Page 15 of Meridian


  "Yes," said Lynne.

  He loosened his grip. They stood together now, his arm around her shoulders, his fingers lightly stroking her breast. From the reflection in the windowpane they appeared to be a couple. Lynne looked into the horrified faces of Altuna, Hedge and Raymond. But perhaps, she thought, they are not horrified. Perhaps that is not a true reading of what I see on their faces (for the first time it seemed to her that black features were grossly different--more sullen and cruel--than white). Though none of them smiled, she could have sworn they were grinning. She imagined their gleaming teeth, with sharp, pointed edges. Oh, God, she thought, what a racist cliche.

  "You want it?" Tommy Odds asked the boys.

  Lynne closed her eyes. She could not imagine they would say no. The whole scene flashed before her. She was in the center of the racist Esquire painting, her white body offered up as a sacrifice to black despair. She thought of the force, the humiliation, the black power. These boys were no longer her friends; the sight of her naked would turn them into savages.

  "Go on," said Tommy Odds. "Have some of it."

  Altuna Jones--whose head was shaped exactly like a person's head would be shaped with such a name, like a melon, long, and with close-cut hair--cleared his throat.

  "It? It?" he said. "What it you talking about? That ain't no it, that's Lynne."

  Hedge Phillips spoke. Like his name there was evasion in his looks. He was short and fat and so oily black his features were hard to distinguish until he smiled. When he talked one foot stroked the ground experimentally, as if eager to move off down the street.

  "We not gon' hurt you," he said to Lynne. "Us thought it was a party here this evening."

  Raymond, shyer even than the other two, but grasping somehow that a masculine line, no matter how weak, must be taken, said, plaintively as it turned out, to Tommy Odds, "You know, Tommy, that I have a girlfriend."

  "Look," said Odds, with contempt, "she's nothing particular. You guys are afraid of her, that's all. Shit. Crackers been raping your mamas and sisters for generations and here's your chance to get off on a piece of their goods."

  "Man, you crazy," said Altuna Jones, and he looked at Lynne with pity, for she had obviously not been--in his opinion--raped. All his life he had heard it was not possible to rape a woman without killing her. To him, in fact, rape meant that you fucked a corpse. That Lynne would actually stoop to sleeping with Tommy Odds meant something terrible with wrong with her, and he was sorry.

  The three boys left.

  "They're not like you," said Lynne, though she had barely finished thinking they would be exactly like Tommy Odds. "They don't need to rape white women to prove they're somebody."

  "Rape," said Tommy Odds. "I fucked you. We fucked."

  Again he pressed her down on the bed and fumbled with her clothes. Even before she began to fight him off she knew she would not have to. Tommy Odds was impotent. He spat in her face, urinated on the floor, and left her lying there.

  When Truman came home again, Lynne could not talk about it. She could hardly talk at all. She was packed and ready to leave. She wished she could go to the police, but she was more afraid of them than she was of Tommy Odds, because they would attack young black men in the community indiscriminately, and the people she wanted most to see protected would suffer. Besides, she thought as long as she didn't tell, Truman would never know. It would hurt him, she thought, to know how much his friend hated her. To know how low was her value. It was as if Tommy Odds thought she was not a human being, as if her whiteness, the mystique of it, the danger of it, the historically verboten nature of it, encouraged him to attempt to destroy her without any feelings of guilt. It was so frightening a thought that she shook with it.

  She had insisted on viewing them all as people who suffered without hatred; this was what intrigued her, made her like a child in awe of them. But she had not been thinking of individual lives, of young men like Tommy Odds whose thin defense against hatred broke down under personal assault. Revenge was his only comfort. And, she thought, on whom was such a man likely to take his revenge? Not on white men at large; certainly not. Not on the sheriff or the judge or the businessman sitting home over his drink. Not on the businessman's wife, because she would scream and put him away for good. He--Tommy Odds--had actually reached (and she understood this too well for her own comfort) an improvement in his choice of whom to punish, when he chose her. For, look at this: He had not, as black men had done foolishly for years, gotten drunk on the weekend and stabbed another black man to death. Nor had he married a black woman in order to possess, again erroneously, his own whipping post. Surely this was proof of a weird personal growth on Tommy's part. There were no longer any white boys, either, in the Movement, so that they could no longer be beaten up or turned, with guilty contempt, out into the street. That left her: a white woman without friends. A woman the white community already assumed was fucking every nigger in sight. Yes, Tommy Odds's logic--convoluted though it might be--was perfect.

  But Truman didn't want her to leave. He would not give her money to leave even after she told him, hysterical finally, what had happened. He chose not to believe her.

  Ask Tommy, she had cried, Just ask him! But if he did, she never knew.

  "Why did you do it, man," Truman asked Tommy Odds.

  "Because your woman ain't shit. She didn't even fight. She was just laying back waiting to give it up."

  Lynne cried every night in her sleep. Truman could not bear it, so he did not usually come home. He slept on a couch in the center. His hand shot out and caught Odds at the base of the throat, which was black and scrawny, like the neck of a hen.

