Meridian

  "I'm going for a walk," said Meridian to Lynne. "But if you're sleepy or tired you can take a nap on the couch in the living room. I'll leave the door open."

  "Doesn't True look well?" Lynne asked, as Meridian stood watching them. She had not been able to ignore their loud voices and was annoyed with them.

  "He looks divine," she said.

  "So mature," said Lynne, "yet so young ... don't you think? You're thirty-four now, aren't you, darlin'?" she asked, turning briefly to Truman, who scowled at her. "Would you believe he's heading for middle age? I wouldn't. It comes from easy living and of course he's a vampire. Sucks the blood of young white virgins to keep him vigorous. Did you know that?" She turned a bright, tight face to Truman. "Tell her about this thing you have, darlin' (and of course he's not the only one), for young white virgins. And don't lie and say I wasn't one."

  "Shut up!

  "You Southern girls lead such sheltered lives," Lynne said, affecting a Southern belle accent and twirling a lock of her unwashed, rather oily hair around her finger, "I declare I'd be just bored to death. That's why your men come North, sugah, looking for that young white meat that proves they have arrived. You know? Tell me, how does it feel to be a complete flop" (this said with a Bette Davis turn of her wrist) "at keeping your men?"

  "You know, I could--yes, fat ass 'n' all, walk up the street anywhere around here and Hey Presto! I'd have all y'all's men following after me, their little black tongues hanging out."

  Truman felt as if his soul, hanging precariously for a lifetime, had fallen off the shelf.

  "It would take a sick mind to be pleased with that old racist chestnut, you silly heifer." He would have liked the power to wither her, literally, with a glance.

  Lynne took out her sunglasses and put them on, smiling and nodding, as if her audience were large.

  "Bravo!" she said. "Underneath that old-fashioned culled exterior beats the heart of a murderer. I knew it."

  "Forgive me, both of you," said Meridian, "but I'm locking the house."

  "A locked house, a locked pussy," said Lynne, giggling.

  "I didn't mean anything by it, Meridian," said Lynne, later, crying into the pillows of the couch. "It's just that you have everything. I mean, you're so strong, your people love you, and you can cope. I don't have anything. I gave up everything for True, and he just shit on me."

  She had stayed in the yard arguing with Truman until he walked away. Then she had gotten into Meridian's house through an open window. Just like these country bumpkins, she thought, to lock the door and leave the window wide open.

  Meridian had walked until she wore herself out, and one thought had preoccupied her mind: "The only new thing now," she had said to herself, mumbling it aloud, so that people turned to stare at her, "would be the refusal of Christ to accept crucifixion. King," she had said, turning down a muddy lane, "should have refused. Malcolm, too, should have refused. All those characters in all those novels that require death to end the book should refuse. All saints should walk away. Do their bit, then--just walk away. See Europe, visit Hawaii, become agronomists or raise Dalmatians." She didn't care what they did, but they should do it.

  She looked at Lynne, who was definitely not yet a saint. She did not know what Lynne should do. She was too tired, at the moment, to care.

  "Listen," said Lynne, "when Camara and I lived in the East Village--oh hell, Lower East Side, on 12th Street--I couldn't walk down the street to take her to kindergarten without niggers wanting to jump me. What could I do? I'm a woman, right? They never let up until they got me in bed. Then the crying and the pleading when I didn't feel like giving 'em any. So usually I just said Fuck it! I've got to get some sleep. So get on up on me, nigger. Just don't take all night. Sometimes I'd go to sleep with 'em still at it."

  "Must you say nigger?" Meridian asked wearily. She realized that among many hip people the use of the word was not considered offensive but rather a matter of style. That she would hate it till the dirt was thrown over her face she knew mattered not at all to people who would eventually appropriate anything they could laugh at, or talk about, or wear. "Why did you let these people in, if you didn't want to be bothered?"

