The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Raymond talked nonstop about a documentary film on Negroes in the South he was working on for his group. He was taking a leave of absence from the print shop to go to Tennessee as a volunteer photographer on a voter registration project.

  Emily poked at her peanuts and chicken in silence as he talked about upcoming rallies and benefits. Most of his face was hidden by his beard, but his eyes gleamed.

  “Raymond, what is it everyone up here has against the South?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I forgot: You’re just off the boat. It must be kind of overwhelming.”

  “Well, it’s just that I wasn’t around when the Crusaders were going off to Constantinople.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “At one time I think you’d have found it funny.”

  “At one time I was a bigot.”

  “I see. Well, then, do I disgust you now? The way I seem to my ex-roommate?”

  “You don’t disgust me, Emily. But you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  Emily speared an evasive slice of water chestnut with her chopstick.

  “But there’s no reason why you should. After all, your family has nowhere to go but down when the South topples.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That blasted hierarchical town we come from: a place for everyone, and everyone in his place. With Daddy Prince on his throne.”

  “I always thought you liked my father.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “It doesn’t?” She envied him his new air of certainty.

  “No, it doesn’t. We’re talking ideology now, not personality.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look, if I hadn’t left, I’d be working for your daddy right now. And I’d be at his mill the rest of my life.”

  “But you could have worked your way up, like your father. Or you could have switched to the paper mill. You could have done whatever you wanted down there, Raymond.”

  “But that’s not the point. Why would I want what I wanted? Because I’d been raised to believe that was all I was good for. I’d be grateful for what Big Daddy paid me. And meanwhile, he’d be living it up on Tsali Street.”

  “Living it up? His idea of a big time is supper at the Barbecue Pit. Raymond, what you’re saying has no bearing on real people.”

  “You can’t see it because you’re the crown princess. There’s no percentage in your seeing it.”

  “Raymond, it’s me: Emily. Your old childhood buddy.”

  “You’re not cute, Emily.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out how come you put up with me?”

  “It ain’t easy,” he drawled.

  “By the way, what have you done with your accent? You sound like a Yankee.”

  He shrugged. “You’ll find it’s not very fashionable to be a white Southerner up here right now.”

  “I’ve noticed. I’ve never even thought of myself as a Southerner, and here I am, hated for being one. Southerner. What does that mean?”

  “You’ll find out fast, and lots you won’t like.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot, Raymond. When I think I could be going to State …”

  “So go to State. Never leave the goddam place.”

  “I’ve already left,” she pointed out.

  Brakes screeched, horns blared, drivers cursed and gestured obscenely. Huge glass and steel buildings ringed the crowd, most dressed as though ready to call home the hogs. The young man in overalls addressing them had spent forty days in Parchman State Prison following a Freedom Ride. Although white and a Yankee, he for some reason was speaking like an Alabama sharecropper: “They’s several hunnert of us gathered here this afternoon. We can be real proud since we competing with a football game.”

  Derisive laughter.

  “But we ain’t got much else to be proud of, friends. Thousands of the brothers and sisters can’t be with us today because they got them no long green to get here on. Never mind that. They got no money to eat on. They working as maids and yard ‘boys’ for ten dollars a week, for families who got theirselves a hunnert thousand dollars a year. They working in fields from sunup to sundown for fifteen dollars a week. Not only ain’t they got no money, they ain’t even got the right, friends, to demonstrate about not having nothing. Old women is being tore into by po-lice dogs. Little girls in their own Sunday school room is being blown to bits. Negro students is being throwed in jail for ordering greasy old hamburgers at dumps they wouldn’t get caught dead in otherwise. And thousands of Negro citizens can’t do nothing to change this because they ain’t allowed a vote. So it’s up to us, brothers and sisters—all of us here this afternoon, and the thousands who couldn’t be—to change all this.”

