by Alice Walker
Her heart was beating as if it would burst, sweat poured down her skin. Meridian did not dare to make promises as a rule for fear some unforeseen event would cause her to break them. Even a promise to herself caused her to tremble with good faith. It was not a vain promise; and yet, if anyone had asked her to explain what it meant exactly she could not have told them. And certainly to boast about this new capacity to kill—which she did not, after all, admire—would be to destroy the understanding she had acquired with it. Namely, this: that even the contemplation of murder required incredible delicacy as it required incredible spiritual work, and the historical background and present setting must be right. Only in a church surrounded by the righteous guardians of the people’s memories could she even approach the concept of retaliatory murder. Only among the pious could this idea both comfort and uplift.
Meridian’s dedication to her promise did not remain constant. Sometimes she lost it altogether. Then she thought: I have been allowed to see how the new capacity to do anything, including kill, for our freedom—beyond sporadic acts of violence—is to emerge, and flower, but I am not yet at the point of being able to kill anyone myself, nor—except for the false urgings that come to me in periods of grief and rage— will I ever be. I am a failure then, as the kind of revolutionary Anne-Marion and her acquaintances were. (Though in fact she had heard of nothing revolutionary this group had done, since she left them ten summers ago. Anne-Marion, she knew, had become a well-known poet whose poems were about her two children, and the quality of the light that fell across a lake she owned.)
It was this, Meridian thought, I have not wanted to face, this that has caused me to suffer: I am not to belong to the future. I am to be left, listening to the old music, beside the highway. But then, she thought, perhaps it will be my part to walk behind the real revolutionaries—those who know they must spill blood in order to help the poor and the black and therefore go right ahead—and when they stop to wash off the blood and find their throats too choked with the smell of murdered flesh to sing, I will come forward and sing from memory songs they will need once more to hear. For it is the song of the people, transformed by the experiences of each generation, that holds them together, and if any part of it is lost the people suffer and are without soul. If I can only do that, my role will not have been a useless one after all.
But at other times her dedication to her promise came back strongly. She needed only to see a starving child or attempt to register to vote a grown person who could neither read nor write. On those occasions such was her rage that she actually felt as if the rich and racist of the world should stand in fear of her, because she—though apparently weak and penniless, a little crazy and without power—was yet of a resolute and relatively fearless character, which, sufficient in its calm acceptance of its own purpose, could bring the mightiest country to its knees.
Travels
“MAMA,” A HALF-NAKED little boy called as they walked up to the porch, “it’s some people out here, and one of ’em is that woman in the cap.”
The wooden steps were broken and the porch sagged. In the front room a thin young man worked silently in a corner. In front of him was a giant pile of newspapers that looked as though they’d been salvaged from the hands of children who ate dinner over the funnies. Meridian and Truman watched the man carefully smooth out the paper, gather ten sheets, then twenty, and roll them into a log around which he placed a red rubber band. When he finished the “log” he stacked it, like a piece of wood, on top of the long pile of such “logs” that ran across one side of the poorly furnished, rather damp and smelly room.
Through the inner door he had a view of his wife—when he turned around to put the paper on the pile—lying on the bed. He nodded to them that they should enter his wife’s room.
“How’re you?” asked Meridian, as she and Truman looked about for chairs.
“Don’t sit there,” the woman said to Truman, who sat in a straight chair the young son brought. “You blocks my view of my husband.”
“I’m sorry,” said Truman, quickly moving.
“I’m feelin’ a little better today,” said the woman, “a little better.” Her small black face was childlike, all bony points and big brown eyes that never left her husband’s back.
“My husband Johnny went out and got me some venison and made me up a little stew. I think that’s helping me to git my strength up some.” She laughed, for no reason that her visitors could fathom. It was a soft, intimate chuckle, weak but as if she wanted them to understand she could endure whatever was wrong.
“Where did he get deer this time of year?” asked Truman.
