You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [50]
“Gonna tell me what you’re brooding about?” asked Pam.
Sarah stood in front of the radiator, her fingers resting on the window seat. Down below girls were coming up the hill from supper.
“I’m thinking,” she said, “of the child’s duty to his parents after they are dead.”
“Is that all?”
“Do you know,” asked Sarah, “about Richard Wright and his father?”
Pamela frowned. Sarah looked down at her.
“Oh, I forgot,” she said with a sigh, “they don’t teach Wright here. The poshest school in the U.S., and the girls come out ignorant.” She looked at her watch, saw she had twenty minutes before her train. “Really,” she said almost inaudibly, “why Tears Eliot, Ezratic Pound, and even Sara Teacake, and no Wright?” She and Pamela thought e.e. cummings very clever with his perceptive spelling of great literary names.
“Is he a poet then?” asked Pam. She adored poetry, all poetry. Half of America’s poetry she had, of course, not read, for the simple reason that she had never heard of it.
“No,” said Sarah, “he wasn’t a poet.” She felt weary. “He was a man who wrote, a man who had trouble with his father.” She began to walk about the room, and came to stand below the picture of the old man and the little girl.
“When he was a child,” she continued, “his father ran off with another woman, and one day when Richard and his mother went to ask him for money to buy food he laughingly rejected them. Richard, being very young, thought his father Godlike. Big, omnipotent, unpredictable, undependable and cruel. Entirely in control of his universe. Just like a god. But, many years later, after Wright had become a famous writer, he went down to Mississippi to visit his father. He found, instead of God, just an old watery-eyed field hand, bent from plowing, his teeth gone, smelling of manure. Richard realized that the most daring thing his ‘God’ had done was run off with that other woman.”
“So?” asked Pam. “What ‘duty’ did he feel he owed the old man?”
“So,” said Sarah, “that’s what Wright wondered as he peered into that old shifty-eyed Mississippi Negro face. What was the duty of the son of a destroyed man? The son of a man whose vision had stopped at the edge of fields that weren’t even his. Who was Wright without his father? Was he Wright the great writer? Wright the Communist? Wright the French farmer? Wright whose white wife could never accompany him to Mississippi? Was he, in fact, still his father’s son? Or was he freed by his father’s desertion to be nobody’s son, to be his own father? Could he disavow his father and live? And if so, live as what? As whom? And for what purpose?”
“Well,” said Pam, swinging her hair over her shoulders and squinting her small eyes, “if his father rejected him I don’t see why Wright even bothered to go see him again. From what you’ve said, Wright earned the freedom to be whoever he wanted to be. To a strong man a father is not essential.”
“Maybe not,” said Sarah, “but Wright’s father was one faulty door in a house of many ancient rooms. Was that one faulty door to shut him off forever from the rest of the house? That was the question. And though he answered this question eloquently in his work, where it really counted, one can only wonder if he was able to answer it satisfactorily—or at all—in his life.”
“You’re thinking of his father more as a symbol of something, aren’t you?” asked Pam.
“I suppose,” said Sarah, taking a last look around her room. “I see him as a door that refused to open, a hand that was always closed. A fist.”
Pamela walked with her to one of the college limousines, and in a few minutes she was at the station. The train to the city was just arriving.
“Have a nice trip,” said the middle-aged driver courteously, as she took her suitcase from him. But for about the thousandth time since she’d seen him, he winked at her.
Once away from her friends she did not miss them. The school was all they had in common. How could they ever know her if they were not allowed to know Wright, she wondered.