by Alice Walker
Truman she had magnanimously sent back to Meridian, at his insistence.
On Giving Him Back to His Own
THE SUBWAY TRAIN rushed through the tunnel screeching and sending out sparks like a meteor. And Lynne would not sit down while it flew. Ninety-sixth Street flashed by, then 125th, then there was a screaming halt, a jolt as the car resisted the sudden stop, and the doors slid back with a rubbery thump. The graffiti, streaked on the walls in glowing reds and glaring yellows, did not brighten at all the dark damp cavern of the station.
“Legs, man,” a boy whispered to his comrade, pausing on the oily stairs as she passed.
“Right on,” he was answered.
She darted up and around people as she rushed upward to the air, thinking, with a part of her brain, that fresh air was certainly what she needed. Nor did she notice any longer that nowhere in the city was the air fresh. Only sometimes, when she took Camara to the park, and even then ... She turned left as she emerged from the subway, trotting now on her dancer’s legs, thinking of herself already in the apartment, the neat space of quiet light and white walls where Truman worked night and day on the century’s definitive African-American masterpieces.
They would not fight, she warned herself. She would be ladylike and precise and he would respond to her cry of help for their child.
“Our daughter has been hurt,” she would say, with the sweet desperation of Loretta Young. Or, “I mean,” slouching with her hands in her pockets like Mia Farrow looking for a tacos stand, “the kid’s been beat up.” Or, looking as if about to choke on her own vomit, like Sandy Dennis, but cool, “There’s been … an accident. Our child. Attacked. Oh, can’t you hurry?” And Truman would respond with all the old tenderness that she knew.
She took the stairs two at a time, her hair streaming and unwashed, her face feeling sooty, until she stood in front of his door. Apartment 3-C. Truman Held, Artist
It was only then that she thought to rest, to compose herself, to suck in her stomach, which felt flabby and at the same time inflated. She was no longer a size seven. This mattered, the longer she huddled there.
Even when Truman was leaving her she had been conscious of her size, her body, from years of knowing how he compared it to the bodies of black women. “Black women let themselves go,” he said, even as he painted them as magnificent giants, breeding forth the warriors of the new universe. “They are so fat,” he would say, even as he sculpted a “Big Bessie Smith” in solid marble, caressing her monstrous and lovely flanks with an admiring hand.
Her figure then, supple from dancing, was like a straw in the wind, he said, her long hair a song of lightness—untangled, glistening and free. And yet, in the end, he had stopped saying those things, at least out loud. It was as if the voluptuous black bodies, with breasts like melons and hair like a crown of thorns, reached out—creatures of his own creation—and silenced his tongue. They began to claim him. When she walked into a room where he painted a black woman and her heaving, pulsating, fecund body, he turned his work from her, or covered it up, or ordered her out of the room.
She had loved the figures at first—especially the paintings of women in the South—the sculptures, enduring and triumphant in spite of everything. But when Truman changed, she had, too. Until she did not want to look at the women, although many of them she knew, and loved. And by then she was willing to let him go. Almost. So worthless did the painted and sculptured women make her feel, so sure was she that Truman, having fought through his art to the reality of his own mother, aunts, sisters, lovers, to their beauty, their greatness, would naturally seek them again in the flesh.
He would always be Camara’s father, he said, repeatedly. He would never forsake her. White-looking though she was.
She rang the bell, long and insistently.
“Why the fuck don’t he answer,” she muttered. She pulled her jacket close around her body and pressed her arms against her sides. She heard the crunch and crackle of a bag of fried plantains being crushed in her pocket. Her other pocket contained a small rubber ball, some string, a sliver of cheese Camara had slipped in when she wasn’t looking. Pennies that she’d collected from Camara’s clothing at the hospital rattled in her purse.
A light across her toes preceded the opening of the door. Truman, his hair in two dozen small braids, looked out at her.
“It’s me,” she said, trying to smile. Smiling, in fact.
He did not throw open the door.