“Don’t tell anybody,” the sick woman chuckled again, slyly, “but he went hunting out at one of those places where the sign says ‘Deer Crossin’.’ If we had a refrigerator we wouldn’t need any more meat for the rest of the year. Johnny—” she began, showing all her teeth as one hand clutched the bedspread with the same intensity as her rather ghastly smile.
“Did you say somethin’, Agnes?” asked Johnny, getting up from his chore with the newspapers and coming to stand at the foot of the bed. “You hongry again?”
“I gets full just lookin’ at you, sugah,” said the sick woman coquettishly. “That’s about the only reason I hate to die,” she said, looking at her visitors for a split second, “I won’t be able to see my ol’ good-lookin’ man.”
“Shoot,” said Johnny, going back to the other room.
“He used to be a worker at the copper plant, used to make wire. They fired him ’cause he wouldn’t let the glass in front of his table stay covered up. You know in the plant they don’t want the working folks to look at nothing but what’s right on the table in front of them. But my Johnny said he wasn’t no mule to be wearing blinders. He wanted to see a little bit of grass, a little bit of sky. It was bad enough being buried in the basement over there, but they wanted to even keep out the sun.” She looked at her husband’s back as if she could send her fingers through her eyes.
“What does he do with the newspapers?” asked Truman.
“Did you see how many he has?” asked the woman. “You should see the room behind this one. Rolled newspapers up to the ceiling. Half the kitchen is rolled newspapers.” She chuckled hoarsely. “So much industry in him. Why, in the wintertime he and little Johnny will take them logs around to folks with fireplaces and sell ’em for a nickel apiece and to colored for only three pennies.”
“Hummm—” said Meridian. “Maybe we could help him roll a few while we’re here. We just came by to ask if you all want to register to vote, but I think we could roll a few newspapers while you think about it.”
“Vote?” asked the woman, attempting to raise her voice to send the question to her husband. Then she lay back. “Go on in there and git a few pages,” she said.
As soon as she touched the newspapers Meridian realized Johnny must have combed the city’s garbage cans, trash heaps, and department store alleys for them. Many were damp and even slimy, as if fish or worse had been wrapped in them. She began slowly pressing the papers flat, then rolling them into logs.
The sick woman was saying, “I have this dream that if the Father blesses me I’ll die the week before the second Sunday in May because I want to be buried on Mother’s Day. I don’t know why I want that, but I do. The pain I have is like my kidneys was wrapped in that straining gauze they use in dairies to strain milk, and something is squeezing and squeezing them. But when I die, the squeezing will stop. Round Mother’s Day, if the merciful Father say so.”
“Mama’s goin’ to heaven,” said Johnny Jr., who came to roll the papers Meridian had smoothed.
“She’s already sweet like an angel,” said Meridian impulsively, rubbing his hair and picking away the lint, “like you.”
“What good is the vote, if we don’t own nothing?” asked the husband as Truman and Meridian were leaving. The wife, her eyes steadily caressing her husband’s back, had fallen asleep, Johnny Jr. cuddled next to her on
the faded chenille bedspread. In winter the house must be freezing, thought Truman, looking at the cracks in the walls; and now, in spring, it was full of flies.
“Do you want free medicines for your wife? A hospital that’ll take black people through the front door? A good school for Johnny Jr. and a job no one can take away?”
“You know I do,” said the husband sullenly.
“Well, voting probably won’t get it for you, not in your lifetime,” Truman said, not knowing whether Meridian intended to lie and claim it would.
“What will it get me but a lot of trouble,” grumbled the husband.
“I don’t know,” said Meridian. “It may be useless. Or maybe it can be the beginning of the use of your voice. You have to get used to using your voice, you know. You start on simple things and move on.…”
“No,” said the husband, “I don’t have time for foolishness. My wife is dying. My boy don’t have shoes. Go somewhere else and find somebody that ain’t got to work all the time for pennies, like I do.”
“Okay,” said Meridian. Surprised, Truman followed as she calmly walked away.
“What’s this here?” asked the husband ten minutes later as they came through his front door with two bags of food.
“To go with the venison.” Meridian grinned.
