You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [38]
Luna and I did not discuss this. It is odd, I think now, that we didn’t. It was as if he was never there, as if he and Luna had not shared the bedroom that night. A month later, Luna went alone to Goa, in her solitary way. She lived on an island and slept, she wrote, on the beach. She mentioned she’d found a lover there who protected her from the local beachcombers and pests.
Several years later, she came to visit me in the South and brought a lovely piece of pottery which my daughter much later dropped and broke, but which I glued back together in such a way that the flaw improves the beauty and fragility of the design.
Afterwords, Afterwards
Second Thoughts
That is the “story.” It has an “unresolved” ending. That is because Freddie Pye and Luna are still alive, as am I. However, one evening while talking to a friend, I heard myself say that I had, in fact, written two endings. One, which follows, I considered appropriate for such a story published in a country truly committed to justice, and the one above, which is the best I can afford to offer a society in which lynching is still reserved, at least subconsciously, as a means of racial control.
I said that if we in fact lived in a society committed to the establishment of justice for everyone (“justice” in this case encompassing equal housing, education, access to work, adequate dental care, et cetera), thereby placing Luna and Freddie Pye in their correct relationship to each other, i.e., that of brother and sister, compañeros, then the two of them would be required to struggle together over what his rape of her had meant.
Since my friend is a black man whom I love and who loves me, we spent a considerable amount of time discussing what this particular rape meant to us. Morally wrong, we said, and not to be excused. Shameful; politically corrupt. Yet, as we thought of what might have happened to an indiscriminate number of innocent young black men in Freehold, Georgia, had Luna screamed, it became clear that more than a little of Ida B. Wells’s fear of probing the rape issue was running through us, too. The implications of this fear would not let me rest, so that months and years went by with most of the story written but with me incapable, or at least unwilling, to finish or to publish it.
In thinking about it over a period of years, there occurred a number of small changes, refinements, puzzles, in angle. Would these shed a wider light on the continuing subject? I do not know. In any case, I returned to my notes, hereto appended for the use of the reader.
Luna: Ida B. Wells—Discarded Notes
Additional characteristics of Luna: At a time when many in and out of the Movement considered “nigger” and “black” synonymous, and indulged in a sincere attempt to fake Southern “hip” speech, Luna resisted. She was the kind of WASP who could not easily imitate another’s ethnic style, nor could she even exaggerate her own. She was what she was. A very straight, clear-eyed, coolly observant young woman with no talent for existing outside her own skin.
Imaginary Knowledge
Luna explained the visit from Freddie Pye in this way:
“He called that evening, said he was in town, and did I know the Movement was coming north? I replied that I did know that.”
When could he see her? he wanted to know.
“Never,” she replied.
He had burst into tears, or something that sounded like tears, over the phone. He was stranded at wherever the evenings fund-raising event had been held. Not in the place itself, but outside, in the street. The “stars” had left, everyone had left. He was alone. He knew no one else in the city. Had found her number in the phone book. And had no money, no place to stay.
Could he, he asked, crash? He was tired, hungry, broke—and even in the South had had no job, other than the Movement, for months. Et cetera.
When he arrived, she had placed our only steak knife in the waistband of her jeans.
He had asked for a drink of water. She gave him orange juice, some cheese, and a couple of slices of bread. She had told him he might sleep on the church