by Alice Walker
Whenever this happened, as it did every year, the people of the community habitually cried and took gifts of fruit and fried chicken to the bereaved family. The men stood about in groups, cursing the mayor and the city commissioner and the board of aldermen, whom they, ironically, never failed to refer to as “the city fathers.” The women would sit with the mother of the lost child, recall their own lost children, stare at their cursing husbands—who could not look back at them— and shake their heads.
It was Meridian who had led them to the mayor’s office, bearing in her arms the bloated figure of a five-year-old boy who had been stuck in the sewer for two days before he was raked out with a grappling hook. The child’s body was so ravaged, so grotesque, so disgusting to behold, his own mother had taken one look and refused to touch him. To the people who followed Meridian it was as if she carried a large bouquet of long-stemmed roses. The body might have smelled just that sweet, from the serene, set expression on her face. They had followed her into a town meeting over which the white-haired, bespectacled mayor presided, and she had placed the child, whose body was beginning to decompose, beside his gavel. The people had turned with her and followed her out. They had been behind her when, at some distance from the center of town, she had suddenly buckled and fallen to the ground.
When she was up again they came to her and offered her everything, including the promise that they would name the next girl child they had after her. Instead she made them promise they would learn, as their smallest resistance to the murder of their children, to use the vote.
At first the people laughed nervously. “But that’s nothing,” these people said, who had done nothing before beyond complaining among themselves and continually weeping. “People will laugh at us because that is not radical,” they said, choosing to believe radicalism would grow over their souls, like a bright armor, overnight.
There were two rooms. In one, a hot plate, a table and a battered chair (brought by the neighbors when they brought the food and the cow), and in the other, where Meridian slept, only her sleeping bag on the floor, some toilet articles on a windowsill (which Truman had overlooked before) and a jar of dried wildflowers in a green wine bottle placed in a corner. And, of course, the letters.
Truman was always looking for Meridian, even when he didn’t know it. He was always finding her, as if she pulled him by an invisible string. But though he always found her, she was never what he expected. This time would not be different.
She would not ride in his new green car. “That’s a pretty car,” she said, “but I prefer to walk.”
“Ten years ago,” said Truman, “when your kind of protest was new and still fashionable, we had to walk. Now we can ride. Or is riding in new cars part of what you are protesting?”
“I suppose it is something like that,” she said.
“Then why not go all out,” he said, “and put rocks in your shoes?”
Camara
SOMETIME AFTER the spring of ’68 Meridian began going, irregularly, to church. The first time, a hot Sunday in June, she had stood in the doorway of a store across the street, watching the people arrive. They drove up in shiny cars of green and brown and black, and emerged well dressed, powdered and brushed, hair glistening, handbags of patent leather, the men formal and cool in dark brown, gray or black suits, the women colorful in dresses of bright pink, yellow and pastel blue, with flowers.
She felt a certain panic, watching them. They seemed so unchanged by everything that had happened to them. True, the church was not like the ones of her childhood; it was not shabby or small. It was large, of brick, with stained-glass windows of yellow and brown squares, and no red or blue. An imposing structure; and yet it did not reach for the sky, as cathedrals did, but settled firmly on the ground. She was aware of the intense heat that closed around the church and the people moving slowly, almost grandly up the steps, as if into an ageless photograph. And she, standing across the street, was not part of it. Rather, she sensed herself an outsider, as a single eye behind a camera that was aimed from a corner of her youth, attached now only because she watched. If she were not there watching, the scene would be exactly the same, the “picture” itself never noticing that the camera was missing.
Each Sunday, for several weeks, she chose a different church. Finally, for no reason she was sure of, she found herself in front of a large white church, Baptist (with blue and red in its stained windows, perhaps that was what drew her), and she sucked in her breath and went up the steps and inside. The church was nearly full and an usher—a quiet young boy, strong-limbed but contained in his somber blue suit—showed her to a seat near the entrance. It was unreal to her that people still came, actually got out of bed on Sunday morning and came, to church; and she stared up at them as they passed, her mouth slightly open.
A dark, heavy man with bulging red eyes—eyes sad or mean she could not tell—shuffled by her bench and went up to the pulpit, which drew her attention to the small group of people assembled there. A humble-looking creature in a snuff brown suit brought from behind the altar a large photograph of a slain martyr in the Civil Rights struggle. Two tiny black girls promptly rose and placed tall vases of lilies—white and unblemished (their green stalks waxy and succulent)—on either side.
She stood as the people began to sing a once quite familiar song. But now she could not remember the words; they seemed stuck in some pinched-over groove in her memory. She stared at the people behind the altar, distractedly clutching the back of the bench in front of her. She did not want to find right then whatever it was she was looking for. She had no idea, really, what it was. And yet, she was there. She opened her mouth and attempted to sing, but soon realized it was the melody of the song she remembered, not the words, because these words sounded quite new to her.
