You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [15]
For centuries the black woman has served as the primary pornographic “outlet” for white men in Europe and America. We need only think of the black women used as breeders, raped for the pleasure and profit of their owners. We need only think of the license the “master” of the slave woman enjoyed. But, most telling of all, we need only study the old slave societies of the South to note the sadistic treatment—at the hands of white “gentlemen”—of “beautiful, young quadroons and octoroons” who became increasingly (and were deliberately bred to become) indistinguishable from white women, and were the more highly prized as slave mistresses because of this.
Although this “fable,” “story,” “introduction” was itself labeled pornographic and banned temporarily by at least one school district in the United States, I believe it is only by writing stories in which pornography is confronted openly and explicitly that writers can make a contribution, in their own medium, to a necessary fight.
A middle-aged husband comes home after a long day at the office. His wife greets him at the door with the news that dinner is ready. He is grateful. First, however, he must use the bathroom. In the bathroom, sitting on the commode, he opens up the Jiveboy magazine he has brought home in his briefcase. There are a couple of jivemate poses that particularly arouse him. He studies the young women—blonde, perhaps (the national craze), with elastic waists and inviting eyes—and strokes his penis. At the same time, his bowels stir with the desire to defecate. He is in the bathroom a luxurious ten minutes. He emerges spent, relaxed—hungry for dinner.
His wife, using the bathroom later, comes upon the slightly damp magazine. She picks it up with mixed emotions. She is a brownskin woman with black hair and eyes. She looks at the white blondes and brunettes. Will he be thinking of them, she wonders, when he is making love to me?
“Why do you need these?” she asks.
“They mean nothing,” he says.
“But they hurt me somehow,” she says.
“You are being a.) silly, b.) a prude, and c.) ridiculous,” he says. “You know I love you.”
She cannot say to him: But they are not me, those women. She cannot say she is jealous of pictures on a page. That she feels invisible. Rejected. Overlooked. She says instead, to herself: He is right. I will grow up. Adjust. Swim with the tide.
He thinks he understands her, what she has been trying to say. It is Jiveboy, he thinks. The white women.
Next day he brings home Jivers, a black magazine, filled with bronze and honey-colored women. He is in the bathroom another luxurious ten minutes.
She stands, holding the magazine: on the cover are the legs and shoes of a well-dressed black man, carrying a briefcase and a rolled Wall Street Journal in one hand. At his feet—she turns the magazine cover around and around to figure out how exactly the pose is accomplished—there is a woman, a brownskin woman like herself, twisted and contorted in such a way that her head is not even visible. Only her glistening body—her back and derriere—so that she looks like a human turd at the man’s feet.
He is on a business trip to New York. He has brought his wife along. He is eagerly sharing 42nd Street with her. “Look!” he says. “How free everything is! A far cry from Bolton!” (The small town they are from.) He is elated to see the blonde, spaced-out hookers, with their black pimps, trooping down the street. Elated at the shortness of the black hookers’ dresses, their long hair, inevitably false and blond. She walks somehow behind him, so that he will encounter