Meridian (1976)

by Alice Walker

  The crowd, by now, had begun to disperse. The last of the children were leaving the wagon. Meridian stood at the bottom step, watching the children and the adults come down. She rested one foot on the rail that ran under the wagon and placed one hand in her pocket. Truman, who knew so well the features of her face, imagined her slightly frowning from the effort to stand erect and casually, just that way.

  “Her name’s Meridian,” Truman said to the sweeper.

  “You don’t know her personally?” asked the sweeper in sympathy.

  “Believe it or not,” he said.

  The door to Meridian’s house was not locked, so Truman went in and walked around. In the room that contained her sleeping bag he paused to read her wallpaper—letters she had stuck up side by side, neatly, at eye level. The first contained Bible verses and was written by Meridian’s mother, the gist of which was that Meridian had failed to honor not just her parents, but anyone. The others were signed “Anne-Marion” (whom Truman knew had been Meridian’s friend and roommate in college) and were a litany of accusations, written with much viciousness and condescension. They all began: “Of course you are misguided ...” and “Those, like yourself, who do not admit the truth ...” and “You have never, being weak and insensitive to History, had any sense of priorities ...,” etc. Why should Meridian have bothered to keep them? On some she had gamely scribbled: “Yes, yes. No. Some of the above. No, no. Yes. All of the above.”

  Above and below this strip of letters the walls were of decaying sheetrock, with uneven patches of dried glue as if the original wallpaper had been hastily removed. The sun through a tattered gray window shade cast the room in dim gray light, and as he glanced at the letters—walking slowly clockwise around the room—he had the feeling he was in a cell.

  It was Meridian’s house—the old sweeper had pointed it out to him—and this was Meridian’s room. But he felt as if he were in a cell. He looked about for some means of making himself comfortable, but there was nothing. She owned no furniture, beyond the sleeping bag, which, on inspection, did not appear to be very clean. However, from his student days, working in the Movement in the South, he knew how pleasant it could be to nap on a shaded front porch. With a sigh of nostalgia and anticipation, Truman bent down to remove his hot city shoes.

  “How was I to know it was you?” he asked, lying, when her eyes opened. He could not have walked up to her in front of all those people. He was embarrassed for her.

  “Why, Che Guevara,” she said dreamily, then blinked her eyes. “Truman?” He had popped up too often in her life for her to be surprised. “You look like Che Guevara. Not,” she began, and caught her breath, “not by accident I’m sure.” She was referring to his olive-brown skin, his black eyes, and the neatly trimmed beard and moustache he’d grown since the last time she saw him. He was also wearing a tan cotton jacket of the type worn by Chairman Mao.

  “You look like a revolutionary,” she said. “Are you?”

  “Only if all artists are. I’m still painting, yes.” And he scrutinized her face, her bones, which he had painted many times.

  “What are you continuing to do to yourself?” he asked, holding her bony, ice-cold hand in his. Her face alarmed him. It was wasted and rough, the skin a sallow, unhealthy brown, with pimples across her forehead and on her chin. Her eyes were glassy and yellow and did not seem to focus at once. Her breath, like her clothes, was sour.

  Four men had brought her home, hoisted across their shoulders exactly as they would carry a coffin, her eyes closed, barely breathing, arms folded across her chest, legs straight. They had passed him without speaking as he lay, attempting to nap, on the porch, placed her on her sleeping bag, and left. They had not even removed her cap, and while she was still unconscious Truman had pushed back her cap as he wiped her face with his moistened handkerchief and saw she had practically no hair.

  “Did they hurt you out there?” he asked.

  “They didn’t touch me,” she said.

  “You’re just sick then?”

  “Of course I’m sick,” snapped Meridian. “Why else would I spend all this time trying to get well!”

  “You have a strange way of trying to get well!”

  But her voice became softer immediately, as she changed the subject.

  “You look just like Che,” she said, “while I must look like death eating a soda cracker.” She reached up and pulled at the sides of her cap, bringing the visor lower over her eyes. Just before she woke up she had been dreaming about her father; they were running up and down steep green hills chasing each other. She’d been yelling “Wait!” and “Stop!” at the top of her lungs, but when she heard him call the same words to her she speeded up. Neither of them waited or stopped. She was exhausted, and so she had woke up.

  “I was waiting for you to come home—lying out on the porch—when I saw these people coming carrying a body”—Truman smiled—“which turned out to be you. They carried you straight as a board across their shoulders. How’d they do that?”

  Meridian shrugged. “They’re used to carrying corpses.”

  “Ever since I’ve been here people have been bringing boxes and boxes of food. Your house is packed with stuff to eat. One man even brought a cow. The first thing the cow did was drop cowshit all over the front walk. Whew,” said Truman, squeezing her hand, “folks sure are something down here.”

  “They’re grateful people,” said Meridian. “They appreciate it when someone volunteers to suffer.”

  “Well, you can’t blame them for not wanting to go up against a tank. After all, everybody isn’t bulletproof, like you.”

  “We have an understanding,” she said.

  “Which is?”

  “That if somebody has to go it might as well be the person who’s ready.”

