Bliss and her parents, Calm and Peace, disappeared into a separate part of the house. Anastasia and Irene sat down at the kitchen table.
"In parts of the country," Irene said in a voice modulated to show this meant nothing whatsoever to her, "the amount of assistance people get is less, by design, than they can live on."
Anastasia leaned forward, and in an equally nonpartisan tone, said, "It is much better to be on welfare in a rich place than in a poor one. Not only do rich people here dress the way we do--if anything they're more tattered and less stylish--but they are so rich it delights them to support us in our poverty."
Irene laughed, dutifully.
"How is your teaching?" asked Anastasia. Like many of Irene's friends, she never read the newsletter that Irene and her group published, in which they discussed in detail methods of teaching older people, under-and miseducated young people, or what they called among themselves, just as society did, "the Unteachables." Only they said it with an informed sense of humor, not yet having encountered an absolute "unteachable."
For a moment, Irene debated with herself whether to respond with more than "okay." In stories, in literature, such work as she did sounds romantic, as well as idealistic. The reality, day to day, is different. In Irene's case there was, first of all, the incredible brain-broiling heat of the Southern summer, when the majority of her students--all women in their late forties, fifties and sixties--could attend classes from one to three weeks at a time. The trailer they used was not air-conditioned, and there were flies. Sometimes classes were crowded, and composed of people who--from years of being passive spectators in church, required only to respond in shouts or "amens"--found it difficult to take an active part in their own instruction. They doubted their own personal histories and their own experience. The food--donated by the local college whose backyard they were in--was bad. Bologna and pork and beans and yellow, wilted slices of lettuce. Oversweetened lemonade that attracted mosquitoes. And there was the smell of clean poverty, an odor Irene wished would disappear from the world, a sharp, bitter odor, almost acrid, as if the women washed themselves in chemicals.
Teaching was exciting only sporadically, when student or teacher learned something. Often no one seemed to learn anything. In desperation Irene would sometimes show films, because whatever the films were about, they seemed to threaten her students less than Irene's constant insistence that they acknowledge their own oppression, as blacks and as women. From films like "Birth of a Nation" there would be an immediate rise; from a film like "Anna Lucasta" a stunned and bewildered silence. At first, anyway.
"It's not going well," Irene said, as Anastasia put a filter into the Chemex, spooned in coffee, and poured on boiling water. Through the low-slung kitchen window Irene saw the fog sliding into the garden, a cat napping on a rock, and a round terra-cotta urn of herbs on the back steps. There was a peace and unreality about the house.
"You wrote me about your school," Anastasia said as noncommittally as possible, as they sipped mellow black coffee and munched on homemade carrot cake.
There was a side of Irene that Anastasia did not like. It was the side that seemed unnecessarily obsessed with the dark, seedy side of life. They'd once discussed Anastasia's inability to get involved in projects that interested Irene, and Anastasia had shrugged and said, "You're into pain!" They had laughed, but Anastasia realized Irene thought her incapable of deep emotion, and so, in a way, talked (or wrote) down to her. Since this spared her a lot of Sturm und Drang, she thought this was okay, and didn't complain. She accepted the shallowness this attitude assured.
It didn't occur to Irene that Anastasia could empathize with her commitments, and their college friendship had been based largely on a shared love of movies and jazz. Though she feigned a good-humored acceptance of Anastasia's easygoing life style, and her reliance on personal fashion to indicate the state of her mind, on a deeper level, she felt contempt for her, as a person who chose to be of limited use.
"It ended for lack of funds," Irene said.
"Who funded it?" asked Anastasia, politely.
Irene sighed, and began in a rush. "In the beginning, there was no funding." The two women could not help grinning in recognition of the somehow familiar sound of this: they had both been brought up in the church. "In the beginning, there was no funding," repeated Irene. "The women wanted to learn before they 'got too old' and they simply talked--and in some cases shamed--younger women into teaching them. Then there was a grant from the government that paid those like me who came from outside. The trouble with government funding, of course, is that it is so fucking fickle.... With the war going on in Vietnam, and bombs to be bought, government could hardly be expected to care that a few dozen old black women still believe in education."
