by Alice Walker
“And my hair is turning gray,” said Lynne. “I have gray strands all across the top. I started to dye it once. You know, it is so hard to live with myself, looking old so quick.” She reached up to touch the almost invisible strands of gray at her temples.
“You’ve had a hard life,” said Meridian.
“The only people who ever loved me,” Lynne continued absently, looking about for a mirror, “were the po’ folks down in the woods, the swamps. They never looked down on me. Never despised me. After I had Camara I brought her back down here one time to show her off and they loved us both. Didn’t despise us. Didn’t try to make us feel we had stolen one of y’all’s scarce few men. Made us feel like family. Of course they were the old type of black people, like that old religious lady who fed us that time. Remember her? They just came out on the porch and said: ‘Y’all come in. Here, girl, let me see this big old fine baby. What you name her? Camara. Now that’s real cute. Lord, ain’t she got a head of hair. And will you look at them big eyes. Just as brown. Naw, I think they’s green. Naw, I believe they is brown. Well, just come on to your kinfolk. Come on here. That’s right.’”
Lynne was beginning to weep. Tears slid off her chin.
“It looks more like it was bleached in the sun,” said Meridian.
“Never made us feel like there was nobody on earth so low as to want us. Me and my brown sugar baby. ‘Hair,’ she said, coming back, ‘looks like it was bleached in the sun’— my ass. Kind, polite, courteous—that’s that Southern charm folks down here have. It’s such shit.”
“Truman is out with his camera. He really should be back any minute.”
“With his camera! Probably taking pictures of all the poor little girls he’d like to fuck. That’s his only interest in the poor. Not to mention the black.” She wiped her eyes and lifted her cup in a salute.
“I forgot sugar,” said Meridian, rising and going into the kitchen.
“Mustn’t forget sugar,” said Lynne. “Oy vey, you’re a regular Betty Crocker. How do y’all do it, I wonder? Always gracious and calm. Perfect little ladies; whether you lived in the big house as Big Missy or as slave. It must’ve been all that corn bread. Made y’all mealy-mouthed.”
“I didn’t invite Truman,” said Meridian. “I never have.”
“I don’t care about Truman,” said Lynne, lighting up a reefer and taking a deep drag. “I don’t care about the son of a bitch any more.”
Meridian watched them meet in her back yard. They did not smile or touch. Truman was frowning, Lynne’s face was tense. Meridian stood in the center of the living room and began doing exercises. First she pretended she was slowly jumping rope, bouncing lightly off the floor and springing into the air. Then she touched her toes. Then she lay down and began raising first one leg and then the other, holding them suspended to the count of ten.
“What the fuck do you mean, nigger?” Lynne’s voice, harsh and wild, came from the back yard. It dropped into the quietness of the neighborhood like a stone.
“Will you shut the fuck up, beast.”
“Not until you tell me why I can’t ever find you unless I look in Meridian’s back yard.”
“I don’t live with you. I don’t have to explain myself to you. Not any more, I don’t.”
“Look at me!” she said, foolishly, since he was looking at her. “You think you can step over me and just keep going ... ruin my life.”
“Don’t bring up your lousy dancing career,” he snarled. “If you people could dance you wouldn’t have to copy us all the time.”
“You asshole,” she said. “You’re a fine one to talk. You’re the only nigger in the Free World who can’t dance a lick. Every time you get out there shaking your ass you look like a faggot with cramps.”
His voice was suddenly menacing: “Cut out the ‘nigger’ shit.”
“I could have made it,” she said. “At least I could have stayed healthy.”
“You always needed a shrink,” he said. “It’s symptomatic of your race.”
Lynne had begun to cry, wiping her nose on the edge of her skirt. Truman watched with disgust.
“My race? my race?” Lynne turned her face up as if imploring the trees. She laughed in spite of herself.
He had never hated, aesthetically, the whiteness of Lynne so much. It shocked him. Her nose was red and peeling, her hair was stringy and—he scrutinized it quickly—there was some gray! And she was so stout! Stouter even than the last time he’d seen her, after Camara died. He could not stop himself from thinking she looked very much like a pig. Her eyes seemed tinier than he’d ever seen them and her white ears needed only to grow longer and flop over a bit.
But what was happening (had happened) to him, that he should have these thoughts? There was a large pecan tree beside him. He leaned against it.
“Lynne,” he said finally, “why don’t you go on back home? There’s nothing between me and Meridian. Not like you think. She doesn’t understand why I keep bothering her any more than I do.”
“Bull.”
“Meridian is my past, my sister...” Truman began, but Lynne cut him off.
“I’ve heard all that shit before,” she said. “But it doesn’t speak to what you did to me and Camara. Running off as soon as black became beautiful ...”
