You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [58]
Fania had stammered, choked, pulled at her earrings and her braids—but in the end had simply refused to learn to read that the only work she’d ever known would soon not exist.
While Irene talked, Anastasia fingered the colorful straw place mat in front of her. As so often happened when she talked to another black person, the world seemed weighted down with problems. “You can’t improve anything, you know?” she said. “You can’t change anything. I’ve learned that from Source.”
Irene waited. Anastasia seemed inspired.
“Source got me and my folks together again. You won’t believe this, but we write to each other now at least once a week. Hey, let me show you…” Anastasia rose and disappeared into another room. She returned with a bundle of letters. She peeled off a letter from the bundle and spread the pages on the table. She changed her mind about reading aloud to Irene, who was looking at her, she felt, skeptically. She pushed the letter toward Irene, who glanced quickly over it.
Anastasia’s parents had once been Baptists; they were now Jehovah’s Witnesses. There was a lot in the letter about continuing to love her and even more about continuing to petition Jehovah God in her behalf. From the letter, prayers were going up from Arkansas by the hour. The hair rose at the back of Irene’s neck, but she forced herself to remain calm.
Irene had met Anastasia’s family once, by design, she always thought, on Anastasia’s part. Irene lived for a time in a terrible D.C. slum, and represented, therefore, a kind of educated lunatic fringe to those friends who thought poverty in and of itself was dangerous to visitors. While her parents were in town, Anastasia asked to stay with Irene, though in fact she was at that time living with her friend Galen. Her parents had driven up in the longest pink Lincoln Continental Irene had ever seen. Her father and brothers had braved the trashy street to come up to Irene’s flat, but her mother had waited in the car—doors locked and windows rolled up tight—until Anastasia and Irene were brought out to her. Her gray, stricken eyes clutched at Irene’s. Why? Why? they asked, while her mouth said how pleased she was they had finally met. “What is she afraid of?” Irene had asked Anastasia; “What isn’t she afraid of?” Anastasia had replied.
Anastasia’s brothers were amber-skinned and curly-haired, with the slouching posture and menacing non-language of other boys their age. They were fifteen and sixteen. Anastasia’s father was an olive-skinned, crinkly-haired man whose intense inner turmoil and heaviness of spirit caused an instant recoiling; on his face, one felt a smile would look unnatural.
This father now wrote of God’s love, God’s grace, God’s assured forgiveness, and of his own happiness that his daughter, always, at heart, “a good girl,” had at last embarked on the path of obedience. This path alone led to peace everlasting, in the new and coming system of the world.
“Obedience,” thought Irene. “Peace Everlasting! Holy shit!”
“I wanted to do good, too,” said Anastasia, and laughed. “Of course all the ‘doing good’ is really for yourself, nobody else. Nobody ever does anybody else any good. The good they do is for them. Altruism doesn’t exist. Neither do good works.”
“Wait a minute,” said Irene, a clenched fist resting on the letters in her lap. “I believe in movements, collective action to influence the future, and all that. Basically, I believe somebody is responsible for the child.”
“People should understand,” said Anastasia, speaking very fast and somewhat blindly, Irene felt, as if she were speaking with her eyes closed, so that for a moment