You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [40]
High above the beautiful city of Havana I sit in the Havana Libre pavilion with the muralist / photographer in our group. He is in his mid-thirties, a handsome, brown, erect individual whom I have known casually for a number of years. During the sixties he designed and painted street murals for both SNCC and the Black Panthers, and in an earlier discussion with Cuban artists he showed impatience with their explanation of why we had seen no murals covering some of the city’s rather dingy walls: Cuba, they had said, unlike Mexico, has no mural tradition. “But the point of a revolution,” insisted Our Muralist, “is to make new traditions!” And he had pressed his argument with such passion for the usefulness, for revolutionary communication, of his craft, that the Cubans were both exasperated and impressed. They drove us around the city for a tour of their huge billboards, all advancing socialist thought and the heroism of men like Lenin, Camilo, and Che Guevara, and said, “These, these are our ‘murals’!”
While we ate lunch, I asked Our Muralist what he’d thought of “Luna.” Especially the appended section.
“Not much,” was his reply. “Your view of human weakness is too biblical,” he said. “You are unable to conceive of the man without conscience. The man who cares nothing about the state of his soul because he’s long since sold it. In short,” he said, “you do not understand that some people are simply evil, a disease on the lives of other people, and that to remove the disease altogether is preferable to trying to interpret, contain, or forgive it. Your ‘Freddie Pye,’” and he laughed, “was probably raping white women on the instructions of his government.”
Oh ho, I thought. Because, of course, for a second, during which I stalled my verbal reply, this comment made both very little and very much sense.
“I am sometimes naive and sentimental,” I offered. I am sometimes both, though frequently by design. Admission in this way is tactical, a stimulant to conversation.
“And shocked at what I’ve said,” he said, and laughed again. “Even though,” he continued, “you know by now that blacks could be hired to blow up other blacks, and could be hired by someone to shoot down Brother Malcolm, and hired by someone to provide a diagram of Fred Hampton’s bedroom so the pigs could shoot him easily while he slept, you find it hard to believe a black man could be hired by someone to rape white women. But think a minute, and you will see why it is the perfect disruptive act. Enough blacks raping or accused of raping enough white women and any political movement that cuts across racial lines is doomed.
“Larger forces are at work than your story would indicate,” he continued. “You’re still thinking of lust and rage, moving slowly into aggression and purely racial hatred. But you should be considering money—which the rapist would get, probably from your very own tax dollars, in fact—and a maintaining of the status quo; which those hiring the rapist would achieve. I know all this,” he said, “because when I was broke and hungry and selling my blood to buy the food and the paint that allowed me to work, I was offered such ‘other work.’”
“But you did not take it.”
He frowned. “There you go again. How do you know I didn’t take it? It paid, and I was starving.”
“You didn’t take it,” I repeated.
“No,” he said. “A black and white ‘team’ made the offer. I had enough energy left to threaten to throw them out of the room.”
“But even if Freddie Pye had been hired by someone to rape Luna, that still would not explain his second visit.”
“Probably nothing will explain that,” said Our Muralist. “But assuming Freddie Pye was paid to disrupt—by raping a white woman—the black struggle in the South, he may have wised up enough later to comprehend the significance of Luna’s decision not to scream.”
“So you are saying he did have a conscience?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said, but his look clearly implied I would