You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

  "Where are you going?" asked Tranquility, as Irene rose.

  "I'll meet you on the street," Irene said.

  On the way back, Peace and Calm talked disjointedly of ego and humility and how they now, since knowing Source, had none of the former and lots of the latter. It was hinted that Irene might likewise be improved.

  "Is the pregnant daughter married?" she asked coldly.

  "Why should she be?" asked Calm.

  "She has Source," sniffed Peace.

  Which was precisely what Irene feared, but she decided against pursuing it.

  "Who supports Source?" she asked.

  "We all do," they said proudly. "Source is too precious to waste his life working."

  A moment later, Tranquility said, "He's a teacher, like you. Teaching is his work."

  "I'm sorry," said Anastasia next day. "But we have decided you have to go."

  "What?" asked Irene.

  "You disapprove of us."

  "I don't understand you."

  "Listen," said Anastasia. "I've finally got my life together, and it's all thanks to Source. I understand I am nothing. That is what Source was testing you to see. You still think you are Somebody. That you matter. That Africans matter. They don't," she said. "And if they are nothing--if nobody's anything--it is impossible to humiliate them."

  "But he's a racist; he treats his daughters like slaves."

  "He is above all that. You don't understand. Right. But see, if nobody's anything, everyone is equal. That's clear enough, isn't it?"

  "Clear enough, but impossible."

  "Before I had my breakdown I didn't understand either. I wanted to be Kathleen Cleaver. I met her once at a party in New York before she was Kathleen Cleaver. She had long, straight, light-colored hair, like mine, just like mine, and she sat in a corner all evening without saying a word. Not one. Men did all the talking. Months later, she changed. Suddenly she was doing the talking because the men were dead or in jail. She cursed a lot, she dressed in boots and sunglasses and black clothes and posed for photographers holding a gun. I did all that. I even found a revolutionary black man to live with who beat me--and thought nothing of forbidding me to talk to what he considered 'strangers,' even though they were my friends.

  "My parents came from Arkansas and got me. They had me locked away in a 'rest' home. It was a long time before I could see their point of view.

  "When I was a child I wanted to change things. When the sit-ins started I wanted to join. I wanted to integrate schools and lunch counters. But I was so fair, and I'd never even seen my own hair unstraightened; mother started having it straightened when I was three, for God's sake.... But my color wasn't the problem. Oh God, I'm so bored with color being the problem. It was my undeveloped comprehension of the world. My parents already had the Truth, which is why they love Source so much, as much as I do. They knew nobody's anything, that color is an illusion, that the universe is unchangeable. Source teaches us nothing can be changed, all suffering is self-indulgence and the good of life is, basically, indifference to it--pleasure, if that is possible."

  "The good of life is indifference?"

  "They released me into Source's care. They help support him, financially. It works out."

  The baby, hungry, was crying and crawling over the floor. Irene walked over to him and picked him up. His mother flew into the room and snatched him from her arms.

  "We try to protect him from bad vibes," she said.

  "Bitch," said Irene, under her breath, then she turned again to Anastasia, who was trembling from the righteousness of her stand.

  "Anastasia," Irene said, "I didn't come all this way to criticize your life. I came all this way because mine is lying kaput all around me, remember?" She knew she wasn't wrong about Source, but what did he matter? she thought. "Perhaps I was wrong about Source. Perhaps you are right to defend him. This is a bad time in my life to have someone like that sprung on me, actually. I was predisposed not to like him; maybe he sensed this...." She rambled on, but Anastasia was not listening. She imagined Anastasia, Peace and Calm meeting in the dead of night to plan just this scene between them. It seemed to her that only the baby, Bliss, had welcomed her, from the start.

  "Your life is what you make it," Anastasia said, stonily.

  "But that's absurd. Not everyone's life is what they make it. Some people's life is what other people make it. I would say this is true of the majority of the people in the world. The women I teach didn't choose to be illiterate, didn't choose to be poor."

  "But you chose to teach that kind of people. Why complain?"

  "That kind of people?"

