You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [24]
She opened her mouth and began to sing with assurance an old, emphatically familiar song.
A slave song. Authorless.
Picked drumsticks fell onto plates like hail. Profound silence at last prevailed.
And it was this child’s confident memory, that old anonymous song, that gave Andrea Clement White the energy to stand up and endure with dignity (the audience surreptitiously nibbling at dessert as she began to speak) the presentation of her one hundred and eleventh major award.
The Abortion
THEY HAD DISCUSSED IT, but not deeply, whether they wanted the baby she was now carrying. “I don’t know if I want it,” she said, eyes filling with tears. She cried at anything now, and was often nauseous. That pregnant women cried easily and were nauseous seemed banal to her, and she resented banality.
“Well, think about it,” he said, with his smooth reassuring voice (but with an edge of impatience she now felt) that used to soothe her.
It was all she did think about, all she apparently could; that he could dream otherwise enraged her. But she always lost, when they argued. Her temper would flare up, he would become instantly reasonable, mature, responsible, if not responsive precisely, to her mood, and she would swallow down her tears and hate herself. It was because she believed him “good.” The best human being she had ever met.
“It isn’t as if we don’t already have a child,” she said in a calmer tone, carelessly wiping at the tear that slid from one eye.
“We have a perfect child,” he said with relish, “thank the Good Lord!”
Had she ever dreamed she’d marry someone humble enough to go around thanking the Good Lord? She had not.
Now they left the bedroom, where she had been lying down on their massive king-size bed with the forbidding ridge in the middle, and went down the hall—hung with bright prints—to the cheerful, spotlessly clean kitchen. He put water on for tea in a bright yellow pot.
She wanted him to want the baby so much he would try to save its life. On the other hand, she did not permit such presumptuousness. As he praised the child they already had, a daughter of sunny disposition and winning smile, Imani sensed subterfuge, and hardened her heart.
“What am I talking about,” she said, as if she’d been talking about it. “Another child would kill me. I can’t imagine life with two children. Having a child is a good experience to have had, like graduate school. But if you’ve had one, you’ve had the experience and that’s enough.”
He placed the tea before her and rested a heavy hand on her hair. She felt the heat and pressure of his hand as she touched the cup and felt the odor and steam rise up from it. Her throat contracted.
“I can’t drink that,” she said through gritted teeth. “Take it away.”
There were days of this.
Clarice, their daughter, was barely two years old. A miscarriage brought on by grief (Imani had lost her fervidly environmentalist mother to lung cancer shortly after Clarice’s birth; the asbestos ceiling in the classroom where she taught first graders had leaked for twenty years) separated Clarice’s birth from the new pregnancy. Imani felt her body had been assaulted by these events and was, in fact, considerably weakened, and was also, in any case, chronically anaemic and run down. Still, if she had wanted the baby more than she did not want it, she would not have planned to abort it.
They lived in a small town in the South. Her husband, Clarence, was, among other things, legal adviser and defender of the new black mayor of the town. The mayor was much in their lives because of the difficulties being the first black mayor of a small town assured, and because, next to the major leaders of black struggles in the South, Clarence respected and admired him most.
Imani reserved absolute judgment, but she did point out that Mayor Carswell would never look at her directly