by Alice Walker
In that yard they had sat in July and August and other hot days, eating countless watermelons, sticky, cool, good, running juice making tracks down her arms. He had photographed her once eating watermelon, and the lines on her arms ruined the picture; they came through like inverted veins, as if some slimy thing had left a whitish scar that dug into the skin. In spite of this she had liked the picture. Her hair, as usual, was loose, coming to below her waist, black, without curl. Her eyes bright (also black, in the photograph, without their brown subtlety,) bold, searching for the thumb that would press the camera button. No surprise. Waiting. So that now when she looked out at the steps she thought she might still be sitting there, unmoved by all that had happened over the years. Sitting there, slender still, her white face happily covered by a fake sheet of brown, glowing, she thought, with health; and in any case, hiding the sickness.
The outhouse was not exactly out, but on the back porch. A dingy door-scratched room. Small, with only the essentials. She had lit another stub of a candle; no one seemed to have lived here since she left. There was still a shard of glass over the washbasin, like a triangle of flawed silver, the dust wiped off in a roll. The toilet gurgled and boiled before it worked. The posters had fallen away from the walls or rotted, but when she held her candle up to one she saw the grayed outline of hundreds of marching forms, though underneath this faded picture the words had been completely eroded away. It was as if the marchers moved through some ghostly, unreal place, specters themselves and not in the least afraid, apprehensive about what would happen when they floated off the picture, off the wall, into a place even more dead, more final.
She was moved to peel and eat an orange. Slowly. Sitting with her feet tucked under her, the candle on the floor, flickering with the small breezes that blew through the paneless window. In her sack she carried oranges, three apples, a triangle of cheese from the delicatessen: where the owners had recognized her and frozen up. She had stood smiling in the irritating way she had (the smile was even irritating to her, but she still used it) when she confronted bigots who also thought they owned her. They did not quite fling the food at her, across the counter, as they had done in the early days, when she would come in with one, maybe two, black men, or women. Or when she was beginning to show her pregnancy.
In the beginning she had actually been able to hear the intake of their breaths: the matronly woman who stood at the cash register, the younger woman who stood over the black cooks in the kitchen, the youngish man who, in the end (by the time Camara was ready to be born), spoke kindly to her, but with a kind of fear of her, like a fear for his own life, his precarious safety. She snatched her money up, looking steadily at all three of them, letting eyes judge them. They made her conscious, heavily, of her Jewishness, when, in fact, they wanted to make her feel her whiteness. And, beyond her whiteness, the whiteness that now engulfed this family (originally, she heard, from New York) like a shroud.
In the early days she would drop in for German beer with her black friends and the eye exchanges, a struggle of which her friends were completely unaware, would go on furiously between her and the three shopkeepers. The youngish man, already balding, his skin sallow from hanging there slicing salami week after week, could, by and by, speak quite plainly with his eyes. He said: We do not want you. Still, come back to us. It is not yet too late. (This was before she became pregnant.) They said: Have you found? Have you found? Her own eyes said to the women with their Southern-style, contrived, hornet-nest hair: You are wasted. Wasted. Surrounded by exotic foods! To the youngish balding man her eyes said: Yes! Yes! I have found. I am happy. Why do you think I glow this way? Idiot. Weakling. Slicer of salami. No-sex. Come back to you? Worm. You are crazy. And what would you do if I did come back? Set me to wrapping pastrami? To fishing for pickles? Shithead. Unliving creature. Maker of money. Slicer of salami. Baker of Challah!
Never once did they ask her what she was. And to them she spoke good finishing school English. It was just that they knew, as she knew about them. That they were transplanted, as they had always been, to a place where they fit like extra toes on a foot. Where they were trusted by no one, exploited, when possible, by anyone with political ambitions. Where they lived in a delicatessen, making money hand over fist because they could think of nothing more exciting to do with their lives. Making money to buy houses—garish, large, separate—outside the city. Making money to send their Elaines and Davids to law and medical school without a word of official Hebrew, except when they visited in synagogues in the North where they also felt like strangers.
Goyim flitted in and out of the delicatessen, reeking of Southern tolerance and charm, like knife edges the forced smiles, the appreciation (genuine) of the food. Unusual, exotic, excellent. A change from pecan pie and gumbo eaten with a tall glass of ginger ale or Tom Collins.
She watched them over the years she lived in the town (because she would shop there, even though it was expensive and she had little money), and even watched the outside of the delicatessen when they closed it after the local synagogue was bombed. They were shocked, the papers said. Aghast at the bombing! She laughed at their naïveté. Laughed at their precarious “safety.” Laughed with such bitter contempt that she could not speak to a Southern Jew without wanting to hit him or her.
The cheese, a tin of Danish camembert, melted like butter on her tongue....
The taste of the cheese brought her back, though she kept her head against the back of her chair, her eyes closed. She sat up, opened her eyes, looked at Meridian who had fallen asleep, and sprang to her feet, yawning loudly.
