It struck Meridian that he was deliberately imitating King, that he and all his congregation knew he was consciously keeping that voice alive. It was like a play. This startled Meridian; and the preacher's voice--not his own voice at all, but rather the voice of millions who could no longer speak-- wound on and on along its now heated, now cool, track. God was not mentioned, except as a reference.
She was suddenly aware that the sound of the "ahmens" was different. Not muttered in resignation, not shouted in despair. No one bounced in his seat. No one even perspired. Just the "ah-mens" rose clearly, unsentimentally, and with a firm tone of "We are fed up."
When the red-eyed man rose there was a buzzing throughout the church. The preacher introduced him as the father of the slain man whose picture was flanked by the white lilies. Yes, now that he was introduced, Meridian remembered him. When his son was killed he had gone temporarily insane. Meridian had read about it in the paper. He had wrecked his own house with an ax, swinging until, absolutely, profoundly silent and blank, he had been carried out of the state and placed in a sanitarium. He had returned red-eyed and heavier and deadly calm--still taking tranquilizers, it was said, and thinking (the people whispered, hoped) of running for office. But this had not materialized.
He lived peacefully in the ruins of his wrecked house, his sanity coming back--unwelcomed--for days at a time. Then he bellowed out his loss. At other times he talked, in his normally reserved, rather ironic voice, to his wife and other children who were already dead (lost previously in a fire). His martyred son was all the family he had. He had boasted when the boy was younger, that his son--slender, black, as gentle and graceful as his mother had been, with her precious small hands--would be his bulwark, his refuge, when he grew old. He had not understood when his son chose struggle. He had understood even less when his son began to actually fight, to talk of bullets, of bombs, of revolution. For his talk alone (as far as his father knew, or believed, or wanted to know) they had killed him. And to his father--on sane days, doped to the gills with tranquilizers (because it was true, he ate them by the handfuls)--it still made no sense. He had thought that somehow, the power of his love alone (and how rare even he knew it was!) would save his son. But his love--selfless, open, a kissing, touching love--had only made his son strong enough to resist everything that was not love. Strong, beloved, knowing through his father's eyes his own great value, he had set out to change the ways of the world his father feared. And they had murdered him.
His father knew the beauty of his son's soul, as a jeweler knows the brilliance of the jewel beneath the stone, the gentleness at the heart of the warrior. And it was for this loss he wept and detested life as capricious and unreasonable. And felt his life empty, and his heart deprived.
The people tried to be kind, as he had felt confident, even in his madness, they would be. It was a feeling he had shared with his son. For no matter how distrustful his son was of white people, rich people, or people who waged wars to destroy others, he had had absolute faith in the people among whom he had grown up. People like his father--who had been a simple mechanic, who owned his own small cluttered shop in which he did fine, proud, honest work--who could bear the weight of any oppression or any revolution as long as they knew they were together and believed the pain they suffered would come to a righteous end. The people would open themselves totally to someone else's personal loss, if it was allowed them to do so. But the father, insane half the time, and gladly so, did not allow closeness. He was, after a while, left alone with his memories and his ghosts.
It was only on occasions such as this, only on anniversaries of his son's death, that his presence was specifically requested, and he came out to the various schools and churches. He never looked at his son's picture, but would come and stand before the people because they, needing reminders, requested it of him. They accepted him then in whatever form he presented himself and knew him to be unpredictable. Today he stood for several minutes, his throat working, his eyes redder than ever, without tears. The congregation was quiet with reverence and an expectation that was already grateful, whatever he would give them. The words came from a throat that seemed stoppered with anxiety, memory, grief and dope. And the words, the beginning of a speech he had laboriously learned years ago for just such occasions as this when so much was asked of him, were the same that he gave every year. The same, exact, three. "My son died."
