Meridian

by Alice Walker

  Flinging his leg off her (he had slept with the curve of his foot locked about her ankle) she hurried to the bathroom and strained over the commode. She wished she had had a douche bag. Instead she took a glass of hot water and worked some of the water up her while lying in the tub. She had made up her mind before coming to Atlanta not to have sex. When she went back into the living room, Truman was gone.

  He had gone back to the last of the exchange students, the one she had liked, Lynne Rabinowitz. It was for this reason, among others, that he never knew she was pregnant. On her way to have an abortion she saw them riding across campus in his father’s new red car. From a distance, they both looked white to her, that day. Later, as the doctor tore into her body without giving her anesthesia (and while he lectured her on her morals) and she saw stars because of the pain, she was still seeing them laughing, carefree, together. It was not that she wanted him any more, she did not. It enraged her that she could be made to endure such pain, and that he was oblivious to it. She was also disgusted with fecundity of her body that got pregnant on less screwing than anybody’s she had ever heard of. It seemed doubly unfair that after all her sexual “experience” and after one baby and one abortion she had not once been completely fulfilled by sex.

  Her doctor was the one from Saxon College, only now in private practice. “I could tie your tubes,” he chopped out angrily, “if you’ll let me in on some of all this extracurricular activity.” His elbow somehow rested heavily on her navel and a whirling hot pain shot from her uterus to her toes. She felt sure she’d never walk again. She looked at him until his hard face began to blur. “Burn ’em out by the roots for all I care.” She had left his office wide-legged with blood soaking her super Kotex and cramps bending her double, but she was crying for other reasons.

  Truman never knew. She thought about telling him, but when she considered he might have the nerve to pity her, she knew she would rather have bitten her tongue in half. After the exchange students left he strolled up to her one day as she emerged from one of her classes.

  “You know,” he said, squinting up his eyes as if seeing something clearly but with immense strain. “I don’t know what was wrong with me. You’re obviously a stone fox. I don’t see why we had to break up.”

  “You’re kidding?” She said this more to herself than to him. She felt nothing and was relieved. She wondered why, or rather how that term came to be so popular. Surely no one had bothered to analyze it as they said it. In her mind she carried a stone fox. It was heavy, gray and could not move.

  “Aw, don’t be like that,” he said, stopping her on the walk and looking into her eyes. “I think I’m in love with you, African woman. Always have been. Since the first.”

  She laughed. It seemed only fair, and her mind was working perfectly after all. “You’re kidding again?”

  “We could be happy together. I know we could. I can make you come. I almost did it that time, didn’t I?” He looked at her, waiting for her to stammer or blush. “All the time I thought you didn’t like to fuck. You do, don’t you? Anyway, your body is beautiful. So warm, so brown ...”

  She turned away, shame for him, for what he was revealing, making her sick.

  “It’s over. Let it stay.”

  But he looked at her with eyes of new discovery.

  “You’re beautiful,” he whispered worshipfully. Then he said, urgently “Have my beautiful black babies.”

  And she drew back her green book bag and began to hit him. She hit him three times before she even knew what was happening. Then she hit him again across the ear and a spiral from a tablet cut his cheek. Blood dripped onto his shirt. When she noticed the blood she turned and left him to the curiosity of the other students crowding there.

  The Recurring Dream

  SHE DREAMED she was a character in a novel and that her existence presented an insoluble problem, one that would be solved only by her death at the end.

  She dreamed she was a character in a novel and that her existence presented an insoluble problem, one that would be solved only by her death at the end.

  She dreamed she was a character in a novel and that her existence presented an insoluble problem, one that would be solved only by her death at the end.

  Even when she gave up reading novels that encouraged such a solution—and nearly all of them did—the dream did not cease.

  She felt as if a small landslide had begun behind her brows, as if things there had started to slip. It was a physical feeling and she paid it no mind. She just began to take chances with her life. She would go alone to small towns where blacks were not welcome on the sidewalks after dark and she would stand waiting, watching the sun go down. She walked for miles up and down Atlanta streets until she was exhausted, without once paying any attention to the existence of cars. She began to forget to eat.

  The day before her graduation from Saxon she suddenly noticed, as she looked at a rack of clean glasses in the dining room, that they were bathed in a bluish light. When she held up one hand in front of her face it seemed bluish also, as if washed in ink. Although Anne-Marion had moved in with her she did not mention the blue spells to her, and they would sit talking, eating the goodies she brought home from Mr. Raymonds and reading about Socialism.

  Both girls had lived and studied enough to know they despised capitalism; they perceived it had done well in America because it had rested directly on their fathers’ and mothers’ backs. The difference between them was this: Anne-Marion did not know if she would be a success as a capitalist, while Meridian did not think she could enjoy owning things others could not have. Anne-Marion wanted blacks to have the same opportunity to make as much money as the richest white people. But Meridian wanted the destruction of the rich as a class and the eradication of all personal economic preserves. Her senior thesis was based on the notion that no one should be allowed to own more land than could be worked in a day, by hand. Anne-Marion thought this was quaint. When black people can own the seashore, she said, I want miles and miles of it. And I never want to see a face I didn’t invite walking across my sand. Meridian reminded her of her professed admiration for Socialist and Communist theories. Yes, Anne-Marion replied. I have the deepest admiration for them, but since I haven’t had a chance to have a capitalist fling yet, the practice of those theories will have to wait awhile.