“Black folks aren’t so special,” she said. “I hate to admit it. But they’re not.”
“Maybe,” said Meridian, as if she had been wide awake all along, “the time for being special has passed. Jews are fighting for Israel with one hand stuck in a crack in the Wailing Wall. Look at it this way, black folks and Jews held out as long as they could.” Meridian rubbed her eyes.
“Good God, this is depressing,” said Lynne. “It’s even more depressing than knowing I want Truman back.”
“That is depressing,” said Meridian.
“Oh, I know he’s not much,” she said. “But he saved me from a fate worse than death. Because of him, I can never be as dumb as my mother was. Even if I practiced not knowing what the world is like, even if I lived in Scarsdale or some other weird place, and never had to eat welfare food in my life, I’d still know. By nature I’m not cut out to be a member of the oppressors. I don’t like them; they make me feel guilty all the time. They’re ugly and don’t know poor people laugh at them and are just waiting to drag them out. No, Truman isn’t much, but he’s instructional,” said Lynne. “Besides,” she continued, “nobody’s perfect.”
“Except white women,” said Meridian, and winked.
“Yes,” said Lynne, “but their time will come.”
Ending
No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger’s wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.
—AKHMATOVA, “Requiem”
Free at Last
A DAY IN APRIL, 1968
Long before downtown Atlanta was awake, she was there beside the church, her back against the stone. Like the poor around her, with their meager fires in braziers against the April chill, she had brought fried chicken wrapped in foil and now ate it slowly as she waited for the sun. The nearby families told their children stories about the old days before black people marched, before black people voted, before they could allow their anger or even their exhaustion to show. There were stories, too, of Southern hunts for coons and ’possums among the red Georgia hills, and myths of strong women and men, Indian and black, who knew the secret places of the land and refused to be pried from them. As always they were dressed in their very Sunday best, and were resigned; on their arms the black bands of crepe might have been made of iron. They were there when the crowd began to
swell, early in the morning. Making room, giving up their spots around the entrance to the church, yet still pressing somehow forward, with their tired necks extended, to see, just for a moment, just for a glimpse, the filled coffin.
They were there when the limousines began to arrive, and there when the family, wounded, crept up the steps, and there when the senators running for President flashed by, and there when the horde of clergy in their outdone rage stomped by, and there when the movie stars glided, as if slowly blown, into the church, and there when all these pretended not to see the pitiable crowd of nobodies who hungered to be nearer, who stood outside throughout the funeral service (piped out to them like scratchy Muzak) and shuffled their feet in their too tight shoes, and cleared their throats repeatedly against their tears and all the same helplessly cried.
Later, following the casket on its mule-drawn cart, they began to sing a song the dead man had loved. “I come to the garden a-lone.…While the dew is still on the ro-ses.…” Such an old favorite! And neutral. The dignitaries who had not already slipped away—and now cursed the four-mile walk behind the great dead man—opened their mouths eagerly in genial mime. Ahead of Meridian a man paraded a small white poodle on a leash. The man was black, and a smiler. As he looked about him a tooth encased in patterned gold sparked in his mouth. On the dog’s back a purple placard with white lettering proclaimed “I have a dream.”
Then she noticed it: As they walked, people began to engage each other in loud, even ringing, conversation. They inquired about each other’s jobs. They asked after members of each other’s families. They conversed about the weather. And everywhere the call for Coca-Colas, for food, rang out. Popcorn appeared, and along their route hot-dog stands sprouted their broad, multicolored umbrellas. The sun came from behind the clouds, and the mourners removed their coats and loosened girdles and ties. Those who had never known it anyway dropped the favorite song, and there was a feeling of relief in the air, of liberation, that was repulsive.
Meridian turned, in shame, as if to the dead man himself.
“It’s a black characteristic, man,” a skinny black boy tapping on an imaginary drum was saying. “We don’t go on over death the way whiteys do.” He was speaking to a white couple who hung on guiltily to every word.
Behind her a black woman was laughing, laughing, as if all her cares, at last, had flown away.
Questions
“I’M AFRAID I WON’T be able to live up to what is required of me—by history, by economics....”
“But there’s so much you can give, other than being able to kill. That should be self-evident.”
“It isn’t though.”
“I used to raise my arm and shout, ‘Death to honkies,’ too,” said Truman, “but I understood I didn’t really mean it. Not really. Not like the men who attacked the police during the riots. I thought of what it would be like to kill, when I thought I was going to be drafted. In the army, killing would be all right, I supposed. Since I wasn’t drafted, it seemed useless to think about it.”
“In the army you would simply kill to keep yourself alive. Revolutionary killing is systematic. You line people up who have abused you, as a group, and you simply eradicate them, like you would eradicate a disease.”
“A disease with faces, with children ... human voices.”
“Yes, but a disease nonetheless.” To Truman the discussion was academic, so he could state his points neatly. “By the way,” he now said, “do you think you could kill anyone, lined up before you like so much diphtheria or smallpox? Or cancer?” Although, to Truman, the rich were a cancer on the world, he would not mind being rich himself.