“Who is it, True?” a voice from the bedroom beyond wafted out. Lynne felt a tingling at the base of her neck, like a rash trying to break through the skin.
“Just a minute,” he called back. Warily he loosened the chain. But when Lynne moved forward she bumped into him. He was moving out, pulling the door closed behind him.
“Shit,” she said, stepping back. “Why don’t you just tell Meridian it’s me. We don’t have any secrets, do we?”
“What do you want, Lynne?”
“Really,” she said, still smiling a silly too-bright smile, “I thought I would have a chance to come in and tell you in style, if not exactly in comfort. I’m thirsty, got any sodas?” She knew she was acting like a silly bitch—one of his favorite, most benign descriptions of her, but she couldn’t help it. How could she tell him that his six-year-old daughter—whom he insisted on nicknaming Princess (tacky, tacky, she’d told him)—had been attacked by a grown man and was now lying nearly dead in the hospital. How could she tell him she just needed his fucking support, standing on a stairwell in the dark?
“It’s not Meridian,” Truman said. He reached into his jeans and brought out his little cigars. She had leaned against the wall, thinking—like the silly bitch she was—but I gave you up for Meridian. For black, brown-skinned Meridian, with her sweet colored-folks’ mouth, and her heroic nigger-woman hair.
“I am not going to make a scene,” she mumbled warningly to herself. “We’re not going to fight like we usually do.”
“Of course we’re not going to fight,” said Truman, his artist’s eye taking her in from white parched face and cracked lips to the thick unstylish bulges she thought she was hiding under her coat.
“Anybody I know?” she sang, with a laugh, as faked as her smile.
“No.”
“I am not going to make a scene,” she began again. “We’re not going to fight....” But before he could stop her she had pushed the door open and stood halfway across the room staring into the eyes of a tiny blonde girl in a tiny, tiny slip that was so sheer she had time to notice—before Truman swung her around—that the girl’s pubic hair was as blonde as the hair on her head.
“Will you tell me why you come up here bothering me? Or is this just some more of your shit?”
Just some more, she wanted to assure him. But she couldn’t speak. She stood between Truman and the girl and looked from one to the other. The girl said “I—” and Truman cut her off.
“Go back in there,” he ordered, twisting his head.
“But I—” the girl began again.
And Lynne began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed. She laughed so hard she got stitches in her side. Then she stopped. She felt that tingle again at the base of her throat.
“Why is it I don’t ever learn nothing!” she asked. “Why is it that everybody in the fucking world learns what makes it go round before I do? Am I just dumb, or what? What do you reckon, Miss?” She turned to the girl and reached out her hand.
“Don’t shut up, sugah,” she said. “Talk. I wants to hear Miz Scarlet talk.” Truman moved close to her and she waved him away.
“Troo-mun?” the girl said, stepping around Lynne as if she had lice. But Truman had turned his back. He stood by the window smoking, looking down into the street.
“Shoot,” said Lynne, and she noticed her voice was now completely changed; she did not sound at all like herself. “Don’t pay that ol’ sucker no mind. Talk. You silly bitch yourself!”
And then the girl’s words, melodiou
s as song, southerly as trade winds, came softly out, like the bewildered mewling of a cat.
“Why, what’s wrong?” drawled the girl, and the pine scents of Alabama, the magnolia smell of Georgia and Mississippi floated out of her mouth. “We’ve been livin’ together for two months. Soon as—Truman says soon as he sells some more of his paintings we’re goin’ to be married. I don’t need to tell you how I expect my folks to take it.…” A gleam of conspiracy had the nerve to be observed in her eye. She raised a delicate hand to point to all of Lynne’s lost and grieved old friends gazing down serenely from the walls. “Aren’t they great?” she innocently asked.
Two Women
AND THEN THERE WAS the part Meridian knew, because she had been the first person Truman sent for when Camara died. Lynne didn’t know what had happened to Scarlet O’Hara. It was Meridian they both needed, and it was Meridian who was, miraculously, there.