  "She's better than you," he said, as Tommy Odds stretched his eyes wide, feigning fear. "You creep," said Truman, with a sneer, "you motherfucker. She felt sorry for you, because you lost your fucking arm."

  He raised his clenched fist underneath Odds's chin and, holding the collar of his shirt, rocked him back and forth, his feet nearly off the floor. It was like lifting a bag of loose, dirty laundry. "She felt sorry for you and look what you did."

  Odds did not raise hand to defend himself. He looked into Truman's eyes, and his own eyes were laughing. The laughter in them was like two melting ice cubes gleaming in a dish.

  "You wish it was my fucking arm she felt sorry for."

  "What do you mean, you son of a bitch?"

  But Tommy Odds, tired now of being held in an awkward position, yanked himself out of Truman's grasp. He straightened his collar, tucked his shirt into his pants, extended his stub out from his side, like a turkey flapping a wing, and ran his fingers through his hair.

  "Why don't you wise up," he said. "She didn't get involved with you because of anything you lost."

  "Why don't you say what you mean!"

  "I mean," said Tommy Odds mockingly, "it is true that you speaks French when you wants to impress folks, and it is true that you went to college, and it is true that you can draw and stuff and one time lived overseas for six months without pig feet or greens. But that ain't what won you Miss Lady Fair. Oh noooo ... you're like a book she hadn't read; like a town she wanted to pass through; like a mango she wanted to taste because mangoes don't grow in her own yard. Boy, if you'd had an arm missing she probably would have kidnapped you a lot sooner than she did."

  Truman wanted very much to destroy Tommy Odds. The impulse was overwhelming.

  "Black men get preferential treatment, man, to make up for all we been denied. She ain't been fucking you, she's been atoning for her sins."

  "That's not true," said Truman, sounding weak, even to himself

  "She felt sorry for me because I'm black, man," said Tommy Odds, and for the first time there was dejection in his voice. "The one thing that gives me some consolation in this stupid world, and she thinks she has to make up for it out of the bountifulness of her pussy." His voice hardened. "I should have killed her."

  "No," said Truman, "no--"

  Tommy Odds stood facing him. He looked
terrible. Puny and exhausted and filthy. Dead. "Listen, man, you want to defend her. It's all right with me. I don't care, man. You want to beat me up," he said, "I'm ready, man. You want to kill me. Look, I won't even complain. You want me to go find you a gun? Or do you want to do it with your fists? Come on, man. Hit me. We'll feel better."

  But Truman had already turned away.

  And so Lynne sat alone, at home always now because she was afraid to go over to the center she had helped create. Afraid and ashamed and not even conscious enough of her own worth to be angry that she was ashamed. She counted the days until she was sure she was not pregnant. When she sold one of her poems--to an anthologist who wanted to document the Movement in poetry, and who wanted the white woman's point of view--she bought birth control pills. Enough for two months.

  Because of what Tommy Odds had done Lynne locked her door, even to her friends Hedge and Altuna and Raymond.

  They came back again and again. At first she looked at them from behind a window shade, ashamed and resentful of her fear. Eventually--from loneliness only--she opened the door and soon everything was, seemingly, back to normal. The boys were as courteous and shy as ever. Truman was not at home very much and when he was home he didn't speak to her. Some nights when she became lonely to the point of suicide, she played checkers with Alonzo, Altuna's brother, who worked at the scrap yard. A man who appeared completely unaware of the Movement and who never had any interest in voting, marching or anything else, he treated her with the stiff, sober courtesy of old-time Negroes. For his kindness, she invited him to sleep with her. In his gratitude, he licked her from her earlobes to her toes.

  On Saturday nights her house became a place of music. She was protected now because she had a special friend in Alonzo. (Everyone seemed to understand that Truman no longer cared.) Men and women came to the house because they heard you could listen to records and dance and smoke reefers. But if she thought being Alonzo's friend was going to save her from other men she was wrong. They pleaded, they cajoled, they begged. And always, in refusing them, she saw their softening, earnest faces go rigid with hatred and she shivered, and began, over the months, to capitulate. She tried in vain to make them her friends, as Alonzo was. But they began to drive up, take her to bed (or on the floor, upside the wall), as if she were a prostitute, get up and leave. In public they did not speak to her.

  Still, the women found out. They began to curse her and to threaten her, attacking her physically, some of them. And she began perversely to enjoy their misguided rage, to use it as acknowledgment of her irresistible qualities. It was during this time that whenever she found herself among black women, she found some excuse for taking down and combing her hair. As she swung it and felt it sweep the back of her waist, she imagined she possessed treasures they could never have.

  She began to believe the men fucked her from love, not from hatred. For as long as they did not hate her she felt she could live. She could bear the hatred of her own father and mother, but not the hatred of black men. And when they no longer came to her--and she did not know why they did not--she realized she needed them. And then there were only Lynne and Truman and when her pills gave out she became pregnant with Camara, and finally took a bus to New York, where Welfare placed her in a one-room apartment near Avenue C.

  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 b
ehind 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.