“I ain’t changed my mind,” said the husband, with a suspicious peek into the bags.
And they did not see him again until the Monday after Mother’s Day, when he brought them six rabbits already skinned and ten newspaper logs; and under the words WILL YOU BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO VOTE in Meridian’s yellow pad, he wrote his name in large black letters.
Treasure
THEY FIRST SAW the home of Miss Margaret Treasure through a landscape of smoke, while walking down a flat dirt road looking for people the census takers always missed. It was the middle of summer, hot as an oven, and sweat fell from their skin and evaporated before it hit the ground. On both sides of the road last year’s cornstalks rustled in dry, lonely talk, and as the chimneys of the house wavered through the haze they saw a large black woman in a tight red dress hobbling toward them, a gasoline can in her hand. She was setting fire to the field.
Truman and Meridian stopped to watch her, and when the woman reached them she too stood still. She was obviously surprised to see them and dropped her gasoline can at Meridian’s feet.
On the wide front porch of Miss Treasure’s neat white house there was a gigantic mahogany bed with head and footboards towering over their heads. Meridian held the fat left hand of Miss Treasure and helped her down on it. Miss Treasure’s tears dripped onto the snowy covering and had already washed pink grooves into the blackness of her skin.
“I got to burn this bed,” said Miss Treasure, slamming her head against the footboard.
“Wait awhile,” said Meridian, looking out at the burning cornfield, “and Truman and I will help you.”
“You will?” asked Miss Treasure. Her tears, for the moment, subsided, and she smiled quite happily. Because she was so fat they had not realized how old she was, but now they could see that, indeed, she was an old woman. Her hands were ropey with veins and knotted from arthritis, her moist eyes were rimmed with cataracts. As Meridian and Truman sat with Miss Treasure on the bed, a younger woman, perhaps in her middle sixties, came to the door and leaned outward against the screen.
“Git away, Lucille!” croaked the old woman, Miss Treasure, whose voice was hoarse from crying.
“Shame,” said the other woman primly, turning away. “Shame. Shame. Shame. Upon our father’s name.”
Miss Treasure rose from the bed and went inside the house, emerging a few minutes later with a pitcher of lemonade and a tall glossy black wig on her head. Under the wig her face was ravaged and wrinkled.
“In the first place,” said Miss Treasure, sipping her lemonade, “I’m only burning what is my own. All this land you see belongs to yours truly. I can burn it up if I want to, ain’t that right?”
“Sure,” said Truman.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Meridian.
“You hear that, sister!” called Miss Treasure.
“Humph!” came from behind the screen.
“What you say y’all name was?”
“Meridian and Truman,” said Meridian.
“I’m Miss Margaret Treasure, and that’s Little Sister Lucille.”
“Miss Lucille Treasure,” said the voice behind the screen. “I’m a Miss same as you.”
“Y’all children want some lemonade?” asked Miss Treasure, pouring it.
Miss Lucille Treasure came out on the porch. Thin and the color of wet sand, she carried herself with the rigid arrogance of a walking stick held in the hand of a prince. There was cruelty in her eyes when she looked at her sister.
“What mind she got left,” she sniffed, “is gone wandering.”
“It ain’t,” protested Miss Margaret Treasure. And she began to tell her story: They had lived on the Treasure plantation—not as tenants but as owners—all their lives. How their father had managed to own a plantation in that part of Georgia they had been as children forbidden to ask. In any case, Miss Margaret Treasure—at Little Sister Lucille’s prompting—had been selling bits and pieces of the place until now all that was left could be seen from the front and back porches. They had lived for years without seeing anyone, except when Little Sister went into town for staples she bought, as her father had done, twice a year. Everything else they needed the farm provided. They had chickens, a few cows, a pig. The only time they saw people for any length of time was when Little Sister Lucille contracted with painters to come and paint the house every five years. It was at the last painting of the house that Miss Margaret Treasure’s troubles started. She had fallen in love with one of the painters.
