"Other men run away from their families outright," said her mother. "You stay, but give the land under our feet away. I guess that makes you a hero."
"We were part of it, you know," her father said.
"Part of what?"
"Their disappearance."
"Hah," said her mother. "You might have been, but I wasn't even born. Besides, you told me how surprised you were to find that some of them had the nerve to fight for the South in the Civil War. That ought to make up for those few black soldiers who rode against Indians in the Western cavalry."
Her father sighed. "I never said either side was innocent or guilty, just ignorant. They've been a part of it, we've been a part of it, everybody's been a part of it for a long time."
"I know," said her mother, scornfully, "and you would just fly away, if you could."
Meridian's father said that Mr. Longknife had killed a lot of people, mainly Italians, in the Second World War. The reasons he'd done this remained abstract. That was why he was a wanderer. He was looking for reasons, answers, anything to keep his historical vision of himself as a just person from falling apart.
"The answer to everything," said Meridian's mother, "is we live in America and we're not rich."
One day when she was helping her father tie up some running beans, three white men in government-issued trucks--army green with white lettering on the side--came out to the farm. They unloaded a large wire trash basket and two brown picnic tables. They said a bulldozer would be coming the next day. The Indian burial mounds of the Sacred Serpent and her father's garden of prize beans, corn and squash were to be turned into a tourist attraction, a public park.
When her father went to the county courthouse with his deed, the officials said they could offer only token payment; that, and the warning to stay away from Sacred Serpent Park which, now that it belonged to the public, was of course not open to Colored.
Each afternoon after school her father had gone out to the farm. It was beautiful land made more impressive by the five-hundred-yard Sacred Serpent that formed a curving, twisting hill beyond the corn. The garden itself was in rich, flat land that fitted into the curves of the Sacred Serpent like the waves of the ocean fit the shore. Across from the Serpent and the garden was a slow-moving creek that was brown and sluggish and thick, like a stream of liquid snuff. Meridian had always enjoyed being on the farm with him, though they rarely talked. Her brothers were not interested in farming, had no feeling for the land or for Indians or for crops. They ate the fresh produce their father provided while talking of cars and engines and tires and cut-rate hubcaps. They considered working at gas stations a step up. Anything but being farmers. To them the word "farm" was actually used as a curse word.
"Aw, go on back to the farm," they growled over delicious meals.
But Meridian grieved with her father about the loss of the farm, now Sacred Serpent Park. For she understood his gifts came too late and were refused, and his pleasures were stolen away.
Where the springing head of the Sacred Serpent crossed the barbed-wire fence of the adjoining farm, it had been flattened years before by a farmer who raised wheat. This was long before Meridian or her father was born. Her father's grandmother, a woman it was said of some slight and harmless madness, and whose name was Feather Mae, had fought with her husband to save the snake. He had wanted to flatten his part of the burial mound as well and scatter the fragmented bones of the Indians to the winds. "It may not mean anything to you to plant food over other folks' bones," Feather Mae had told her husband, "but if you do you needn't expect me to eat another mouthful in your house!"
It was whispered too that Feather Mae had been very hot, and so Meridian's great-grandfather had not liked to offend her, since he could not bear to suffer the lonely consequences.
She had liked to go there, Feather Mae had, and sit on the Serpent's back, her long legs dangling while she sucked on a weed stem. She was becoming a woman--this was before she married Meridian's insatiable great-grandfather--and would soon be married, soon be expecting, soon be like her own mother, a strong silent woman who seemed always to be washing or ironing or cooking or rousing her family from naps to go back to work in the fields. Meridian's great-grandmother dreamed, with the sun across her legs and her black, moon-bright face open to the view.
One day she watched some squirrels playing up and down the Serpent's sides. When they disappeared she rose and followed them to the center of the Serpent's coiled tail, a pit forty feet deep, with smooth green sides. When she stood in the center of the pit, with the sun blazing down directly over her, something extraordinary happened to her. She felt as if she had stepped into another world, into a different kind of air. The green walls began to spin, and her feeling rose to such a high pitch the next thing she knew she was getting up off the ground. She knew she had fainted but she felt neither weakened nor ill. She felt renewed, as from some strange spiritual intoxication. Her blood made warm explosions through her body, and her eyelids stung and tingled.
Later, Feather Mae renounced all religion that was not based on the experience of physical ecstasy--thereby shocking her Baptist church and its unsympathetic congregation--and near the end of her life she loved walking nude about her yard and worshiped only the sun.
This was the story that was passed down to Meridian.
It was to this spot, the pit, that Meridian went often. Seeking to understand her great-grandmother's ecstasy and her father's compassion for people dead centuries before he was born, she watched him enter the deep well of the Serpent's coiled tail and return to his cornfield with his whole frame radiating brightness like the space around a flame. For Meridian, there was at first a sense of vast isolation. When she raised her eyes to the pit's rim high above her head she saw the sky as completely round as the bottom of a bowl, and the clouds that drifted slowly over her were like a mass of smoke cupped in downward-slanting palms. She was a dot, a speck in creation, alone and hidden. She had contact with no other living thing; instead she was surrounded by the dead. At first this frightened her, being so utterly small, encircled by ancient silent walls filled with bones, alone in a place not meant for her. But she remembered Feather Mae and stood patiently, willing her fear away. And it had happened to her.