"I thought you said in your letters that some of the women are white," said Anastasia, resting her chin on the back of her hand, and gazing steadily at Irene. She liked to look at Irene, liked her sometimes fierce brown eyes, liked very much the dark richness of her skin--but she could never say so.
"Oh yes," said Irene, "some of them are. Three, in fact." When white people reached a certain level of poverty (assuming they were not members of the Klan, or worse, which they very often were), they ceased to be "white" to her. Like many of her quasi-political beliefs, however, she had not thought this through. She was afraid to, and this was one of the major failings in her character. If she thought this through, for example, she would have to think of what becomes of poor whites when (if) they become rich (and how could she waste her time teaching incipient rich, white people?) and what becomes of blacks when they become middle class; she was already contemptuous of the black middle class. In fact, for its boringly slavish imitation of the white middle class, which she considered mediocre in its tiniest manifestations, she hated it. And yet, technically, she was now a part of this class.
If she began questioning these things, she would have to question her own place in society and how she was going to be a success at whatever she did (she had few doubts about her capabilities and none about her energy) but at the same time avoid becoming bourgeois. She enjoyed so many bourgeois pleasures, and yet she loathed the thought of settling for them. Just as jazz was her favorite music because it held the middle class in abeyance, Steppenwolf was the novel that, since college, had most enduringly reflected her mind.
"Can the women go back to learning the way they did before the funding?" asked Anastasia.
"One day they might," said Irene. "I don't know. A funny thing happened to them, and to me, around the funding from government. At first it lifted our spirits, made us believe someone up there in D.C. cared about the lives of these women, the deliberate impoverishment of their particular past. And the women settled down to learn in that belief. As amazingly as the funding began, though, it ended. We had just had time to get used to more than we had before when suddenly there was nothing at all. We had 'progressed' to a new level only to find ourselves stranded. To go back to the old way would feel like defeat."
As Irene talked, she thought of one of the women in her class who particularly moved her, and who resisted learning to read because everything she was required to read was so painful. Irene had had to coax her back to class after the first day. On the first day, the woman, whose name was Fania, had expressed a strong desire to learn to read. She was a stout, walnut-colored woman who wore her hair in braids that crossed at the back of her neck and, in her ears, small gold loops. Her embarrassment at not knowing how to read was so acute that, in admitting it, she kept her eyes tightly shut, and in the course of making a very short statement of her condition, she undid both braids and managed to get the earrings tangled in her hair.
Like so much that is deeply tragic, this sight was also comic. Realizing how she must appear to the class, and to Irene, Fania had blushed darkly and offered a short puzzled laugh at herself. It was a look and a laugh that Irene never forgot.
Irene had had much success teaching reading by using the newspape
rs. She found nonreaders related quickly to news about what was going on in their midst, and that often too they recognized certain words--like names of towns, stores, and so on--with which they were already familiar. Each time they "read" a word they already knew, they were encouraged.
For Fania, Irene had chosen a rather innocuous item about the increasing mechanization of farm labor, which was the kind of work most of her students knew well. She thought the words "fertilizer distributor," "automatic weeder," "cotton picker" and the like would be easy. They were long words, true, but words used every day by the women, as they passed by plantations where this new machinery was already in operation.
Irene read quickly over the short news item, to rob it of any surprise. Surprises in any form, she had discovered, inhibited these would-be readers.
"'Way, Georgia: Sources at the Department of Agriculture predict that in less than ten years, farming as our state has known it for generations will no longer exist. Widespread use of fertilizer distributors, automatic weeders and cotton pickers will virtually wipe out the need for human labor. Thousands of tenant farmers who have traditionally farmed the land, have already been displaced. Crop prices--including those for soybeans and peanuts--are expected to continue to rise. It is expected that automation will increase profits and stimulate the growth of other industries that are beginning to relocate in the South because of the abundance of energy, in terms of both the environment and the ever-populous, non-unionized, labor pool.'"