“Help me through this shit,” Truman had said when Meridian walked off the bus into his arms. And she had, but she had also tried to help Lynne.
She had spent a month shuttling between his lovely bright studio uptown (where a painting of her own face surprised her on every wall) to Lynne’s tiny hovel downtown. Between them they had drained her dry. She could not even think of that miserable month, later, without seeing it as a story told about someone else. She remembered the last days especially as one of those silent movies with Meridian Hill the poor star, dashing in and out of subways, cooking meals, listening to monologues thickened with grief, being pulled into bed—by Lynne, who held on to her like a child afraid of the dark—and by Truman, who almost drowned his body with her own, stuffing her flesh into his mouth as if he literally starved for her. It was then that her feeling for Truman returned, but it was not sexual. It was love totally free of possessiveness or contempt. It was love that purged all thought of blame from her too accurate memory. It was forgiveness.
Lynne remembered Meridian’s last evening with her.
“What time is Truman coming?” she had asked, because she did not want to be there when he arrived.
“He ought to be here any minute,” said Lynne, beginning to rock, and feeling herself, in the rocking, growing old.
As they sat they watched a television program. One of those Southern epics about the relationship of the Southern white man to madness, and the closeness of the Southern black man to the land. It did not delve into the women’s problems, black or white. They sat, companionable and still in their bathrobes, watching the green fields of the South and the indestructible (their word) faces of black people much more than they watched the madness. For them, the madness was like a puzzle they had temporarily solved (Meridian would sometimes, in the afternoons, read poems to Lynne by Margaret Walker, and Lynne, in return, would attempt to cornrow Meridian’s patchy short hair), they hungered after more intricate and enduring patterns. Sometimes they talked, intimately, like sisters, and when they did not they allowed the television to fill the silences.
There was a scene on the television of a long, shady river bank and people—mothers and fathers, children, grandparents—almost elegantly fishing, and then the face, close up, of a beautiful young black man with eyes as deceptively bright as dying stars. Now that he had just about won the vote, he was saying, where was he to get the money to pay for his food? Looks like this whole Movement for the vote and to get into motels was just to teach him that everything in this country, from the vote to motels, had to be changed. In fact, he said, looks like what he needed was a gun.
To them both this was obvious. That the country was owned by the rich and that the rich must be relieved of this ownership before “Freedom” meant anything was something so basic to their understanding of America they felt naive even discussing it. Still, the face got to them. It was the kind of face they had seen only in the South. A face in which the fever of suffering had left an immense warmth, and the heat of pain had lighted a candle behind the eyes. It sought to understand, to encompass everything, and the struggle to live honorably and understand everything at the same time, to allow for every inconsistency in nature, every weird possibility and personality, had given it a weary serenity that was so entrenched and stable it could be mistaken for stupidity. It made them want to love. It made them want to weep. It made them want to cry out to the young man to run away, or at least warn him about how deeply he would be hurt. It made them homesick.
“We got any peaches?”
“I’d settle for a pine tree limb.”
And Meridian and Lynne got up, rummaged around the apartment, looking for some traces of their former Southern home. Lynne found her Turkey Walk quilt and spread it over her knees.
In the small, shabby apartment there were mementos of other places, other things. There was, for example, a child’s day bed folded up in a corner of the living room. Toys—if you opened the closet door too quickly—fell on your head. Tiny scuffed white shoes were still hiding—one of them, anyhow— under the headboard of the bed. Small worn dresses, ripped, faded or in good repair, hung on nails in a small back room.
The absence of the child herself was what had finally brought them together. Together they had sustained a loss not unlike the loss of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or George Jackson. They grieved more because the child, Camara (after Camara Laye, the African novelist who, of course, did not know of her existence, but whose book The Radiance of the King had struck a responsive chord in Lynne), had been personally known, had been small—six years old—and had died after horrible things were done to her. They knew her suffering did not make her unique; but knowing that crimes of passion or hatred against children are not considered unique in a society where children are not particularly valued, failed to comfort them.
