You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [17]
Now she is busy pasting Audre Lorde’s words on the cabinet over the kitchen sink.
When they make love she tries to look him in the eye, but he refuses to return her gaze.
For the first time he acknowledges the awareness that the pleasure of coming without her is bitter and lonely. He thinks of eating stolen candy alone, behind the barn. And yet, he thinks greedily, it is better than nothing, which he considers her struggle’s benefit to him.
The next day, she is reading another essay when he comes home from work. It is called “A Quiet Subversion,” and is by Luisah Teish. “Another dyke?” he asks.
“Another one of your sisters,” she replies, and begins to read, even before he’s had dinner:
During the “Black Power Movement” much cultural education was focused on the black physique. One of the accomplishments of that period was the popularization of African hairstyles and the Natural. Along with this new hair-do came a new self-image and way of relating. Then the movie industry put out “Superfly,” and the Lord Jesus Look, the Konked head, and an accompanying attitude, ran rampant in the black community. Films like “Shaft” and “Lady Sings the Blues” portray black “heroes” as cocaine-snorting, fast-life fools. In these movies a black woman is always caught in a web of violence.…
A popular Berkeley theatre featured a porno movie titled “Slaves of Love.” Its advertisement portrayed two black women, naked, in chains, and a white man standing over them with a whip! How such racist pornographic material escaped the eye of black activists presents a problem.…
Typically, he doesn’t even hear the statement about the women. “What does the bitch know about the Black Power Movement?” he fumes. He is angry at his wife for knowing him so long and so well. She knows, for instance, that because of the Black Power Movement (and really because of the Civil Rights movement before it), and not because he was at all active in it, he holds the bourgeois job he has. She remembers when his own hair was afroed. Now it is loosely curled. It occurs to him that, because she knows him as he was, he cannot make love to her as she is. Cannot, in fact, love her as she is. There is a way in which, in some firmly repressed corner of his mind, he considers his wife to be still black, whereas he feels himself to have moved to some other plane.
(This insight, a glimmer of which occurs to him, frightens him so much that he will resist it for several years. Should he accept it at once, however unsettling, it would help him understand the illogic of his acceptance of pornography used against black women: that he has detached himself from his own blackness in attempting to identify black women only by their sex.)
The wife has never considered herself a feminist—though she is, of course, a “womanist.”* A womanist is a feminist, only more common. (The author of this piece is a womanist.) So she is surprised when her husband attacks her as a “women’s libber,” a “white women’s lackey,” a “pawn” in the hands of Gloria Steinem, an incipient bra-burner! What possible connection could there be, he wants to know, between her and white women—those overprivileged hags now (he’s recently read in Newsweek) marching and preaching their puritanical horseshit up and down Times Square!
(He remembers only the freedom he felt there, not her long standing before the window of the plastic doll shop.) And if she is going to make a lot of new connections with dykes and whites,