by Alice Walker
He often thought about that woman; in fact, she and her big belly haunted him. Probably any other woman (or even pregnant bitch) he would have pulled to safety no matter how much she feared him or despised him or hated him or whatever that woman had felt so strongly against him. But he faced his refusal to save her squarely. Her contempt for him had been the last straw; never again would he care what happened to any of them. She was perhaps the only one of them he would ever sentence to death. He had killed a thousand, ten thousand, a whole country of them in his mind. She was the first, and would probably be the only real one.
The death of the woman was simple murder, he thought, and soul condemning; but in a strange way, a bizarre way, it liberated him. He felt in some way repaid for his own unfortunate life. It was the taking of that white woman’s life—and the denying of the life of her child—the taking of her life, not the taking of her money, that forced him to want to try to live again. He believed that, against his will, he had stumbled on the necessary act that black men must commit to regain, or to manufacture their manhood, their self-respect. They must kill their oppressors.
He never ceased to believe this, adding only to this belief, in later years, that if one kills he must not shun death in his turn. And this, he had found, was the hardest part, since after freeing your suppressed manhood by killing whatever suppressed it you were then taken with the most passionate desire to live!
After leaving the park that night he had waited for an end to come to him. He was both ready and not ready. He felt alive and liberated for the first time in his life. He wanted to see a thousand tomorrows! For, perhaps because he had both killed and not killed the woman (it was her decision not to take his offered help, he reasoned), he did not know if his own life was required. But his exaltation had been part readiness to die. As a sinner, after seeing the face of God, is ready then immediately to meet him, not wanting a continuation of his sordid past to reverse his faith.
“Teach them to hate!” he shouted up and down the Harlem streets, his eyes glazed with his new religion. “Teach them to hate, if you wants them to survive!”
Mothers, shuffling along Lenox Avenue with dozens of black children in tow, turned to look at him with hopeless eyes. The children giggled at him as if they already understood the amusing complexity of it all.
At storefront churches he disrupted services.
“Don’t teach ’em to love them!” he cried. “Teach them to hate ’em!”
The black, oily-voiced preachers and the beige and powdered (and elaborately wigged) sisters looked at him in horrified preeminence.
“Git that drunk sinner out of here, deacons!” the preachers shouted. The parasites!
The overworked deacons, with rough pious hands that beat their women to death when they couldn’t feed them, would come up to him apologetically.
“You drunk, brother?” they asked him gently.
“Betta sleep it off!”
Not one of them earned enough to feed his children meat for Sunday dinner.
“Love thy neighbor,” they whispered to him. “Do good to them that despitefully use you.”
“We have loved them,” Grange whispered back, his voice rising to compete with the melancholy notes of the church’s organ. “We loves ’em now. And by God it killing us! It already done killed you.”
The kindly deacons walked him to the street, urging him with soothing words to see reason. Grange hated them with great frustration. Loving their white neighbors in the North as in the South got them nothing but more broken heads and contemptuous children. But did they dare to learn why they had no love for themselves and only anger for their children? No, they did not.
“Hatred for them will someday unite us,” he shouted from the corner of Seventh Avenue. “It will be the only thing that can do it. Deep in our hearts we hates them anyhow. What I say is brang it out in the open and teach it to the young ’uns. If you teach it to them young, they won’t have to learn it in the school of the hard knock.”
“Hatred is bad for a man’s mind,” someone told him.
“Man don’t live with his mind alone,” said Grange. “He live with his mouth and with his stomach. He live with his pride and with his heart. That man’s got to eat. That man’s got to sleep. That man got to be able to take care of his own life. I say if love can git man all this, then go ’head and let it; but it ain’t done nothin’ all these years for us. If love can do so much good to the minds of all these here dope addicts an’ cutthroats hangin’ round this here street it mighty late startin’—on account they is so many dope addicts and cutthroats, and they ain’t all children!
“You wants to keep on teachin’ your children Christian stuff from a white-headed Christ you go right on—but me, an’ later on you—is goin’ to have to switch to somethin’ new! And since hatred is what’s got to be growin’ inside of you that’s exactly what has to come out, and in the right direction this time!”
He was like a tamed lion who at last tasted blood. There was no longer any reason not to rebel against people who were not gods. His aggressiveness, which he had vented only on his wife, and his child, and his closest friends, now asserted itself in the real hostile world. For weeks after the incident at the pond he fought more Italians, Poles, Jews (all white; he did not understand differences in their cultures, and if they “acted white” he punched them in the nose!), in and around Harlem than he had been aware lived there. And in this fighting too he tasted the sweet surge of blood rightfully directed in its wrath that proclaimed his freedom, his manhood. Every white face he cracked, he cracked in his sweet wife’s name.
But soon he realized he could not fight all the whites he met. Nor was he interested in it any longer. Each man would have to free himself, he thought, and the best way he could. For the time being, he would withdraw completely from them, find a sanctuary, make a life that need not acknowledge them, and be always prepared, with his life, to defend it, to protect it, to keep it from whites, inviolate.