From a spot at the back of her left leg there began a stinging sensation, which, had she not been standing so purposely calm and waiting, she might have dismissed as a sign of anxiety or fatigue. Then her right palm, and her left, began to feel as if someone had slapped them. But it was in her head that the lightness started. It was as if the walls of earth that enclosed her rushed outward, leveling themselves at a dizzying rate, and then spinning wildly, lifting her out of her body and giving her the feeling of flying. And in this movement she saw the faces of her family, the branches of trees, the wings of birds, the corners of houses, blades of grass and petals of flowers rush toward a central point high above her and she was drawn with them, as whirling, as bright, as free, as they. Then the outward flow, the rush of images, returned to the center of the pit where she stood, and what had left her at its going was returned. When she came back to her body--and she felt sure she had left it--her eyes were stretched wide open, and they were dry, because she found herself staring directly into the sun.
Her father said the Indians had constructed the coil in the Serpent's tail in order to give the living a sensation similar to that of dying: The body seemed to drop away, and only the spirit lived, set free in the world. But she was not convinced. It seemed to her that it was a way the living sought to expand the consciousness of being alive, there where the ground about them was filled with the dead. It was a possibility they discussed, alone in the fields. Their secret: that they both shared the peculiar madness of her great-grandmother. It sent them brooding at times over the meaning of this. At other times they rejoiced over so tangible a connection to the past.
Later in her travels she would go to Mexico to a mountain that contained at its point only the remains of an ancient alt
ar, the origin of which no one was certain. She would walk up a steep stair made of stones to the pinnacle of the altar and her face would disappear into the clouds, just as the faces of ancient priests had seemed to disappear into the heavens to the praying followers who knelt in reverence down below. There would again be a rushing out from her all that was surrounding, all that she might have touched, and again she would become a speck in the grand movement of time. When she stepped upon the earth again it would be to feel the bottoms of her feet curl over the grass, as if her feet were those of a leopard or a bear, with curving claws and bare rough pads made sensitive by long use.
In the Capital's museum of Indians she peered through plate glass at the bones of a warrior, shamelessly displayed, dug up in a crouched position and left that way, his front teeth missing, his arrows and clay pipes around him. At such sights she experienced nausea at being alive.
When blacks were finally allowed into Sacred Serpent Park, long after her father's crops had been trampled into dust, she returned one afternoon and tried in vain to relive her earlier ecstasy and exaltation. But there were people shouting and laughing as they slid down the sides of the great Serpent's coil. Others stood glumly by, attempting to study the meaning of what had already and forever been lost.
English Walnuts
"WHY ARE YOU always so sourfaced about it?" some boy would breathe into her bosom in the back seat of his car during the fifties. "Can't you smile some? I mean, is it gon' kill you?"
Her answer was a shrug.
Later on she would frown even more when she realized that her mother, father, aunts, friends, passers-by--not to mention her laughing sister--had told her nothing about what to expect from men, from sex. Her mother never even used the word, and her lack of information on the subject of sex was accompanied by a seeming lack of concern about her daughter's morals. Having told her absolutely nothing, she had expected her to do nothing. When Meridian left the house in the evening with her "boyfriend"--her current eager, hot-breathing lover, who always drove straight to the nearest lovers' lane or its equivalent, which in her case was the clump of bushes behind the city dump--her mother only cautioned her to "be sweet." She did not realize this was a euphemism for "Keep your panties up and your dress down," an expression she had heard and been puzzled by.
And so, while not enjoying it at all, she had had sex as often as her lover wanted it, sometimes every single night. And, since she had been told by someone that one's hips become broader after sex, she looked carefully in her mirror each morning before she caught the bus to school. Her pregnancy came as a total shock.
They lived, she and the latest lover, in a small house not a mile from the school. He married her, as he had always promised he would "if things went wrong." She had listened to this promise for almost two years (while he milked the end of his Trojans for signs of moisture). It had meant nothing because she could not conceive of anything going more wrong than the wrong she was already in. She could not understand why she was doing something with such frequency that she did not enjoy.
His name was Eddie. She did not like the name and didn't know why. It seemed the name of a person who would never amount to much, though "Edward" would have suited her no better.
As her lover, Eddie had had certain lovable characteristics--some of which he retained. He was good-looking and of the high school hero type. He was tall, with broad shoulders, and even though his skin was dark brown (and delicious that way) there was something of the prevailing white cheerleader's delight about him; there was a square regularity about his features, a pugness to his nose. He was, of course, good at sports and excelled in basketball. And she had loved to watch him make baskets from the center of the gymnasium floor. When he scored he smiled across at her, and the envy of the other girls kept her attentive in her seat.
