A prolific period followed, during which she produced, among other works, the novel Meridian (1976) and edited a groundbreaking collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…And Then Again When I’m Looking Mean and Impressive (1979).
She picked up characters from The Color Purple in the novels Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), the latter an outspoken indictment against the African practice of female genital mutilation. Walker also effectively employed nonfiction prose to further her politics, most notably in her essay collections In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) and Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973–1987 (1988). Walker’s first declaration of her bisexuality to appear in print was published in Essence magazine in 1996, just as her first book of autobiographical writings, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996), was brought out.
In addition to her extensive career as a novelist and essayist, Walker is a respected writer of short stories, with several collections, including In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981), and The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000), which features the following story, “This Is How It Happened.”
This Is How It Happened
[2000]
This is how it happened. After many years of being happier than anyone we knew, which worried me, my partner of a dozen years and I broke up. I still loved him, in a deeply familial way, but the moments of palpable deadness occurring with ever greater frequency in our relationship warned me we’d reached the end of our mutual growth. How to end it? How to get away?
My old friend Marissa, with whom I’d been infatuated years ago in Brooklyn, came to San Francisco for a visit. She was a dyke, pure and strange, and I could never see her without a certain amount of awe. She was the most beautiful of women, shapely and brown, but she could also wire houses and fix cars. All the while speaking in the softest of voices and never showing any of her innate wildness until left alone on the dance floor. She immediately caused the other dancers to disappear and the dance floor itself to retreat until it seemed to be in a forest somewhere and the five thousand or so years of a lackluster patriarchy fairly forgotten.
We had met while I was in a marriage with a decent, honorable man who had not danced in six or seven years, and she was living with a woman who told her what to eat, think and wear. I didn’t know this when we met, of course. Because she was an electrician and earned her own living I found her strong, independent, free. In retrospect we decided, once we’d been separated for some years from our earlier partners, we’d been infatuated with the image of each other that we needed to help us flee.
“I thought you always knew exactly what you were doing,” she said. “To have married someone nice to support you while you perfected your craft as an artist. To have had children with someone who supported you and them. Oh,” she continued, “the list was long.”
I was amazed. “It was all instinct,” I said. “I had seen so many women married to men who squashed their development. Any hint of such a personality turned me off. And of course,” I said, “I never seriously considered women.” Nor had I understood I could.
“Well,” she said, “you wouldn’t have done any better with the one I found. Libby is just the man her father was. Domineering, bossy, a real pain in the neck.” She sighed. “And after the first couple of years, no sex.”
“No sex?” How could sexy Marissa not be having sex?
Marissa shrugged. “It’s a curious thing to encounter the father of your woman leering out at you. Which is what happened when Libby drank. She’d forget we’d argued and that I’d been humiliated over some outrageous behavior of hers. She’d get sentimental in her drunkenness and want to make love. By force if necessary. I was repelled.”
I too had enjoyed making love with Tripper for many years. Then it seemed to me my sexual rhythm was broken. I no longer experienced any periods of horniness, as I had earlier in my life. Eventually I realized it was because over time Tripper’s sexual needs set the times of love’s occasions. I was never able to say no, but my body did. It withheld its pleasure, since its own desire was not permitted to set the pattern of celebration and release.
Why didn’t either of us speak up? Marissa and I often asked each other. We agreed that we’d tried, but habits, once formed, had proved hard to break, and retreat and silence had offered a spuriously virtuous comfort. Our mothers’ behavior, probably, copied while we were very young, too early to recognize it for the depression it was.
The week I left Tripper he was still interested in making love to me, and suggested a “good-bye fuck” even though my body had not for many months expressed the slightest desire. In fact, it had expressed just the opposite, with its pancake-flat nipples and a vulva so dry I’d thought I’d prematurely entered “the change.”
When Marissa came to pick me up Chung was in the kitchen attempting to repair the toaster. His straight black hair, with the dapper streak of gray on the left side, hung in his eyes, and his somewhat paunchy torso, sans shirt, glistened with sweat. When we’d met I’d practically drooled over his body. I still admired it, but in a more critical way. I loved the fact that he was short, and that when we kissed, we could look squarely into each other’s eyes. Also that my arms reached easily around him—Tripper had been both large and tall—and I could grab a nice handful of his butt. Marissa took a beer from the fridge and sat gap-legged at the table sipping it and watching him struggle with the toaster as long as she could stand it. By the time I was ready to go she’d ripped it from his fingers and declared it dead and therefore inefficient. Chung, who has a sense of humor if not much vitality at this stage in his life, grabbed a beer for himself and was still laughing as we went out of the house.
I backed my battered pea-green Karman Ghia out of the driveway and then stopped to put down the top. Marissa and I flew down the streets giddy as teenagers, serene as the old friends we were.