It was his turn to laugh. “You don’t believe that?” he asked.
“You bet your stinking life I do. You must think I’m stupid. You only married me because you were too much of a coward to throw a bomb at all the crackers who make you sick. You’re like the rest of those nigger zombies. No life of your own at all unless it’s something against white folks. You can’t even enjoy a good fuck without hoping some cracker is somewhere grinding his teeth.”
“I married you because I loved you.”
“Yeah, and you wanted something strange around the house to entertain your friends.”
“Shut up, Lynne,” said Truman, as he saw Meridian coming out of the house.
“I’m going for a walk,” said Meridian to Lynne. “But if you’re sleepy or tired you can take a nap on the couch in the living room. I’ll leave the door open.”
“Doesn’t True look well?” Lynne asked, as Meridian stood watching them. She had not been able to ignore their loud voices and was annoyed with them.
“He looks divine,” she said.
“So mature,” said Lynne, “yet so young ... don’t you think? You’re thirty-four now, aren’t you, darlin’?” she asked, turning briefly to Truman, who scowled at her. “Would you believe he’s heading for middle age? I wouldn’t. It comes from easy living and of course he’s a vampire. Sucks the blood of young white virgins to keep him vigorous. Did you know that?” She turned a bright, tight face to Truman. “Tell her about this thing you have, darlin’ (and of course he’s not the only one), for young white virgins. And don’t lie and say I wasn’t one.”
“Shut up!
“You Southern girls lead such sheltered lives,” Lynne said, affecting a Southern belle accent and twirling a lock of her unwashed, rather oily hair around her finger, “I declare I’d be just bored to death. That’s why your men come North, sugah, looking for that young white meat that proves they have arrived. You know? Tell me, how does it feel to be a complete flop” (this said with a Bette Davis turn of her wrist) “at keeping your men?”
“You know, I could—yes, fat ass ’n’ all, walk up the street anywhere around here and Hey Presto! I’d have all y’all’s men following after me, their little black tongues hanging out.”
Truman felt as if his soul, hanging precariously for a lifetime, had fallen off the shelf.
“It would take a sick mind to be pleased with that old racist chestnut, you silly heifer.” He would have liked the power to wither her, literally, with a glance.
Lynne took out her sunglasses and put them on, smiling and nodding, as if her audience were large.
“Bravo!” she said. “Underneath that old-fashioned culled exterior beats the heart of a murdere
r. I knew it.”
“Forgive me, both of you,” said Meridian, “but I’m locking the house.”
“A locked house, a locked pussy,” said Lynne, giggling.
“I didn’t mean anything by it, Meridian,” said Lynne, later, crying into the pillows of the couch. “It’s just that you have everything. I mean, you’re so strong, your people love you, and you can cope. I don’t have anything. I gave up everything for True, and he just shit on me.”
She had stayed in the yard arguing with Truman until he walked away. Then she had gotten into Meridian’s house through an open window. Just like these country bumpkins, she thought, to lock the door and leave the window wide open.
Meridian had walked until she wore herself out, and one thought had preoccupied her mind: “The only new thing now,” she had said to herself, mumbling it aloud, so that people turned to stare at her, “would be the refusal of Christ to accept crucifixion. King,” she had said, turning down a muddy lane, “should have refused. Malcolm, too, should have refused. All those characters in all those novels that require death to end the book should refuse. All saints should walk away. Do their bit, then—just walk away. See Europe, visit Hawaii, become agronomists or raise Dalmatians.” She didn’t care what they did, but they should do it.
She looked at Lynne, who was definitely not yet a saint. She did not know what Lynne should do. She was too tired, at the moment, to care.
“Listen,” said Lynne, “when Camara and I lived in the East Village—oh hell, Lower East Side, on 12th Street—I couldn’t walk down the street to take her to kindergarten without niggers wanting to jump me. What could I do? I’m a woman, right? They never let up until they got me in bed. Then the crying and the pleading when I didn’t feel like giving ’em any. So usually I just said Fuck it! I’ve got to get some sleep. So get on up on me, nigger. Just don’t take all night. Sometimes I’d go to sleep with ’em still at it.”
“Must you say nigger?” Meridian asked wearily. She realized that among many hip people the use of the word was not considered offensive but rather a matter of style. That she would hate it till the dirt was thrown over her face she knew mattered not at all to people who would eventually appropriate anything they could laugh at, or talk about, or wear. “Why did you let these people in, if you didn’t want to be bothered?”