  "Miserable. Hopeless in this incarnation."

  Irene laughed. "You make me think of Kissinger, who said, 'This is not Africa's century.'"

  Anastasia did not smile.

  "I didn't mean to complain," Irene said, humiliated at the thought.

  "If you suffer in a place, leave," Anastasia said with conviction, and, Irene thought, a great deal of smugness.

  "If you suffer in a condition?"

  Anastasia lifted her spoon.

  It was now years later for almost everyone. It was certainly years later for Irene, who was astounded one day to find herself discussing teaching methods with a group of Native American and white women educators in Alaska.

  "As soon as I heard you were coming," said Anastasia, who now lived near Anchorage, "I told my man, 'I have to go see her; she's an old friend!'"

  They were sitting in a bar that on clear days boasted a perfect view of Mt. McKinley, a hundred miles away. Alas, clear days were apparently rare, and Irene had seen nothing of Alaska's legendary mountains but their feet. But even these were impressive.

  "You've forgiven me, I hope, for throwing you out," said Anastasia.

  "Oh, sure," said Irene. She was looking at the other people in the bar. She liked Alaska. She liked the way the people looked as if they had come, that very month, from someplace else. The damp weather, however, though not cold--as she had expected it to be--made her long for the sun, for fireplaces, for a less penetrable selection of clothing than she'd brought.

  Anastasia had snared her directly from the stage, where Irene had sat beside a Native Alaskan woman who talked of the failing eyesight of Alaskans, who were reading print, over long periods, for the first time.

  "Native Alaskans always took perfect vision for granted," the woman had said. "Then comes this reading. This television. This shopping where everything is labeled with words for more reading. Everybody needs glasses now to see anything at all." She was wearing huge aviator glasses with purple lenses. She yanked them off and blinked at the audience. It was a long pause, during which she dropped the assertive stance of her statement and seemed, somewhere inside herself, to fold. "There's a basic distrust maybe," she continued softly, "about acquiring knowledge in a way that can make you blind. This has to be behind many of our older people's reading problems."

  Irene didn't doubt it for a moment.

  Anastasia had taken Irene's arm and stood close beside her while Native Alaskan educators pressed her hand warmly. "So good to see you!" they said, as if they had been waiting for her. "So happy you could come all this way up from the Lower 48!"

  "When I heard you were coming, and that it would be a conference about Natives, I thought I'd be the only white chick around. But I see I'm not."

  Irene did not blink at this.

  And now they sat at the bar, with its famous absent view of Mt. McKinley. Irene felt drained from the panel discussion. Thinking of the woman in the aviator glasses, she was also depressed. She finished her first Irish whiskey and ordered another. When she looked at Anastasia, whose hair was now in braids and held by leather thongs with feathers, and whose eyes literally danced, it was as if Anastasia were receding, receding, receding, into the blurred landscape. But this was a momentary and maudlin vision, which Irene had another gulp of her drink to squelch.

  "So," she said, "nobody's anything."

  "I hear
d you were happily married," said Anastasia, ignoring Irene's remark.

  "We were happy. I'm almost sure we were happy. You know happiness is being able to assume you are happy. Anyway, he left me."

  "I love being white," Anastasia said, plunging in and screwing up her face in a mock excess of delight. "Ask me why."

  "Why?" said Irene.

  "Because as a black person I had no sense of humor!" She laughed, and her funny face and her laughter meshed.

  "I can't deny that," said Irene. "Besides, passing for white is so--so--colorful." She meant, really, that it was passe.

  "No, no," said Anastasia. "That's Imitation of Life--and what was that other tacky movie? Pinky? Not even a Jessie Fauset or a Nella Larsen novel, where being white is such a to-do about what colors now look good against your skin. There were shades of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in the beginning--you know, could a potentially great black woman find happiness as a mediocre white one?--but that passed." She laughed. "Anyway, I'm not passing; I'm just through trying to correct other people's opinion."

  Irene, staring directly into Anastasia's eyes, felt the strangest sensation. Those eyes now looked out of a white person. What did that mean?

