You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [39]
At first he muttered, groaned, and cursed in his sleep. Then he fell off the narrow church pew. He kept rolling off. At two in the morning she unlocked her door, showed him her knife, and invited him to share her bed.
Nothing whatever happened except they talked. At first, only he talked. Not about the rape, but about his life.
“He was a small person physically, remember?” Luna asked me. (She was right. Over the years he had grown big and, yes, burly, in my imagination, and I’m sure in hers.) “That night he seemed tiny. A child. He was still fully dressed, except for the jacket, and he, literally, hugged his side of the bed. I hugged mine. The whole bed, in fact, was between us. We were merely hanging to its edges.”
At the fund-raiser—on Fifth Avenue and 71st Street, as it turned out—his leaders had introduced him as the unskilled, barely literate, former Southern fieldworker that he was. They had pushed him at the rich people gathered there as an example of what “the system” did to “the little people” in the South. They asked him to tell about the thirty-seven times he had been jailed. The thirty-five times he had been beaten. The one time he had lost consciousness in the “hot” box. They told him not to worry about his grammar. “Which, as you may recall,” said Luna, “was horrible.” Even so, he had tried to censor his “ain’ts” and his “us’es.” He had been painfully aware that he was on exhibit, like Frederick Douglass had been for the Abolitionists. But unlike Douglass he had no oratorical gift, no passionate language, no silver tongue. He knew the rich people and his own leaders perceived he was nothing: a broken man, unschooled, unskilled at anything.…
Yet he had spoken, trembling before so large a crowd of rich, white Northerners—who clearly thought their section of the country would never have the South’s racial problems—begging, with the painful stories of his wretched life, for their money.
At the end, all of them—the black leaders, too—had gone. They left him watching the taillights of their cars, recalling the faces of the friends come to pick them up: the women dressed in African print that shone, with elaborately arranged hair, their jewelry sparkling, their perfume exotic. They were so beautiful, yet so strange. He could not imagine that one of them could comprehend his life. He did not ask for a ride, because of that, but also because he had no place to go. Then he had remembered Luna.
Soon Luna would be required to talk. She would mention her confusion over whether, in a black community surrounded by whites with a history of lynching blacks, she had a right to scream as Freddie Pye was raping her. For her, this was the crux of the matter.
And so they would continue talking through the night.
This is another ending, created from whole cloth. If I believed Luna’s story about the rape, and I did (had she told anyone else I might have dismissed it), then this reconstruction of what might have happened is as probable an accounting as any is liable to be. Two people have now become “characters.”
I have forced them to talk until they reached the stumbling block of the rape, which they must remove themselves, before proceeding to a place from which it will be possible to insist on a society in which Luna’s word alone on rape can never be used to intimidate an entire people, and in which an innocent black man’s protestation of innocence of rape is unprejudicially heard. Until such a society is created, relationships of affection between black men and white women will always be poisoned—from within as from without—by historical fear and the threat of violence, and solidarity among black and white women is only rarely likely to exist.
Postscript: Havana, Cuba, November 1976
I am in Havana with a group of other black American artists. We have spent the morning apart from our Cuban