  “And are you ready?”

  “Now? No. What you see before you is a woman in the process of changing her mind.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “It’s amazing how little that matters.”

  “You mean that kindly, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me,” said Truman, who did not want to show how sad he suddenly felt, “did you look inside the wagon yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I knew that whatever the man was selling was irrelevant to me, useless.”

  “The whole thing was useless, if you ask me,” said Truman, with bitterness. “You make yourself a catatonic behind a lot of meaningless action that will never get anybody anywhere. What good did it do those kids to see that freak’s freaky wife?”

  “She was a fake. They discovered that. There was no salt, they said, left in the crevices of her eyesockets or in her hair. This town is near the ocean, you know, the children have often seen dead things wash up from the sea. They said she was made of plastic and were glad they hadn’t waited till Thursday when they would have to pay money to see her. Besides, it was a hot day. They were bored. There was nothing else to do.”

  “Did you fall down in front of them?”

  “I try never to do that. I never have. Some of the men— the ones who brought me home—followed me away from the square; they always follow me home after I perform, in case I need them. I fell down only when I was out of the children’s sight.”

  “And they folded your arms?”

  “They folded my arms.”

  “And straightened your legs?”

  “They’re very gentle and good at it.”

  “Do they know why you fall down?”

  “It doesn’t bother them. They have a saying for people who fall down as I do: If a person is hit hard enough, even if she stands, she falls. Don’t you think that’s perceptive?”

  “I don’t know what to think. I never have. Do you have a doctor?”

  “I don’t need one. I am getting much better by myself....” Meridian moved her fingers, then lifted her arms slightly off the floor. “See, the paralysis is going away already.” S
he continued to raise and lower her arms, flexing her fingers and toes as she did so. She rolled her shoulders forward and up and raised and twisted her ankles. Each small movement made her face look happier, even as the effort exhausted her.

  Truman watched her struggle to regain the use of her body. “I grieve in a different way,” he said.

  “I know,” Meridian panted.

  “What do you know?”

  “I know you grieve by running away. By pretending you were never there.”

  “When things are finished it is best to leave.”

  “And pretend they were never started?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s not possible.”

  Meridian had learned this in New York, nearly ten summers ago.

  “You are a coward,” one of the girls said then, though they knew she was not a coward.

  “A masochist,” sniffed another.

  And Meridian had sat among them on the floor, her hands clasping the insides of her sneakers, her head down. To join this group she must make a declaration of her willingness to die for the Revolution, which she had done. She must also answer the question “Will you kill for the Revolution?” with a positive Yes. This, however, her tongue could not manage. Through her mind was running a small voice that screamed: “Something’s missing in me. Something’s missing!” And the voice made her heart pound and her ears roar. “Something the old folks with their hymns and proverbs forgot to put in! What is it? What? What?”

  “Why don’t you say something?” Anne-Marion’s voice, angry and with the undisguised urgency of her contempt, attempted to suppress any tone of compassion. Anne-Marion had said, “Yes, I will kill for the Revolution” without a stammer; yet Meridian knew her tenderness, a vegetarian because she loved the eyes of cows.

  Meridian alone was holding on to something the others had let go. If not completely, then partially—by their words today, their deeds tomorrow. But what none of them seemed to understand was that she felt herself to be, not holding on to something from the past, but held by something in the past: by the memory of old black men in the South who, caught by surprise in the eye of a camera, never shifted their position but looked directly back; by the sight of young girls singing in a country choir, their hair shining with brushings and grease, their voices the voices of angels. When she was transformed in church it was always by the purity of the singers’ souls, which she could actually hear, the purity that lifted their songs like a flight of doves above her music-drunken head. If they committed murder—and to her even revolutionary murder was murder—what would the music be like?

  She had once jokingly asked Anne-Marion to imagine the Mafia as a singing group. The Mafia, Anne-Marion had hissed, is not a revolutionary cadre!

  “You hate yourself instead of hating them,” someone said.

  “Why don’t you say something?” said another, jabbing her in the ribs.

  This group might or might not do something revolutionary. It was after all a group of students, of intellectuals, converted to a belief in violence only after witnessing the extreme violence, against black dissidents, of the federal government and police. Would they rob a bank? Bomb a landmark? Blow up a police station? Would they ever be face to face with the enemy, guns drawn? Perhaps. Perhaps not. “But that isn’t the point!” the small voice screeched. The point was, she could not think lightly of shedding blood. And the question of killing did not impress her as rhetorical at all.