  "I loved being married," said Irene, lowering her gaze to her glass. "I was finally calm enough to look about me without panic." She shrugged. For years of her marriage there had been so little panic she'd fallen asleep. So that if you asked her what she did between 1965 and 1968, she would probably recall only that those three years amounted to one day, really, and that on that day one of her neighbors had invited her to go fishing, and she had declined.

  "That's it," said Anastasia, "sort of. When you're not living with someone it's like all sides of you are exposed at once. Right? But when you are living with someone at least one side of you is covered. Panic can still strike, but not on that one side." She wanted to emphasize how this was especially true in the case of race. That, having put race aside as a cause of concern, she could now concentrate on whatever assaults were in store for the other facets of herself. But of course Irene would say she had not put aside race, only chosen a different side of it to live on. Blacks who had not had her experience were rarely inclined to appreciate her point of view; though she understood this, she still thought it spoke of limitation on their part.

  "What happened to Source, Peace and Calm, Bliss and Co.--South America? Do you have the baby here with you?" Irene asked, looking about the bar as if she expected to see Bliss crawling under the tables in their direction.

  Anastasia looked glum. Her cheeks, Irene noticed, sagged when she wasn't smiling. But this was no worse than what the years had done to Irene's own face.

  Anastasia had switched to Mai Tais; in her mind, Alaska and Hawaii were very close--they were so distant from the other forty-eight states. She said, sullenly, taking a sip from her small, overdressed drink (in addition to the traditional umbrella, there were tiny snowshoes), "I have a permanent tremor under my eye now--you know that? I've had it since living in San Francisco. It comes and goes. Now that I've mentioned it, watch for it. It is sure to make its appearance before long."

  Her right eye, underneath the eye, really, began to quiver.

  "I hate that," she said, clapping her palm over it. "I don't know where they are. They may have gone to South America, for all I know. I don't know what happened to Bliss." She giggled.

  "Something happened to bliss," said Irene, and giggled also. The two of them whooped, thumped their glasses on the table and rumbled their feet underneath. A solicitous waitress inquired if there were something she could do.

  "Find out what happened to bliss!" they said, laughing up at her and ordering doubles.

  "After a couple of years I began to fall apart again," said Anastasia. "Facial tic, constant colds, diarrhea, you name it. You should have seen me. My hair looked like brass wire, my skin had more eruptions than Indonesia. My teeth were loosening.... If I was so tranquil, why was this happening? I hadn't slept a whole night since I couldn't remember when, either.

  "But I didn't want to leave Source, oh no! Listen, average sex, but with great dope, a little music, somebody above you to intercede with God, and the world outside your immediate premises fails to interest."

  "Hummmmm," said Irene.

  "Leave Source? Not on your life! Or my life, as the case was. Enter my parents--as screwed up as I was myself, but a mite put out that I was in the habit of talking to myself as easily as to strangers on the street." She shrugged. "Back to Arkansas. A few months of house arrest, no dope, church music (listen, the only reason Jehovah's Witnesses can sing is they've ripped off so many Baptists) and the realization that neither black nor white had ever known what to do with us in Arkansas. That we were freaks. And that it was my parents' ambivalence, as much as anything, that had driven us all nuts. They were horrified if my friends were poor and black, disappointed in my taste if they were black and middle class, and embittered if they were white; where was my racial pride?

  "I married the first man who signed up from Arkansas to work on the Alaska pipeline. Found a job. Divorced him. Voila."

  Irene thought of Fania, whose interest in reading had finally been sustained by the slave narratives of black women so similar, she felt, to herself, and who would have read with keen interest the story Anastasia was now telling.

  Was your mother white?

  Yes, she pretty white; not white enough for white people. She have long hair, but it was kinda wavy....

  Were your children mulattoes?

  No, Sir! They were all white. They looked just like him...then he told me he was goin' to die...and he said that if I would promise him that I would go to New York, he would leave me and the children free.... He told me no person would know it (that I was colored) if I didn't tell it*

  "Did I ever tell you about Fania Evans?" asked Irene. "No? She was one of the women I tried to teach to read the newspaper. I had trouble because she refused to learn to read anything that hurt her. The world being what it is, this left very little news."

