You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [46]
It was the word “adventure” and the different meaning it had for each of us that finally separated us. We had come to understand that, and to accept it without bitterness.
“I wanted to ask you to let me go away with him, for just a couple of months,” I said. “To let me go…”
“He grew steadily worse, you know. His last letters were brutal. He blamed you for everything, even the accident, accusing you of awful, nasty things. He became a bitter, vindictive man.”
He knew me well enough to know I heard this and I did not hear it.
He sighed. “It would have been tough for me,” he said. “Tough for our daughter. Tough for you. Toughest of all for Laurel.”
(“Tell me it’s all right that I didn’t go!” I wanted to plead, but didn’t.)
“Right,” I said instead, shrugging, and turning our talk to something else.
A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?
DEAR LUCY,
You ask why I snubbed you at the Women for Elected Officials Ball. I don’t blame you for feeling surprised and hurt. After all, we planned the ball together, expecting to raise our usual pisspot full of money for a good cause. Such a fine idea, our ball: Come as the feminist you most admire! But I did not know you most admired Scarlett O’Hara and so I was, for a moment, taken aback.
I don’t know; maybe I should see that picture again. Sometimes when I see movies that hurt me as a child, the pain is minor; I can laugh at the things that made me sad. My trouble with Scarlett was always the forced buffoonery of Prissy, whose strained, slavish voice, as Miz Scarlett pushed her so masterfully up the stairs, I could never get out of my head.
But there is another reason I could not speak to you at the ball that had nothing to do with what is happening just now between us: this heavy bruised silence, this anger and distrust. The day of the ball was my last class day at the University, and it was a very heavy and discouraging day.
Do you remember the things I told you about the class? Its subject was God. That is, the inner spirit, the inner voice; the human compulsion when deeply distressed to seek healing counsel within ourselves, and the capacity within ourselves both to create this counsel and to receive it.
(It had always amused me that the God who spoke to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth told them exactly what they needed to hear, no less than the God of the Old Testament constantly reassured the ancient Jews.)
Indeed, as I read the narratives of black people who were captured and set to slaving away their lives in America, I saw that this inner spirit, this inner capacity for self-comforting, this ability to locate God within that they expressed, demonstrated something marvelous about human beings. Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God, just as it has created us with the capacity to know speech. The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate!
I suppose this has all been thought before; but it came to me as a revelation after reading how the fifth or sixth black woman, finding herself captured, enslaved, sexually abused, starved, whipped, the mother of children she could not want, lover of children she could not have, crept into the corners of the fields, among the haystacks and the animals, and found within her own heart the only solace and love she was ever to know.
It was as if these women found a twin self who saved them from their abused consciousness and chronic physical loneliness; and that twin self is in all of us, waiting only to be summoned.
To prepare my class to comprehend God in this way, I requested they read narratives of these captured black women and also write narratives themselves, as if they were those women, or women like them. At the same time, I asked them to write out their own understanding of what the inner voice, “God,” is.
It was an extraordinary class, Lucy! With women of all colors, all ages, all shapes and sizes and all conditions. There were lesbians, straights, curveds, celibates, prostitutes, mothers, confuseds, and sundry brilliants