Fania had stammered, choked, pulled at her earrings and her braids--but in the end had simply refused to learn to read that the only work she'd ever known would soon not exist.
While Irene talked, Anastasia fingered the colorful straw place mat in front of her. As so often happened when she talked to another black person, the world seemed weighted down with problems. "You can't improve anything, you know?" she said. "You can't change anything. I've learned that from Source."
Irene waited. Anastasia seemed inspired.
"Source got me and my folks together again. You won't believe this, but we write to each other now at least once a week. Hey, let me show you..." Anastasia rose and disappeared into another room. She returned with a bundle of letters. She peeled off a letter from the bundle and spread the pages on the table. She changed her mind about reading aloud to Irene, who was looking at her, she felt, skeptically. She pushed the letter toward Irene, who glanced quickly over it.
Anastasia's parents had once been Baptists; they were now Jehovah's Witnesses. There was a lot in the letter about continuing to love her and even more about continuing to petition Jehovah God in her behalf. From the letter, prayers were going up from Arkansas by the hour. The hair rose at the back of Irene's neck, but she forced herself to remain calm.
Irene had met Anastasia's family once, by design, she always thought, on Anastasia's part. Irene lived for a time in a terrible D.C. slum, and represented, therefore, a kind of educated lunatic fringe to those friends who thought poverty in and of itself was dangerous to visitors. While her parents were in town, Anastasia asked to stay with Irene, though in fact she was at that time living with her friend Galen. Her parents had driven up in the longest pink Lincoln Continental Irene had ever seen. Her father and brothers had braved the trashy street to come up to Irene's flat, but her mother had waited in the car--doors locked and windows rolled up tight--until Anastasia and Irene were brought out to her. Her gray, stricken eyes clutched at Irene's. Why? Why? they asked, while her mouth said how pleased she was they had finally met. "What is she afraid of?" Irene had asked Anastasia; "What isn't she afraid of?" Anastasia had replied.
Anastasia's brothers were amber-skinned and curly-haired, with the slouching posture and menacing non-language of other boys their age. They were fifteen and sixteen. Anastasia's father was an olive-skinned, crinkly-haired man whose intense inner turmoil and heaviness of spirit caused an instant recoiling; on his face, one felt a smile would look unnatural.
This father now wrote of God's love, God's grace, God's assured forgiveness, and of his own happiness that his daughter, always, at heart, "a good girl," had at last embarked on the path of obedience. This path alone led to peace everlasting, in the new and coming system of the world.
"Obedience," thought Irene. "Peace Everlasting! Holy shit!"
"I wanted to do good, too," said Anastasia, and laughed. "Of course all the 'doing good' is really for yourself, nobody else. Nobody ever does anybody else any good. The good they do is for them. Altruism doesn't exist. Neither do good works."
"Wait a minute," said Irene, a clenched fist resting on the letters in her lap. "I believe in movements, collective action to influence the future, and all that. Basically, I believe somebody is responsible for the child."
"People should understand," said Anastasia, speaking very fast and somewhat blindly, Irene felt, as if she were speaking with her eyes closed, so that for a moment she reminded Irene of Fania, "that when they suffer it is because they choose suffering. If you suffer in a place, leave."
The baby was awake now and Irene was holding him. His thick hair smelled of incense. His slender fingers probed her nose.
"You can't leave a baby," Irene said.
"Men do it all the time."
"Women stay because they don't want to be 'men.'"
"And men go because they don't want to be women--that half of the human race that never realizes it has a choice."
"But who will look after the children?"
"Someone will," she said, "or won't." She looked into Irene's face.
"It's all the same." She shrugged. "That's the point."
The baby's mother came into the room. She had a face the color of a pink towel, a stout figure and blue eyes shaped like arrows. Spiritual striving was most apparent in her speech; over her harsh New York accent she'd poured a sweetness that hurt the ears.