Meridian laughed, the stubborn ambivalence of her nature at last amusing her. “Sometimes I’m positive I could. Other times I’m just as sure I could not. And even if I felt sure I could do it all the time I still couldn’t know, could I, until the occasion for killing someone presented itself? Besides,” she said, “I don’t trust revolutionaries enough to let them choose who should be killed. I would probably end up on the wrong side of the firing squad, myself.”
“No one would ask killing of you,” said Truman.
“Because I’m a woman?”
“Oh, Christ,” said Truman, “because you’re obviously not cut out for it. You’re too sensitive. One shot and even though you missed you’d end up a basket case.”
“That’s true,” said Meridian, “but do you think that has anything to do with it? I don’t. I mean, I think that all of us who want the black and poor to have equal opportunities and goods in life will have to ask ourselves how we stand on killing, even if no one else ever does. Otherwise we will never know—in advance of our fighting—how much we are willing to give up.”
“Suppose you found out, without a doubt, that you could murder other people in a just cause, what would you do? Would you set about murdering them?”
“Never alone,” said Meridian. “Besides, revolution would not begin, do you think, with an act of murder—wars might begin in that way—but with teaching.”
“Oh yes, teaching,” said Truman, scornfully.
“I would like to teach again,” said Meridian. “I respect it, when it’s done right. After all, people want to be taught how to live....”
“And do you think you could teach them?”
“I don’t know. I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don’t see it as a handling down of answers. So much of what passes for teaching is merely a pointing out of what items to want.”
“Meridian,” Truman said. “Do you realize no one is thinking about these things any more? Revolution was the theme of the sixties: Medgar, Malcolm, Martin, George, Angela Davis, the Panthers, people blowing up buildings and each other. But all that is gone now. I am, myself, making a statue of Crispus Attucks for the Bicentennial. We’re here to stay: the black and the poor, the Indian, and now all those illegal immigrants from the West Indies who adore America just the way it is.”
“Then you think revolution, like everything else in America, was reduced to a fad?”
“Of course,” said Truman. “The leaders were killed, the restless young were bought off with anti-poverty jobs, and the clothing styles of the poor were copied by Seventh Avenue. And you know how many middle-class white girls from Brooklyn started wearing kinky hair.”
“But don’t you think the basic questions raised by King and Malcolm and the rest still exist? Don’t you think people, somewhere deep inside, are still attempting to deal with them?”
“No,” said Truman.
“Is there no place in a revolution for a person who cannot kill?” asked Meridian, obviously not believing him.
“Why do you drive yourself crazy over these questions?” asked Truman, leaning over her. “When the time comes, trust yourself to do the right thing.”
“The ‘right’ thing? Or merely the thing that will save my life?”
“Don’t nitpick.”
“No. Don’t you see, what you mean is that I should trust myself to do the ‘correct’ thing. But I’ve always had trouble telling the ‘correct’ thing from the ‘right’ thing. The right thing is never to kill. I will always believe that. The correct thing is to kill when killing is necessary. And it sometimes is, I know that.”
She could not help struggling with these questions. Just as Truman could not help thinking such struggle useless. In the end people did what they had to do to survive. They acquiesced, they rebelled, they sold out, they shot it out, or they simply drifted with the current of the time, whatever it was. And they didn’t endanger life and limb agonizing over what they would lose, which was what separated them from Meridian.
It was a small white house, freshly painted by the black community, with green shutters and a green door. It sat on a bank over a dirt street as did all the other houses. The “street” was a road filled with ruts, and on each side were shallow gullies thick with weeds and straggly yellow flowers. From the road the
house was almost entirely hidden by a fence made of hog wire that had slowly, over the years, become covered with running vines which revealed themselves each summer to be blue and purple morning glories and orange and yellow honeysuckle, and in the winter there was a green and leafy ivy. The gate, too, was vine-covered and opened with a rusty iron clasp. From the road, only the chimney could be seen, and a ribbon of black roof. The yard sloped down in back to a large ditch that ran the length of the street, which the residents of the area called, with impotent bitterness, “the pool.” When it rained, children were forbidden to play outside because the water in the pool could rise silently as a thief until it covered the head of a three-year-old.
But the children loved to play in the pool when the weather was hot and would sneak behind their houses to wade in it. The public white swimming pool, having been ordered, by the federal government, opened to blacks, was closed by city officials who were all rich and white and who had, moreover, their own private swimming pools in their own back yards. There had never been a public swimming pool for blacks, few of whom, consequently, knew how to swim.
Flooding was especially bad in the spring and fall because the heaviest rains came then. But in addition to this, the same city officials who had closed the public swimming pool had erected a huge reservoir very near the lower-lying black neighborhood. When the waters of the reservoir rose from the incessant rains, the excess was allowed to drain off in any direction it would. Since this was done without warning, the disobedient children caught wading in the pool were knocked off their feet and drowned.