You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [22]
Mrs. Hyde had stopped the car and reached into the back seat and fetched up the cane that made walking a somewhat more steady affair for Mrs. Clement White. It was a lovely oak cane, hand carved by a famous eighteenth-century carver who fell into the hands of a mistress who demanded twenty such carved canes a week; these she sold in the marketplace in Charleston, and thus, after her husband lost his money gambling and ran off with a woman who supplied him with more, she had supported herself. The carver, sick of carving and unbelieving that the Civil War would free the slaves, and too much of a gentleman to rebel or run away from a helpless white woman who needed him, cut off three fingers from his left hand, “accidentally,” while “branching” a tree. But he had not reckoned on the Scarlett O’Hara persistence of his mistress. She limited the number of canes she expected weekly to fifteen.
I was standing watching Ben make the canes, thought Andrea Clement White, because I was his daughter. Was I pretty? She thought probably she was. And she had been his other hand until freedom came. Freedom had come and everyone had had ideas about what it was for, even Ben. He had simply died. I was at the burying, of course. It was I, in fact, who dug the grave, along with…then she wondered if she would have had to be a boy to help dig the grave. She saw herself as one. Handsome, was he? She thought probably yes. But then she thought she would not have had to be a boy to do it because she had been doing every kind of work on the plantation as a girl, and no one thought anything of it, so she’d stay a girl. She sighed with relief.
Rudolph Miller opened the car door on her side and she looked out and up into his lapel. He had the unctuous, shit-eating grin she’d despised for—thirty years. How had she stood it without throwing up? It seemed to be made of wet papier-mâché. Took his hand: dry, plump, old hand, horny nails. Yuck. (Her grandchildren’s expressions came in handy at times like this.) Mrs. Hyde trotted around the car with the cane. So fat, Mrs. Hyde, and given to hyperventilation. But oh, the lilacs! Even here. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed…” Abe Lincoln had probably never dreamed there would be colleges like this, for blacks, in the South. What had he dreamed? To be better looking, she didn’t doubt.
Now she had liver spots on her cheeks and her hair was slowly receding, but that wasn’t so bad. She could look infinitely worse and there’d still be a luncheon for her, a banquet later tonight and book parties and telegrams and people beaming at her well into the future. Success was the best bone structure. Or the best cosmetic. But was she a success? she asked herself. And herself answered, in a chorus, exasperated, Of Course You Are! Only a small voice near the back faltered. She stifled it.
There was, oh, McGeorge Grundy. Bundy. Ford Foundation. Going up the stairs. (They had really scrounged for dignitaries for this affair.) It would turn into a fund raiser, as everything did. And did she mind? She was making a speech as McGeorge: I give you all the money in one lump. You’ll never have to worry about money again. Or beg. Period. Good-bye. Cheering. Throwing of hats in the air. People actually used to do that. But few people wore hats today. Of course Nigerians, she heard, threw people, but that was depressing.
“This little lady has done…” Would he have said “This little man…”? But of course not. No man wanted to be called little. He thought it referred to his penis. But to say “little lady” made men think of virgins. Tight, tiny pussies, and moments of rape.
But this was fame, thought Andrea Clement White, poking at her Rock Cornish