"It's a beautiful baby," Irene said, as she plucked grapes off a bunch on the table and began plopping them into her own and the baby's mouths.
"Thank you," she cooed. "We're giving him to Anastasia. She loves him so much and is such a good mommy. We're going to South America."
"When?" asked Irene.
She shrugged. "Sometime."
"Was that hard to decide?" Irene wanted to know.
"Source teaches us that all children belong to everyone, to the whole world."
"But not to anyone in particular?"
She sang, "That's right," and swept out of the room.
"We have to take you to meet Source," said Peace, who came in next and rummaged through the grapes. He was emaciated, far taller than the refrigerator and wore his long straw-colored hair in a ponytail tied with a bright green cord. A brilliant red birthmark, shaped like a tiny foot, "walked" across his nose.
Source lived in a large apartment house very close by. One of his daughters, a thin, sad-eyed girl in her teens, her long black hair shining against her sallow brown skin, showed them up to his flat. After admitting them she kept her gaze below their knees.
Anastasia, Peace, Calm and Bliss had brought an offering of wine and money, which they placed on a table near Source's feet. Source himself was seated in the lotus position on a round bed shoved against the wall of the otherwise bare and dingy room. The guests were offered cushions on the floor. A second daughter padded up silently, her eyes as sad as the first's, and poured the wine into glasses which she handed to each of them. She also lit a stick of incense. Soon the room was hazy with smoke and the air heavy with the sweet, oppressive smell.
A third daughter came and stood at her father's left hand, which he periodically raised and sent her scurrying into the other rooms for something he wanted.
"It is possible that all swamis look alike," Irene was thinking. Source was a pale, grayish brown, with dark glittery eyes and graying dark hair parted in the middle and hanging about his shoulders. He wore a white robe that he used, as he talked, to cover and uncover his bare feet. It was a slow, flipping motion that relaxed and in a way hypn
otized his audience.
Irene was determined not to think any of the prejudicial things she was thinking, and adjusted her face to show interest, concern, anticipatory delight.
Source's voice had a whine and a drone somewhere in it, however, and this made it objectionable. He was saying how the first time he met Anastasia, whom he called, in Sanskrit, Tranquility, she looked exactly like Kathleen Cleaver, "dressed all entirely completely in black" (he was to use triple qualifiers frequently). "Her hair like an angry, wild, animal bush. And her skin pale pale pale, like that one. Militant, you see?" He laughed, fluttered the fingers of his left hand in the air beside his nose, and the sad-eyed daughter standing beside him shifted the pillow behind his back.
Anastasia was laughing, fingering her spoon and occasionally sniffling and rubbing her eyes, which were red and glassy.
"Well"--she shrugged--"I thought I was black."
"Nobody's anything," said Source, as to a dense child, and Anastasia shrugged again.
Source called out sharply. There was a flurry of movement in the kitchen, and his other two daughters came and stood next to the one who had remained beside the bed.
"Nobody's anything," he repeated. The daughter began to write down his words. Through her rather bedraggled sari it was clear she was pregnant.
"I used to live in Africa, in Uganda," continued Source, "and the Africans wanted to be black black black. They were always saying it: black black black. But that is because Africans are backward people. You see? Indians do not go about saying, 'We are brown brown brown,' or the Chinese, 'yellow yellow yellow.'"
"No," said Irene, "they say they are Chinese Chinese Chinese and Indian Indian Indian."
However, it was out of line to speak while Source spoke. He continued as if she had not interrupted.
"Africans are strange creatures. I will tell you a story that really happened in Africa. An African..."
It was such an ancient racist joke, Irene had not heard it since she was a small child. "The African" in it as stupid, lazy, backward and unmotivated to improve as any colonialist could wish. Tranquility, Peace and Calm and even the baby--whose vicariously stoned response to the world was a look of slack wonder--giggled.