  Emily didn’t know what to make of it all. Jed would have jumped up there and punched the guy out, but Emily’s responses were more confused. On one side of her was Joan; on the other, Corinne. They had taken her political education in hand. Intent on being polite when a guest in other people’s countries, Emily was attending each benefit, rally, concert, and coffee house they suggested. They appeared to regard her with the same delight Victorian missionaries lavished on a naked savage whom they’d persuaded to wear a loincloth. They assured her that her moral inadequacies were not her own personal fault, but the result of an upbringing in an iniquitous social system. (One of the South’s inadequacies, Emily had decided, was to instill in its children the ability to listen politely while people dumped on their homeland.)

  Joan’s parents owned a furniture store on 125th Street, which made her an expert on race relations. Several times a week she’d perch on Emily’s bed and compare the South to a large Nazi concentration camp.

  The first time Emily replied, “Yes, but it’s not like that.”

  Joan looked at her. “Listen, Emily, you don’t know from nothing.”

  “But Joan, I lived there eighteen years.”

  Statistics, broken down by race, showered down like balloons at a convention rally—infant mortality rates, per capita income, expenditures on education, welfare payments, violent death rate. There was nothing Emily could say. Joan would never discuss if she could argue or lecture. You had to become sly, go to rallies like this one when you really wanted to be at the football game, appear to be convinced; then you could think as you liked in the privacy of your own brain. She liked Joan and Corinne. She just couldn’t understand what they were so upset about all the time. And she felt a little bit guilty pretending to understand in order to have friends to drink coffee with after supper.

  “People here in the North, they all the time saying, ‘Hey, man, what you wanna go sit in some rat-trap Southern bus station for anyhow?’ And Southerners, they sez to me, sez, ‘Son, you just keep quiet about it, and you can sit wherever you want with whoever you want. But don’t you go stirring up no trouble now, hear?’ Well, I sez to them, ‘Baby, I want to stir up trouble.’ Hell, I don’t give a shit bout no bus station, man. I’m talking serious revo-loo-shun.

  “We can’t wait no more on the courts. The brothers and sisters in the South been waiting on the courts for a hunnert years. We got to grassroots it, baby! We want Freedom! We want Justice! We want Brotherhood! We want them for all the people! And we want them now!

  “We going out in the streets—of the Mississippi Delta, of southwest Georgia, of the en-tire state of Alabama! Wallace, Eastland, Thurmond, they ain’t stopping us! We gon march through Dixie like Sherman through Georgia, and we gon burn ole Jim Crow down!”

  The crowd went crazy. Bearded young men, holding bed sheets taut, moved through the crowd yelling, “Support the brothers and sisters in the South!” People threw coins and wadded bills. The young men shook the sheets so the change jingled like a camel caravan. Emily held Joan’s and Corinne’s hands and swayed and sang “We Shall Overcome.” As they hummed, tears streamed down everyone’s face. Back home, Emily reflected, people who intended to lead a new life in Christ would now have been called down front by the
preacher.

  Corinne, who lived in the room next door to Emily, was the daughter of an investment banker. She had stringy blonde hair, baleful blue eyes, and a way of cringing that made Emily want to slug her. She was constantly hocking her ancestral jewelry and turning over the proceeds to startled blind Negro amputees who sold pencils on the corner of Forty-second Street. A trip downtown with her was like a tour through a leper colony with a Sister of Mercy.

  Corinne dated Negro musicians whom she met at coffee houses in the Village. She usually sported a few stitches or a chipped tooth because they didn’t hesitate, as Emily did, to slug her when she cringed. Emily had gone to listen to Corinne’s latest boyfriend play the drums. The marble-topped tables were filled with white students disguised as field hands who sat with closed eyes, nodding their heads to the music.

  “Have you ever had a Negro boyfriend?” Corinne asked. Emily nodded no.

  “They’re wonderful. So … oh, I don’t know. So forceful. So sure of themselves compared to white boys. They’re men, not boys. They’ve coped with adversity all their lives. Maybe I can get Fishbait to fix you up.” Fishbait, who had a black patch over one eye, came over, saving Emily from trying to shoehorn Donny into this description of Negro Male.

