You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [28]
It was a hundred degrees by ten o’clock. By eleven, when the memorial service began, it would be ten degrees hotter. Imani staggered from the heat. When she sat in the car she had to clench her teeth against the dizziness until the motor prodded the air conditioning to envelop them in coolness. A dull ache started in her uterus.
The church was not of course air conditioned. It was authentic Primitive Baptist in every sense.
Like the four previous memorials this one was designed by Holly Monroe’s classmates. All twenty-five of whom—fat and thin—managed to look like the dead girl. Imani had never seen Holly Monroe, though there were always photographs of her dominating the pulpit of this church where she had been baptized and where she had sung in the choir—and to her, every black girl of a certain vulnerable age was Holly Monroe. And an even deeper truth was that Holly Monroe was herself. Herself shot down, aborted on the eve of becoming herself.
She was prepared to cry and to do so with abandon. But she did not. She clenched her teeth against the steadily increasing pain and her tears were instantly blotted by the heat.
Mayor Carswell had been waiting for Clarence in the vestibule of the church, mopping his plumply jowled face with a voluminous handkerchief and holding court among half a dozen young men and women who listened to him with awe. Imani exchanged greetings with the mayor, he ritualistically kissed her on the cheek, and kissed Clarice on the cheek, but his rather heat-glazed eye was already fastened on her husband. The two men huddled in a corner away from the awed young group. Away from Imani and Clarice, who passed hesitantly, waiting to be joined or to be called back, into the church.
There was a quarter hour’s worth of music.
“Holly Monroe was five feet, three inches tall, and weighed one hundred and eleven pounds,” her best friend said, not reading from notes, but talking to each person in the audience. “She was a stubborn, loyal Aries, the best kind of friend to have. She had black kinky hair that she experimented with a lot. She was exactly the color of this oak church pew in the summer; in the winter she was the color [pointing up] of this heart pine ceiling. She loved green. She did not like lavender because she said she also didn’t like pink. She had brown eyes and wore glasses, except when she was meeting someone for the first time. She had a sort of rounded nose. She had beautiful large teeth, but her lips were always chapped so she didn’t smile as much as she might have if she’d ever gotten used to carrying Chap Stick. She had elegant feet.
“Her favorite church song was ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.’ Her favorite other kind of song was ‘I Can’t Help Myself—I Love You and Nobody Else.’ She was often late for choir rehearsal though she loved to sing. She made the dress she wore to her graduation in Home Ec. She hated Home Ec.…”
Imani was aware that the sound of low, murmurous voices had been the background for this statement all along. Everything was quiet around her, even Clarice sat up straight, absorbed by the simple friendliness of the young woman’s voice. All of Holly Monroe’s classmates and friends in the choir wore vivid green. Imani imagined Clarice entranced by the brilliant, swaying color as by a field of swaying corn.
Lifting the child, her uterus burning, and perspiration already a stream down her back, Imani tiptoed to the door. Clarence and the mayor were still deep in conversation. She heard “board meeting…aldermen…city council.” She beckoned to Clarence.
“Your voices are carrying!” she hissed.
She meant: How dare you not come inside.
They did not. Clarence raised his head, looked at her, and shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Then, turning, with the abstracted air of priests, the two men moved slowly toward the outer door, and into the churchyard, coming to stand some distance from the church beneath a large oak tree. There they remained throughout the service.
Two years later, Clarence was furious