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 experienced 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 c
ontinue. 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 painted, 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.
Mrs. Hill had had only two pairs of cotton bloomers. She wore and washed, washed and wore. She had only one dress. She and her sister swapped dresses each day so they might have at least this much variety in their attire. They had gone without shoes much of the time. And yet, miraculously, Meridian's mother had finished school and, what was more, helped four of her sisters and brothers do the same. And she had become a schoolteacher, earning forty dollars a month, four months out of the year. (Her students were in the cotton fields the rest of the time.) She had bought her a coat and a new pair of shoes with her first pay. Hers had also been the honor, a short time later, of paying for her mother's pink coffin.
When her mother talked about her childhood Meridian wept and clung to her hands, wishing with all her heart she had not been born to this already overburdened woman. Whatever smugness crept into her mother's voice--as when she said "I never stole, I was always clean, I never did wrong by anyone, I was never bad; I simply trusted in the Lord"--was unnoticed by her. It seemed to Meridian that her legacy from her mother's endurance, her unerring knowledge of rightness and her pursuit of it through all distractions, was one she would never be able to match. It never occurred to her that her mother's and her grandmother's extreme purity of life was compelled by necessity. They had not lived in an age of choice.
None of these thoughts could she convey to Miss Winter. She merely smiled at her from the calm plateau in her illness she had happily reached. Now and again she saw clouds drift across Miss Winter's head and she amused herself picking out faces that she knew. When she slept she dreamed she was on a ship with her mother, and her mother was holding her over the railing about to drop her into the sea. Danger was all around and her mother refused to let her go.
"Mama, I love you. Let me go," she whispered, licking the salt from her mother's black arms.
Instinctively, as if Meridian were her own child, Miss Winter answered, close to her ear on the pillow, "I forgive you."
The next morning Meridian ate all her breakfast, though it would not all stay down. For the first time she asked for a mirror and tried to sit up in bed. Soon, her strength exhausted, she slept. Anne-Marion watched the sun climb again to illuminate the edges of her hair, and knew she could not endure a friendship that required such caring vigilance. Meridian, for all her good intentions, might never be ready for the future, and
that would be too painful. Anne-Marion could not continue to care about a person she could not save. Nor could she end a close friendship without turning on the friend.
One morning, when Meridian was standing by the window, her face pensive, nearly beautiful and pathetically thin, Anne-Marion did something she had always wanted to do: It was the equivalent of a kick. She began telling jokes to make Meridian laugh--because she could not leave her while she looked this way--and when she succeeded, just at the point where Meridian's face lost its magically intriguing gloom, she said, with a very straight face herself, "Meridian, I can not afford to love you. Like the idea of suffering itself, you are obsolete."
Later, though they met again in New York and briefly shared a room, and Meridian had seemed not to remember this parting comment, Anne-Marion continued to think of it as her final word.
After Meridian had gone back South and Anne-Marion discovered herself writing letters to her, making inquiries month after month to find out which town she now lived in and to which address she should send her letters, no one could have been more surprised and confounded than she, who sat down to write each letter as if some heavy object had been attached to her knees, forcing them under her desk, as she wrote with the most galling ferocity, out of guilt and denial and rage.
Truman Held
THE LAST TOAST
I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.
--AKHMATOVA
Truman and Lynne: Time in the South
Lynne: She is sitting on the porch steps of a battered wooden house and black children are all around her. They look, from a distance, like a gigantic flower with revolving human petals. Lynne is the center. Nearer to them Truman notices the children are taking turns combing her hair. Her hair--to them lovely because it is easy to comb--shines, held up behind by black and brown hands as if it is a train. The children might be bridesmaids preparing Lynne for marriage. They do not see him. He frames a picture with his camera but something stops him before he presses the shutter. What stops him he will not, for the moment, have to acknowledge: It is a sinking, hopeless feeling about opposites, and what they do to each other. Suddenly he swings around, and bending on one knee takes a picture of the broken roofing and rusted tin on wood that makes up one wall of a shabby nearby house.