  They were waiting for her to speak. But what could she say? Saying nothing, she remembered her mother and the day she lost her. She was thirteen, sitting next to her mother in church, drunk as usual with the wonderful music, the voices themselves almost making the words of songs meaningless; the girls, the women, the stalwart fathers singing

  The day is past and gone

  The evening shade appear

  Oh may we all remember well

  The night of death draw near

  Sniffing, her heart breaking with love, it was her father’s voice, discerned in clarity from all the others, that she heard. It enveloped her in an anguish for that part of him that was herself—how could he be so resigned to death, she thought. But how sweet his voice! It was her mother, however, whom she heeded, while trying not to: “Say it now, Meridian, and be saved. All He asks is that we acknowledge Him as our Master. Say you believe in Him.” Looking at her daughter’s tears: “Don’t go against your heart!” But she had sat mute, watching her friends walking past her bench, accepting Christ, acknowledging God as their Master, Jesus their Savior, and her heart fluttered like that of a small bird about to be stoned. It was her father’s voice that moved her, that voice that could come only from the life he lived. A life of withdrawal from the world, a life of constant awareness of death. It was the music that made her so tractable and willing she might have said anything, acknowledged anything, simply for peace from his pain that was rendered so exquisitely beautiful by the singers’ voices.

  But for all that her father sang beautifully, heartbreakingly, of God, she sensed he did not believe in Him in quite the same way her mother did. Her mind stuck on a perennial conversation between her parents regarding the Indians:

  “The Indians were living right here, in Georgia,” said her father, “they had a town, an alphabet, a newspaper. They were going about their business, enjoying life ... It was the same with them all over the country, and in Mexico, South America ... doesn’t this say anything to you?”

  “No,” her mother would say.

  “And the women had babies and made pottery. And the men sewed moccasins and made drums out of hides and hollow logs.”

  “So?”

  “It was a life, ruled by its own spirits.”

  “That’s what you claim, anyway.”

  “And where is it now?”

  Her mother sighed, fanning herself with a fan from the funeral home. “I never worry myself about those things. There’s such a thing as progress. I didn’t invent it, but I’m not going to argue with it either. As far as I’m concerned those people and how they kept off mosquitoes hasn’t got a thing to do with me.”

  Meridian’s mother would take up a fistful of wire clothes hangers, straighten them out, and red, yellow and white crepe paper and her shears, and begin to cut out rose petals. With a dull knife she scraped each petal against her thumb and then pressed both thumbs against the center of the petal to make a cup. Then she put smaller petals inside larger ones, made the bud of the rose by covering a small ball of aluminum foil with bright green paper, tied the completed flower head to the end of the clothes hanger, and stood the finished product in a churn already crowded with the artificial blooms. In winter she made small pillows, puckered and dainty, of many different colors. She stuck them in plastic bags that piled up in the closet. Prayer pillows, she called them. But they were too small for kneeling. They would only fit one knee, which Meridian’s mother never seemed to notice.

  Still, it is death not to love one’s mother. Or so it seemed to Meridian, and so, understanding her mother as a willing know-nothing, a woman of ignorance and—in her ignorance—of cruelty, she loved her more than anything. But she respected even more her father’s intelligence, though it seemed he sang, beautifully, only of death.

  She struggled to retain her mother’s hand, covering it with her own, and attempted to bring it to her lips. But her mother moved away, tears of anger and sadness coursing down her face. Her mother’s love was gone, withdrawn, and there were conditions to be met before it would be returned. Conditions Meridian was never able to meet.

  “Fallen asleep, have you?” It was a voice from the revolutionary group, calling her from a decidedly unrevolutionary past. They made her ashamed of that past, and yet all of them had shared it. The church, the music, the tolerance shown to different beliefs outside the community, the tolerance shown to strangers. She felt she loved them. But love was not what they wanted, it was not what they needed.

  They needed her to kill. To say she would k
ill. She thought perhaps she could do it. Perhaps.

  “I don’t know if I can kill anyone ...”

  There was a relaxing of everyone. “Ah ...”

  “If I had to do it, perhaps I could. I would defend myself ...”

  “Sure you would ...” sighed Anne-Marion, reining in the hatred about to run wild against her friend.

  “Maybe I could sort of grow into the idea of killing other human beings ...”

  “Enemies ...”

  “Pigs ...”

  “But I’m not sure ...”

  “Oh, what a drag this girl is ...”

  “I know I want what is best for black people ...”

  “That’s what we all want!”

  “I know there must be a revolution ...”

  “Damn straight!”

  “I know violence is as American as cherry pie!”

  “Rap on!”

  “I know nonviolence has failed ...”

  “Then you will kill for the Revolution, not just die for it?” Anne-Marion’s once lovely voice, beloved voice. “Like a fool!” the voice added, bitterly and hard.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shee-it...!”

  “But can you say you probably will? That you will.”

  “No.”

  Everyone turned away.

  “What will you do? Where will you go?” Only Anne-Marion still cared enough to ask, though her true eyes—with their bright twinkle—had been replaced with black marbles.

  “I’ll go back to the people, live among them, like Civil Rights workers used to do.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Yes,” she had said, “I am serious.”

  And so she had left the North and come back South, moving from one small town to another, finding jobs—some better or worse than others—to support herself; remaining close to the people—to see them, to be with them, to understand them and herself, the people who now fed her and tolerated her and also, in a fashion, cared about her.

  Each time Truman visited Meridian he found her with less and less furniture, fewer and fewer pieces of clothing, less of a social position in the community—wherever it was— where she lived. From being a teacher who published small broadsides of poems, she had hired herself out as a gardener, as a waitress at middle-class black parties, and had occasionally worked as a dishwasher and cook.