  “Well, well. Look here what the cat’s dragged in.” Corinne cringed. “How come you always look like shit, mama? I swear, don’t white girls know how to dress. Or do much of anything else.” He laughed. “Ain’t that so, mama?” Corinne nodded obediently. “Shit, woman, you so ugly tonight I can’t hardly look at you.”

  “I try, Fishbait.”

  “Look to me like you don’t hardly try enough.” He took a handful of her stringy blonde hair and pulled it until tears came to her eyes. “You call this hair, mama? Look like dirty spaghetti to me. Can’t you put no curl in it?”

  “I’m sorry, Fishbait. I thought you liked it straight.”

  “Well, guess I’d better be going.” Emily stood up, feeling as if she were sitting in on someone’s lovemaking.

  “What did you think of Fishbait?” Corinne asked Emily the next day as she powdered a black eye in the bathroom mirror.

  “He’s really something.”

  Corinne laughed. “Yes, isn’t he wonderful?”

  After supper in the cafeteria, Emily, Joan, Corinne, and Lou would gather in Joan’s room to drink instant coffee, smoke, listen to records—Joan Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Ma Rainey; Billie Holiday; Bessie Smith—and to discuss their classes and their autobiographies. Corinne and Joan also discussed the news, which usually concerned the racial situation in the South.

  “Those bastards! Those redneck bastards! They should rot!” Joan raged.

  “Those poor people. And all because of the color of their skin,” Corinne moaned.

  “I’m ashamed to be a citizen of the same nation,” announced Joan one night.

  “We did try to pull out,” Emily pointed out. “You wouldn’t let us.”

  “Me? Listen, I had nothing to do with that. My family came from Russia in 1903.”

  “And after all,” Corinne said, “that was a hundred years ago.”

  “That’s right. Only a hundred years ago.”

  Lou was sitting in silence sipping coffee. At this, she closed her eyes and threw her head back, smiled faintly, and made a noise that sounded like “huh.” Lou, who lived across the hall, was up from Charlotte on an exchange program designed to rescue promising Negro students from unpromising Southern colleges. Though it wasn’t strictly an “exchange,” since no students from up here went down to Lou’s college. Emily and Lou nodded to each other warily from time to time. Emily, having discovered she was the Oppressor, no longer knew how to behave around her victims. But she was very aware of Lou’s “huh,” which was halfway between a mirthless laugh and a snort of disdain. The first time Emily noticed it, she had just made a response Joan and Corinne found politically acceptable. Corinne said, “It’s so nice, Emily, to hear you say something intelligent in that accent of yours.”

  Lou closed her eyes, threw back her head, smiled wearily, and said, “Huh.” Emily wasn’t sure what it meant.

  After the rally, Joan and Corinne were heading for the Village. Emily declined Corinne’s offer to fix her up with a friend of Fishbait’s. “I have to work on a paper,” she mumbled. She received from Joan and Corinne gazes accusing her of racism. “I do,” Emily pleaded.

  She walked west toward the Hudson. As she crossed West End Avenue, she saw a white woman in a nanny uniform holding the hands of two well-dressed young Negro children. Emily stared at them until they turned a corner.

  The sidewalks were sprinkled with tattered yellow and rust leaves. As her feet crunched them, their acrid scent rose to her nostrils. She recalled The Five’s raking leaves into great piles; then jumping off branches into the soft centers yelling “Geronimo!” Burrowing through the piles like earthworms through topsoil. Leaping out to terrify passing first-graders. Prancing around huge bonfires, pretending they were burning cavalry officers.

  If she wasn’t incarcerated in Freedom City right now, she’d be at a football game with Earl, wearing a Chi O blazer and plaid pleated skirt, instead of wheat jeans. He’d have his arm around her, and they’d be sipping bourbon from his silver flask. The cheerleaders, the marching band, the teams in bright jerseys working out their intricate square dance on the green field with its pattern of white lines. Afterward she and Earl would drink more bourbon at the KT bar, and sing fight songs, and upstairs in his room … Why had this seemed so unappealing a few months earlier?