At the dance, as I suspected, Marissa was queen. The best dancers sought her out and she outdanced all of them. It was the kind of dykey joint that still intimidated me. The kind with lots of women in all manner of dress and an obligatory three or four men. I was always wondering about the men. Who were they? Why were they there? Were they bouncers? Were they brothers of some of the women? Lovers of some of the women? Straight? Bisexual? Gay?
What men? was always Marissa’s response when I asked her about them.
Tonight as always I sat quietly in a corner hoping not to be approached. Unless it was by a particular woman across the room who attracted me by the sexiness of her dress—I’d discovered I liked femme-looking women, with their low-cut dresses and light, pinky-plum colors. But butches too—like Marissa, who wore tight jeans, a leather jacket and a scarf around her neck—could be almost unbelievably alluring. Marissa would dance with me until my lack of wildness bored her. Then she’d whirl out on the dance floor dancing only with partners who, in their abandon, reminded her of herself. Or, she’d dance alone, a voluptuous brown-skinned woman with dreadlocks to her ass, and everyone watching her imagined her dancing just for them, in silvery moonlight beneath a canopy of ancient trees, naked.
After sleeping together once or twice why hadn’t we become lovers? I often asked myself. Perhaps because you can’t recall whether it was once or twice, said Marissa, when I queried her. I certainly loved and admired her. Yet she seemed somehow beyond me, freer. I felt I’d never catch up. Her “way” seemed natural to her. I would have to learn it. This frightened, irritated and depressed me. I tried to imagine Marissa in a heterosexual relationship and it made me laugh. I tried to imagine the two of us as a couple and it made me uneasy.
Sitting in my corner drinking a margarita I was for a moment unaware I’d been watching a woman standing by the door holding a baby in her arms. This was so incongruous—the loud music, the energetic dancing, the drinking and smoking—that I immediately rose and walked over to her, o
ffering her the seat next to mine. She could not come over just yet, she explained, because she was selling some articles of apparel from Guatemala which I now noticed she carried in a large denim bag at her feet. I was shocked by this, I don’t know why. But within minutes I was holding the baby, a fitfully dozing black-eyed boy, who was not an infant but a two-year-old, and she was squatting beside her merchandise where much to my surprise she seemed to make sales by simply rummaging for a particular item in her bag and then briefly flinging it over a cleared spot on the floor. Money changed hands rapidly and soon she’d sold enough colorfully striped cotton trousers, headbands and vests to satisfy her for the evening. Dragging what was left in her bag she hurried over to us. The baby strained against my arms as she approached, and resolutely wriggled off my lap and toddled up to her. When they met, on the fringe of the whirling dancers, who any minute I expected to stomp on him, she smiled down at him and stopped to swing him up in her arms. At that moment the Drifters or some other old group was singing the golden oldie “With Every Beat of My Heart,” and the two of them danced a moment cheek to cheek. Her hair was in short, thick, warrior erect dreadlocks. She was wearing pants that looked like a skirt, and a light blue denim shirt with an open collar. Beneath the shirt was a peach-colored tank. She wore earrings. Bracelets. And on her feet, sturdy brown boots.
It happened in the moment they were dancing, the child closing his eyes in a swoon of delight. The woman a being I’d never seen before.
MICHELLE CLIFF
[1946–]
JAMAICA-BORN LESBIAN AUTHOR MICHELLE CLIFF BRINGS AN immigrant’s perspective to outsider sexual identity. A light-skinned girl, Cliff often passed as white during her childhood in New York City’s Jamaican community. Her alienation and feelings of difference shaped her search for self-expression, which is a consistent theme in her fiction, essays, and poetry.
Cliff’s family eventually moved back to Jamaica; she returned to New York in the 1960s to attend college. She worked at W. W. Norton as an editor in the 1970s and served as coeditor and publisher of the lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom with partner Adrienne Rich in the 1980s.
Cliff’s first book, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980), is a collection of essays about the impact of racism and colonization on the women in her family. Her first novel, Abeng (1984), introduces Clare Savage, a young, light-skinned Jamaican woman. Savage’s strained relations with her family, homeland, and dark-skinned friends serve as the foundation for the book’s sequel, No Telephone to Heaven (1987), which also features a cross-dressing gay man who befriends Clare. While lesbian identity informs Cliff’s writing, racial and gender concerns are her primary topics.
In the short story “Ecce Homo,” however, homosexuality runs as a major a theme alongside race. Set in fascist Rome, the piece is about a black gay American linguist whose outlaw sexuality—coupled with his blackness—lands him in a concentration camp.
Ecce Homo
[2000]
Dream…on black wings…you come whenever sleep…sweet god, truly… sorrow powerfully…to keep separate…I have hope that I shall not share… nothing of the blessed…for I would not be so.
—Sappho #63
The story as I was told it begins in Rome. There is a man who is a linguist. He is accomplished in several languages. Western and nonwestern. He gets a job as a translator in the U.S. Embassy. He translates for Italians who clamor for visas. Jews among others.