  "Aw, I don't know. I got so tired. Begging, listening to people begging, is tiring. Besides, you don't know what's going on in the cities. There are all these white girls that are so fucked up with guilt they're willing and happy to keep a black guy, even if he's obviously a junkie bum. Not like me, at least I try for the classier bums--like the old poets and jazz stars of yesteryear. Like--"

  "Don't give me any names," said Meridian. "Believe me when I say I don't want to know."

  "I don't freak myself out, analyzing everything I do. What's a screw between friends, anyhow?"

  "Between friends would be different."

  "You can't understand. Your life is so ... there's something wrong with your life, you know. It's so, so, proscribed. Like you drew a circle around it and only walk as far as the edge. Why did you come back down here? What are you looking for? These people will always be the same. You can't change them. Nothing will."

  "But I can change," said Meridian. "I hope I will."

  "I live for the moment, no looking back for me. Take what life offers ... ah shit! It's just that my life is so fucked up. Truman was the only stable thing in it. I don't even have a photograph of my folks." Lynne's eyes narrowed. "Not that I need one to remember them. All I have to do is close my eyes and I see them all too well."

  "My father was, actually, my father was wonderful--at least I thought he was wonderful. He wasn't your dashing prince, but in his dull, careful, Jewish way, he was terrific. He never spoke more than a dozen words to me in anger, all the time I was growing up. Always so gentle, so fair. I couldn't believe it when I called to tell them Camara had been attacked and died. You know what he said? My mother wouldn't even speak to me, although she could tell I was crying. My father took the phone and asked me to repeat. I told him my daughter was dead and he said, 'So's our daughter,' meaning me! And when I stopped breathing, because I thought I'd heard wrong, he said--as calmly as anything--'Nu? So what else?'" Lynne was eating grapes, she spat out a grape seed. "The heartless bastard, the least he could have done was prepare me for the creep he turned out to be. Fathers suck," she added, frowning. "When my old Tata is dead, then I'll remember his kindness. I refuse to do so until then.

  "Mothers are beasts, too," continued Lynne. "All my mother thinks about is herself as perceived by the neighbors."

  Meridian sat deep in her chair, her legs had fallen asleep. "It's all behind you," she said.

  "You don't know the half," said Lynne, darting a glance at her. "Really you don't."

  Sleepy, puzzled, off-guard, Meridian stared at her.

  "Truman said one of my fantasies was being raped by a black man. That was what he reduced everything to. But it wasn't!" Her eyes, pleading, were filled with tears. She sat up on the couch and wiped her eyes. "You're the only one I can talk to about it. The only one who would believe it wasn't my fault that it happened. True let one of his friends ..."

  "I can't listen to this," said Meridian, rising abruptly and throwing up her hands. "I'm sorry, I just can't."

  "Wait a minute," cried Lynne. "I know you're thinking about lynchings and the way white women have always lied about black men raping them. Maybe this wasn't rape. I don't know. I think it was. It felt like it was."

  Meridian sat down again and looked at Lynne through her fingers, which were spread, like claws, over her face.

  "Can't you understand I can't listen to you? Can't you understand there are some things I don't want to know?"

  "You wouldn't believe me either?" Lynne asked.

  "No," Meridian said, coldly.

  "Well fuck you."

  "Go to bed, Lynne. Why don't you go to bed?"

  But Lynne did not intend to leave the room. Perhaps Meridian wouldn't listen to her, but she could sit there herself and try to remember what had happened to her and Truman
's life.

  Lynne

  SHE REMEMBERED it was spring, and she had left her parents' house, she hoped, for good. And if this hope was not to become reality she did not intend to struggle over it or care. They headed south over the Interstate, their old car, a venerable black ruin, loaded down with her books, his paints, rolls of canvas, two cameras, and filled with music from a black radio station in Newark that, miraculously, they held until they reached the vicinity of the Maryland border.