The man with the red eyes whispered to the people around him, mopping his face and neck with a handkerchief that showed snowy against his glistening skin. One of the men rose and asked someone to lead them in prayer. The man who came forward did not kneel. He stood straight, his shoulders back, his face stern before the congregation. He said they were glad to have this opportunity to be with one another again. He said they were thankful to be alive and to be, for the most part, healthy, and holding together as a community and as families. He said he was thankful they could count on each other in times of trouble. He said he would not pray any longer because there was a lot of work for the community to do. He sat down.
This prayer was followed by another song that was completely foreign to Meridian, whose words were completely hidden from her by the quite martial melody. It seemed to Meridian that this was done deliberately; in any case, her consciousness was no longer led off after a vain search for words she could not recall, but began instead to slowly merge itself with the triumphant forcefulness of the oddly death-defying music.
“Let the martial songs be written,” she found herself quoting Margaret Walker’s famous poem; “let the dirges disappear!” She started and looked quickly around her. The people looked exactly as they had ever since she had known black churchgoing people, which was all her life, but they had changed the music! She was shocked.
The minister—in his thirties, dressed in a neat black suit and striped tie of an earlier fashion—spoke in a voice so dramatically like that of Martin Luther King’s that at first Meridian thought his intention was to dupe or to mock. She glanced about to see if anyone else showed signs of astonishment or derision. But every face on her bench looked forward stoically, and even the chattering young men across the aisle from her did not seem perturbed. Her first impulse had been to laugh bitterly at the pompous, imitative preacher. But she began, instead, to listen. David and Goliath were briefly mentioned, to illustrate a point. Then the preacher launched into an attack on President Nixon, whom he called “Tricky Dick”! He looked down on the young men in the audience and forbade them to participate in the Vietnam war. He told the young women to stop looking for husbands and try to get something useful in t
heir heads. He told the older congregants that they should be ashamed of the way they let their young children fight their battles for them. He told them they were cowardly and pathetic when they sent their small children alone into white neighborhoods to go to school. He abused the black teachers present who did not, he said, work hard enough to teach black youth because they obviously had no faith in them.
It struck Meridian that he was deliberately imitating King, that he and all his congregation knew he was consciously keeping that voice alive. It was like a play. This startled Meridian; and the preacher’s voice—not his own voice at all, but rather the voice of millions who could no longer speak— wound on and on along its now heated, now cool, track. God was not mentioned, except as a reference.
She was suddenly aware that the sound of the “ahmens” was different. Not muttered in resignation, not shouted in despair. No one bounced in his seat. No one even perspired. Just the “ah-mens” rose clearly, unsentimentally, and with a firm tone of “We are fed up.”
When the red-eyed man rose there was a buzzing throughout the church. The preacher introduced him as the father of the slain man whose picture was flanked by the white lilies. Yes, now that he was introduced, Meridian remembered him. When his son was killed he had gone temporarily insane. Meridian had read about it in the paper. He had wrecked his own house with an ax, swinging until, absolutely, profoundly silent and blank, he had been carried out of the state and placed in a sanitarium. He had returned red-eyed and heavier and deadly calm—still taking tranquilizers, it was said, and thinking (the people whispered, hoped) of running for office. But this had not materialized.
He lived peacefully in the ruins of his wrecked house, his sanity coming back—unwelcomed—for days at a time. Then he bellowed out his loss. At other times he talked, in his normally reserved, rather ironic voice, to his wife and other children who were already dead (lost previously in a fire). His martyred son was all the family he had. He had boasted when the boy was younger, that his son—slender, black, as gentle and graceful as his mother had been, with her precious small hands—would be his bulwark, his refuge, when he grew old. He had not understood when his son chose struggle. He had understood even less when his son began to actually fight, to talk of bullets, of bombs, of revolution. For his talk alone (as far as his father knew, or believed, or wanted to know) they had killed him. And to his father—on sane days, doped to the gills with tranquilizers (because it was true, he ate them by the handfuls)—it still made no sense. He had thought that somehow, the power of his love alone (and how rare even he knew it was!) would save his son. But his love—selfless, open, a kissing, touching love—had only made his son strong enough to resist everything that was not love. Strong, beloved, knowing through his father’s eyes his own great value, he had set out to change the ways of the world his father feared. And they had murdered him.
His father knew the beauty of his son’s soul, as a jeweler knows the brilliance of the jewel beneath the stone, the gentleness at the heart of the warrior. And it was for this loss he wept and detested life as capricious and unreasonable. And felt his life empty, and his heart deprived.
The people tried to be kind, as he had felt confident, even in his madness, they would be. It was a feeling he had shared with his son. For no matter how distrustful his son was of white people, rich people, or people who waged wars to destroy others, he had had absolute faith in the people among whom he had grown up. People like his father—who had been a simple mechanic, who owned his own small cluttered shop in which he did fine, proud, honest work—who could bear the weight of any oppression or any revolution as long as they knew they were together and believed the pain they suffered would come to a righteous end. The people would open themselves totally to someone else’s personal loss, if it was allowed them to do so. But the father, insane half the time, and gladly so, did not allow closeness. He was, after a while, left alone with his memories and his ghosts.