Well, Miss Margaret continued, now she was down to the last few acres and the house, which she wanted to keep. But she had to sell them in order to keep her good name and her self-respect. Because six months ago she had looked out of her bedroom window and seen a face hanging there above a ladder. It was the face of her fate. His name was Rims Mott. A dog’s name, she added, bursting into fresh tears.
Little Sister Lucille stood with her hands on her hips, scowling at the quivering shoulders of her fat sister.
“They was keeping company,” she said sourly, spitting over the porch rail, her brown spittle falling between two blue hydrangea bushes. “At her age! All night long I’d hear ’em at it. Yowlin’ and goin’ on like alley cats.”
“Git back!” said the crying woman. “I don’t need you to stand over me and gloat. Just because he never looked at you!”
“What do I want with a forty-five-year-old man?” asked Little Sister Lucille. “I knowed better than to let myself get messed up. At least,” she sniffed, “I’m going to meet my maker a clean woman, just as pure on that day as the day I was born.”
Miss Margaret’s wet face was twisted in agony. From a compact which she held in trembling fingers she dabbed on more face powder, even as her tears continued to wash it away. “They say I got to marry him,” she sobbed, “but I don’t want to now.”
“Then don’t marry him,” said Truman and Meridian in the same breath.
“Because if I marry him,” Miss Margaret continued, “he’ll be sure to outlive me, and then his name will be on this house. He’ll own it, and I don’t trust him enough to raise no child.”
Meridian’s face at last showed surprise, and at the same time, the reason for Miss Margaret’s tears came to Truman.
“Yes,” said Little Sister Lucille smugly, watching their changed faces, “she’s fat and black and seventy-two years old, and the first man she opened her legs to made her pregnant.”
“Sixty-nine,” said Miss Margaret.
Laughter, like a wicked silver snake, wriggled up Truman’s spine. It knocked him out to hear Meridian ask, conversationally, “How far along are you?” He glanced at her expecting to see a face fighting to control itself, but there was only a slig
ht blush already fading into her brown skin.
“Ahhh!” Miss Margaret screamed and jumped to her feet, pulling at the heavy bed. “Help me burn it up now, y’all,” she cried, and yanked with such force her wig fell off at their feet. Little Sister Lucille grabbed it up and began to laugh, forgetting, apparently, that her own hair was severely marcelled and dyed a foolish orange.
Truman and Meridian took hold of the bed and pushed with all their strength. It hung over the edge of the porch like an ancient ship hovering over the edge of the sea. Miss Margaret pulled and the bed crashed down the steps and into the yard, Miss Margaret’s leg caught under it. She did not seem to feel the pain but tugged relentlessly at the bed trying to pull it over her and out to the edge of the cornfields where the fire, by this time, had gone out.
“You’re out of gasoline,” said Meridian, holding up the can.
Meridian and Truman sat in the yard under a hot midsummer sun, binding Miss Margaret’s leg in cold-water wraps.
“Miss Margaret,” said Meridian, holding the leg on her lap and giving it an affectionate pat every now and then, “from the way you handle yourself, I don’t think you’re pregnant. Do you think she looks pregnant?” she asked Truman. “Truman’s wife had a little girl,” she explained to Miss Treasure, “so he’d be a good person to ask because he’d know.”
Truman shook his head slowly, “You don’t look a bit pregnant to me,” he choked out.
Miss Margaret’s face lit up, but quickly went dark again. “Rims said it, too,” she said. “Him and Little Sister Lucille both said it.”
“Well,” said Meridian, “when we take you in to the doctor for your leg we can ask him.”
Miss Margaret looked at them in fear. It had been years since she was off the plantation, and from the magazines she read the world beyond her property was not safe. She grieved over her life and moaned from the pain coming into her wounded leg. She had been a virgin until Rims came into her life, filling it with fluttery anticipation and making her body so changed, so full of hurting brightness she had known it was a sin for which she would be punished. She lay on the hot ground like a lost child, or like a dog kicked so severely it has lost its sense of smell and wanders about and leans on the tree it otherwise would have soiled.