  For six months they'd met secretly in his mother's house. His room at the top of the stairs, the paintings--by Romare Bearden, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence--on the walls, as familiar to her as her own room across town. More familiar, because her room seemed still to be the hideout of a sixteen-year-old kid--with dancing shoes, tights, paper flowers from some forgotten high school decoration, and the faces of movie stars her mother encouraged her to like. No black faces, of course (though she had once had a picture of Sammy Davis, Jr., and Mai), which was not unusual. Not even any really Jewish faces, for that matter. No faces as dark, ripening, lean and high-nosed as her own. A young room, fresh, tacky, that wore innocence like the wrong shade of face powder, youth beneath the pink canopied bed like a bright rose preserved under glass. And she--entering her room--felt now a superiority to it, as if she now knew more (since her relationship with Truman) than the room was capable of containing. For although it was her room, it was in her mother's house. Vulnerable to search and seizure, and the contemplative scrutiny of her mother's always uneasy mind.

  When her mother tracked her to Truman's house they heard her screaming from three blocks away, because it was then that her mother noticed she had tracked her only daughter--who had slipped out of the house as furtively as a rabbi from a pogrom--to a black neighborhood. And she had screamed without ceasing, without, seemingly, even stopping to inhale, all the way to the Helds' steps. Where she had paused long enough to press the bell, the ringing of the bell itself like a blunter bellowing of her anguish. That harsh buzz, followed by the continuation of her mother's, by then, howl, rested in the back of Lynne's brain like a spinning record on which the sound was turned down. It would never leave her, even when she was most happy. Like the birth cry to a lucid mother it existed simultaneously with the growth of herself away from and apart from her mother. When she died she knew it would still be spinning soundlessly there.

  Tommy Odds

  "ALTUNA JONES?" Tommy Odds laughed. "Hedge Phillips, and what was that other guy's name?" He stood over her while she sewed, his usually sad black eyes brightly twinkling.

  "I bet them guys never saw nobody like you. And if they did they never would let on. I bet you're scaring them niggers to death in them shorts."

  He was only half-playful because he disliked what whites in the Movement chose to wear in black communities. A girl who had volunteered to take notes at church meetings had liked to sit with her dress pulled up so high you could see her drawers. This she did in the amen corner. The pious old women and hacked-down prayerful old men had hardly been able to express their grievances. And she, a blonde with a blank, German face--had placidly chewed gum and scratched her thighs, oblivious to what was hanging the people up. And of course nobody dared tell her. It wasn't fear. They were simply too polite to tell a guest in their community that she was behaving like a tramp.

  Tommy Odds looked at Lynne carefully. She had tanned since coming South. She seemed relaxed and happy. He thought of her life with Truman--how they could never ride on the same seat of their car, but must always sit as if one of them were chauffeuring the other. And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up. Sometimes she would paste an especially good one--one she'd liked--in front of the commode, at eye level. You had no choice but to read it. These were usually love poems to Truman, or poems about the need for gentleness in the heart of the Revolution. Her favorite book was Jane Stembridge's plea for love and community, I Play Flute. It was clear also in her poetry and in the things she said that to her black people had a unique beauty, a kind of last-gasp loveliness, which, in other races, had already become extinct.

  He had wanted to make love to her. Because she was white, first of all, which meant she would assume she was in control, and because he wanted--at first--to force her to have him in ways that would disgust and thrill her. He thought of hanging her from a tree by her long hair and letting her weight gradually pull the hair from her scalp. He wondered if that would eventually happen to a person hung up in that way.

  But Lynne grew on him, as she did on everyone. And she was a good worker. Better--to be honest--than the black women who always wanted to argue a point instead of doing what they were told. And she liked doing things for him; it was almost as if she knew he must be placated, obeyed. She had sewed the armbands willingly, and listened to his teasing enthusiastically, and tried to be carefree and not too Northern or hip. And she had worn her hair--for some strange reason that amounted almost to a premonition--in tight braids that she pinned securely to the top of her head.

  Lynne

  FOR OF COURSE it was Tommy Odds who raped her. As he said, it wasn't really rape. She had not screamed once, or even struggled very much. To her, it was worse than rape because she felt circumstances had not permitted her to scream. As Tommy Odds said, he was just a lonely one-arm nigger down on his luck that nobody had time for any more. But she would have time--wouldn't she? Because she was not like those rough black women who refused to be sympathetic and sleep with him--was she? She would be kind and not like those women or any other women who turned him down because they were repulsed and prejudiced and the maroon stump of his arm made them sick. She would be a true woman and save him--wouldn't she?

