You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [14]
It was their first quarrel.
When he saw her again she had spent the weekend (which had been coming up) in nearby Boston. She looked cheerful, happy and relaxed. From her letters to him—which he had thought embarrassingly self-revealing and erotic, though flattering, of course, to him—he had assumed she was on the point of declaring her undying love and of wanting to run away with him. Instead, she had gone off for two days, without mentioning it to him. And she had gone, so she said, by herself!
She soothed him as best she could. Lied, which she hated more than anything, about her work. “It was going so poorly,” she complained (and the words rang metallic in her mouth); “I just couldn’t bear staying here doing nothing where working conditions are so idyllic!” He appeared somewhat mollified. Actually, her work was going fine and she had sent off to her publishers a completed book of poems and jazz arrangements—which was what she had come to the Colony to do. “Your work was going swimmingly down at the lake,” she giggled. “I didn’t wish to disturb you.”
And yet it was clear he was disturbed.
So she did not tell him she had flown all the way home.
He was always questioning her now about her town, her house, her child, her husband. She found herself describing her husband as if to a prospective bride. She lingered over the wiry bronze of his hair, the evenness of his teeth. his black, black eyes, the thrilling timbre of his deep voice. It was an exceptionally fine voice, it seemed to her now, listening to Ellis’s rather whining one. Though, on second thought, it was perhaps nothing special.
At night, after a rousing but unsatisfactory evening with Ellis, she dreamed of her husband making love to her on the kitchen floor at home, where the sunlight collected in a pool beneath the window, and lay in bed next day dreaming of all the faraway countries, daring adventures, passionate lovers still to be found.
Petunias
This is what they read on the next to the last page of the diary they found after her death in the explosion:
As soon as my son got off the bus from Vietnam I could tell he was different. He said, Mama, I’m going to show you how to make bombs. He went with me to the house, me thinking it was all a big joke. He had all of the stuff in a footlocker and in his duffel bag among his clothes. So it wouldn’t jar, he said.
Son, I said, I don’t think I want that stuff in my house.
But he just laughed. Let’s make a big noise in Tranquil, Mississippi, he said.
We have always lived in Tranquil. My daddy’s grandmama was a slave on the Tearslee Plantation. They dug up her grave when I started agitating in the Movement. One morning I found her dust dumped over my verbena bed, a splintery leg bone had fell among my petunias.
Coming Apart
By Way of Introduction to Lorde, Teish and Gardner
IN 1979 I WAS INVITED by Laura Lederer to write an introduction to the Third World Women’s chapter of a book she was then editing about pornography called Take Back the Night. When I agreed to write it, she sent me three essays, by Audre Lorde, Luisah Teish and Tracy A. Gardner. I was moved by the essays and the following “introduction”—published in Ms. before book publication simply as “A Fable”—was the result.
The “fable” works, I think, as a story, and in fact it appears as one, rather than as an introduction, in Take Back the Night. However, if I had written it as a story originally, making up all the parts myself, or choosing my informants, my analysis of the roots of vicious white male pornographic treatment of white women would have been somewhat different, with a longer historical perspective.
While not