  "Oh yes, I think I remember something about her," said Anastasia, in the spirit of the conversation. She didn't remember a word. "But wait a minute," she said, "let me really bring you up to date. The man I live with now is an Indian, an Aleut. Did I tell you that?"

  "You probably tried to," said Irene, "but no saga of sexual superiority, womanlike tenderness or rippling muscles, please."

  "He does have it all," said Anastasia, happily, "but I won't mention it."

  "Thanks," said Irene.

  "We live in a small fishing village where the only industry is smoking salmon. That's all the women there know how to do. But as a white woman--" she grinned across the table at Irene, who at that moment was feeling unpleasantly sour, "or should I say as a non-Native? Anyway, they didn't expect me to know how to smoke salmon. When I did it along with them, they were delighted. It was as if I'd evolved. They don't know this yet, but I'm on my way to being them." She paused. "I think really that Source was a fascist. Only a fascist would say nobody's anything. Everybody's something. Somebody. And I couldn't feel like somebody without a color. I don't think anyone in America can.... Which really is pathetic. However, looking as I look, black wasn't special enough. It required two hours of explanation to every two seconds of joy." She paused again. "And it was two seconds."

  "Gotcha," said Irene. She was so drunk by now that she understood everything Anastasia said as if she'd thought it herself. But she also forgot it at once.

  "Now, tell me about Fania Whosis? I want to know all about her," said Anastasia.

  "No," said Irene, "I'm too drunk."

  "I'll order coffee," said Anastasia. "I also have to go to the toilet."

  "So do I," said Irene, feeling her stomach muscles rebel against her control-top panty hose.

  When they returned, a pitcher of coffee shaped like a moose's head awaited them. Irene was still mopping her face and neck with a wet paper towel, and Anastasia was taking a small conta
iner of honey from her handbag. She did not eat sugar.

  For ten minutes they drank the strong coffee in silence. Eventually, their heads began to clear.

  For the first time, Irene was aware of the people in the booth directly behind them. Fifteen years ago, a man's voice said, they weren't allowed in places like this. No dogs, Eskimos or Indians Allowed. That's terrible, a woman's voice replied. Especially since it was their country, a young man spoke, sneeringly. But we developed it, said the young woman, in sisterly explanation. Oh, sure, said the young man. How can a woman say something so stupid? You've been developed yourself, only you're so dumb you think you like it. The older woman's voice, attempting to keep the peace, spoke up, changing the subject. Is it really all that much bigger than Texas? Oh, way bigger, said the older man with pride.

  All Irene had known about Alaska she'd read in an Edna Ferber novel. Now she had learned about gigantic turnips, colossal watermelons, marijuana that was not only legally grown, harvested and used, but that regularly grew twenty feet tall in the hot, intensely productive summers. She had learned that parkas were way beyond her budget and that mukluks made her feet sweat. The Eskimos and Indians she saw on the street looked like any oriental San Franciscan. Now her mind stuck on fifteen years ago, and her own witnessing of similar signs coming down in the South. But the signs had already done their work. For as long as she lived she knew she would be intimidated by fancy restaurants, hotels, even libraries, from which she had been excluded before.

  "It's nice to look at you. To tell you I enjoy the way you look." Anastasia reached over and caressed Irene's cheek. Then she got up, bent over Irene, and very deliberately gave her a kiss, pressing her lips firmly against the warm, jasmine-smelling brown skin. "I always envied you, before," she said.

  "It's supposed to be the other way around," said Irene, smiling.

  "It was so miserable, growing up, not resembling any of my friends. Resembling, instead, the people they hated! And oh, black people were so confused. They showed me in every way they envied me because my color and my hair made things 'easy' for me, but those other people, with hair and skin like mine, they despised, and took every opportunity to tell me so. And another thing, I'm really rather homely, even funny-looking. But I was convinced very early that I was a beauty. I was never permitted an accurate reflection of myself."