  "But Tommy Odds," she pleaded, pushing against his chest, "I'm married to your friend. You can't do this."

  "You don't have to tell him," he said, undoing her braids and wrapping his hand twice in her hair. "Kiss me," he said, pulling her against him. Water stood in her eyes as she felt her hair being tugged out at the roots.

  "Please don't do this," she whimpered softly.

  "You knows I cain't hep mysef," he said in loose-lipped mockery, looking at her red cheeks where tiny red capillaries ran swollen and broken. His eyes were sly, half-closed, filled with a sensuousness that was ice-cold. "You're so white and red, like a pretty little ol' pig." He lifted her briefly by her hair, pulled her closer to him.

  "Tommy Odds--"

  "Put your arms around me," he said, "and tell me you love me."

  "Tommy Odds please." She was crying aloud now and when she flailed her arms she bumped against his stump. Her throat worked.

  "It makes you sick?" asked Tommy Odds. "You think I'm a cripple? Or is it that you really don't dig niggers? Ones darker than your old man?"

  "You know that's not true," she groaned.

  He had tripped her back onto the bed and was pulling up her skirt with his teeth. His hand came out of her hair and was quickly inside her blouse. He pinched her nipples until they stung.

  "Please" she begged.

  "I didn't really mean that," he said. "I know your heart is in the right place" (sucking her left nipple). "You're not like the others."

  "God--" she said.

  There was a moment when she knew she could force him from her. But it was a flash. She lay instead thinking of his feelings, his hardships, of the way he was black and belonged to people who lived without hope; she thought about the loss of his arm. She felt her own guilt. And he entered her and she did not any longer resist but tried instead to think of Tommy Odds as he was when he was her friend--and near the end her arms stole around his neck, and before he left she told him she forgave him and she kissed his slick rounded stump that was the color of baked liver, and he smiled at her from far away, and she did not know him. "Be seein' you," he said.
>
  The next day Tommy Odds appeared with Raymond, Altuna and Hedge.

  "Lynne," he said, pushing the three boys in front of him into the room, "I'm going to show you what you are."

  She thought, helplessly, as if it were waiting for just this moment to emerge from her memory, of a racist painting she had once seen in Esquire of a nude white woman spread-eagled on a rooftop surrounded by black men. She thought: gang rape. Her anal muscles tightened, her throat closed with an audible choking sound.

  "What do you want?" she asked, looking--for the first time--downward toward the genitals of Hedge and Altuna and Raymond. They were looking sideways at her, as if embarrassed. All of them had been smoking grass, she smelled it on them.

  Pointing to her body as if it were conquered territory, Tommy Odds attempted to interest the boys in exploring it: "Tits," he said, flicking them with his fingers, "ass."

  "What do you want?" demanded Lynne, furious because seeing the faces of Altuna, Hedge and Raymond through the front window had reassured her, and she had not locked her door.

  "What did we do yesterday afternoon?" Tommy asked lazily, idly, holding the back of her neck. "What did I do?"

  Lynne gathered her courage. "You raped me."

  "Um hum," he said, smiling at the boys who were attentive, curious and silent, as if holding their breath. "And what did you do when I was getting ready to get out of you?"

  She did not reply. He squeezed her neck.

  "I--" she began.

  "A little nine-year-old black girl was raped by a white animal last week in Tchula," said Tommy Odds, "they pulled her out of the river, dead, with a stick shoved up her. Now that was rape. Not like us." He tightened his grip. "Tell us, bitch, what did you do when it started getting good to you?"

  "It was never good," said Lynne. Then, "I kissed your arm."

  "My stub," he corrected her. "You hugged me and you kissed my stub. And what else did you do?"

  He was holding her neck in the crook of his elbow, her chin was pointed at the ceiling. He squeezed.

  "I forgave you," said Lynne.

  Tommy Odds laughed. "Forgave me," he said.