You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [63]
Her right eye, underneath the eye, really, began to quiver.
“I hate that,” she said, clapping her palm over it. “I don’t know where they are. They may have gone to South America, for all I know. I don’t know what happened to Bliss.” She giggled.
“Something happened to bliss,” said Irene, and giggled also. The two of them whooped, thumped their glasses on the table and rumbled their feet underneath. A solicitous waitress inquired if there were something she could do.
“Find out what happened to bliss!” they said, laughing up at her and ordering doubles.
“After a couple of years I began to fall apart again,” said Anastasia. “Facial tic, constant colds, diarrhea, you name it. You should have seen me. My hair looked like brass wire, my skin had more eruptions than Indonesia. My teeth were loosening.… If I was so tranquil, why was this happening? I hadn’t slept a whole night since I couldn’t remember when, either.
“But I didn’t want to leave Source, oh no! Listen, average sex, but with great dope, a little music, somebody above you to intercede with God, and the world outside your immediate premises fails to interest.”
“Hummmmm,” said Irene.
“Leave Source? Not on your life! Or my life, as the case was. Enter my parents—as screwed up as I was myself, but a mite put out that I was in the habit of talking to myself as easily as to strangers on the street.” She shrugged. “Back to Arkansas. A few months of house arrest, no dope, church music (listen, the only reason Jehovah’s Witnesses can sing is they’ve ripped off so many Baptists) and the realization that neither black nor white had ever known what to do with us in Arkansas. That we were freaks. And that it was my parents’ ambivalence, as much as anything, that had driven us all nuts. They were horrified if my friends were poor and black, disappointed in my taste if they were black and middle class, and embittered if they were white; where was my racial pride?
“I married the first man who signed up from Arkansas to work on the Alaska pipeline. Found a job. Divorced him. Voilà.”
Irene thought of Fania, whose interest in reading had finally been sustained by the slave narratives of black women so similar, she felt, to herself, and who would have read with keen interest the story Anastasia was now telling.
Was your mother white?
Yes, she pretty white; not white enough for white people. She have long hair, but it was kinda wavy.…
Were your children mulattoes?
No, Sir! They were all white. They looked just like him…then he told me he was goin’ to die…and he said that if I would promise him that I would go to New York, he would leave me and the children free.… He told me no person would know it (that I was colored) if I didn’t tell it*
“Did I ever tell you about Fania Evans?” asked Irene. “No? She was one of the women I tried to teach to read the newspaper. I had trouble because she refused to learn to read anything that hurt her. The world being what it is, this left very little news.”
“Oh yes, I think I remember something about her,” said Anastasia, in the spirit of the conversation. She didn’t remember a word. “But wait a minute,” she said, “let me really bring you up to date. The man I live with now is an Indian, an Aleut. Did I tell you that?”
“You probably tried to,” said Irene, “but no saga of sexual superiority, womanlike tenderness or rippling muscles, please.”
“He does have it all,” said Anastasia, happily, “but I won’t mention it.”
“Thanks,” said Irene.
“We live in a small fishing village where the only industry is smoking salmon. That’s all the women there know how to do. But as a white woman—” she grinned across the table at Irene, who at that moment was feeling unpleasantly sour, “or should I say as a non-Native? Anyway, they didn’t expect me to know how to