His hair was straight up, like a brush--neither kinky nor curly. A black version of the then popular crew cut. He wore brown loafers, too, with money in them. And turtlenecks--when they were popular--and the most gorgeous light-blue jeans. Which, she was to learn, required washing and starching and ironing every week, as his mother had done, for dirty jeans were not yet the fashion. His eyes were nice--black and warm; his teeth, perfect. She loved the way his breath remained sweet--like a cow's, she told him, smiling fondly.
Being with him did a number of things for her. Mainly, it saved her from the strain of responding to other boys or even noting the whole category of Men. This was worth a great deal, because she was afraid of men--and was always afraid until she was taken under the wing of whoever wandered across her defenses to become--in a remarkably quick time--her lover. This, then, was probably what sex meant to her; not pleasure, but a sanctuary in which her mind was freed of any consideration for all the other males in the universe who might want anything of her. It was resting from pursuit.
Once in her "sanctuary" she could, as it were, look out at the male world with something approaching equanimity, even charity; even friendship. For she could make male friends only when she was sexually involved with a lover who was always near--if only in the way the new male friends thought of her as "So-an-so's Girl."
Her mother was long-suffering, typically, about the marriage; What had she ever done? and so forth. Then dedicated to the well-being of the beginning small family. Eddie was a good boy, it was argued, it was agreed--in her family's estimation. And he was, by several of the prevailing standards: He was always clean--he bathed, in summer, two or three times a week. His pants, jeans and Sunday, were creased always. His shirts starched and not in loud colors. His white buckskin shoes were dirty only when it became the fashion for them to be dirty. When the fashion said otherwise, the buckskins absorbed one bottle of white polish a week. And Eddie was smart: He made B's and an A in Band. He might become a businessman like his father, who worked in his own lumber company. He did not drop out of school when he got married, but simply worked overtime at the restaurant where he had previously worked after school. He had absorbed the belief, prevalent in all their homes, that without at least a high school diploma, a person would never amount to anything. He was even sorry she was expelled from school because of the pregnancy.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked, burrowing his bristly head into her lap.
"Forgive you for what?" It had not occurred to her to blame him. She felt, being pregnant, almost as if she'd contracted a communicable disease, that the germs had been in the air and that her catching the disease was no one's fault.
"You know I've always required a lot."
"Always?"
"I did it the first time when I was nine, standing on top of a washtub, under the girl's window."
They laughed. "Did you know what you were doing?"
"A balancing act. But it felt so good!"
When she was not nauseous or throwing up, they laughed a lot, though there was a dizziness about it for her, the laughter seemed muted, as if she did it underwater, and the echo of it whirled sluggishly through her head.
They lived simply. She became drawn into the life of his family. Became "another daughter" to his mother. Listened politely to his father's stories of his exploits during the days when black people were sure enough chicken-shit.
Considered chicken-shit, he added. It was her mother-in-law--a plump, rosy-brown woman with one breast, the other lost to cancer--who told her the "mysteries" of life. Astonishing her with such facts as: It is not possible to become pregnant if love is made standing up. Together they bought cloth to make the baby's clothes. Shopped for secondhand furniture, bought quantities of seasonal foods the two households could share.
And through it all, she sat in the small house not a mile from the school and never thought about the baby at all-- unless her mother-in-law called and mentioned it, or something to do with it. She knew she did not want it. But even this was blurred. How could she not want something she was not even sure she was having? Yet she was having it, of course. She grew and grew and grew, as pregnant women will. Her skin, always
smooth as velvet, became blotchy, her features blunted; her face looked bloated, tight.
She did not, also, think of Eddie very much. She woke to his sweet breath on her face every morning--and wondered who, really, he was. What he was doing there in bed with her. Or she lay with him quietly, after making love, and enjoyed the incredible warmth of his very beautiful young body. So nearly black, so glowing and healthy, so slim now, next to hers. She loved the warmth, would do anything for it, his gentleness. She was grateful that he was willing to work so hard for their future, while she could not even recognize it.
"One day," he said over lunch, "we'll have a house like Mr. Yateson's. It will have cactus plants around it and sky-blue driveway and painted blue trim. In the dining room there'll be a chandelier like the ones in Joan Crawford movies. And there'll be carpeting wall to wall and all the rooms will be different colors."
Mr. Yateson was the principal of their school. His brand-new house, floating on the bright-blue driveway and concrete walks that encircled it, sat back from a dirt road that was impassable when it rained and made Meridian think of a fancy-dressed lady without shoes standing in a puddle of mud.
"Um hum," she would nod vaguely at Eddie's dream.
At the restaurant he worked as a waiter and sometimes short-order cook--hard work, little pay. And yet he was always patient and gentle with her, protective. If he worried he kept it from her, justifying his silence by her "condition." The worries he was unable to hide were about small things that bothered him: the ironing of his clothes, and even her own, which she did not do nearly as well as his mother (who, finally, in the last stages of her daughter-in-law's pregnancy, began to collect their dirty clothes each Wednesday to bring them back on Friday stainless and pale from bleach); the cooking, which she was too queasy to do at all; and the sex, which she did not seem (he said) interested in.