  She climbed the tower of Riverside Church and looked out, turning around time after time like a dog unable to find its spot. Across the Hudson, the high-rises of New Jersey lurked behind a veil of smog. Southward stretched the apartment buildings of Riverside Drive, in their decaying, multi-windowed elegance. Inland lay brick row houses and redevelopment projects. But even if she could have looked in every direction at once, the city was too vast to take in. She’d gone on a boat tour up the East River to the Harlem River and into the Hudson. The rivers intermingled. The boat cut through the exact same mix of waterlogged crates, candy wrappers, and rat corpses. The city sat on a small island. But it was composed of hundreds of self-contained worlds. Getting a fix on it was like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from many different puzzles. From the Castle Tree you could take in all Newland at once. Most everyone you ever saw you already knew. You knew what church they went to and which dentist cleaned their teeth. You knew which shop the clothes they were wearing came from and how much they cost. You knew which movie they’d seen last weekend and with whom. You knew whose third cousin once removed they were, and which three houses in town their family had previously occupied. And they knew all those things about you. You could sit on the beach at a TVA lake with the ageless cliffs and perennial forests behind you, and the billions of receding stars overhead—and know exactly where you fit. Here in New York she didn’t have a clue.

  At home at this time of day the sun would have been at a forty-five-degree angle with the horizon. Here it was almost setting. At this time of year The Five used to pluck persimmons from the trees behind her house. If they’d been frost-struck enough, they’d be transformed from hard sour opaque balls into sweet juicy translucent orange delicacies. When they’d eaten their fill, they’d gather handfuls and hurl them at each other in roiling battles through the woods and fields …

  She put her face in her hands and cried.

  The cafeteria was almost empty that evening as she and Lou ate in silence. It was the first time they’d been alone together. Emily couldn’t think of things to say. “Uh, how was the football game?”

  “Oh, fine,” Lou said. “Didn’t realize how much I’d been missing them.”

  “You watch a lot of football in Charlotte?”

  “Oh, yeah. Every weekend. Nothing else to do. How bout you?”

  “Same.”

  “How come you to miss the game today?”

  “W
ent to that rally at Columbus Circle.”

  “Huh,” said Lou. “And how was it?”

  “Fine.” They glanced at each other. Emily wanted to ask how come Lou hadn’t gone to the rally, what she thought of it. But she didn’t.

  Emily asked Lou back to her room for coffee. She surveyed her record collection, wishing she had some Bob Dylan or something that might indicate to Lou her racial good will. But all she had was rock and roll and Honey Sweet. She settled for Chuck Berry. She handed a mug of coffee to Lou and sat down, then she jumped up and opened her window. In the middle of Broadway right outside her second-floor room was a pothole. Each car that hit it clattered like a skeleton falling off a tin roof.

  Emily sat back down and sipped her coffee. She looked at Lou, who smiled and sipped her coffee. Emily felt an anxious need to convey to Lou that she liked her, a need to elicit from Lou that same reassurance. Then she was seized with irritation and wished Lou would leave.

  “What would you be doing in Tennessee right now?” Lou asked.

  “Dancing. Drinking. Making out”

  “Huh.”

  “You?”

  “Same.”

  “Did you go to that mixer the other night?”

  “No. How was it?”

  “I got stuck with this guy from the Business School who spent a half hour explaining pork belly futures to me.”

  Lou laughed. Emily wanted to ask whether she was dating. If Corinne and Joan wanted to fix Emily up with Fishbait’s friends, were they trying to fix Lou up with white men? She couldn’t think how to phrase it, so she asked about Charlotte instead. Lou said her father was an undertaker, and they lived in a big house on a street that formed a border of the Negro section. Growing up, she played with Negro children in one direction and poor white children in the other.

  “My mother used to make me take ballet lessons and piano lessons. Filled our house up with all this china and silver and linen and junk. Huh.”