You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [27]
They were in the living room of their peaceful, quiet and colorful house. Imani was in her rocker, Clarice dozing on her lap. Clarence sank to the floor and rested his head against her knees. She felt he was asking for nurture when she needed it herself. She felt the two of them, Clarence and Clarice, clinging to her, using her. And that the only way she could claim herself, feel herself distinct from them, was by doing something painful, self-defining but self-destructive.
She suffered the pressure of his head as long as she could.
“Have a vasectomy,” she said, “or stay in the guest room. Nothing is going to touch me anymore that isn’t harmless.”
He smoothed her thick hair with his hand. “We’ll talk about it,” he said, as if that was not what they were doing. “We’ll see. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of things.”
She had forgotten that the third Sunday in June, the following day, was the fifth memorial observance for Holly Monroe, who had been shot down on her way home from her high-school graduation ceremony five years before. Imani always went to these memorials. She liked the reassurance that her people had long memories, and that those people who fell in struggle or innocence were not forgotten. She was, of course, too weak to go. She was dizzy and still losing blood. The white lawgivers attempted to get around assassination—which Imani considered extreme abortion—by saying the victim provoked it (there had been some difficulty saying this about Holly Monroe, but they had tried) but were antiabortionist to a man. Imani thought of this as she resolutely showered and washed her hair.
Clarence had installed central air conditioning their second year in the house. Imani had at first objected. “I want to smell the trees, the flowers, the natural air!” she cried. But the first summer of 110-degree heat had cured her of giving a damn about any of that. Now she wanted to be cool. As much as she loved trees, on a hot day she would have sawed through a forest to get to an air conditioner.
In fairness to him, she had to admit he asked her if she thought she was well enough to go. But even to be asked annoyed her. She was not one to let her own troubles prevent her from showing proper respect and remembrance toward the dead, although she understood perfectly well that once dead, the dead do not exist. So respect, remembrance was for herself, and today herself needed rest. There was something mad about her refusal to rest, and she felt it as she tottered about getting Clarice dressed. But she did not stop. She ran a bath, plopped the child in it, scrubbed her plump body on her knees, arms straining over the tub awkwardly in a way that made her stomach hurt—but not yet her uterus—dried her hair, lifted her out and dried the rest of her on the kitchen table.
“You are going to remember as long as you live what kind of people they are,” she said to the child, who, gurgling and cooing, looked into her mother’s stern face with light-hearted fixation.
“You are going to hear the music,” Imani said. “The music they’ve tried to kill. The music they try to steal.” She felt feverish and was aware she was muttering. She didn’t care.
“They think they can kill a continent—people, trees, buffalo—and then fly off to the moon and just forget about it. But you and me, we’re going to remember the people, the trees and the fucking buffalo. Goddammit.”
“Buffwoe,” said the child, hitting at her mother’s face with a spoon.
She placed the baby on a blanket in the living room and turned to see her husband’s eyes, full of pity, on her. She wore pert green velvet slippers and a lovely sea green robe. Her body was bent within it. A reluctant tear formed beneath his gaze.
“Sometimes I look at you and I wonder ‘What is this man doing in my house?’”
This had started as a joke between them. Her aim had been never to marry, but to take in lovers who could be sent home at dawn, freeing her to work and ramble.
“I’m here because you love me,” was the traditional