You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [32]
He thinks frantically of what she might be thinking of him. Realizes he is moving in her desperately, as if he is climbing the walls of a closed building. As if she reads his mind, she moans encouragingly. But it is a distracted moan—that offends him.
He bites the pillow over her head: Where is she? he thinks. Is she into fantasy or not?
He must be.
He slips her into the role of “Fannie” with some hope. But nothing develops. As “Fannie” she refuses even to leave her Southern town. Won’t speak to, much less go down on, either of the two gays.
He races back and forth between an image of her bound and on her knees, to two black men and a white woman becoming acquainted outside a bar.
This does not help.
Besides, she is involved in the activity inside herself and holding him—nostalgically.
He feels himself sliding down the wall that is her body, and expelled from inside her.
Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells
I MET LUNA the summer of 1965 in Atlanta where we both attended a political conference and rally. It was designed to give us the courage, as temporary civil rights workers, to penetrate the small hamlets farther south. I had taken a bus from Sarah Lawrence in New York and gone back to Georgia, my home state, to try my hand at registering voters. It had become obvious from the high spirits and sense of almost divine purpose exhibited by black people that a revolution was going on, and I did not intend to miss it. Especially not this summery, student-studded version of it. And I thought it would be fun to spend some time on my own in the South.
Luna was sitting on the back of a pickup truck, waiting for someone to take her from Faith Baptist, where the rally was held, to whatever gracious black Negro home awaited her. I remember because someone who assumed I would also be traveling by pickup introduced us. I remember her face when I said, “No, no more back of pickup trucks for me. I know Atlanta well enough, I’ll walk.” She assumed of course (I guess) that I did not wish to ride beside her because she was white, and I was not curious enough about what she might have thought to explain it to her. And yet I was struck by her passivity, her patience as she sat on the truck alone and ignored, because someone had told her to wait there quietly until it was time to go.
This look of passively waiting for something changed very little over the years I knew her. It was only four or five years in all that I did. It seems longer, perhaps because we met at such an optimistic time in our lives. John Kennedy and Malcolm X had already been assassinated, but King had not been and Bobby Kennedy had not been. Then too, the lethal, bizarre elimination by death of this militant or that, exiles, flights to Cuba, shoot-outs between former Movement friends sundered forever by lies planted by the FBI, the gunning down of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr., as she played the Lord’s Prayer on the piano in her church (was her name Alberta?), were still in the happily unfathomable future.
We believed we could change America because we were young and bright and held ourselves responsible for changing it. We did not believe we would fail. That is what lent fervor (revivalist fervor, in fact; we would revive America!) to our songs, and lent sweetness to our friendships (in the beginning almost all interracial), and gave a wonderful fillip to our sex (which, too, in the beginning, was almost always interracial).
What first struck me about Luna when we later lived together was that she did not own a bra. This was curious to me, I suppose, because she also did not need one. Her chest was