You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [59]
The baby was awake now and Irene was holding him. His thick hair smelled of incense. His slender fingers probed her nose.
“You can’t leave a baby,” Irene said.
“Men do it all the time.”
“Women stay because they don’t want to be ‘men.’”
“And men go because they don’t want to be women—that half of the human race that never realizes it has a choice.”
“But who will look after the children?”
“Someone will,” she said, “or won’t.” She looked into Irene’s face.
“It’s all the same.” She shrugged. “That’s the point.”
The baby’s mother came into the room. She had a face the color of a pink towel, a stout figure and blue eyes shaped like arrows. Spiritual striving was most apparent in her speech; over her harsh New York accent she’d poured a sweetness that hurt the ears.
“It’s a beautiful baby,” Irene said, as she plucked grapes off a bunch on the table and began plopping them into her own and the baby’s mouths.
“Thank you,” she cooed. “We’re giving him to Anastasia. She loves him so much and is such a good mommy. We’re going to South America.”
“When?” asked Irene.
She shrugged. “Sometime.”
“Was that hard to decide?” Irene wanted to know.
“Source teaches us that all children belong to everyone, to the whole world.”
“But not to anyone in particular?”
She sang, “That’s right,” and swept out of the room.
“We have to take you to meet Source,” said Peace, who came in next and rummaged through the grapes. He was emaciated, far taller than the refrigerator and wore his long straw-colored hair in a ponytail tied with a bright green cord. A brilliant red birthmark, shaped like a tiny foot, “walked” across his nose.
Source lived in a large apartment house very close by. One of his daughters, a thin, sad-eyed girl in her teens, her long black hair shining against her sallow brown skin, showed them up to his flat. After admitting them she kept her gaze below their knees.
Anastasia, Peace, Calm and Bliss had brought an offering of wine and money, which they placed on a table near Source’s feet. Source himself was seated in the lotus position on a round bed shoved against the wall of the otherwise bare and dingy room. The guests were offered cushions on the floor. A second daughter padded up silently, her eyes as sad as the first’s, and poured the wine into glasses which she handed to each of them. She also lit a stick of incense. Soon the room was hazy with smoke and the air heavy with the sweet, oppressive smell.
A third daughter came and stood at her father’s left hand, which he periodically raised and sent her scurrying into the other rooms for something he wanted.
“It is possible that all swamis look alike,” Irene was thinking. Source was a pale, grayish brown, with dark glittery eyes and graying dark hair parted in the middle and hanging about his shoulders. He wore a white robe that he used, as he talked, to cover and uncover his bare feet. It was a slow, flipping motion that relaxed and in a way hypnotized his audience.
Irene was determined not to think any of the prejudicial things she was thinking, and adjusted her face to show interest, concern, anticipatory delight.
Source’s voice had a whine and a drone somewhere in it, however, and this made it objectionable. He was saying how the first time he met Anastasia, whom he called, in Sanskrit, Tranquility, she looked exactly like Kathleen Cleaver, “dressed all entirely completely in black” (he was to use triple qualifiers frequently). “Her hair like an angry, wild, animal bush. And her skin pale pale pale, like that one. Militant, you see?” He laughed, fluttered the fingers of his left hand in the air beside his nose, and the sad-eyed daughter standing beside him shifted the pillow behind his back.
Anastasia was laughing, fingering her spoon and occasionally sniffling and rubbing her eyes, which were red and glassy.
“Well”—she shrugged—“I thought I was black.”
“Nobody’s anything,” said Source, as to a dense child, and Anastasia shrugged again.