  But Anne-Marion, Meridian would say, that is probably exactly what Henry Ford said! Tell Henry I agree with him, said Anne-Marion.

  These exchanges would be marked by laughter and the attempt to pretend they were not serious.

  Fuck Democracy, Anne-Marion would say, biting into a cookie. Fuck the Free World. Let the Republicans and the Democrats-as-we-know-them fuck each other’s grandmothers.

  Meridian would laugh and laugh, until her arms grew tired from slapping the side of her bed.

  But one day the blue became black and she temporarily—for two days—lost her sight. Until then she had not thought seriously of going to a doctor. For one thing, she had no money. For another, if she went to the campus doctor he would want payment for having tied her tubes. Still, when she awoke from a long faint several days after her eyesight returned and found him standing over her, she was not surprised. His presence seemed appropriate. Without waiting to hear her symptoms he had her lifted up on the examination table—using his best officious manner before his nurses— and she was given a thorough and painful pelvic examination. Her breasts were routinely and exhaustively felt. She was asked if she slept with boys. She was asked why she slept with boys. Didn’t she know that boys nowadays were no good and could get her into trouble?

  He thought she’d better come to his off-campus office for further consultation; there, he said, he had more elaborate equipment with which to test her.

  She returned to the apartment sicker than when she left. Happily, two days later, neither the fainting nor the blue-black spells had returned. Then she found—on trying to get out of bed—that her legs no longer worked. Since she had experienc
ed paralysis before, this worried her less than the losing of her sight. As the days passed—and she attempted to nibble at the dishes Anne-Marion brought—she discovered herself becoming more and more full, with no appetite whatsoever. And, to her complete surprise and astonished joy, she began to experience ecstasy.

  Sometimes, lying on her bed, not hungry, not cold, not worried (because she realized the worry part of her brain had been the landslide behind her brows and that it had slid down and therefore no longer functioned), she felt as if a warm, strong light bore her up and that she was a beloved part of the universe; that she was innocent even as the rocks are innocent, and unpolluted as the first waters. And when Anne-Marion sat beside the bed and scolded her for not eating, she was amazed that Anne-Marion could not see how happy and content she was.

  Anne-Marion was alarmed. Before her eyes, Meridian seemed to be slipping away. Still, the idea that Meridian might actually die, while smiling happily at a blank ceiling, seemed preposterous, and she did nothing about it. But one day, as she sat on her own bed across from Meridian’s, reading a book of Marxist ideology that included The Communist Manifesto, which she considered a really thought-provoking piece of work, she glanced at Meridian’s head in shock. For all around it was a full soft light, as if her head, the spikes of her natural, had learned to glow. The sight pricked an unconscious place in Anne-Marion’s post-Baptist memory.

  “Ah shit!” she said, stamping her foot, annoyed that she’d thought of Meridian in a religious context.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Meridian dreamily. She moved her head slightly and the soft bright light disappeared.

  Anne-Marion hugged her book as if it were a lover going off on a long trip. “We’ve been raised wrong!” she said, “that’s what’s wrong.” What she meant was, she no longer believed in God and did not like to think about Jesus (for whom she still felt a bitter, grudging admiration).

  “How long has she been in bed?” asked Miss Winter.

  “About a month,” said Anne-Marion.

  “You should have come to me sooner,” said Miss Winter.

  Miss Winter was also a misfit at Saxon College. Yellow, with bulging black eyes and an elaborate blue wig, she was the school’s organist—one of only three black teachers on the faculty. The other two taught PE and French. It was she each morning who played the old English and German hymns the program required, and the music rose like marching souls toward the vaulted ceiling of the chapel. And yet, in her music class she deliberately rose against Saxon tradition to teach jazz (which she had learned somewhere in Europe to pronounce “jawhz”) and spirituals and the blues (which she pronounced “blews”). It was thought each year that she would never survive to teach at Saxon the following one. But she endured. As aloof and ladylike as she appeared (and she never wore outfits the parts of which did not precisely match), her fights with the president and the college dean could be heard halfway across the campus.

  Miss Winter was from Meridian’s home town and had known Meridian’s family all her life. She was a Saxon graduate herself, and when she learned Meridian had been accepted as a student she fought down her first feelings, which were base. She had enjoyed being the only person from her town to attend such a college; she did not wish to share this distinction. By the time Meridian arrived, however, she had successfully uprooted this feeling. She would not, even so, return the girl’s timid greeting the first day they met.

  She had once attended an oratorical competition at her old high school, where Meridian was well on the way to distinguishing herself. Meridian was reciting a speech that extolled the virtues of the Constitution and praised the superiority of The American Way of Life. The audience cared little for what she was saying, and of course they didn’t believe any of it, but they were rapt, listening to her speak so passionately and with such sad valor in her eyes.