It was only on occasions such as this, only on anniversaries of his son’s death, that his presence was specifically requested, and he came out to the various schools and churches. He never looked at his son’s picture, but would come and stand before the people because they, needing reminders, requested it of him. They accepted him then in whatever form he presented himself and knew him to be unpredictable. Today he stood for several minutes, his throat working, his eyes redder than ever, without tears. The congregation was quiet with reverence and an expectation that was already grateful, whatever he would give them. The words came from a throat that seemed stoppered with anxiety, memory, grief and dope. And the words, the beginning of a speech he had laboriously learned years ago for just such occasions as this when so much was asked of him, were the same that he gave every year. The same, exact, three. “My son died.”
He stood there for several minutes more, on display. Sunk in his own memories, in confusion, in loss, then was led back gently to his seat, his large body falling heavily into his chair, his arms hanging limply, showing ashen palms to the crowd. And then there rose the sweet music, that received its inimitable soul from just such inarticulate grief as this, and a passing of the collection plate with the money going to the church’s prison fund, and the preacher urged all those within his hearing to vote for black candidates on the twenty-third. And the service was over.
For a while, the congregation did not move. Meridian sat thinking of how much she had always disliked church. Whenever she was in a church, she felt claustrophobic, as if the walls were closing in. She had, even as a child, felt pity for the people who sat through the long and boring sermons listlessly fanning in the summer heat and hoping, vainly, she felt, for the best. The music she loved. Next to the music, she had liked only the stained-glass windows, when there were any, because the colored glass changed ordinary light into something richer, of gold and rose and mauve. It was restful and beautiful and inspired the reverence the sermons had failed to rouse. Thinking of the glass now she raised her head to look at the large stained-glass window across from her.
Instead of the traditional pale Christ with stray lamb there was a tall, broad-shouldered black man. He was wearing a brilliant blue suit through which the light swam as if in a lake, and a bright red tie that looked as if someone were pouring cherries down his chest. His face was thrown back, contorted in song, and sweat, like glowing diamonds, fell from his head. In one hand he held a guitar that was attached to a golden strap that ran over his shoulder. It was maroon, much narrower at one end than at the other, with amber buttons, like butterscotch kisses, on the narrow end. The other arm was raised above his head and it held a long shiny object the end of which was dripping with blood.
“What’s that?” she asked the placid woman sitting next to her, who was humming and swatting flies and bopping her restless children, intermittently, on the head.
“What?” she turned kindly to Meridian and smiled in a charming and easygoing way. “Oh, that. One of our young artists did that. It’s called ‘B.B., With Sword.’”
And what was Meridian, who had always thought of the black church as mainly a reactionary power, to make of this? What was anyone? She was puzzled that the music had changed. Puzzled that everyone in the congregation had anticipated the play. Puzzled that young people in church nowadays did not fall asleep. Perhaps it was, after all, the only place left for black people to congregate, where the problems of life were not discussed fraudulently and the approach to the future was considered communally, and moral questions were taken seriously.
She considered the face of the young man in the photograph as she was walking away. A face destroyed by clubs held by men. Now it would be nothing but the cracked bones, falling free as the skin rotted away, coming apart into the bottom of the casket; and the gentle fingers, all broken and crushed under the wheels of cars, would point directions no more. She would always love this young man who had died before she had a chance to know him. But how, she wondered, could she show her love for someone who was already dead?
There was a reason for the ceremony she had witnessed in the church. And, as she pursued this reason in her thoughts, it came to her. The people in the church were saying to the red-eyed man that his son had not died for nothing, and that if his son should come again they would protect his life with their own. “Look,” they were saying, “we are slow to awaken to the notion that we are only as other women and men, and even slower to move in anger, but we are gathering ourselves to fight for and protect what your son fought for on behalf of us. If you will let us weave your story and your son’s life and death into what we already know—into the songs, the sermons, the ‘brother and sister’—we will soon be so angry we cannot help but move. Understand this,” they were saying, “the church” (and Meridian knew they did not mean simply “church,” as in Baptist, Methodist or whatnot, but rather communal spirit, togetherness, righteous convergence), “the music, the form of worship that has always sustained us, the kind of ritual you share with us, these are the ways to transformation that we know. We want to take this with us as far as we can.”
In comprehending this, there was in Meridian’s chest a breaking as if a tight string binding her lungs had given way, allowing her to breathe freely. For she understood, finally, that the respect she owed her life was to continue, against whatever obstacles, to live it, and not to give up any particle of it without a fight to the death, preferably not her own. And that this existence extended beyond herself to those around her because, in fact, the years in America had created them One Life. She had stopped, considering this, in the middle of the road. Under a large tree beside the road, crowded now with the cars returning from church, she made a promise to the red-eyed man herself: that yes, indeed she would kill, before she allowed anyone to murder his son again.