You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [52]
“I don’t follow you,” said her brother. He had always been the activist in the family. He simply directed his calm rage against any obstacle that might exist, and awaited the consequences with the same serenity he awaited his sister’s answer. Not for him the philosophical confusions and poetic observations that hung his sister up.
“That’s because you’re a radical preacher,” said Sarah, smiling up at him. “You deliver your messages in person with your own body.” It excited her that her brother had at last imbued their childhood Sunday sermons with the reality of fighting for change. And saddened her that no matter how she looked at it this seemed more important than Medieval Art, Course 201.
3
“Yes, Grandma,” Sarah replied. “Cresselton is for girls only, and no, Grandma, I am not pregnant.”
Her grandmother stood clutching the broad wooden handle of her black bag, which she held, with elbows bent, in front of her stomach. Her eyes glinted through round wire-framed glasses. She spat into the grass outside the privy. She had insisted that Sarah accompany her to the toilet while the body was being taken into the church. She had leaned heavily on Sarah’s arm, her own arm thin and the flesh like crepe.
“I guess they teach you how to really handle the world,” she said. “And who knows, the Lord is everywhere. I would like a whole lot to see a Great-Grand. You don’t specially have to be married, you know. That’s why I felt free to ask.” She reached into her bag and took out a Three Sixes bottle, which she proceeded to drink from, taking deep swift swallows with her head thrown back.
“There are very few black boys near Cresselton,” Sarah explained, watching the corn liquor leave the bottle in spurts and bubbles. “Besides, I’m really caught up now in my painting and sculpting.…” Should she mention how much she admired Giacometti’s work? No, she decided. Even if her grandmother had heard of him, and Sarah was positive she had not, she would surely think his statues much too thin. This made Sarah smile and remember how difficult it had been to convince her grandmother that even if Cresselton had not given her a scholarship she would have managed to go there anyway. Why? Because she wanted somebody to teach her to paint and to sculpt, and Cresselton had the best teachers. Her grandmother’s notion of a successful granddaughter was a married one, pregnant the first year.
“Well,” said her grandmother, placing the bottle with dignity back into her purse and gazing pleadingly into Sarah’s face, “I sure would ’preshate a Great-Grand.” Seeing her granddaughter’s smile, she heaved a great sigh, and, walking rather haughtily over the stones and grass, made her way to the church steps.
As they walked down the aisle, Sarah’s eyes rested on the back of her grandfather’s head. He was sitting on the front middle bench in front of the casket, his hair extravagantly long and white and softly kinked. When she sat down beside him, her grandmother sitting next to him on the other side, he turned toward her and gently took her hand in his. Sarah briefly leaned her cheek against his shoulder and felt like a child again.
4
They had come twenty miles from town, on a dirt road, and the hot spring sun had drawn a steady rich scent from the honeysuckle vines along the way. The church was a bare, weather-beaten ghost of a building with hollow windows and a sagging door. Arsonists had once burned it to the ground, lighting the dry wood of the walls with the flames from the crosses they carried. The tall spreading red oak tree under which Sarah had played as a child still dominated the churchyard, stretching its branches widely from the roof of the church to the other side of the road.
After a short and eminently dignified service, during which Sarah and her grandfather alone did not cry, her father’s casket was slid into the waiting hearse and taken the short distance to the cemetery, an overgrown wilderness whose stark white stones appeared to be the small ruins of an ancient