His is a low-level position for a man of his qualifications.
He is black which is of concern to his country.
He is homosexual but they seem unaware.
He counts his blessings beside the Trevi Fountain.
All in all he has been comfortable in Rome.
His is an adopted country.
He was brought to America when he was fourteen. His are a nomadic people. Strivers, always in search of a better place. His mother and father—he was blessed with both—settled in Philadelphia. He did well in school, near the top of his graduating class.
He availed himself of Lincoln, the Black Princeton.
One evening in the Pizza Navona he is sitting at an outdoor restaurant. He has ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio—Campanile ’36—and is lighting a Muratti cigarette. The restaurant—the storyteller cannot recall the name—is located at the south end of piazza, and from his table the linguist can see Bernini’s Il Moro and takes heart.
That very evening he meets a man, an Italian.
A simple meeting: the Italian stops by the linguist’s table, asks for a cigarette, a light.
They stroll the Roman streets, light at the Italian’s apartment.
They become lovers.
On the weekends they spend time in a hilltown beyond the hills of the city the Italian knows from childhood.
They speak freely. The storyteller says that was when they fell in love.
But too soon Americans have to leave. The linguist—like it or not—is a naturalized American. As such he must go.
But the linguist does not want to abandon his beloved. The linguist— the Negro who speaks in tongues—of rivers—unlike the tongues of the women back home (home the place that is unAmerica) in the pocomania shacks—twirling their spirituous tongues—was once tongue tied— “What’s the matter, boy?” “Wha’ do you, bwai?”
“Is Cat got you tongue?”
“Don’ mek me give you one tongue-lashing.”
Now his tongue is the most skilled part of him.
He works with his tongue. He makes love with his tongue. He knows when to hold his tongue.
The linguist tries to arrange a visa but the beloved is a known quantity and the application is denied.
He will not leave.
And that—the storyteller says—is the beginning of the end.
One night the fascists descend on the rooms the two men share in the Piazza della Repubblica. They are removed suddenly, without incident, but for the incident of their removal.
When he was a boy, before the family left for America, he read in a newspaper about two men apprehended because they were found together. A laborer, a casual laborer, the paper had reported, and a bank clerk. They were discovered in “an obscene condition”—a child, he did not know what this meant. When the two men were arraigned on a charge of public indecency (they’d been discovered under a pier near the Myrtle Bank Hotel) hundreds packed the court-room—including mothers and their children. Later the two men were given twelve strokes of the Cat and five years hard labor.
The police take the two men to the nearby train station where they are loaded on a car bound for a camp.
Do you remember the end of The Garden of the Finzi-Contini? The film, this does not happen in the book. The schoolroom where the deportees are taken to be sorted and shipped. The train station in this story has a similar feel right now. There are still the stalls selling bottles of Acqua Mia and San Benedetto, bunches of grapes in white paper, newspapers, magazines, paperbound libretti—the air smells of cigarette smoke and oranges and damp—the ordinariness of it all—strikes them—commerce, train travel—the schoolroom smelling of chalkdust—and people who have been tagged.
The two men arrive at the camp together. Thank God they have not been separated. But they will do well to ignore one another. To ignore one another while looking out for the other—that is their task.
They mask their longing.
They are assigned forced labor. Breaking rocks. Drawing the rocks, wagonload by wagonload, up the side of the quarry, stacking them in pyramids. The guards, wielding sledgehammers, smash the pyramids; the prisoners return to the pit of the quarry and break more stones, draw them to the lip of the quarry, stack them.
The two men are mocked, called names only the linguist understands.
Outside the windows of the storyteller’s flat the sun is going down over the Pacific, beyond the Golden Gate.
The storyteller does not know how the two managed to escape. We will have to bring our imaginat
ions to bear.
It must be night. Under cover of night they drift to the edge of the camp. In the darkness they burrow out under the barbed wire. Something like that. An opportunity has presented itself and they take it.
They find their way into some woods.
They live in the heart of the woods in the heat of a war as lovers. They live on mushrooms and lamb’s quarters and wild birds the Italian traps. And the storyteller knows this is romantic, but let’s let them have it. They make a place to sleep in a tree trunk heavy with moss and shelved with lichen.
A decayed, decadent nest.
The gunfire which seems to encircle them is coming closer to them. They whisper about which course to take. They sleep with their legs wrapped together. One man’s penis nestles against the other’s flank. When it rains, the rain draws a curtain around them.
They decide they will try to find Switzerland. They laugh. At least they have a plan. The linguist will pretend to be the Ethiopian servant of the Italian: “A spoil of war,” the linguist whispers.
Now they’re getting somewhere.
Suddenly luck finds them. They stumble upon a company of American troops—Negro soldiers encamped nearby. The linguist explains—omitting the triangle—now but a ghost on his chest.
Time passes. Switzerland is forgotten.
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