He stood there for several minutes more, on display. Sunk in his own memories, in confusion, in loss, then was led back gently to his seat, his large body falling heavily into his chair, his arms hanging limply, showing ashen palms to the crowd. And then there rose the sweet music, that received its inimitable soul from just such inarticulate grief as this, and a passing of the collection plate with the money going to the church's prison fund, and the preacher urged all those within his hearing to vote for black candidates on the twenty-third. And the service was over.
For a while, the congregation did not move. Meridian sat thinking of how much she had always disliked church. Whenever she was in a church, she felt claustrophobic, as if the walls were closing in. She had, even as a child, felt pity for the people who sat through the long and boring sermons listlessly fanning in the summer heat and hoping, vainly, she felt, for the best. The music she loved. Next to the music, she had liked only the stained-glass windows, when there were any, because the colored glass changed ordinary light into something richer, of gold and rose and mauve. It was restful and beautiful and inspired the reverence the sermons had failed to rouse. Thinking of the glass now she raised her head to look at the large stained-glass window across from her.
Instead of the traditional pale Christ with stray lamb there was a tall, broad-shouldered black man. He was wearing a brilliant blue suit through which the light swam as if in a lake, and a bright red tie that looked as if someone were pouring cherries down his chest. His face was thrown back, contorted in song, and sweat, like glowing diamonds, fell from his head. In one hand he held a guitar that was attached to a golden strap that ran over his shoulder. It was maroon, much narrower at one end than at the other, with amber buttons, like butterscotch kisses, on the narrow end. The other arm was raised above his head and it held a long shiny object the end of which was dripping with blood.
"What's that?" she asked the placid woman sitting next to her, who was humming and swatting flies and bopping her restless children, intermittently, on the head.
"What?" she turned kindly to Meridian and smiled in a charming and easygoing way. "Oh, that. One of our young artists did that. It's called 'B.B., With Sword.'"
And what was Meridian, who had always thought of the black church as mainly a reactionary power, to make of this? What was anyone? She was puzzled that the music had changed. Puzzled that everyone in the congregation had anticipated the play. Puzzled that young people in church nowadays did not fall asleep. Perhaps it was, after all, the only place left for black people to congregate, where the problems of life were not discussed fraudulently and the approach to the future was considered communally, and moral questions were taken seriously.
She considered the face of the young man in the photograph as she was walking away. A face destroyed by clubs held by men. Now it would be nothing but the cracked bones, falling free as the skin rotted away, coming apart into the bottom of the casket; and the gentle fingers, all broken and crushed under the wheels of cars, would point directions no more. She would always love this young man who had died before she had a chance to know him. But how, she wondered, could she show her love for someone who was already dead?
There was a reason for the ceremony she had witnessed in the church. And, as she pursued this reason in her thoughts, it came to her. The people in the church were saying to the red-eyed man that his son had not died for nothing, and that if his son should come again they would protect his life with their own. "Look," they were saying, "we are slow to awaken to the notion that we are only as other women and men, and even slower to move in anger, but we
are gathering ourselves to fight for and protect what your son fought for on behalf of us. If you will let us weave your story and your son's life and death into what we already know--into the songs, the sermons, the 'brother and sister'--we will soon be so angry we cannot help but move. Understand this," they were saying, "the church" (and Meridian knew they did not mean simply "church," as in Baptist, Methodist or whatnot, but rather communal spirit, togetherness, righteous convergence), "the music, the form of worship that has always sustained us, the kind of ritual you share with us, these are the ways to transformation that we know. We want to take this with us as far as we can."
In comprehending this, there was in Meridian's chest a breaking as if a tight string binding her lungs had given way, allowing her to breathe freely. For she understood, finally, that the respect she owed her life was to continue, against whatever obstacles, to live it, and not to give up any particle of it without a fight to the death, preferably not her own. And that this existence extended beyond herself to those around her because, in fact, the years in America had created them One Life. She had stopped, considering this, in the middle of the road. Under a large tree beside the road, crowded now with the cars returning from church, she made a promise to the red-eyed man herself: that yes, indeed she would kill, before she allowed anyone to murder his son again.
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 sh
e 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.