  Then, in the middle of her speech, Meridian had seemed to forget. She stumbled and then was silent on the stage. The audience urged her on but she would not continue. Instead she covered her face with her hands and had to be led away.

  Meridian’s mother went out into the hallway where Meridian was and Miss Winter overheard them talking. Meridian was trying to explain to her mother that for the first time she really listened to what she was saying, knew she didn’t believe it, and was so distracted by this revelation that she could not make the rest of her speech. Her mother, not listening to this explanation at all, or at least not attempting to understand it, was saying something else: She was reminding Meridian that whenever something went wrong for her she simply trusted in God, raised her head a little higher than it already was, stared down whatever was in her path, never looked back, and so forth.

  Meridian, who was seated and whose eyes were red from crying, was looking up at her mother hopelessly. Standing over her, her mother appeared huge, a giant, a woman who could trust in God, hold up her head, never look back, and get through everything, whether she believed in it or not. Meridian, on the other hand, appeared smaller than she actually was and looked as though she wanted to melt into her seat. She had doubled over, as if she might shrink into a ball and disappear.

  Miss Winter had pushed back the cuff of her gray mink coat and put a perfumed arm around Meridian’s shoulders. She told her not to worry about the speech. “It’s the same one they made me learn when I was here,” she told her, “and it’s no more true now than it was then.” She had never said anything of the sort to anyone before and was surprised at how good it felt. A blade of green grass blew briefly across her vision and a fresh breeze followed it. She realized the weather was too warm for mink and took off her coat.

  But Meridian continued to huddle there, and her mother, her body as stately as the prow of a ship, moved off down the hall where she stood head and shoulders above all the girls—Meridian’s classmates—who seemed an insubstantial mass of billowing crinolines and flashy dresses, gathered there.

  To Meridian, her mother was a giant. She had never perceived her in any other way. Or, if she did have occasional thoughts that challenged this conception she swept them out of her mind as petty and ridiculous. Even on the day Miss Winter remembered, Meridian’s sadness had been only that she had failed her mother. That her mother was deliberately obtuse about what had happened meant nothing beside her own feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Besides, she had already forgiven her mother for anything she had ever done to her or might do, because to her, Mrs. Hill had persisted in bringing them all (the children, the husband, the family, the race) to a point far beyond where she, in her mother’s place, her grandmother’s place, her great-grandmother’s place, would have stopped.

  This was her mother’s history as Meridian knew it:

  Her mother’s great-great-grandmother had been a slave whose two children were sold away from her when they were toddlers. For days she had followed the man who bought them until she was able to steal them back. The third time—after her owner had exhausted one of his field hands whipping her, and glints of bone began to show through the muscles on her back—she was allowed to keep them on the condition that they would eat no food she did not provide herself.

  During the summers their existence was not so hard. They learned to pick berries at night, after the day’s work in the fields, and they gathered poke salad and in the autumn lived on nuts they found in the woods. They smoked fish they caught in streams and the wild game she learned to trap. They were able to exist this way until the children were in their teens. Then their mother died, the result of years of slow starvation. The children were sold the day of their mother’s burial. Mrs. Hill’s great-grandmother had been famous for painting decorations on barns. She earned money for the man who owned her and was allowed to keep some for herself. With it she bought not only her own freedom, but that of her husband and children as well. In Meridian’s grandmother’s childhood, there were still barns scattered throughout the state that bloomed with figures her mother had painted. At the center of each tree or animal or bird she painte
d, there was somehow drawn in, so that it formed a part of the pattern, a small contorted face—whether of man or woman or child, no one could tell—that became her trademark.

  Mrs. Hill’s mother married a man of many admirable qualities. He was a person who kept his word, ran a prosperous farm and had a handsome face. But he also had no desire to raise children—though he enjoyed sex with any willing, good-looking woman who came his way—and he beat his wife and children with more pleasure than he beat his mules.

  Mrs. Hill had spent the early part of her life scurrying out of her father’s way. Later, when she was in her teens, she also learned to scurry out of the way of white men—because she was good-looking, defenseless and black. Her life, she told Meridian, was one of scurrying, and only one thing kept her going: her determination to be a schoolteacher.

  The story of her pursuit of education was pitiful.

  First, she had come up against her father, who said she did not need to go to school because if she only learned to cook collard greens, shortbread and fried okra, some poor soul of a man might have her, and second, she had to decide to accept the self-sacrifice of her mother, whom she had worshiped. Her mother, by that time, was pregnant with her twelfth child, and her hair had already turned white. But it was her mother who made the bargain with her father that allowed her to go to school. The agreement was wretched: School would cost twelve dollars a year, and her mother would have to earn every cent of it. Refusing to complain and, indeed, refusing even to discuss the hardship it would cause, her mother had gone out to do other people’s laundry, and Meridian’s mother remembered her trudging off—after doing her own washing and work in the fields—with her rub board under her arm.