And so he had come back to Baker County, because it was home, and to Josie, because she was the only person in the world who loved him, and because he needed even more money than he had to buy the rock of his refuge.
Josie, who had lived so long in the hope of his love, was persuaded, out of her own love for him, to sell her cherished livelihood, the Dew Drop Inn. With his money and hers he bought a farm. A farm far from town, off the main road, deep behind pines and oaks. He raised his own bread, fermented his own wine, cured his own meat. At last, he was free.
But his freedom had cost him. There was Josie, learning each day that once again she had been used by a man and discarded when his satisfaction was secured. He had done her wrong, and the thought nagged at him and had finally begun to make him appreciate her for the first time. She was big-hearted, generous; she could love in spite of all that had gone wrong in her life. But then there had been Ruth, breaking in on his growing love for Josie, his acceptance of her genuine goodness and adoration. Ruth, who needed him and who was completely fresh and irresistibly innocent, as alas, Josie was not. He had felt himself divided, wanting to comfort the old but feeling responsible for the new. And then there had been Brownfield, again. And though he had forgiven Josie once (true, not out of love but greed and expediency) for her attachment to his son, he did not know if he could forgive her a second time. Josie and Brownfield sought to retaliate against his indifference to them; but even for this was he not to blame?
“You are not selfish,” Ruth was saying as she bent over to lift a small rabbit from a trap. “You would never steal. Even your cussing is harmless.” She laughed as her grandfather took the rabbit from her, felt its smallness and let it go. “I know you don’t like killing things, even things to eat.”
“It ought never to be necessary to kill nobody to assert nothing,” he said. “But some mens, in order to live, can’t be innocent.”
Ruth was still laughing. “You so tall and rough-looking with your big boots and your long gun.” Impul
sively she hugged his arm. “But we know you got a heart, don’t we?”
And Grange knew he would never tell her of his past, of the pregnant woman and his lectures of hate; he would never tell her that he’d mugged old women and weak-limbed students to buy his food. He would never tell her that he was guilty of every sin, including selfishness, or that Josie’s heart was purer than his had ever been. He would never tell her that the land she stood on, which would be hers someday, was bought with blood and tears. He would never tell her because she might believe him, and because with Ruth he had learned an invaluable lesson about hate; he could only teach hate by inspiring it. And how could he spoil her innocence, kill the freshness of her look, becloud the brightness of her too inquisitive eyes?
At least love was something that left a man proud that he had loved. Hate left a man shamed, as he was now, before the trust and faith of the young.
“The mean things I’ve done,” he began. “Think of me, when I’m gone, as a big, rough-looking coward. Who learned to love hisself only after thirty-odd years. And then overdone it.”
She was not to know until another time, that her grandfather, as she knew him, was a reborn man. She did not know fully, even after he was dead, what cruelties and blood fostered his tolerance and his strength. And his love.
Part VIII
38
AFTER MEM’S FUNERAL, to which he was allowed to go, though chained to a red-faced warden in dirty boots, Brownfield had thought uncomfortably but not regretfully of what he had done. But he had never been able to think himself very far. He liked plump women. That was the end-all of his moral debates. Ergo, he had murdered his wife because she had become skinny and had not, with much irritation to him, reverted, even when well-fed, to her former plumpness. He was not a fool to ask himself whether there was logic in his nerves. He knew what he liked.
The days of her plumpness haunted him as blackberry pie had done when he was a growing boy and pies of any kind were few and far between. He longed for a now over-and-done with lushness. His time of plenty, when he could provide.
Plumpness and freedom from the land, from cows and skinniness, went all together in his mind, and her face as it had been when he first knew her at the Dew Drop Inn took on for him the same one-dimensional quality as his memory of pies and a whiskey bottle. He could forget her basic reality, convert it into comparisons. She had been like good pie, or good whiskey, but there had never been a self to her because one no longer existed in him. Dead, Mem became a myth of herself, a beautiful plump girl with whom he had fallen in love, but who had changed before his eyes into an ugly hag, screeching at him and making him feel small.
If she had been able to maintain her dominance over him perhaps she would not stand now so finished, a miniature statue, in his mind, but her inherent weakness, covered over momentarily by the wretched muscular hag, had made her ashamed of her own seeming strength. And without this strength, the strength to kill his ass, to make him wallow continually in his own puke, she was lost. Her weakness was forgiveness, a stupid belief that kindness can convert the enemy. The logical next step from hitting him so magnificently over the head with the gun was for one of them to use it. That was where her staunch ten-point resolution had failed her. And he, without resolutions, but with the memory of his humiliation, could, and did, at last regain what she had stolen that Sunday morning when he lay in vomit at her feet. The punishment he had devised for her “come down” had not been enough. She had thought she could best him again by leaving him. And he had warned her, if she tried, what he would do. A man of his word, as he thought of himself, he had kept his word. His word had even become his duty.
But she was not a plump woman and he did not like them skinny. When they were like that something was wrong, and you weren’t doing them right. And he did not want to know about it.
