturday-night dates, every single Saturday night for all those years. How, slowly, we grew apart, attached ourselves to other people, without trying to maintain what had been a great friendship.
I do not tell him this, but my dreams about him are rarely erotic. He is simply, occasionally, in my dreams; perpetually slim, perpetually seventeen. Whether I am picking daisies or facing a firing squad.
“You remain mysterious to me,” I tell him. “Because I knew you so well, and now I don’t know you at all.” Perhaps it is the writer in me that is frustrated, hating loose ends of such personal significance.
“I haven’t changed,” he says, and I am moved by the casual tenderness with which he caresses the cheek of his son, who stands behind him clinging to one leg. That gesture of nurturing affection, I recognize.
Jackson, Mississippi, January 17, 1976
I have a friend who hates neighborhoods. I hope I will always live in one. When my husband and I moved to Jackson to live in 1967 we were often afraid our house would be attacked. (Our interracial marriage was considered dangerous as well as illegal in Mississippi, though a U.S. Supreme Court ruling three months before we arrived struck down the statute forbidding it. And my husband, as “yet another Jew lawyer from New York,” was welcomed only by the black community he served.) We bought a dog and a rifle, but we depended on our neighbors. If they saw a car full of strange white people cruising our street they called us, or stood on their porches until the car disappeared. When I drive past our old house on Rockdale Street I feel as if I’m coming home.
“I got your room all ready for you, soon as you called,” Lorene says. Lorene and her family live in the house next door to where we used to live. She works as a nurse’s aide at a local hospital. Her husband, Thomas, used to own a small neighborhood grocery store, but now it is not clear what he does. I suspect he is out of work, but he is not the kind of person to offer that particular information. Thomas and Lorene remind me of people I knew growing up in the country: completely accessible and dependable, generous beyond all understanding, so black and yet so unconscious of blackness as an ideology that to visit them is to take a mental rest.
They have three small children, two of them born during the year and a half since we moved away. Thomas is holding the baby, watching television, and attempting to repair a broken toy at the same time. Like most of the people I’ve talked to, he intends to vote for Jimmy Carter for President. There is a curious pride in the fact that Carter is a Southerner. “A decent, intelligent white one, for a change,” everyone says. Though Thomas likes him simply because he raises peanuts, on the theory that “a man who raises peanuts for money can’t help but do the country good.”
“I was in New York City once,” he says in a slow, deeply accented voice. “Couldn’t make sense out of it. The sun rose in the north to me the whole time I was there.” He puts the baby in his walker and tosses the broken toy behind his reclining chair. “I drove through Brooklyn one time by mistake. It looked like Korea during war. How in the world do you live there?”
“In my usual country style,” I laugh. “With a big flower garden, a smoky fireplace, and a very slow mailman.”
Living in Brooklyn (though I commute to Manhattan two or three times a week) is remarkably like living in Mississippi, in fact. My Civil Rights-lawyer husband was suing racist real-estate dealers in Jackson before we left. He is now filing identical suits in Brooklyn. And, again, what makes life bearable, even happy occasionally, is the proximity of our neighbors, a multiethnic conglomerate of peacemakers in the war-torn city of New York. I lapse into the usual brownstoner’s paean to my neighbor’s rose gardens, the way they sweep their sidewalks, the way, in Brooklyn, anything is an excuse to plant another tree. My wonder that the people on my street, who have long since become my friends (willing to look after my house or my child on a moment's notice), are so civil and generous and clean they are nobody's idea of what New Yorkers are like.
“Yes,” says Lorene, “but what’s the worse thing that’s happened to you since you moved to New York?”
And she's right to be skeptical, because something horrible has indeed happened. I approach her question, as they say here, from the long way.
“You know how, growing up in the South you might be afraid, for good reason, of white people, but you’re never afraid of blacks?”
I remember a good illustration of this lack of fear: “When I was a little girl, some black convicts were cutting a road near our house, and one of them used to come up to the porch and ask for water. Back then convicts wore those suits like black-and-white-striped pajamas, so he really should have looked strange to us, but he didn’t. We’d give him water, dinner, anything we had, and then we’d ask to walk back to the road with him. We’d go strolling up the path with this convict who was in prison for killing a man, and never once were we afraid. We believed him innocent, even if he was guilty.”
“You’re sometimes scared of other black people in New York, aren’t you?” asks Lorene.
“For the first time in my life.” (Of course I have lived in the city before; once, on the lower East Side in a building that had no door. But I was too young then to be afraid of anything.)
For a long time we do not speak; we watch the children playing, struggling over a toy.
“I guess that takes some getting used to,” says Thomas.
But I’ll never be used to it. The bond of black kinship—so sturdy, so resilient—has finally been broken in the cities of the North. There is no mutual caring, no trust. Even the rhetoric of revolutionary peoplehood is hissed out threateningly. The endearment “sister” is easily replaced with “bitch.” My fear is part grief, and if I were ever attacked or robbed by another black person I doubt I’d recover. This thought itself scares me. There is also the knowledge that just as I’m afraid of them, because I no longer know what behavior to expect, they’re afraid of me. Of all the vile things that have happened to us in America, this fear of each other is to me the most unbearable, the most humiliating.
“It’s the drugs,” says Lorene.
“Those little nasty spaces they have to live in,” says Thomas.
“All those from the South,” says Lorene, “probably miss their gardens.”
“Miss going fishing.”
“Miss trees.”
“Miss having people smile at them out of true affection.”
&nbs
p; This is the most quaintly put reason, and perhaps it is the truest of all.
Mrs. Cornelius
I walk half a block down the street to the first place my six-year-old daughter went to school. It is a neat brick house with trees and swings in the yard.
“How is my Rebecca?” her former teacher, Mrs. Cornelius, asks.
She is stout and black-skinned and warm, and is exactly the sort of person I wanted my daughter’s first teacher to be. The nursery school is a large, spotless room added to the house four years ago, and I gaze at the small chairs and tables almost with longing. In Brooklyn my daughter attends a fine public school, with loving teachers and friendly classmates, but it is not the same.
“Your Rebecca is fine,” I tell her. And we chat about the changes in the school since we moved away. But I have really come to thank her for what she and her school meant to me and my child.
“When I was four years old,” I tell her, “my mother could no longer take me to the fields with her when she went to work. She asked Mrs. Reynolds, the teacher in the local primary school, if she could accept me in her first-grade class. I started the very next day. Though I was the youngest person in the class I was made to feel entirely comfortable. Mrs. Reynolds taught me that school is a wonderful place, full of people who care about you and your family, and understand you and your ways, and love you for what you are.
“When Rebecca was only one, you took her in, because being home all day with her while trying to write a novel was driving me crazy, and it will be because of you, when she grows up, that she will know the meaning of supportive affection and generosity, even from strangers.”
Mrs. Cornelius pooh-poohs the assertion that her school is the best I expect Rebecca to know, wherever she is in her life, because it was here that the culture and the curriculum matched serenely, where Rebecca learned to sing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round” as readily as “You Are My Sunshine,” where she could hear the story of Harriet Tubman read to her and see Harriet herself in her teacher’s face.