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.
Y
ES, 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.
In that yard they had sat in July and August and other hot days, eating countless watermelons, sticky, cool, good, running juice making tracks down her arms. He had photographed her once eating watermelon, and the lines on her arms ruined the picture; they came through like inverted veins, as if some slimy thing had left a whitish scar that dug into the skin. In spite of this she had liked the picture. Her hair, as usual, was loose, coming to below her waist, black, without curl. Her eyes bright (also black, in the photograph, without their brown subtlety,) bold, searching for the thumb that would press the camera button. No surprise. Waiting. So that now when she looked out at the steps she thought she might still be sitting there, unmoved by all that had happened over the years. Sitting there, slender still, her white face happily covered by a fake sheet of brown, glowing, she thought, with health; and in any case, hiding the sickness.
The outhouse was not exactly out, but on the back porch. A dingy door-scratched room. Small, with only the essentials. She had lit another stub of a candle; no one seemed to have lived here since she left. There was still a shard of glass over the washbasin, like a triangle of flawed silver, the dust wiped off in a roll. The toilet gurgled and boiled before it worked. The posters had fallen away from the walls or rotted, but when she held her candle up to one she saw the grayed outline of hundreds of marching forms, though underneath this faded picture the words had been completely eroded away. It was as if the marchers moved through some ghostly, unreal place, specters themselves and not in the least afraid, apprehensive about what would happen when they floated off the picture, off the wall, into a place even more dead, more final.
She was moved to peel and eat an orange. Slowly. Sitting with her feet tucked under her, the candle on the floor, flickering with the small breezes that blew through the paneless window. In her sack she carried oranges, three apples, a triangle of cheese from the delicatessen: where the owners had recognized her and frozen up. She had stood smiling in the irritating way she had (the smile was even irritating to her, but she still used it) when she confronted bigots who also thought they owned her. They did not quite fling the food at her, across the counter, as they had done in the early days, when she would come in with one, maybe two, black men, or women. Or when she was beginning to show her pregnancy.
In the beginning she had actually been able to hear the intake of their breaths: the matronly woman who stood at the cash register, the younger woman who stood over the black cooks in the kitchen, the youngish man who, in the end (by the time Camara was ready to be born), spoke kindly to her, but with a kind of fear of her, like a fear for his own life, his precarious safety. She snatched her money up, looking steadily at all three of them, letting eyes judge them. They made her conscious, heavily, of her Jewishness, when, in fact, they wanted to make her feel her whiteness. And, beyond her whiteness, the whiteness that now engulfed this family (originally, she heard, from New York) like a shroud.
In the early days she would drop in for German beer with her black friends and the eye exchanges, a struggle of which her friends were completely unaware, would go on furiously between her and the three shopkeepers. The youngish man, already balding, his skin sallow from hanging there slicing salami week after week, could, by and by, speak quite plainly with his eyes. He said: We do not want you. Still, come back to us. It is not yet too late. (This was before she became pregnant.) They said: Have you found? Have you found? Her own eyes said to the women with their Southern-style, contrived, hornet-nest hair: You are wasted. Wasted. Surrounded by exotic foods! To the youngish balding man her eyes said: Yes! Yes! I have found. I am happy. Why do you think I glow this way? Idiot. Weakling. Slicer of salami. No-sex. Come back to you? Worm. You are crazy. And what would you do if I did come back? Set me to wrapping pastrami? To fishing for pickles? Shithead. Unliving creature. Maker of money. Slicer of salami. Baker of Challah!
Never once did they ask her what she was. And to them she spoke good finishing school English. It was just that they knew, as she knew about them. That they were transplanted, as they had always been, to a place where they fit like extra toes on a foot. Where they were trusted by no one, exploited, when possible, by anyone with political ambitions. Where they lived in a delicatessen, making money hand over fist because they could think of nothing more exciting to do with their lives. Making money to buy houses—garish, large, separate—outside the city. Making money to send their Elaines and Davids to law and medical school without a word of official Hebrew, except when they visited in synagogues in the North where they also felt like strangers.
Goyim flitted in and out of the delicatessen, reeking of Southern tolerance and charm, like knife edges the forced smiles, the appreciation (genuine) of the food. Unusual, exotic, excellent. A change from pecan pie and gumbo eaten with a tall glass of ginger ale or Tom Collins.
She watched them over the years she lived in the town (because she would shop there, even though it was expensive and she had little money), and even watched the outside of the delicatessen when they closed it after the local synagogue was bombed. They were shocked, the papers said. Aghast at the bombing! She laughed at their naïveté. Laughed at their precarious “safety.” Laughed with such bitter contempt that she could not speak to a Southern Jew without wanting to hit him or her.
The cheese, a tin of Danish camembert, melted like butter on her tongue....