39
JOSIE TOLD HIM that Ruth now lived, and happily, with Grange. It maddened Brownfield that his father should presume to try to raise his child. Ornette and Daphne, taken up North by Mem’s father, did not concern Brownfield as much as Ruth, because when they went North he relinquished claim to them, knowing quite well he would never go North after them. In prison, condemned for ten years to cut lawns and plant trees for jailers, judges, and prominent citizens of Baker County (though he was to be paroled after seven years), he realized an extraordinary emotion. He loved the South. And he knew he loved it because he had never seriously considered leaving it. He felt he had a real understanding of it. Its ways did not mystify him in the least. It was a sweet, violent, peculiarly accommodating land. It bent itself to fit its own laws. One’s life, underneath the rigidity of caste, was essentially one of invisibility and luck. One did not feel alone in one’s guilt. Guilt dripped and moved all over and around and about one like the moss that clung to the trees. A man’s punishment was never written up somewhere in a book before his crime was committed—it was not even the same as someone else’s punishment for the same crime. The punishment was made to fit the man and not the crime. It was individual punishment. One felt unique in one’s punishment if not in one’s crime. This appealed to Brownfield. It meant to him that one could punish one’s own enemies with a torture of one’s own choosing. One could make up the punishment and no one had the right to interfere.
In the prison with Brownfield were murderers, pimps, car thieves, drunkards and innocents, and their sentences bore no set relation to their crimes. A young boy of seventeen was in for stealing hubcaps and his sentence was five years. A hatchet murderer whom Brownfield came to know quite well, who had dispatched not only his wife but his wife’s mother and aunt, was paroled after three years. Before he was paroled he was a trustee. Before that he had been able to go out of the prison to attend church every Sunday and to spend a few minutes with his woman whenever the desire arose. He had played poker on weekends with the jailers. There was no order about this, which was why it appealed to Brownfield.
Brownfield brooded, while he worked—setting out dogwoods, magnolias and mimosas on spacious well-tended lawns—on his father’s audacity at taking his daughter. He brooded on Grange’s serenity and on his prosperity. Although he did not love Grange, he was very often depressed by the thought that his father had never really loved him.
Brownfield learned to read and write rather well while in prison. One day he was looking through the account, on the colored page, of Mem’s murder, and he saw his own name. Without knowing what was happening he read the whole article and went on to read other articles. The hatchet murderer, who became his friend, told him that the same thing had happened to him. On the day he was brought to trial, he said, his woman had thrust some newspapers into his hands. Look, she had said, there’s your picture! She wanted to cheer him up because she was afraid he was going to be electrocuted. The jailers had taken the papers away before he had a chance to examine them, but later, in jail, his woman brought him some more, to celebrate, she had said, his light sentence. They were both very pleased that there was a picture of him in the paper! He had sat a long time marveling at his big ugly picture in the paper, he said, and then, interested in what the paper might say about him, he began to read it. He could not recall where he learned the ABC’s; when he was a child he had owned a tiny children’s prayer book, from which his mother had read to him over and over. That had been his entire education, as far as he knew.
The boy who stole the hubcaps had been in high school and read well. Brownfield and the hatchet murderer took lessons from him and called him professor. One day, as Brownfield was writing his name, age and prison number on the margins of a newspaper it struck him suddenly that Mem had actually succeeded in teaching him to read and write and that somehow he had not only forgotten those days with her but had also forgotten what she’d taught him. He wondered about this, staring the while at his hands, then he burst into terrible sobs that tore his chest and brought him to the floor.
But his tears did not soften him, did not make him analyze his life or his crime. H
is crying was just a part of the life that produced his crime. It only made him feel lonely. Introspection came hard to Brownfield and was therefore given up before he became interested in it. The least deep thinking and he was sure he would be lost. As it was, while in prison, he wanted Josie, he wanted his father, he even wanted his mother.
He wanted Ruth. He had a great fear of being alone. He thought he could understand better than any of the other prisoners why God had created the universe when He found himself alone, and fixed it so man had two warm arms and a tongue.
“My daughter,” he wrote, in crude spellbound letters. And, “I wish I had got Grange too.” He did not hide these words, written on candy wrappers, newspapers and bits of paper from the trash. He left them lying around, clear marks of his existence and his plan.
Brownfield and the hatchet murderer talked sometimes about their motives in life. They watched television every Saturday evening and motives was a new word picked up from the television series, “Dragnet.” The motive that got him into prison, said Brownfield, was a keen desire to see if he had any control over himself. No matter which way he wanted to go, he said, some unseen force pushed him in the opposite direction.
“I never did want to be no sharecropper, never did want to work for nobody else, never did want to have white folks where they could poke themselves right into my life and me not have nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah, Lawd, and I know what you mean,” said the hatchet murderer, who had been a minister before he married one of his converts and started a family. He had discovered too late that he couldn’t feed his wife and her kin on what he made off the gospel. Marriage had stripped his nice black suit from him and in its place he had had to make do with overalls caked with sweat and dust he got in fields that would never be his. He knew what his friend was talking about because he had himself struggled against the unseen force. But he had decided the unseen force was God and so killed his wife and her kin. It was his way of leaving God’s company.