“Aw, I don’t know. I got so tired. Begging, listening to people begging, is tiring. Besides, you don’t know what’s going on in the cities. There are all these white girls that are so fucked up with guilt they’re willing and happy to keep a black guy, even if he’s obviously a junkie bum. Not like me, at least I try for the classier bums—like the old poets and jazz stars of yesteryear. Like—”
“Don’t give me any names,” said Meridian. “Believe me when I say I don’t want to know.”
“I don’t freak myself out, analyzing everything I do. What’s a screw between friends, anyhow?”
“Between friends would be different.”
“You can’t understand. Your life is so ... there’s something wrong with your life, you know. It’s so, so, proscribed. Like you drew a circle around it and only walk as far as the edge. Why did you come back down here? What are you looking for? These people will always be the same. You can’t change them. Nothing will.”
“But I can change,” said Meridian. “I hope I will.”
“I live for the moment, no looking back for me. Take what life offers ... ah shit! It’s just that my life is so fucked up. Truman was the only stable thing in it. I don’t even have a photograph of my folks.” Lynne’s eyes narrowed. “Not that I need one to remember them. All I have to do is close my eyes and I see them all too well.”
“My father was, actually, my father was wonderful—at least I thought he was wonderful. He wasn’t your dashing prince, but in his dull, careful, Jewish way, he was terrific. He never spoke more than a dozen words to me in anger, all the time I was growing up. Always so gentle, so fair. I couldn’t believe it when I called to tell them Camara had been attacked and died. You know what he said? My mother wouldn’t even speak to me, although she could tell I was crying. My father took the phone and asked me to repeat. I told him my daughter was dead and he said, ‘So’s our daughter,’ meaning me! And when I stopped breathing, because I thought I’d heard wrong, he said—as calmly as anything—‘Nu? So what else?’” Lynne was eating grapes, she spat out a grape seed. “The heartless bastard, the least he could have done was prepare me for the creep he turned out to be. Fathers suck,” she added, frowning. “When my old Tata is dead, then I’ll remember his kindness. I refuse to do so until then.
“Mothers are beasts, too,” continued Lynne. “All my mother thinks about is herself as perceived by the neighbors.”
Meridian sat deep in her chair, her legs had fallen asleep. “It’s all behind you,” she said.
“You don’t know the half,” said Lynne, darting a glance at her. “Really you don’t.”
Sleepy, puzzled, off-guard, Meridian stared at her.
“Truman said one of my fantasies was being raped by a black man. That was what he reduced everything to. But it wasn’t!” Her eyes, pleading, were filled with tears. She sat up on the couch and wiped her eyes. “You’re the only one I can talk to about it. The only one who would believe it wasn’t my fault that it happened. True let one of his friends ...”
“I can’t listen to this,” said Meridian, rising abruptly and throwing up her hands. “I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
“Wait a minute,” cried Lynne. “I know you’re thinking about lynchings and the way white women have always lied about black men raping them. Maybe this wasn’t rape. I don’t know. I think it was. It felt like it was.”
Meridian sat down again and looked at Lynne through her fingers, which were spread, like claws, over her face.
“Can’t you understand I can’t listen to you? Can’t you understand there are some things I don’t want to know?”
“You wouldn’t believe me either?” Lynne asked.
“No,” Meridian said, coldly.
“Well fuck you.”
“Go to bed, Lynne. Why don’t you go to bed?”
But Lynne did not intend to leave the room. Perhaps Meridian wouldn’t listen to her, but she could sit there herself and try to remember what had happened to her and Truman’s life.
Lynne
SHE REMEMBERED it was spring, and she had left her parents’ house, she hoped, for good. And if this hope was not to become reality she did not intend to struggle over it or care. They headed south over the Interstate, their old car, a venerable black ruin, loaded down with her books, his paints, rolls of canvas, two cameras, and filled with music from a black radio station in Newark that, miraculously, they held until they reached the vicinity of the Maryland border.
For six months they’d met secretly in his mother’s house. His room at the top of the stairs, the paintings—by Romare Bearden, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence—on the walls, as familiar to her as her own room across town. More familiar, because her room seemed still to be the hideout of a sixteen-year-old kid—with dancing shoes, tights, paper flowers from some forgotten high school decoration, and the faces of movie stars her mother encouraged her to like. No black faces, of course (though she had once had a picture of Sammy Davis, Jr., and Mai), which was not unusual. Not even any really Jewish faces, for that matter. No faces as dark, ripening, lean and high-nosed as her own. A young room, fresh, tacky, that wore innocence like the wrong shade of face powder, youth beneath the pink canopied bed like a bright rose preserved under glass. And she—entering her room—felt now a superiority to it, as if she now knew more (since her relationship with Truman) than the room was capable of containing. For although it was her room, it was in her mother’s house. Vulnerable to search and seizure, and the contemplative scrutiny of her mother’s always uneasy mind.
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.