You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [20]
Long before she returns he is reading her books and thinking of her—and of her struggles alone and his fear of sharing them—and when she returns, it is sixty percent her body that he moves against in the sun, her own black skin affirmed in the brightness of his eyes.
* “Womanist” approximates “black feminist.”
Fame
“IN ORDER TO SEE anything, and therefore to create,” Andrea Clement White was saying to the young woman seated across from her and listening very attentively, “one must not be famous.”
“But you are famous,” said the young woman, in mock perplexity, for the television cameras.
“Am I?” asked Andrea Clement White, and then added, “I suppose I am. But not really famous, you know, like…like…” But she could not bring herself to utter a rival’s name, because this would increase the rival’s fame, she felt, while diminishing her own.
“Your books have sold millions of copies,” the young interviewer was saying. “They’ve been translated into a dozen languages. Into German and Dutch and Portuguese…”
“Into Spanish and French and Japanese and Italian and Swahili,” Andrea Clement White completed the list for her, omitting, because they never came to mind, Russian, Greek, Polish and Lithuanian.
“And you’ve made from your work, how much? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes, yes,” said Andrea Clement White, in a little girl’s voice that mixed pride with peevishness. “I can’t complain, as to sales.”
And so the interview continued. A gentle interrogation with no embarrassing questions, because Andrea Clement White was now old and had become an institution and there was never anyone in her presence who did not evince respect.
“Let me put it this way,” she said. “It is more important that they are people, from the novelist’s point of view. A botanist might say of a flower, it is a red flower. He is really studying flowers.”
(Her mind had switched to automatic. No one had asked an interesting question in years.)
If she was famous, she wondered fretfully behind the alert face she raised for television, why didn’t she feel famous? She had made money, as the young woman—lamentably informed in other respects—had said. Lots of money. Thousands upon thousands of dollars. She had seen her work accepted around the world, welcomed even, which was more than she’d ever dreamed possible for it. And yet—there remained an emptiness, no, an ache, which told her she had not achieved what she had set out to achieve. And instead must live out her life always in the shadow of those who had accomplished more than she, or had, in any case, received a wider and more fervid recognition. But, on closer scrutiny, those “others” she immediately thought of—the talk show guests, the much reviewed, the oft quoted—had not received more acclaim or been more praised than she; why then did she feel they had?
(She knew she would not be satisfied with the interview when it was aired. She would come across as a fatuous, smug know-everything, or as an irritable, spacy old fool. Her chronic dissatisfaction was always captured by television, no matter how cleverly she tried to disguise it as, oh, fatigue, too much to think about, doddering old age, or whatever.)
She left the studio thinking of the luncheon for her that same afternoon. It was at the college where she’d taught English literature (how she’d struggled to prove Charles Chesnutt wrote in English!) for over a decade. The president would be there and all her colleagues, with whom she’d battled, sometimes successfully, sometimes not (for five years they’d resisted Chesnutt, for example) over the years. They would fulsomely praise her—obliterating from memory