They waited for the pain of Camara’s death to lessen. They waited to ask forgiveness of each other. They waited until they could talk again. And they waited for Truman, Camara’s father, to come to his wife who had faced her tragedy as many a welfare mother before her had done: She had turned to pills, excesses of sex (or excesses of abstinence; Meridian wasn’t sure which), and she had wandered back to the South, where she and Truman—she seemed fuzzily to remember—had for a short time been happy. And she had had a public mental breakdown. The first that many of the people there had seen. (For when their own relatives regularly freaked out a breakdown was not what it was called. Breakdown was, after all, different from broke down—as in “So-and-so just broke down.” Usually at a funeral.)
“I want to tell you something,” said Meridian. “I tried very hard not to hate you. And I think I always succeeded.”
“It ain’t easy not to hate the omnipresent honky woman,” said Lynne.
“I agree.”
Meridian’s bags had not actually been unpacked. She collected her tights and toothbrush from the bathroom.
“Thanks, Meridian, for everything. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“You would have had Truman,” said Meridian.
“Ah, Truman,” said Lynne. “The last thing that held us together is safely buried.” And she bit her lip in an effort not to cry. “I guess I should be glad,” she said. “I guess I should be thankful it’s over. ‘You can go home now,’ is what Truman said to me. Like, this little flirtation of yours to find out how the other half lives is over now, so you can just take your sorry white ass home. Can’t you just see me walking in on my folks: ‘Hi, y’all, that black nigger I run off with done left me, my mulatto kid done died. I reckon I’m ready to go to graduate school.’ Meridian,” she said, looking up at her, “do you realize how fucked up everything is?”
“Yep,” said Meridian.
“I can’t go back home. I don’t even have a home. I wouldn’t go back if I could. I know white folks are evil and fucked up, I know they’re doomed. But where does that leave me? I know I have feelings, like any other human being. Camara wasn’t just some little black kid that got ripped off on the street. She was my child. I’d have to walk
over my child’s grave to go back, and I won’t.”
“I know,” said Meridian.
Meridian had hugged her, she had hugged Meridian, and they had parted. Lynne had soon drifted into a kind of sleep, while thinking of the South.
Lynne
YES, SHE HAD GONE BACK to the South. Back to the small unpainted house. It was deserted, forlorn, an abandoned friend.
She did not stop to wonder if someone would charge breaking and entering. She pulled herself up on the porch, feeling glass beneath her feet, and tried first to look into a window. She could reach her hand right through, because some of the panes were gone. Then she tried the door. It was not locked: She had not wondered whether it would or would not be. She entered the house as she used to, stepping quickly over the raised doorjamb, stepping down, then reached out to flick on the light. It was not working, whether because the power had been shut off or not she did not care. It was dark. She felt, with her fingers sliding through cobwebs, over dust, for some familiar objects on a windowsill Soon she lit the remains of a multicolored candle. The dust burned with a keen dry smell. The cot was there. She threw herself upon it, raising still more dust. She spread her scarf under her head, her cheek. She was more tired than hungry. She kicked off her shoes. Drew her coat over her. And fell asleep.
She slept the clock around, so that when she awoke it was still quite dark. She rose unsteadily, feeling in the moment of rising refreshed, not in need yet of the blue and orange pills in clear plastic phials in her bag. She put on her shoes easily in the darkness, her feet were cold, and moved over to the window. It was a night with clouds, gray and luminous clouds because the moon was behind them. Through the trees just off the porch she could almost see it. The yard was quiet, even the trees did not bow and whisper as she had remembered them doing. But maybe that was because it was not yet summer. It was not yet even spring, though here it seemed spring. After the long winter in the North, where winter winds still raged and snow had followed the bus as far as northern Tennessee, the air here was light and warm on her skin, a trifle moist; with something kissing, she thought, with that easy poetical association she did not admire in herself.
